A procedure can lower the target behavior and still cause problems. Crying, aggression, fear of a therapy room, or running from a caregiver can all come from the procedure itself. As a BCBA, you need to predict these effects, watch for them, and design plans that keep them small.
Why it matters
Extinction and punishment are the procedures most likely to produce emotional and elicited side effects. These effects can put the client, caregivers, and staff at risk. They can also damage the relationship between the client and the people who teach them. A plan that "works" on the target behavior but leaves a child afraid of school is not a good plan.
The Ethics Code for Behavior Analysts asks you to weigh the risks of every intervention, prefer the least restrictive effective option, and minimize harm. Knowing these side effects lets you warn caregivers, add safeguards, and measure what matters. Evaluating them means naming the effect, telling it apart from similar effects, and judging which plan carries the most risk.
Key ideas
- Elicited vs. emitted. An elicited response is respondent behavior: a stimulus produces it, as when an aversive event produces a startle, a racing heart, or a burst of aggression. Emotional episodes often mix respondent parts (physiological arousal) with operant parts (yelling that has produced attention before).
- Extinction side effects. When reinforcement is withheld, you may see an extinction burst (a temporary increase in the frequency, duration, or intensity of the behavior), more variable responding, emotional behavior such as crying or screaming, and extinction-induced aggression. Later, the behavior may briefly reappear (spontaneous recovery).
- Punishment side effects. Aversive events can elicit aggression and emotional responding such as crying or fear. They can also set up escape and avoidance of the person, task, or setting tied to the punishment.
- Respondent pairing. Neutral stimuli present when punishment or other aversive events happen (a therapist, a room, a work task) can become conditioned aversive stimuli. They may then elicit fear or anxiety and evoke escape on their own, even when no punishment is delivered.
- Look beyond the target. Punishment can also suppress appropriate behavior that was never targeted, such as hand-raising or work near the person who punishes. A conditioned fear that is already present weakens with graduated exposure paired with reinforcers, not with more forced contact.
- Loss of reinforcement counts too. Time-out and response cost remove reinforcers, so they can bring emotional reactions similar to those seen with extinction.
- These effects are not guaranteed. They are common enough to plan for, and research suggests they are less likely when extinction or punishment is combined with rich reinforcement for appropriate behavior.
Definitions
- Extinction burst: a temporary increase in the behavior, often in its intensity, soon after extinction starts.
- Extinction-induced aggression: aggression that appears or increases when a previously reinforced behavior no longer produces reinforcement.
- Elicited (respondent) aggression: aggression produced by aversive stimulation. It is often directed at whoever or whatever is nearby, whether or not it ends the aversive event.
- Conditioned aversive stimulus: a once-neutral stimulus that functions as aversive because it has been paired with aversive events.
- Escape and avoidance: behavior that ends or prevents contact with the people, places, or tasks linked to aversive events.
Examples from a session
Side effects in real settings
- Clinic, extinction: Theo, 6, yells to get his therapist's attention. Staff stop attending to yelling and praise quiet hand-raising. For four sessions, yelling gets louder and longer, and once he kicks a chair. His BCBA had warned the team, and by the second week yelling is well below baseline.
- Home, escape extinction: Noor, 7, has a toothbrushing plan in which her parent keeps brushing through protests until the routine ends. After three weeks, she cries and pulls back as soon as she is walked to the bathroom, before the toothbrush comes out. The bathroom has become a conditioned aversive stimulus.
- School, time-out: Jae, 12, is sent to a time-out chair for throwing materials and, on the way, often pushes the nearest desk or classmate. His BCBA tracks aggression as a side-effect measure alongside the target behavior.
- Adult program, reprimands: Mr. Haddad, 42, starts avoiding the staff member who reprimands him most often and skips the job tasks she supervises.
Non-example: Priya, 9, hits her brother only when he takes her toy, and hitting reliably gets the toy back. That aggression is operant, maintained by access to the toy. No procedure produced it, so it is not a side effect.
Common mistakes / exam traps
- Reading a burst as failure. A brief rise in behavior right after extinction starts is expected. Giving in at the peak teaches the person that more intense behavior works.
- Measuring only the target behavior. Add measures for aggression, crying, avoidance, and other side effects so you can see the full picture.
- Using extinction or punishment alone. Pair them with reinforcement for a functional alternative (for example, DRA or NCR), a safety plan, and caregiver training.
Exam trap
Burst or spontaneous recovery? Check the timing. A burst is a rise right after extinction starts. Spontaneous recovery is a brief return after the behavior has already dropped.
Exam trap
Elicited or operant aggression? Check what follows it. Elicited aggression closely follows an aversive event, may hit bystanders, and occurs whatever it produces. Operant aggression rises and falls with the consequences it gets.
Quick check
Sam, 9, used to get extra recess time by arguing. His teacher stops granting extra time after arguing. For the next week, Sam argues louder and longer, then arguing drops well below baseline. What best describes the first week?
Related topics
- Operant vs. respondent extinction, as procedure and as process (B.11)
- Respondent vs. operant conditioning (B.3)
- Differential reinforcement (DRA, DRO, DRL, DRH) with and without extinction (G.2)
- Punishment procedures: time-out, response cost, and overcorrection (G.17)
- Planning for unwanted effects of reinforcement, extinction, and punishment (H.4)