Editing Reinforcement (section)

==Terminology==

{{addiction glossary}}
In the behavioral sciences, the terms "positive" and "negative" refer when used in their strict technical sense to the nature of the action performed by the conditioner rather than to the responding operant's evaluation of that action and its consequence(s). "Positive" actions are those that add a factor, be it pleasant or unpleasant, to the environment, whereas "negative" actions are those that remove or withhold from the environment a factor of either type. In turn, the strict sense of "reinforcement" refers only to reward-based conditioning; the introduction of unpleasant factors and the removal or withholding of pleasant factors are instead referred to as "punishment", which when used in its strict sense thus stands in contradistinction to "reinforcement". Thus, "positive reinforcement" refers to the addition of a pleasant factor, "positive punishment" refers to the addition of an unpleasant factor, "negative reinforcement" refers to the removal or withholding of an '''''unpleasant factor''''', and "negative punishment" refers to the removal or withholding of a '''''pleasant factor'''''.

This usage is at odds with some non-technical usages of the four term combinations, especially in the case of the term "negative reinforcement", which is often used to denote what technical parlance would describe as "positive punishment" in that the non-technical usage interprets "reinforcement" as subsuming both reward and punishment and "negative" as referring to the responding operant's evaluation of the factor being introduced. By contrast, technical parlance would use the term "negative reinforcement" to describe encouragement of a given behavior by creating a scenario in which an unpleasant factor is or will be present but engaging in the behavior results in either escaping from that factor or preventing its occurrence, as in [[Martin Seligman |Martin Seligman’s]] experiment involving dogs [[Learned helplessness#Early experiments|learning to avoid electric shocks]].