Establishing schedule control over dropping to the floor

In contrast to inherently dangerous behaviors such as self-injury and aggression, some behaviors are problematic because of the context in which they occur. In the current study, we report on a boy who engaged in dropping to the floor both excessively and at inappropriate times. During the functional analysis, dropping occurred across all conditions, suggesting that it was either multiply maintained or maintained by automatic reinforcement. Treatment involved the use of discriminative stimuli and differential reinforcement with response cost to teach the client when dropping to the floor was and was not appropriate. Copyright (C) 2003 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.