A fellow Billerica, BCBA, Julie Alden, passed along this video to me. It is a great way to explain what we refer to as an “extinction burst.” Lots of the time, when a new plan is implemented or a new strategy applied, you will see behavior get worse before it gets better. While this can be extremely frustrating, it is an expected pattern of behavior that happens once reinforcement is withheld from a previously reinforced behavior. Hopefully this video will explain it a little better:
One way I have always described extinction bursts in trainings is to imagine you go to use an elevator. You push the button, but nothing happens. What would you do next? You would push it again. Then again. Then maybe push it harder and repetitively until, finally, you realize it isn’t working. In the past, pushing the button has lead to being reinforced with the elevator magically opening for you. Now, though, that button pressing behavior isn’t giving you what you want. Even when you upped the ante by making your behavior more intense, you still didn’t get what you had expected. Finally, you have to use a different behavior, such as going up the staircase, to get where you need to go.
In the example in the video, what might be a better analogy would be if the child kept requesting a cookie by screaming “COOKIE!” and mom withheld the cookie until the child was able to ask, “May I please have a cookie?” Those are interventions with expects extinction bursts we see often in the school setting, which is more of a shaping procedure (which is a post for another day).
There are so many idiosyncracies to behavior, but my hope is that introducing some of these basic behavioral principles can help you make better informed decisions when you are in the trenches. Even if you aren’t able to carry out an intervention as planned, knowing where you went wrong and what you can do differently the next time is more than half the battle.
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