Differential Reinforcement

Joni works in a group home with a group of men with disabilities. She has a good relationship with each of the men, but one of the residents continues to make sexually-inappropriate comments to her. Joni typically replies, "Frank, stop calling me that! You know I don't like it and it's not appropriate," as she turns red in the face. An informal functional behavior assessment indicates this behavior is maintained by Joni's attention. The group home staff decides to implement a DRA intervention. Which of the following would be an appropriate example of DRA in this case?

• Providing enthusiastic attention whenever Frank says anything appropriate to Joni, while ignoring him if he makes inappropriate remarks

• Providing enthusiastic attention whenever Frank makes an appropriate greeting to Joni (such as "You look nice today, Joni."), while ignoring Frank if he uses inappropriate greetings

• Providing increased enthusiastic attention to Frank throughout the day

• Ignoring all of Frank's inappropriate verbalizations

Differential reinforcement always includes what two principles of behavior?

• Reinforcement and punishment

• Reinforcement and stimulus control

• Reinforcement and extinction

• Positive and negative reinforcement

In DRA, a practitioner:

• Reinforces a desirable alternative to the problem behavior

• Places the problem behavior on extinction

• May choose to reinforce a behavior that is incompatible with the problem behavior

• All of these are correct

The behavior selected as an alternative behavior in a DRA:

• Should already be in the learner's repertoire.

• Should require more effort than the problem behavior.

• Should be emitted at a very low rate prior to intervention.

• Should require extensive training for practitioners to learn how to reinforce it.

DRO interventions:

• Provide reinforcement for a specific alternative behavior.

• Provide reinforcement for slowly increasing occurrences of a behavior.

• Provide reinforcement for incompatible behaviors.

• Provide reinforcement for not responding.

A limitation of DRO is:

• Other inappropriate behaviors may be reinforced accidentally.

• One may accidentally punish all responding in the individual.

• It often produces an extinction burst effect.

• The effects have been shown to be slow and gradual.

A DRL intervention is useful when the practitioner wants to:

• Get rid of a target behavior all together

• Teach a new response to replace the problem behavior

• Decrease the overall rate of a problem behavior, but not get rid of it all together

• Increase the overall rate of a target behavior

If the mean interresponse time (IRT) of a target problem behavior is 12 responses per hour, and you are implementing a DRL procedure, what should the initial DRL criterion be?

• More than 12 responses per hour

• No more than 11 responses per hour

• No more than 1 response per hour

• No more than 4 responses per hour