The History and Evolution of Behavioral Approaches and Positive
Behavioral Interventions Derrick Dufresne: Staff Can Be Negative
Reinforcers Derrick Dufresne: I mean, we did so many things that
at time we thought, you know what? You see, no one ever talked
about this either. If it didn't make sense to the person, and it
maybe didn't make sense to the staff, but, yeah, we used all
kinds of reinforcers. But then we also got into some things that
I know we'll talk about a little bit is that it wasn't so much
the reinforcers. It's that we were working with people that had
pretty out of control behaviors and we kept upping the ante. So
reinforcers were kind of on the positive side but they also were
things that we called—and this is in the literature too—which I
always thought was an interesting term—negative reinforcer. And
I never realized that, as staff, we could be negative
reinforcers to people. And sometimes, and we'll talk about this,
too, sometimes I think I was the reason for people's behavior. I
mean, yo