Assessment and treatment of automatically reinforced self-induced emesis

Frequent emesis can cause substantial deleterious effects to a child's health and environment. We conducted a functional analysis of a 3-year-old girl's self-induced emesis and confirmed that emesis was maintained by automatic reinforcement. In a reversal design, we evaluated the efficacy of implementing response blocking at 100% and 50% treatment integrity levels on both attempts and successful production of emesis. One hundred percent blocking, but not 50% blocking, was successful in reducing attempts and emesis below baseline levels.