Association for Behavior Analysis International

This presentation will describe research on the therapeutic workplace, an employment-based intervention to address the interrelated problems of poverty, unemployment and drug addiction. Abstinence reinforcement, in which patients receive desirable consequences contingent on providing objective evidence of abstinence, can promote abstinence from abused drugs, but they must employ high magnitude reinforcement to promote abstinence in treatment-refractory patients and they must be maintainedin time to prevent relapse. The therapeutic workplace was developed to provide a practical way to arrange high magnitude and long duration abstinence reinforcement. Under the therapeutic workplace intervention, individuals are hired and paid to work. To reinforce abstinence, participants are required to provide objective evidence of drug abstinence to maintain workplace access. Because many poor individuals lack job skills, the therapeutic workplace offers a training phase before formal employment, and incentives are strategically used to promote engagement in computer-based vocational training on-site. Controlled studies have shown that the therapeutic workplace can retain low-income unemployed adults in training and in employment, promote the development of job skills, initiate and maintain abstinence from heroin and cocaine, and promote adherence to addiction medications in chronically unemployed adults.

Forthcoming.

The concept of reinforcement is at least incomplete and almost certainly incorrect. An alternative way of organizing our understanding of behavior may be built around three concepts: allocation, induction, and correlation. Allocation is the measure of behavior and captures the centrality of choice: All behavior entails choice and consists of choice. Allocation changes as a result of induction and contingency. The term induction covers phenomena such as adjunctive, interim, and terminal behavior—behavior induced in a situation by occurrence of food or another Phylogenetically Important Event (PIE) in that situation. If one allowed that some stimulus control were the result of phylogeny, then induction and stimulus control would be identical, and a PIE would resemble a discriminative stimulus. Much evidence supports the idea that a PIE induces all PIE-related activities. Research also supports the idea that stimuli correlated with PIEs become PIE-related conditional inducers. Contingencies create correlations between "operant" activity (e.g., lever pressing) and PIEs (e.g., food). Once an activity has become PIE-related, the PIE induces it along with other PIE-related activities. Contingencies also constrain possible performances. These constraints specify feedback functions, which explain phenomena such as the higher response rates on ratio schedules in comparison with interval schedules.