SOME EXPERIMENTS ON REINFORCEMENT PRINCIPLES WITHIN A PSYCHIATRIC WARD FOR DELINQUENT SOLDIERS¹

Abstract

Several experiments exploring the effects of certain behavioral procedures were performed on a psychiatric ward for delinquent soldiers. Within the context of a point economy, the behavioral procedures were examined for their applicability to this patient group in a hospital-ward setting. The following procedures were studied: (1) use of points as consequences for specific behaviors compared with demonstration of "model" behavior by a ward officer; (2) punishment by a point-fine to control undesired behavior; (3) use of a chainingtype reinforcement contingency to increase desired behavior; (4) differential reinforcement of the individual versus the group to increase the frequency of a verbal performance; and (5) reinforcement of reports of personal problems versus impersonal problems.A psychiatric ward for delinquent soldiers was the setting for several experiments exploring the application of procedures derived from operant conditioning research. The ward, its patients, and the general ward procedures are described more fully in other papers (Colman and Baker, 1969;Colman and Boren, 1969; and Ellsworth and Colman, in press). Briefly, the ward was established to treat soldiers who had been diagnosed by two Army psychiatrists as having character and behavior disorders. Many studies have described the poor response of this patient group to conventional ward treatment (see Quitkin and Klein, 1967 to work effectively with this difficult group, a point economy was established whereby the soldiers were awarded points for certain appropriate social behaviors. These behaviors included attending educational classes, dressing neatly, carrying out work projects, delivering verbal reports, etc. The soldiers could then exchange the points for a variety of privileges, such as semi-private rooms, free coffee, access to a television set, pool room privileges, and weekend passes. The number of soldiers varied from time to time, as a man was assigned to or transferred from the ward, but, the ward census was usually maintained at 12 to 15 men.The research was aimed partly at exploring the efficient application of certain behavioral procedures to a hospital ward of characterand behavior-disorder patients, partly at generating experimental evidence convincing to the ward staff and to administrators that the behavioral procedures could be effective on this difficult patient population, and partly at elucidating the reactions of this special patient group to the various procedures. Within the context of the ward system, experiments were performed to examine the following procedures: (1) use of points as consequences (reinforcements) for specified behaviors compared with demonstration of "model" behavior by a ward officer (a psychiatric resident);(2) punishment of undesired behavior by a point fine; (3) use of a chaining-type reinforcement contingency to increase desired behavior; (4) differential reinforcement of the individual speaker versus reporting the group to 29 1970, 3., [29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37] NUMBER I (SPRING 1...

EFFECTS OF SERIAL DEPENDENCY ON THE AGREEMENT BETWEEN VISUAL AND STATISTICAL INFERENCE1

“…Judges were full-time researchers, university professors, and graduate students with 3 to 17 yr of research experience in psychology, including applied behavior analysis. Each (Boren and Colman, 1970); (b) a traditional reversal design-ABAB (Ingham and Andrews, 1973); (c) a multiple component study-ABCB (Phillips, Phillips, Fixsen, and Wolf, 1971); (d) a multiple-baseline study-A/B/C/B/C (Baer, Rowbury, and Baer, 1973); and (e) a reversal component study-ABACADEA (Wincze, Leitenberg, and Agras, 1972). Some of these and the other studies sampled involved combined data for a number of subjects; others involved individual subjects.…”

A Comparison of Cost and Reward Procedures With Interdependent Group Contingencies

“…Backup reinforcement may include a variety of preferred classroom activities such as extra recess time, early dismissal or access to additional materials (e.g., stickers and glitter for art time). Within the literature, token economies have often been evaluated at the individual level (McGoey & DuPaul, 2000;Conyers, Miltenberger, Maki, Barenz, Jurgens, Sailer, Haugen, & Kopp, 2004;Boren & Colman, 1970) however they may also be administered as group-wide token economies (Cooper, Heron & Heward;Ward, 1992;Macciomei, 1999) where earning a token is contingent on the behavior of each member of the group.…”

“…Previous research has compared the direct effectiveness of different variations of token economies when administered to individual students (Boren & Colman, 1970;Conyers et al, 2004;Kaufman & O'Leary, 1972;McGoey, & DuPaul, 2000;Iwata & Bailey, 1974) however research is limited on the effectiveness of variations of token economies in conjunction with group contingencies (Lloyd, Eberhardt, & Drake, 1996).…”

“…Boren and Colman (1970) implemented a point procedure (token economy) for delinquent soldiers in a psychiatric ward. In experiment 2, points were taken away for soldiers who failed to attend a daily meeting.…”

ACHIEVEMENT PLACE: DEVELOPMENT OF THE ELECTED MANAGER SYSTEM1

“…The most common system of administering routine tasks in programs based on a token economy seems to involve a staff member (1) assigning each task to an individual, (2) evaluating each individual's performance, and (3) to each individual the consequences, such as praise and tokens for task completion, and perhaps punishment, such as loss of tokens or reassignment of the task, for failure to complete the task. This administrative system involving staff members directly supervising individual clients seems to be the most commonly described system in the token economy literature Azrin, 1965, 1968;Burchard, 1967; Atthowe and Krasner, 1968;Boren and Colman, 1970; Winkler, 1970).…”