PSYB45H3 Chapter Notes - Chapter 23: Functional Analysis, Traumatic Brain Injury, Reinforcement
Document Summary
Functional assessment refers to a variety of approaches that attempt to identify the antecedents and consequences for problem behaviors. Functional analysis is the systematic manipulation of environmental events to experimentally test their role as antecedents or consequences in controlling or maintaining specific problem behaviors. Also called experimental functional assessment one directly assesses the effects of potential controlling variables on the problem behavior. Early days of behavior modification, it was often assumed that appropriate scheduling of positive reinforcers or punishers would overcome whatever might have been causing or maintaining it. Often worked well, but finding positive reinforcers powerful enough to overcome severe problem behaviors was difficult especially true for self-injurious behavior emitted by individuals with developmental disabilities. If extreme harmful self-injurious behaviors were to be controlled, behavior modifiers seemed to have no choice other than to resort to strong punishment, such as electric shock punishment.
