[PDF] Motivating Operations and Discriminative Stimuli: Distinguishable but Interactive Variables | Semantic Scholar (2024)

From both a theoretical and a practical perspective, rethinking the application of the motivating operations concept to negative reinforcement is advantageous, and the implications of doing so are explored with the aim of encouraging relevant research and improving the practice of applied behavior analysis.

The development and acceptability of a comprehensive crisis prevention program and its modification for a large pediatric health care system to help remediate the limitations of existing programs are described and well received overall by employees.

Red redefining motivating operations as operations that modulate the reinforcing or punishing effectiveness of particular kinds of events and the control of behavior by discriminative stimuli historically relevant to those events is proposed.

11 studies concerned with the influence of varying levels of food or water deprivation on stimulus generalization suggest that motivating operations influence stimulus control by changing the evocative strength of not just an established discriminative stimulus, but also of stimuli that are physically similar to it.

The concept of function-altering CSSs has implications for such areas of interest as stimulus equivalence, the terminology involving “rules” and “rule-governed behavior,’ and the way in which behavior analysts view the effects of such basic processes as reinforcement and punishment.

The first two books on behavior analysis had chapter-length coverage of motivation, but by the late 1960s it was no longer being given much treatment in the behavior-analytic literature.

It is hoped that this endeavour will encourage the utilization of the full conceptual system of the MO and provide “real world” examples of the conditioned MO.

Here the stimulus change functions more like an establishing operation than a discriminative stimulus, and the new term, "establishing stimulus," is suggested.

How the current conceptualization of the EO is in need of revision is described, alternative terms, including the generic term motivating operation (MO), are suggested, and examples of MOs and their behavioral effects are provided using articles from the applied behavior analysis literature.

An extensive treatment of establishing operations, including the warning and the blocked-response conditioned establishing operations is provided, followed by a description of the mand in terms of such operations.

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