Love Sex and Porn Addiction: THE OPERANT THERAPIES
THE OPERANT THERAPIES
The operant therapist uses these principles in asking three essential questions: (1) What undesirable behavior or maladaptive operants does the patient engage in? (2) What reinforcers maintain these maladaptive responses? (3) What environmental changes, usually reinforcement or discriminative stimulus changes, can be made to change the maladaptive behavior into adaptive behavior? (Ullmann and Krasner, 1965).
A variety of operant therapies have been employed for a variety of forms of psychopathology.
Selective Positive Reinforcement In the technique of selective positive reinforcement, the therapist selects a target behavior or adaptive behavior that is to be increased in probability. By the systematic delivery of positive reinforcement contingent on the occurrence of the target behavior, this behavior becomes more frequent. Anorexia nervosa is a life-threatening disorder that, for the most part, afflicts women in their teens and early twenties. They literally starve themselves to death. By engaging in bizarre eating habits, such as eating only three Cheerios a day, an anorexic will lose 25 to 30 percent of her body weight within a couple of months. When they are hospitalized, the first problem with these patients (who may weigh as little as seventy-five pounds) is not curing them, but just saving their lives. Such patients usually do not cooperate with regimes that attempt to force them to eat. One highly effective way of saving the life of an anorexic woman is to selectively reinforce her for eating by using a reinforcer that is more highly desired than is eating. But, if you ask her what would be a reward that would induce her to eat, she will probably not tell you. In such a situation, a therapist will look for a behavior that the patient engages in frequently and will only give her the opportunity to perform it if she first eats (Premack, 1959). If we observe and time what an anorexic does during the day, we might find, for example, that she watches television for an hour and a half, spends forty-five minutes talking with fellow patients, and spends an hour pacing the halls. An operant therapist would then set up a regime such that in order to be allowed to do anyone of these three activities, the anorexic would have to first eat a fixed amount. For example, if she first ate a tablespoon of custard, she would then be allowed to watch television for ten min utes; if she ate all ofher steak, she would then be allowed to pace the halls for twenty minutes (Stunkard, 1976). The use of selective positive reinforcement can also be seen in a type of interpersonal therapy called behavioral contracting. In this therapy, two people, usually a married couple, contract with each other to perform some behavior that one of them wants the other to do in exchange for the other engaging in behavior that the first wants. For example, a wife might not want her husband to stay out late at night several evenings a week drinking with his friends; a husband might not want his wife to return late from her class. The husband's drinking irks the wife, and the wife's failure to return from class irks the husband. In this situation, the wife will contract to come home earlier ifthe husband has stayed home the night before. Similarly, the husband will contract to stay home if the wife comes home earlier. Both members ofthe pair receive positive reinforcement contingent on their performing specific desired responses. Such marital contracting often removes sources of conflict in a disturbed marriage and in addition shows each spouse that they can affect the behavior of their mate (Stuart, 1969; Patterson, Weiss, and Hops, 1976).
Love Sex and Porn Addiction During twenty years of research, selective positive reinforcement has been shown to be an effective technique across a very wide range of behavioral disorders. When a discrete and specifiable instrumental response is missing from the adaptive repertoire of an individual, application of selective positive reinforcement will generally produce and maintain that response.