Abstract
This study compared the relative effectiveness of different procedures for decreasing response durations in three severely retarded 14 to 20-year-old women who were severely disruptive and noncompliant. The conditions included two potentially positively reinforcing procedures and two potentially negatively reinforcing procedures. The two positive procedures consisted of contingent deliveries of verbal praise, back pats, and squirts of juice. One of the negative procedures consisted of tapping the subjects' hands, arms, back, and back of the neck until the correct response was evoked. The other negative procedure consisted of finger and thumb pressure to the sides of the subject's neck until a correct response was evoked. During both of these negative procedures, cessation of tapping or finger pressure was contingent upon emission of an appropriate response. For two of the subjects, the two positive procedures were compared with the negative tapping procedure and with each other; for the third subject, the positive praise plus juice procedure was compared with the two negative procedures, which were also compared with each other. The results consistently indicated that for the first two subjects, the negative tapping procedure was more effective than either praise or praise plus juice, with the latter two being equally effective. For the third subject, the negative finger pressure procedure was more effective than the negative tapping procedure, which in turn was more effective than the positive praise plus juice procedure.
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