Staff perceptions of reinforcer responsiveness and aberrant behaviors in people with mental retardation.
Staff see clients who ignore social praise but love edibles as the most likely to show irritability, stereotypy, hyperactivity, lethargy, and inappropriate speech.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team asked direct-care staff to rate how 184 adults with severe or profound intellectual disability respond to eight kinds of reinforcers.
Staff also scored each adult on five maladaptive behavior areas: irritability, stereotypy, hyperactivity, lethargy, and inappropriate speech.
A survey design let the researchers look for patterns between reinforcer profiles and behavior problems.
What they found
Adults seen as "low social, high consumable" were linked to higher scores on all five problem behavior domains.
In plain words, staff believed clients who rarely liked praise or play but always wanted food or drink were the most challenging.
How this fits with other research
Geckeler et al. (2000) extends this idea by testing the link: they gave brief choice tests and then used the top pick as a reinforcer. Two-thirds of participants with severe ID actually worked for their staff-selected favorite, giving partial backing to staff judgment.
Ivancic et al. (1996) sounds like a contradiction: they showed that even items picked 80% of the time sometimes failed to work as reinforcers. The difference is method: M et al. asked staff opinions, while T et al. ran reinforcement sessions and watched response rates.
Matson et al. (1999) is the direct successor: seven years later they built a formal rating scale from the same eight classes so future staff can score reinforcer choices faster and more reliably.
Why it matters
If you support adults with severe ID, remember that staff hunches about "food only" versus "likes praise" clients can flag who may show irritability or stereotypy. Use quick preference assessments to double-check those hunches, and keep social reinforcers in the mix even for clients who seem consumable-oriented.
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Join Free →Run a five-minute MSWO preference check on the client staff call "food only" and test if praise or brief touch also gains approach, then graph the results.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Perceptions by staff of the classes of reinforcers and aberrant behaviors of a sample of 470 people with predominantly severe or profound mental retardation were explored. Principal components analysis of a 45-item survey suggested eight classes of reinforcers: consumable, verbal-speaker, visual-motor, social, physical-contact, passive-observer, play, and academic reinforcers. Stepwise multiple regression was used to predict five classes of maladaptive behaviors as measured by the Aberrant Behavior Checklist (irritability, lethargy, stereotypy, hyperactivity, and inappropriate speech) from the eight classes of reinforcers. Each class of psychopathology was related to a unique set of predictors. All classes of psychopathology could be predicted by staff perceptions of underresponsiveness to social reinforcers and overresponsiveness to consumable reinforcers. The findings of organized structures of reinforcers and their covariation with pathological behaviors have implications for research and intervention as well as theoretical value in defining aberrant behaviors in people with mental retardation.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 1992 · doi:10.1007/BF01046404