BA400 Unit 6 Extinction Paper Example

Ignoring Worked for Gail and Failed for Kevin: A BA400 Unit 6 Extinction Paper

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

BA400: Foundations of Behavior Analysis

Unit 6 Extinction Paper

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The writer, the group home, the residents and every figure are composite and illustrative; the studies cited are real.

One Instruction, Two Results

Our house manager writes notes for staff on the office whiteboard, and one of them set up this paper. In June, after a staff training on challenging behavior, the house manager posted a note in the office: when residents do something inappropriate to get a reaction, ignore it. Staff applied the note to two residents that same week, without changing anything else.

At dinner, Gail, who is 41, reaches for food on her housemates' plates, and until June staff answered every reach with a reprimand. Under the new instruction, staff stopped reprimanding, quietly moved plates out of reach and looked away. Kevin, 29, shouts when asked to unload the dishwasher, and staff had been letting him go to his room afterward. Under the new instruction, staff stopped responding to the shouting with words or eye contact, but continued to finish the dishwasher after he left.

Over three weeks, Gail's food-taking fell from about four times a meal to less than once, after a short-lived increase. Kevin's shouting did not change at all, and staff began to say that ignoring did not work for him.

What Extinction Is

Extinction, in operant terms, means discontinuing the reinforcement that maintains a behavior, so that the behavior no longer produces its usual consequence and gradually decreases. The definition depends on the behavior's function. Ignoring is a form, an action staff take. It counts as extinction only if the reinforcer being withheld is attention.

Iwata et al. (1994) demonstrated this experimentally with people who engaged in self-injury. They first identified the function of each person's behavior through functional analysis, then tested different extinction procedures. Procedures that withheld the specific reinforcer maintaining the behavior reduced it. Procedures that looked similar but withheld a different consequence did not. For behavior maintained by escape from demands, for example, an extinction procedure that withheld attention was ineffective, while one that prevented escape, continuing the demand, reduced the behavior.

Ignoring Kevin's shouting withheld something he was not seeking; he still got what he wanted, which was out of the kitchen.

Gail: Extinction of Attention

Earlier analysis had shown that staff reprimands were reinforcing Gail's food-taking: the reprimand was attention, and food-taking had increased while staff reprimanded it. When staff stopped reprimanding, attention no longer followed the behavior. That is extinction matched to function, and the behavior declined.

The first week brought an increase. Gail took food more often, reached farther and once called a staff member's name while doing it. This pattern is called an extinction burst, a short-lived rise in the frequency, intensity or variety of a behavior when its reinforcement is discontinued. Lerman and Iwata (1995) reviewed treatment cases involving extinction and found that bursts occurred in a substantial minority of cases, about a third when extinction was used alone, and less often when extinction was combined with other procedures, such as reinforcement for alternative behavior. Gail's burst was brief, perhaps because staff also began giving her frequent attention whenever she kept her hands to her own meal.

Kevin: Why Ignoring Failed

Kevin's behavior had a different function. Data showed that his shouting reliably ended dishwasher tasks: staff let him leave, and the task was removed. The reinforcer was escape. Ignoring his shouting left that reinforcer in place. Each time he shouted and left, the shouting still worked, so there was no extinction at all.

For escape-maintained behavior, the matching extinction procedure is escape extinction, in which the task continues despite the problem behavior. Applied alone, escape extinction can be hard on both client and staff. The behavior specialist combined it with a replacement skill: Kevin learned to hand staff a break card, which earned him a short rest after he unloaded one rack. Shouting no longer ended the task, but asking for a break did, after a manageable amount of work. Within three weeks, Kevin shouted on only a small fraction of dishwasher requests, and he was handing over the card most afternoons.

Spontaneous Recovery and Consistency

Even after a behavior declines under extinction, it can reappear briefly, especially after a break, a phenomenon called spontaneous recovery. Gail took food twice at the first dinner after a holiday weekend at her sister's house. Staff had been warned to expect this and did not respond, and the behavior faded again.

Consistency is essential. If even one staff member reprimands Gail or lets Kevin leave after shouting, the behavior is reinforced intermittently, which can make it more persistent. Our team now briefly discusses each resident's plan at every shift change and keeps a short summary in the office.

Teaching Staff the Difference

The two results became a training example for our team. At a staff meeting, the behavior specialist drew two columns on a whiteboard, one for Gail and one for Kevin, and asked staff to fill in what happened before each behavior, what the resident did and what happened right after. Staff quickly saw that the after column was different: a reprimand for Gail, leaving the kitchen for Kevin. She then asked which consequence the ignore note had removed in each case. The room went quiet when people realized that for Kevin, the note had removed nothing he cared about.

Cooper et al. (2020) caution that extinction is one of the most misunderstood procedures in applied behavior analysis, often confused with ignoring and used without identifying function first. Our meeting was a small demonstration of that point. Several staff said they had been ignoring behaviors in other settings for years without knowing whether they were withholding the right thing.

What the Note Should Have Said

The house manager's note was well intended but described a form, not a function. A better note would have read: before changing how we respond to a behavior, find out what the behavior gets, and stop providing that. For Gail, that meant attention. For Kevin, it meant escape. The same word, extinction, required opposite actions.

Conclusion

Extinction is defined by function, not form. Ignoring worked for Gail because attention maintained her food-taking, and failed for Kevin because escape maintained his shouting. Iwata and colleagues' research explains why, Lerman and Iwata's data show that bursts are common but less so with reinforcement for alternatives, and both residents' results show that the first question in any extinction plan is what the behavior gets.

References

Cooper, J. O., Heron, T. E., & Heward, W. L. (2020). Applied behavior analysis (3rd ed.). Pearson.

Iwata, B. A., Pace, G. M., Cowdery, G. E., & Miltenberger, R. G. (1994). What makes extinction work: An analysis of procedural form and function. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 27(1), 131-144. https://doi.org/10.1901/jaba.1994.27-131

Lerman, D. C., & Iwata, B. A. (1995). Prevalence of the extinction burst and its attenuation during treatment. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 28(1), 93-94. https://doi.org/10.1901/jaba.1995.28-93