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

• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2047/d20001171

Social praise is generally considered to be a conditioned reinforcer. However, many children with developmental disabilities do not respond to social stimuli as a typically developing child would. The present study replicated the procedures of Gibson (2009) to establish 2 social consequences, back pats and verbal praise, as conditioned reinforcers for a 3-year-old boy with autism. Both a stimulus-stimulus pairing procedure and an SD procedure were evaluated. In the stimulus-stimulus pairing procedure, the delivery of the social stimulus was immediately followed by the delivery of the primary reinforcer. In the SD procedure, the social stimulus was established as a discriminative stimulus for the primary reinforcer. The results indicated that neither the stimulus-stimulus pairing procedure nor the SD procedure effectively conditioned the social stimuli as reinforcers.