Selective Punishment Therapy: Sex Porn and Love Addiction
Selective Punishment
Selective Punishment In selective punishment, or selective negative reinforcement procedures, the therapist selects a target behavior that is maladaptive. By applying an aversive event when this target behavior occurs, the therapist causes its probability of occurrence to decrease.
This maladaptive behavior is persistent, and most attempts at intervention on the part of a therapist will produce no or only temporary effects. In some of these cases, operant therapists have applied selective punishment. In one particular case, whenever the autistic child hit himself, a shock was delivered to him. The child soon learned that his behavior brought punishment, and he engaged less often in self-mutilation (Lovaas and Simmons, 1969; Dorsey, Iwata, Ong, and McSween, 1980). This procedure did not cure the child's autism, but it did stop his maladaptive behavior.
Extinction Punishment involves imposing some noxious event on the patient such as a loud noise, an electric shock, or a nauseating drug. Even though such stimuli can be highly effective in removing unwanted behaviors, there are obvious undesirable aspects to such therapy. For example, patients may come to find the entire therapeutic setting aversive. Or many therapists, quite understandably, may feel uncomfortable with shocking, nauseating, and otherwise scaring fellow human beings, particularly those already burdened with psychological problems.
Extinction is sometimes an alternative strategy: one can eliminate a behavior by merely omitting some highly desired event whenever the target behavior occurs. This procedure is sometimes called "time out from reinforcement" (Kazdin, 1980).
The most common use of extinction in behavior therapy is when the therapist suspects that some maladaptive target behavior is being performed in order to get some positive reinforcement. The therapist then arranges the contingencies so that this behavior no longer produces the reinforcement. If the behavior decreases in frequency, extinction has been successful. For example, there was a case of a female psychotic patient who would make numerous disruptive visits to the nurses' office on the ward. An operant therapist believed that the attention that the patient received from the nurses when she barged into their office was a positive reinforcer that maintained the disruptive behavior. So the therapist instructed the nurses to ignore the patient completely when the patient entered their office, thereby eliminating what was believed to be positive reinforcement. After seven weeks of treatment, the patient's visits dropped from an average of sixteen per day to two per day (Ayllon and Michel, 1959).