Determining the reinforcing value of social consequences and establishing social consequences as reinforcers: a replication.

• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2047/d20000288

Social consequences, such as praise, do not function as reinforcers for many individuals with autism. The current study replicated the procedures of Gibson (2009) in order to condition 2 social stimuli, verbal praise and thumbs up, as reinforcers for a 3-year-old boy with autism. Two procedures, stimulus-stimulus pairing and a discriminative stimulus procedure, were evaluated. The stimulus-stimulus pairing procedure involved delivering the to-be-conditioned stimulus and immediately following it with a known reinforcer. The discriminative stimulus procedure involved establishing the to-be-conditioned stimulus as discriminative for a response that produced the same known reinforcer. Results indicated that the stimulus-stimulus pairing procedure was ineffective, while the discriminative stimulus procedure effectively conditioned both social stimuli as reinforcers.