RE: Discipline, Punishment, and a Crazy lil thing called Love

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RE: Discipline, Punishment, and a Crazy lil thing calle... - 8/29/2007 8:02:54 AM

KnightofMists

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quote:

ORIGINAL: Padriag

Put another way... the alcoholic drinks because getting drunk is rewarding to them, thus making it a reinforcer. Since we can't remove the effects of alcohol on them as a reinforcer, we have to find a way to counter it. One option is to present a stronger punisher, an aversive stimulus, which in this case is the nausea that then occurs anytime they drink alcohol. This works in cases where the level of reward they gain from the alcohol is overpowered by the punishing effect of the aversive stimuli. Once the habitual behavior is broken its easier to manage and further alter, though we have to be aware that there may be periodic attempts to reassert the old behavior (call extinction bursts).

mmmmmm is it a reward?.. or are they just avoiding being sober because the consequences of being sober is not so good for them.

That's the problem. what is the actual motivation for the behavior?.. the motivation to drink will denote it's a reinforcer to continue to drink or a Punishment to be sober. Maybe it a bit of both... but I suspect one is a root cause or the stronger influence that causes a given behavior to increase and another behavior to decrease. You have two behavior... Being Drunk and Being Sober. so which is the person attracted to or avoiding the most.

Helping and teaching a person life skills can go along ways to help a person avoid drinking as an answer to avoid the issue they face... since life is not so good for them when are sober. It's not so much that drinking is a reinforcer but being sober is a punishment.... to use Skinner's definitions.

< Message edited by KnightofMists -- 8/29/2007 8:03:25 AM >

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RE: Discipline, Punishment, and a Crazy lil thing calle... - 8/29/2007 11:09:04 AM

Aswad

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Not quite so, KnightofMists, at least going by the research I've read so far. I'll try to keep it simple.

First off, there is a genetic component that accounts for about half of the problem [1,2].

Attempts to peg down social problems, depression, coping skills, etc., as antecedents to alcohol abuse have been inconclusive. By contrast, such antecedents have been established for other popular drugs of abuse. Given the greater prevalence of alcohol ue, it should have been far easier to establish these antecedents. Alcohol addiction works in the brain much the same as with other kinds of addiction, including the changes to the reward circuits in the brain, and therapies based on these elements have shown more success than therapies based on Skinner's theories. Also, people who recover from dependency are not usually able to control intake afterwards.

I'm not saying you're wrong, just that Skinner's model is not up to the task of modelling alcohol abuse and alcohol dependancy.

#1 -- J Am Pharm Assoc 41(1):78-90, 2001 -- Drug abuse and dependency.
#2 -- Curr Psychiatry Rep. 2006 Apr;8(2):151-7 -- The genetics of alcohol dependence.

< Message edited by Aswad -- 8/29/2007 11:10:37 AM >

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From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
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RE: Discipline, Punishment, and a Crazy lil thing calle... - 8/29/2007 7:23:34 PM

KnightofMists

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Hard science is always much easier to establish factual understandings. However, Soft Sciences is another thing all together. The biological affects of chemicals (drugs and alchohol) into the body are measurable to a much greater degree. As such it is obviously much easier to establish the antecedents.

However, mental thought processes are in large part unmeasurable and it's not surprizing that no signifcant establishment of these antecedents have occurred. Secondly, Expecting that we should see universal antecedents on a psychological level is a red herring. As individuals we percieve and experince the world uniquely. When we compare biological aspects.. we are in essense comparing apples to apples and we can even quantify biological differences. However, we can't begin to consider the number of variations of the psychology of humankind on the indivdual perspective. These issue make it hardly surprizing that science has been unable to measure any universal applied antecedents to the psychological factors of humankind.

In essense we are left with assessing things at one case at a time. Attempting to connect the mindfield of issues that affected the pyschological make up of an individual person. As a person, I have known more than a few individuals that seeked to drink as escape and not because they liked its affects. Some cutters use the pain as a coping mechinism for the issue that they face in life. The fact is that people do resort to destructive behaviors that can't be attributed to biological factors... but psychological factors. I don't believe it is constructive or useful to chase for some universal reasons that people do X is because they experience Y. The idea of Cause and Effect is very limited and is showing itself very limited in dealing with these human mental issues.

I agree.. Skinner's model falls short.

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RE: Discipline, Punishment, and a Crazy lil thing calle... - 9/9/2007 2:40:55 AM

Aswad

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As I said, not saying you're wrong, just saying (as you also did) that Skinner falls short.

I definitely know cases where people have started drinking to "lose themselves" (i.e. escape) in a situation they did not see any way out of. But most of those have been a lot more successful at managing it than those that started drinking as a regular addiction. Also, there are some genetic markers for the latter group, but I can't remember them off the top of my head right now.

Other drugs seem to have a higher prevalence of people using it to cope, though, and are generally a lot less negative in that regard (at least in the short term), among other things because substances like heroin, cocaine, and so forth, do not cause the same level of impairment at an equivalent level of intoxication, and also do have positive effects on things like depression et al, although they carry their own problems (tolerance buildup with heroin, unless the docs are willing to use PKC-inhibitors and/or NMDA-antagonists to prevent that in an effort at harm reduction; irreversible VMAT2 damage with cocaine, and oxidative stress etc.).

Generally, the statistics seem to indicate that proper treatment of mental health issues, along with efforts to improve the environment (e.g. better welfare system), could avoid a significant portion of the "hard" substance abuse going on out there. Similar things go for people with ADHD, where treatment reduces the likelyhood of drug abuse from alot-more-likely-than-not to slightly-above-average.

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... - 9/9/2007 4:03:50 AM

LostMyself

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quote:

ORIGINAL: celticlord2112

I prefer not to discuss the matter too much after a punishment. When I punish, once the punishment is done it is DONE. I don't want any guilt or other negative feeling lingering around.

Wipe the slate clean, restore the balance, then move on. That is how I approach such things.

That's how it used to be with my master and mistress.

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Post #: 145