Skills-based treatment for stereotypy

Document Type

Thesis

College

College of Arts and Sciences

Department

Psychology

Degree

M.S. Applied Behavior Analysis

Date Completed

2018

First Committee Member

Hanley, Gregory

Second Committee Member

Ahearn, William

Third Committee Member

MacDonald, Rebecca

Abstract

"A skills-based treatment has been shown to successfully treat socially mediated problem behavior by teaching participants to mand for access to reinforcers maintaining their problem behavior, tolerate unpredictable denials of the mand, and comply with directives when reinforcement is unavailable. We used a similar progressive program of prompting and differential reinforcement to teach a young man with autism to mand for access to his own automatically-reinforced motor stereotypy, tolerate mand denials, and comply with alternative leisure and academic demands during periods in which that mand was denied and stereotypy was blocked. We correlated colored cards with periods during which stereotypy was available (S+) and unavailable (S-) to promote stimulus control of the communication responses and stereotypy. Motor stereotypy was effectively decreased during instructional periods and brought under discriminative control using this progressive treatment process which relied on intermittent and unpredictable access to stereotypy following functional communication, toleration of denials of communication, or compliance with teacher’s instructions."

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