Behavior Met With Punishment Contingencies

Unit 6 Discussion Board
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Behavior can be rule-governed or contingency-shaped and can be accompanied by punishment contingencies. This paper will discuss a personal experience where behavior was met with punishment contingencies. The essay will critically analyze the conduct to ascertain whether it was contingency-shaped. Furthermore, it will evaluate the utilization of positive and negative punishment contingency and analyze the resultant impacts of the resulting behavior. Lastly, the paper will offer a behavior analytic view concerning the suitability of incorporating punishment as a strategy and explain the modification of previous approaches to reduce the problem behavior utilizing positive punishment, negative punishment, or extinction.
While at high school, I was a hardworking and diligent student, always striving to complete assignments before schedules and consistently. The behavior under consideration is failing to complete a task before the deadline. Arguably, such behavior is identifiable as rule-governed, considering there was knowledge of the consequences involved in the failure to meet the deadline (Hayes & Zettle, 2014). My teacher used a negative punishment contingency when I failed to finish my task before the deadline as a response to the behavior. The teacher deducted several points from my final grade. This deduction is a significant consequence of failure to adhere to the deadline (Cooper et al., 2022). Such a negative punishment impacted my behavior immediately since I had a strong sense of disappointment and regretted my failure to meet the schedule expectations. Notably, the negative punishment contingency significantly affected my problem behavior. It acted as a deterrent and improved my motivation to prioritize and plan for my assignments in the future such that I meet deadlines. Point deduction from my final grade served as a consequence which I attributed to my lack of timely task completion, thus becoming more conscientious about completing subsequent tasks ahead of the deadline.
Incorporating punishment in such an experience is appropriate from a behavior-analytic view. The negative punishment contingency is significant in mitigating any future occurrences of the problem behavior (Cooper et al., 2022). This mitigation is evident in deadline adherence to the subsequent tasks. However, Carbone (2019) highlights the importance of considering alternative strategies to enhance behavior change while reducing any possible adverse effects concerni...