A Practitioner's Review of Rooker et al., 2022- Subtyping Auto SIB

Analysis of unexpected disruptive effects of contingent food reinforcement on automatically maintained self-injury.

Findings

To understand the meaning behind this translational article, it is important to understand the background context. Hagopian et al., 2015 and 2017 developed and finalized a way to identify different subtypes of automatically maintained behavior. Specifically, they looked at self-injury. They were trying to figure out why some clients with SIB would easily be treated and some would require multiple treatment components, sometimes even punishment. Hagopian et al., were able to determine that automatically maintained self-injury can be divided into three different subtypes. Subtype 1 presents with differentiation between the alone and play condition of an FA, Subtype 2 has no differentiation between the alone and play condition, and subtype 3 engages in self-restraining behavior. Based on their findings and follow-up studies, they found that subtype 2 behaviors were very difficult to change and resistant to reinforcement-based strategies. Therefore, Rooker et al., 2019 conducted a translational study to examine if this resistant to change trait persisted across other, non-automatically maintained responses classes. They found that it did not persist, but that when they were conducting this experiment, they found something unique. When engaging with the arbitrary response, self-injury decreased. Therefore, to examine this further, this paper looked at the effect that different schedules of competing reinforcement have on the frequency of automatically maintained self-injury. They found that the richer the schedule of reinforcement for a response outside the auto response class, the less auto SIB occurred. This indicates that a potential treatment pathway would be competing response classes, rather than competing stimuli.

Research to Practice

This article, in theory, can help the practitioner develop treatments. While it is not a treatment article and one should not replicate it, this article does show a possibility for a treatment idea. However, much more follow-up research is needed to see if the effects of a competing schedule of reinforcement can be faded and extended over a long period of time. If it can be, then that indicates that rather than focusing on competing stimulus assessments, it may be more useful to focus on competing task and response class building with this subset of individuals. Without a doubt, more research is going to come out on this topic, and it will be interesting to see how it develops!

Citation

Rooker, G. W., Hagopian, L. P., Haddock, J. N., Arevalo, A. R., Bonner, A. C., & Dillon, C.M. (2022). Analysis of unexpected disruptive effects of contingent food reinforcement on automatically maintained self-injury. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 55(1), 62-79. https://doi.org/10.1002/jaba.875