Negative Punishment: It’s not as bad as it sounds!
As we move forward in our training terms, today we’ll tackle Negative Punishment. If you haven’t been on the journey with us this month, don’t jump to conclusions! It’s not as bad as it sounds, I promise 🙂 For any “newbies” that are just now jumping on board with this blog, we are talking about Operant Conditioning, and there are four parts to it. They are:
- Positive Reinforcement
- Positive Punishment
- Negative Reinforcement
- Negative Punishment.
Remember – don’t get caught up on the words themselves, because they might not mean exactly what you first think 😉
Training Terms (another quick recap):
According to Wikipedia:
A stimulus is something that causes a physiological or psychological response:
- Stimulation
- Stimulus (physiology), something external that influences an activity
- Stimulus (psychology), a concept in behaviorism and perception
And don’t forget: “positive” and “negative” do NOT mean “good” or “bad”. You have to think in more mathematical terms, here: POSITIVE = ADDITION, NEGATIVE = SUBTRACTION. Operant conditioning is all about the addition or removal of a stimulus into the environment and how that effects the frequency of the behavior. Now, reinforcement and punishment refer to a consequence that cause a behavior to occur more or less frequently: REINFORCEMENT = CONSEQUENCE CAUSES GREATER FREQUENCY; PUNISHMENT = CONSEQUENCE CAUSES LESS FREQUENCY.
As with all the other posts, let’s follow the definitions again….This leads us to: Negative Punishment occurs when a stimulus (that is regarded as favorable) is the removed, therefore resulting in a decrease of the behavior. It’s important to note that timing is, once again, pretty important. You have to remove the favorable stimulus after the unwanted behaviors occurs, so that your dog associates the removal of something they like with the behavior that just happened.
Negative Punishment in Dog Training:
Ready to put this into “real world” terms? Let’s say your dog LOVES to get his ears scratched. So, you’re scratching his ears, and he starts play-biting you (which hurts!). As soon as he starts the play-biting, then you STOP scratching his ears. At some point, he will learn that the play-biting caused the ear-scratching to stop, so he will stop play-biting.
See? It’s not so bad after all, right? I know, this term in particular can put people on the defensive as soon as they read it, because of the way we are programmed to those terms individually. Which is why I saved it for last 😉 Maybe one day they will rename the terms, but for now, I hope I at least helped clear this one up for you!
I hope that helped you learn this term a little better, and not have a bad reflex reaction to it anymore ;-P Next week starts a new month – can you believe it’s October already?! October is National Adopt-a-Pet Month, so we’ll be diving into this a bit more and of course giving some tips around “Howl”oween to keep your dog safe 🙂
Remember, our trainers are trained with our Multi-method Training System, so we can find the best way your dog learns 🙂 We always have you and your dog’s best interest at heart, because we want your dog to become a valued member of the family!
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