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In psychology, aversives are unpleasant stimuli that induce changes in behavior via negative reinforcement or positive punishment. By applying an aversive immediately before or after a behavior, the likelihood of the target behavior occurring in the future may be reduced. Aversives can vary from being slightly unpleasant or irritating to physically, psychologically and/or emotionally damaging.
There are two types of aversive stimuli:
Unconditioned aversive stimuli naturally result in pain or discomfort and are often associated with biologically harmful or damaging substances or events. Examples include extreme heat or cold, bitter flavors, electric shocks, loud noises and pain. Aversives can be applied naturally (such as touching a hot stove) or in a contrived manner (such as during torture or behavior modification).
A conditioned aversive stimulus is an initially neutral stimulus that becomes aversive after repeated pairing with an unconditioned aversive stimulus. This type of stimulus would include consequences such as verbal warnings, gestures or even the sight of an individual who is disliked.
Aversives may be used as punishment or negative reinforcement during applied behavior analysis. In early years, the use of aversives was represented as a less restrictive alternative to the methods used in mental institutions such as shock treatment, hydrotherapy, straitjacketing and frontal lobotomies. Early iterations of the Lovaas technique incorporated aversives, [2] though Lovaas later abandoned their use. [3] Over time the use of aversives has become less common, though they are still in use as of 2021. [4]
Several national and international disability rights groups have spoken against the use of aversive therapies, including TASH and the Autism National Committee (known as AUTCOM). Although it has generally fallen out of favor, at least one institution continues to use electric shocks on the skin as an aversive. [5] A ruling in 2018 supported its continued use. [6] The FDA has made a commitment to ban its use, but as of January 2019 has not yet done so. [7]
A report from the Food and Drug Administration found that "the literature contains reports that when health care providers have resorted to punishers... the addition of punishers proved no more successful than [Positive behavioral support]-only techniques... Reflecting this trend, a 2008 survey of members of the Association for Behavior Analysis found that providers generally view punishment procedures as having more negative side effects and being less successful than reinforcement procedures." [8] The Behavior Analyst Certification Board has stated their support the use of aversives on children with consent by a parent of guardian. [9] [10]
The use of aversives in applied behavior analysis is opposed by many advocacy groups for people with disabilities. These include:
Operant conditioning, also called instrumental conditioning, is a learning process where voluntary behaviors are modified by association with the addition of reward or aversive stimuli. The frequency or duration of the behavior may increase through reinforcement or decrease through punishment or extinction.
In behavioral psychology, reinforcement refers to consequences that increase the likelihood of an organism's future behavior, typically in the presence of a particular antecedent stimulus. For example, a rat can be trained to push a lever to receive food whenever a light is turned on. In this example, the light is the antecedent stimulus, the lever pushing is the operant behavior, and the food is the reinforcer. Likewise, a student that receives attention and praise when answering a teacher's question will be more likely to answer future questions in class. The teacher's question is the antecedent, the student's response is the behavior, and the praise and attention are the reinforcements.
The experimental analysis of behavior is a science that studies the behavior of individuals across a variety of species. A key early scientist was B. F. Skinner who discovered operant behavior, reinforcers, secondary reinforcers, contingencies of reinforcement, stimulus control, shaping, intermittent schedules, discrimination, and generalization. A central method was the examination of functional relations between environment and behavior, as opposed to hypothetico-deductive learning theory that had grown up in the comparative psychology of the 1920–1950 period. Skinner's approach was characterized by observation of measurable behavior which could be predicted and controlled. It owed its early success to the effectiveness of Skinner's procedures of operant conditioning, both in the laboratory and in behavior therapy.
Aversion therapy is a form of psychological treatment in which the patient is exposed to a stimulus while simultaneously being subjected to some form of discomfort. This conditioning is intended to cause the patient to associate the stimulus with unpleasant sensations with the intention of quelling the targeted behavior.
Behaviorism is a systematic approach to understand the behavior of humans and other animals. It assumes that behavior is either a reflex evoked by the pairing of certain antecedent stimuli in the environment, or a consequence of that individual's history, including especially reinforcement and punishment contingencies, together with the individual's current motivational state and controlling stimuli. Although behaviorists generally accept the important role of heredity in determining behavior, they focus primarily on environmental events. The cognitive revolution of the late 20th century largely replaced behaviorism as an explanatory theory with cognitive psychology, which unlike behaviorism examines internal mental states.
Motivational salience is a cognitive process and a form of attention that motivates or propels an individual's behavior towards or away from a particular object, perceived event or outcome. Motivational salience regulates the intensity of behaviors that facilitate the attainment of a particular goal, the amount of time and energy that an individual is willing to expend to attain a particular goal, and the amount of risk that an individual is willing to accept while working to attain a particular goal.
Ole Ivar Løvaas was a Norwegian-American clinical psychologist and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is most well known for his research on what is now called applied behavior analysis (ABA) to teach autistic children through prompts, modeling, and positive reinforcement. The therapy is also noted for its use of aversives (punishment) to reduce undesired behavior, however these are now used less commonly than in the past.
Discrete trial training (DTT) is a technique used by practitioners of applied behavior analysis (ABA) that was developed by Ivar Lovaas at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). DTT uses mass instruction and reinforcers that create clear contingencies to shape new skills. Often employed as an early intensive behavioral intervention (EIBI) for up to 25–40 hours per week for children with autism, the technique relies on the use of prompts, modeling, and positive reinforcement strategies to facilitate the child's learning. It previously used aversives to punish unwanted behaviors. DTT has also been referred to as the "Lovaas/UCLA model", "rapid motor imitation antecedent", "listener responding", errorless learning", and "mass trials".
Applied behavior analysis (ABA), also called behavioral engineering, is a psychological intervention that applies approaches based upon the principles of respondent and operant conditioning to change behavior of social significance. It is the applied form of behavior analysis; the other two forms are radical behaviorism and the experimental analysis of behavior.
Shaping is a conditioning paradigm used primarily in the experimental analysis of behavior. The method used is differential reinforcement of successive approximations. It was introduced by B. F. Skinner with pigeons and extended to dogs, dolphins, humans and other species. In shaping, the form of an existing response is gradually changed across successive trials towards a desired target behavior by reinforcing exact segments of behavior. Skinner's explanation of shaping was this:
We first give the bird food when it turns slightly in the direction of the spot from any part of the cage. This increases the frequency of such behavior. We then withhold reinforcement until a slight movement is made toward the spot. This again alters the general distribution of behavior without producing a new unit. We continue by reinforcing positions successively closer to the spot, then by reinforcing only when the head is moved slightly forward, and finally only when the beak actually makes contact with the spot. ... The original probability of the response in its final form is very low; in some cases it may even be zero. In this way we can build complicated operants which would never appear in the repertoire of the organism otherwise. By reinforcing a series of successive approximations, we bring a rare response to a very high probability in a short time. ... The total act of turning toward the spot from any point in the box, walking toward it, raising the head, and striking the spot may seem to be a functionally coherent unit of behavior; but it is constructed by a continual process of differential reinforcement from undifferentiated behavior, just as the sculptor shapes his figure from a lump of clay.
Behavior modification is a treatment approach that uses respondent and operant conditioning to change behavior. Based on methodological behaviorism, overt behavior is modified with (antecedent) stimulus control and consequences, including positive and negative reinforcement contingencies to increase desirable behavior, administering positive and negative punishment, and extinction to reduce problematic behavior. It also uses "flooding" desensitization to combat phobias.
An avoidance response is a response that prevents an aversive stimulus from occurring. It is a kind of negative reinforcement. An avoidance response is a behavior based on the concept that animals will avoid performing behaviors that result in an aversive outcome. This can involve learning through operant conditioning when it is used as a training technique. It is a reaction to undesirable sensations or feedback that leads to avoiding the behavior that is followed by this unpleasant or fear-inducing stimulus.
The Judge Rotenberg Center (JRC) is a controversial institution in Canton, Massachusetts, United States, for people with developmental disabilities and emotional and behavioral disorders. The center has been condemned for torture by the United Nations special rapporteur on torture. The JRC is known for its use of the graduated electronic decelerator (GED), a device that administers electric shocks to residents as part of the institution's behavior modification program.
In operant conditioning, punishment is any change in a human or animal's surroundings which, occurring after a given behavior or response, reduces the likelihood of that behavior occurring again in the future. As with reinforcement, it is the behavior, not the human/animal, that is punished. Whether a change is or is not punishing is determined by its effect on the rate that the behavior occurs. This is called motivating operations (MO), because they alter the effectiveness of a stimulus. MO can be categorized in abolishing operations, decrease the effectiveness of the stimuli and establishing, increase the effectiveness of the stimuli. For example, a painful stimulus which would act as a punisher for most people may actually reinforce some behaviors of masochistic individuals.
The professional practice of behavior analysis is a domain of behavior analysis, the others being radical behaviorism, experimental analysis of behavior and applied behavior analysis. The practice of behavior analysis is the delivery of interventions to consumers that are guided by the principles of radical behaviorism and the research of both experimental and applied behavior analysis. Professional practice seeks to change specific behavior through the implementation of these principles. In many states, practicing behavior analysts hold a license, certificate, or registration. In other states, there are no laws governing their practice and, as such, the practice may be prohibited as falling under the practice definition of other mental health professionals. This is rapidly changing as behavior analysts are becoming more and more common.
Conditioned place preference (CPP) is a form of Pavlovian conditioning used to measure the motivational effects of objects or experiences. This motivation comes from the pleasurable aspect of the experience, so that the brain can be reminded of the context that surrounded the "encounter". By measuring the amount of time an animal spends in an area that has been associated with a stimulus, researchers can infer the animal's liking for the stimulus. This paradigm can also be used to measure conditioned place aversion with an identical procedure involving aversive stimuli instead. Both procedures usually involve mice or rats as subjects. This procedure can be used to measure extinction and reinstatement of the conditioned stimulus. Certain drugs are used in this paradigm to measure their reinforcing properties. Two different methods are used to choose the compartments to be conditioned, and these are biased vs. unbiased. The biased method allows the animal to explore the apparatus, and the compartment they least prefer is the one that the drug is administered in and the one they most prefer is the one where the vehicle is injected. This method allows the animal to choose the compartment they get the drug and vehicle. In comparison, the unbiased method does not allow the animal to choose what compartment they get the drug and vehicle in. Instead, the researcher chooses the compartments.
Murray Sidman was an American behavioral scientist, best known for Sidman Avoidance, also called "free-operant avoidance", in which an organism learns to avoid an aversive stimulus by engaging in a targeted response in the absence of stimuli indicating whether the aversive stimulus is forthcoming. Sidman's explanation of free-operant avoidance is an alternative to the Miller-Mowrer two-process theory of avoidance.
Motivating operation (MO) is a behavioristic concept introduced by Jack Michael in 1982. It is used to explain variations in the effects in the consequences of behavior. Most importantly, an MO affects how strongly the individual is reinforced or punished by the consequences of their behavior. For example, food deprivation is a motivating operation; if an individual is hungry, food is strongly reinforcing, but if they are satiated, food is less reinforcing. In 2003 Laraway suggested subdividing MOs into those that increase the reinforcing or punishing effects of a stimulus, which are termed establishing operations, and MOs that decrease the reinforcing or punishing effects of a stimulus, which are termed abolishing operations.
The Self-Injurious Behavior Inhibiting System (SIBIS) is an apparatus designed to reduce self-injurious behavior (SIB) directed at the head, such as banging the head against walls and other objects or hitting oneself in the head. Invented by Dr. Robert E. Fischell, Glen H. Fountain, and Charles M. Blackburn in 1984, the device is able to detect instances of head-directed SIB, and delivers an aversive electric shock contingent on its occurrence. The United States Food and Drug Administration banned the device in 2020 as part of a larger blanket ban on devices that use electric shocks to modify behavior without the consent of the user. Other devices covered by this ban include the Graduated Electronic Decelerator.
Functional behavior assessment (FBA) is an ongoing process of collecting information with a goal of identifying the environmental variables that control a problem or target behavior. The purpose of the assessment is to prove and aid the effectiveness of the interventions or treatments used to help eliminate the problem behavior. Through functional behavior assessments, we have learned that there are complex patterns to people's seemingly unproductive behaviors. It is important to not only pay attention to consequences that follow the behavior but also the antecedent that evokes the behavior. More work needs to be done in the future with functional assessment including balancing precision and efficiency, being more specific with variables involved and a more smooth transition from assessment to intervention.
The behavior analyst must obtain the client's or client-surrogate's approval in writing of the behavior assessment procedures before implementing them. As used here, client-surrogate refers to someone legally empowered to make decisions for the person(s) whose behavior the program is intended to change; examples of client-surrogates include parents of minors, guardians, and legally designated representatives
respects the right of the client to terminate services at any time