Aswad
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Joined: 4/4/2007
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quote:
ORIGINAL: ExSteelAgain
I don't mean to butt into this indepth discussion you guys are having, but can you give examples of where punishment is used constructively in a rehabilitative sense?
Quips about the death penalty aside, the antabuse is a potential example. Risperidone can do similar things for sex in some people, if WP is right (I can't recall seeing that side-effect mentioned elsewhere), by causing them to get nauseous upon orgasm, possibly vomiting. But we weren't discussing drug assisted bits here.
I'll try to outline the mechanism here; please bear with me despite the length.
When I was a kid, I used to love smoked salmon on bread. Once, however, I ate it just before I vomited for entirely different reasons. Since that one event, I would get quite nauseous at so much as the smell, let alone the taste. I later desensitized myself to the point where I can eat it, then left it at that. But fixing it took more time than causing it.
The reason for this is basically that I didn't see it coming.
In nature, it is often fatal to make a mistake when it comes to what you eat. So vomiting generally registers as bad, because the bad makes us learn not to repeat the mistake. Of course, in this case, it wasn't a mistake, but figuring that out requires knowing things that we couldn't have known at the time this mechanismdeveloped. A simpler way is needed.
So nature cheats.
The subconscious parts of the mind assume that the time between two events describes how likely they are to be related. Technically, that isn't so, but it's close enough that it really doesn't matter from a survival perspective, so nature hasn't had any good reason to build a better mechanism for this. (Cf. temporal distance learning)
Of course, vomiting is one thing, but what about pleasure? Pain? Joy? Injury?
Clearly, some responses are more important than others, and the ones that push hardest on our buttons, are the ones that were and/or are relevant to survival, and the ones that draw on something we have already learned. Apart from that, there is the intensity of the response, which is also a significant part of how hard our buttons are pushed.
Now, how does this mesh with learning?
Simply put, whenever something pushes one of our buttons harder than we expected it to, whether in a good way or a bad way, the mind takes that as a cue to pay attention, and a subconscious learning process takes place, wherein the context that the wrong guess occured in becomes associated with the actual outcome.
But this part of the mind needs the result to be- at least in part- unexpected to work.
When a person is raped by someone they trust, they subconsciously take in as much detail as their mind can handle under that level of stress (which may be only a few parts of the whole; so-called "triggers"), and the mind learns to engage the same mechanisms and responses when the trigger (e.g. a smell, a touch, or even arousal) is encountered again.
The surprise of betrayal cements whatever "predictive" factors the mind latched on to.
When a person with panic anxiety or phobia walks into a situation where they fully expect it to be triggered, and it unexpectedly doesn't, this can often immediately dissolve the whole learned expectation and its attendant discomfort, tenseness and so forth, which can be a big part in making progress toward mastering the problem.
The surprise that it didn't turn out bad diminshes or removes the predictors.
When a sub / slave tries to cross a limit, succeeding with flying colours (whether by chance or thanks to very careful orchestration to insure that they do succeed), and they see that look of great pride, approval and love in their dom / master's face, this can be catharctic and will often make them more eager to try it again in the future.
The surprise that it turned out great creates one or more predictors, or alters existing ones.
Now, that covers the mechanism involved in a cursory manner.
Punishment by itself yields compliance, although a known punishment is much less of a deterrent than an unexpected one, and lacks much of the formative impact. Not much to my tastes. However, it can be used as a part of a whole to systematically create good predictors for obedience and bad predictors for disobedience. When obedience is what you want, this is effectively rehabilitation. But we see it elsewhere, too. When the boss tears you a new one for a mistake, you take care not to do it again. When you get shocked by an electrical appliance, you pay attention to electricity. And when a vanilla clicks a link to Goatse, they learn not to click links on the Internet indiscriminately. This, too, is rehabilitation, but only in the sense of improvement. Good strategies employ as many elements of controlling the inputs to learning as possible, and direct them all at the desired goal.
If you want your dog to stop begging at the table, one approach is to simply ignore it and not give it any of the food afterwards, until it tires of trying. When it leaves you alone, and not before, you give it the leftovers when you're done. Usually straight away, but sometimes needing a few repetitions, it will realize that it gets its share if it waits, but not if it doesn't.
Consistency can be useful in maintaining behaviour, but when establishing it, that will make a much more superficial impact than one would get from giving a stronger feedback than expected (i.e. by not creating expectations in advance). Surprise is more likely to avoid the need for maintenance, because it sticks.
Hope that makes some sense and addresses the question adequately.
Health,
al-Aswad.
_____________________________
"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind.
From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
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RE: Discipline, Punishment, and a Crazy lil thing calle... - 
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