Contingent exercise: a mild but powerful procedure for suppressing inappropriate verbal and aggressive behavior

Two single-subject experiments were conducted in public school classrooms for severely emotionally disturbed children. Both experiments investigated the effects of a treatment requiring a child to exhibit a simple exercise task after a verbal or aggressive response, using reversal and multiple-baseline designs. The independent variable, contingent exercise, required standing up and sitting on the floor five to ten times contingent on an inappropriate behavior. It was found that contingent exercise was easy to carry out, and following it, the child quickly returned to the learning task that had been interrupted by the inappropriate behavior. The contingent exercise procedure required a minimum of prompting or manual guidance. Although contingent exercise was not topographically related to the inappropriate response, it decreased those responses dramatically. The results suggested that contingent exercise was not only more powerful than DRO but also could be administered independently. It was concluded that contingent exercise may constitute an alternative procedure that can be used by therapists confronted with severely abnormal behaviors. It would appear to be particularly relevant in settings where procedures such as timeout and painful consequences find restricted use. Finally, a number of guidelines have been proposed as a safeguard against the misuse of this mild but powerful procedure.