Chapter 15 – Decreasing Behavior With Punishment

Ben, a 7-year-old boy with a developmental delay, was in a public-school program for severely disturbed children. The staff at the school noticed an increase in his frequency of hitting other children and staff members. A punisher is an immediate consequence of an operant behavior that causes that behavior to decrease in frequency. Punishers are sometimes referred to as aversive stimuli, or simply aversives. Once an event has been determined to function as a punisher for a particular behavior of an individual in a particular situation, that event can be used to decrease other operant behaviors of that individual in other situations. Many kinds of events, when delivered as immediate consequences for behavior, fit the definition of punisher as given here. Most of these events can be classified in the following categories: physical punisher, reprimand, timeout, and response cost.