Functional communication training has been reported to be a promising treatment for severe behavior problems. In this study, functional communication training alone and combined with extinction and/or punishment was evaluated for 4 clients with severe retardation, behavior problems, and communication deficits. The participants were inpatients on a hospital unit for treatment of severe behavior disorders. They received individualized interventions based on functional assessment that included reinforcement of a communication response with the same function as their destructive behavior. Results showed that for some patients, functional communication training was not sufficient to produce clinically significant reductions in destructive behavior, and the combination of training plus punishment produced the largest and most consistent reductions.

Three studies are presented in which environmental correlates of self-injurious behavior were systematically examined and later used as the basis for treatment. In Study 1, 7 developmentally disabled subjects were exposed to a series of conditions designed to identify factors that maintain self-injurious behavior: attention contingent on self-injurious behavior (positive reinforcement), escape from or avoidance of demands contingent on self-injurious behavior (negative reinforcement), alone (automatic reinforcement), and play (control). Results of a multielement design showed that each subject's self-injurious behavior occurred more frequently in the demand condition, suggesting that the behavior served an avoidance or escape function. Six of the 7 subjects participated in Study 2. During educational sessions, "escape extinction" was applied as treatment for their self-injurious behavior in a multiple baseline across subjects design. Results showed noticeable reduction or elimination of self-injurious behavior for each subject and an increase in compliance with instructions in all subjects for whom compliance data were taken. The 7th subject, whose self-injurious behavior during Study 1 occurred in response to medical demands (i.e., physical examinations), participated in Study 3. Treatment was comprised of extinction, as in Study 2, plus reinforcement for tolerance of the examination procedure, and was evaluated in a multiple baseline across settings design. Results showed that the treatment was successful in eliminating self-injurious behavior and that its effects transferred across eight new therapists and three physicians. General implications for the design, interpretation, and uses of assessment studies are discussed.DESCRIPTORS: avoidance behavior, escape behavior, extinction, functional analysis, negative reinforcement, self-injurious behavior.Results from a number of studies indicate that self-injurious behavior (SIB), a chronic and serious disorder occurring in approximately 10% of the developmentally disabled population, may be ac-

Reliable changes in a variety of behaviors, or classes of behaviors, when only one is manipulated experimentally, have demonstrated that even topographically dissimilar responses can be functionally related. We investigated such a relationship between topographically different child behaviors (compliance and inappropriate activities) by using a methodology that tests for response covariation. Five conditions were provided to sequentially increase and decrease first one and then the other of these behaviors, with the degree of covariation between the two behaviors (i.e., the relationship between changes in the targeted and nontargeted behaviors) being the finding of interest. Results showed that, regardless of the intervention used, the behavior targeted, or the direction manipulated, the nontargeted behavior reliably covaried inversely with the targeted one. The findings have immediate relevance to the clinical treatment of multiple behavior problems exhibited by children. Furthermore, the study of relationships between responses and the processes underlying these relationships can have important implications for understanding the complexity characteristic of human behavior not yet analyzed by behavioral research.

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