Renewal is defined as the reemergence of a previously eliminated behavior following a context change. Determining the prevalence of this effect in clinical practice would allow clinicians to better anticipate the reemergence of problem behavior, such as when a patient is discharged from a treatment facility to return to their home. The current consecutive, case‐series analysis determined the prevalence and magnitude of renewal when implementing behavioral treatments for problem behavior. Across 182 context changes, renewal was observed 77 times (42.3%). In the first session following the context change, problem behavior rates increased by a factor of 3 and then decreased across successive sessions. These results indicated that renewal effects may be common, but are also transient and return to rates observed before context changes.
Studies on preference assessments have shown that when both edible and leisure items are compared, edible items tend to displace leisure items in preference hierarchies. However, the mechanisms behind this process are currently unclear. One possibility is that displacement may be a product of the relatively brief periods of access to leisure items typically used in preference assessments. The purpose of the current investigation was to examine whether the duration of access to leisure items affects displacement. In this study, participants chose between preferred leisure items and the edible items that had previously been shown to displace those leisure items in a preference hierarchy. Duration of access to the leisure item was systematically increased across series to identify the magnitude at which leisure items became more preferred than edible items. Results indicate that as the duration of access to leisure items increases, displacement decreases.
Pica displayed by two individuals with autism was decreased by a treatment involving differential reinforcement and response interruption that altered the chain of behavior involved in pica (i.e., picking up items and placing them in the mouth). The treatment involved establishing prompts to 'clean-up' as a new discriminative stimulus (SD) for picking up items from the floor; and holding potential pica items was established as an SD for discarding those items in a trash receptacle, putting them away, or using them appropriately. After demonstrating the effectiveness of the treatment in an analog setting, the treatment package was systematically generalized to community settings.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.