Use of delayed feedback and reinforcement for reducing inappropriate behaviors with chronically institutionalized mental clients

This study investigated the efficacy of: (a) delayed feedback; (b) delayed feedback and social reinforcement; or (c) delayed feedback, social reinforcement, and tangible reinforcement for reducing the rate of bizarre motoric behaviors for 2 female and 1 male chronically institutionalized mental clients. These treatments were consecutively employed with each subject, utilizing a multiple baseline across subjects experimental design. Results indicated that these subjects were able to retain and understand the feedback on both their problem and alternative behaviors but that reductions in the inappropriate motoric behaviors resulted only when tangible reinforcers were included in the treatment. Implications for further investigations and for the utility and efficiency of delayed feedback and reinforcement with chronically institutionalized adults are discussed.     

The effects of fading,feedback, and feedback plus instruction on the perfomance of institutionalized retarded children in number retention exercises

Summary Three feedback training procedures, fading, feedback and feedback plus instruction, were used in conjunction with reinforcement contingencies to assess the performance of 12 mentally retarded boys in number rentention exercises. The fading and the feedback plus instruction procedures were the only ones to yield highly significant effects: none of the procedures led to any substantially improved performance in transfer exercises. Advantages of fading over the more traditional procedure (less errors, ability to learn difficult exercises) are discussed, as are the problems arising in the application of this method. Analysis of the exercises showed that premature removal of the additional colour cues in the fading procedure resulted in a substantial reduction of the number of correct responses, especially in the difficult exercises, and that the feedback procedure was particularly unsuccessful in difficult exercises. Methodological problems encountered in previous retention studies were indicated and an attempt made to overcome them.

---

Zusammenfassung Kombiniert mit Belohnungen, die nur für richtige Antworten erfolgten, wurden drei Rückmelde-Trainingsverfahren: Fading, Feedback und Feedback plus Instruction angewandt, um 12 geistig retardierte Jungen an Zahlen-Konservations-Aufgaben zu trainieren. Nur die Fading- und Feedback plus Instruction-Techniken zeigten hoch signifikante Trainingsgewinne, doch keine der Techniken führte zu bedeutenden Verbesserungen bei Transferaufgaben. Die Vorteile der Fading-Technik gegenüber mehr traditionellen Verfahren (weniger Fehler, Erlernen schwierigerer Aufgaben) wurde ebenso erörtert wie Probleme ihrer Anwendung. Aufgabenanalysen zeigten, daß erstens verfrühtes Ausblenden der zusätzlichen Farben bei der Fading-Technik zu einem starken Absinken der Anzahl der richtigen Antworten besonders bei schwierigen Aufgaben führt; und daß zweitens die Feedback-Technik beim Erlernen schwieriger Aufgaben besonders geringen Erfolg hat. Methodologische Probleme bei vorausgegangenen Konservationsexperimenten wurden aufgezeigt, und es wurde versucht, diese methodologischen Probleme zu lösen.

---

---

This paper is based on a thesis submitted by the author to the University Mannheim as partial fulfillmant of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science (Diplom). The writer is greatly indebted to Dr. Norman H. Stein for his guidance throughout the planning and execution of the study and to his helpful suggestions and criticisms. The writer is also indebted to Dr. Byron J. Ward for making subjects available at Syracuse State School, and to the teachers of the Association for Retarded Children in Syracuse, New York. The study was conducted during a one year stay at Syracuse University. The financial support of the Studentenwerk Mannheim for tuitions and living expenses and a travel grant of the Fulbright Commission is gratefully acknowledged.     

The effects of family structure on institutionalized children's self-concepts

This study examined the effects of family structure (intact, stepparent, and single parent) on children's self-concepts, using Parish and Taylor's Personal Attribute Inventory for Children. One hundred sixty-six institutionalized children in Grades 5 through 12 participated in the study. Although a trend was noted for students from single-parent families to check fewer positive adjectives, they did not differ significantly (.05 level) from children from intact families or stepfamilies.     

Major legal and ethical issues in behavioral treatment: Focus on institutionalized mental patients

Proponents of behavior therapies advocate expanded use of this approach based on its pragmatics and clinical successes. Critics, however, point not only to abuses in implementation, but charge that the behavioral approach is inherently unethical, especially when used with institutionalized mental patients. This article will review these arguments as well as provide an updated exploration of relevant court decisions impacting behavioral treatment in mental institutions. Suggested courses of action are then provided.     

Long-term effects of a control-relevant intervention with the institutionalized aged

Elderly nursing home residents who were tested as part of an intervention designed to increase feelings of choice and personal responsibility over daily events were reevaluated 18 month later. Nurses' ratings and health and mortality indicators suggest that the experimental treatment and /or the processes that it set in motion had sustained beneficial effects.     

The effects of feedback in psychophysical tasks

Previous results of the reinforcement effects of feedback in psychophysical tasks have been interpreted as changes in the S’s response bias in the uncertain sensory state. The present study varied the percentage of feedback in a two-altemative loud-soft recognition task. The values of the probability of correct feedback were 1, .8, .6, .4, .2, and 0. The results indicated that Ss learned to respond to agree with the experimental feedback rather than with the actual cue presented on a trial. The probability of a response on Trial n +1 was highly dependent upon the response and feedback of Trial n only when the two trials were the same. It was concluded that feedback must influence the response probability vector associated with a given detection state.     

The influence of performance feedback on goal-setting and mental effort regulation

Goal-setting and mental effort investment may be influenced by the perception of success or failure. The aim of the current study was to investigate the dynamics of motivational intensity model using false performance feedback. Forty participants performed a demanding cognitive task over five successive (5 min) blocks. Participants received performance feedback of either progressive success or progressive failure. A number of psychophysiological variables were used to index mental effort investment and emotion, including: HRV components, blood pressure, skin conductance level, EEG, and facial EMG. Subjective estimates of mood, workload and motivation were also collected alongside performance measures. The success group experienced positive affect and a less pronounced decline in subjective motivation in response to a perception of successful achievement. In contrast, feedback of failure led to adverse changes in mood/motivation, but did not lead to the absolute withdrawal of effort, although trends in the psychophysiological data suggest that participants in the failure group were on the verge of abandoning the task. The implications of these findings are discussed within the context of goal-setting and effort regulation models.     

The effects of feedback consistency and feedback favorability on self-perceived task competence and perceived feedback accuracy

The present study, employing a 2 × 2 true-experimental design and regression analyses assessed the main and interactive effects of feedback consistency (consistent vs inconsistent), and feedback favorability (acceptable vs superior), for feedback given at two time periods on measures of perceived feedback accuracy and self-perceived task competence. Among the study's findings were that (a) the perceived accuracy of feedback at the second period was a function of the favorability of feedback received at the first time period, (b) the self-perceived task competence levels of subjects were jointly determined by the favorability of feedback received at both time periods, and (c) the perceived accuracy of feedback was a function of its consistency. Organizational implications of the study's results are offered.     

Hand Test indices of violent and destructive behavior for institutionalized mental retardates.

The Hand Test (Wagner, 1962) and the maladaptive behavior scale of the AAMD Adaptive Behavior Scale (ABS) were administered to 78 institutionalized retardates (46 males and 32 females) in order to investigate the relationship between violent and destructive behavior and two purported indicants of violent and destructive acting-out behavior on the Hand Test, the acting-out-score (AOS and movement-content response (ACT-MOV). Significant correlations between the two Hand Test indices and the number of types of violent and destructive behavior evinced during a three-month period were obtained.     

The effects of feedback format on dynamic decision making

The tendency for people to perform poorly on dynamic decision-making tasks has been attributed to their inability to form adequate mental models of dynamic systems (Sterman, 1994). An alternative explanation is that the tabular feedback formats used in previous studies do not facilitate mental representations of the dynamic task and lead to processing overload. Drawing on research in the human factors area, this study examined the impact of graphical versus tabular feedback formats on performance, response times, and learning on a dynamic inventory control task under differing levels of complexity. The graphical feedback group performed better but the tabular group showed stronger evidence of learning. The two groups did not differ in response times. Records of decision rationales showed that participants were aware of complexity factors but were unable to cope with them effectively under either feedback format. The proximity compatibility principle ( Wickens & Carswell, 1995) from human factors, which argues that feedback must be matched to the processing requirements of the task, provides a useful theoretical framework for the design and testing of feedback formats for organizational tasks and criteria.     

The immediate effects of positive and negative feedback signals

Reaction time priming techniques were used in 4 experiments to assess the effects of feedback signals on arousal, response, and attentional processes. The letter A, C, or F served as a priming signal presented 100 ms before a target letter. Emotional value was manipulated by using A, C, and F to reflect good, average, and poor performance on the previous trial. The positive (A), neutral (C), and negative (F) primes did not differ in their effects on arousal. At the response level, positive and neutral primes exerted similar effects, and negative primes led to response inhibition. Regarding attention, positive and negative primes attracted greater attention than neutral primes, with the effect stronger for positive than for negative primes. These effects disappeared when the emotional value of the stimuli was removed, and the effects were not a consequence of expectancies or performance factors extending across trials.     

Passive tactile feedback facilitates mental rotation of handheld objects

Mental rotation of objects improves when passive tactile information for the rotating object accompanies the imagined rotation (Wraga, Creem, & Proffitt, 2000). We examined this phenomenon further using a within-subjects paradigm involving handheld objects. In Experiment 1, participants imagined rotating an unseen object placed on their upturned palms. The participants were faster at mental rotation when the object was rotated on their palm than when the object remained stationary. Experiment 2 tested whether the performance advantage would endure when the participants received tactile information for only the start- and endpoints of the rotation event. This manipulation did not improve performance, relative to a stationary control. Experiment 3 revealed that ambiguous tactile information, continuous with the rotation event but independent of object shape, actually degraded performance, relative to a stationary control. In Experiment 4, we found that continuous tactile rotation discrepant from imagined object movement also hindered performance, as compared with continuous tactile information aligned with imagined object movement. The findings suggest a tight coupling between tactile information specifying continuous object rotation and the corresponding internal representation of the rotating object.     

Effects of antipsychotic medication on discrimination learning for institutionalized adults who have mental retardation

Reduction in medication levels of drugs used to suppress inappropriate behavior (chlorpromazine, thioridazine and haloperidol) resulted in increases in performance on a discrimination learning task for seven residents of a state institution who are mentally retarded. After training to criterion on a matching-to-sample task, these participants experienced reductions in medication in an N of 1 AB replication paradigm. Two controls were medication free, and one remained on a stable dosage throughout. Improvement of performance on the first dependent variable (number of trials needed to meet criterion) ranged from 13.8% to 53.3% for the seven participants, while the three controls improved less than 1%. Improvement of performance on the second dependent variable (percentage of correct responses) ranged from 2.7% to 19.7% for experimental subjects; five of the seven subjects exhibited a minimum improvement of 8%. The change in percentage of correct responses for the three controls ranged from ?4.9 to 1.3. Treatment implications are discussed.     

Reinforcement and instructions with mental patients

An attempt was made to modify a socially desirable response of mental patients. It was found that instructions to the patients had no enduring effect unless accompanied by reinforcement. Also, it was found that reinforcement was not effective unless the reinforcement procedure was accompanied by instructions that specified the basis for the reinforcement. Maximum change in behavior was obtained when the reinforcement procedure took advantage of the existing verbal repertoire of the patients. A significant methodological finding was that substantial modification of the behavior of psychotics could be achieved by briefly delaying, rather than withholding, food reinforcement.