Applied Behavior Analysis Commons^™

Phase Duration And Resurgence, Sean Smith

Theses & Dissertations

Resurgence, the recurrence of responding due to a worsening of reinforcement conditions for current behavior, is a prevalent form of treatment relapse. Resurgence as Choice in Context predicts that increasing the duration of exposure to reinforcement for target responding during Phase 1 will increase resurgence magnitude, whereas increasing the duration of exposure to reinforcement for alternative responding and extinction for target responding during Phase 2 will decrease resurgence magnitude. We conducted an experiment evaluating these predictions with human participants recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform. We varied Phase 1 and Phase 2 durations across four experimental groups. Resurgence as Choice …