Which reinforcement strategy ensures inappropriate behaviors are not reinforced while encouraging positive behaviors?

The correct strategy for ensuring that inappropriate behaviors are not reinforced while simultaneously promoting positive behaviors is differential reinforcement. This approach involves reinforcing specific desirable behaviors and withholding reinforcement for undesirable ones. By focusing on reinforcing only the acceptable behaviors, it effectively decreases the occurrence of unwanted actions.

In practice, differential reinforcement can take various forms, such as differential reinforcement of alternative behavior (DRA), where a positive behavior is reinforced as a substitute for an inappropriate one, or differential reinforcement of incompatible behavior (DRI), where the desired behavior is incompatible with the undesired behavior, thus making it impossible to do both simultaneously.

In contrast, continuous reinforcement involves providing a reward for every instance of a desired behavior, which is not ideal for managing inappropriate behaviors, as it does not specifically address the idea of reinforcing only positive behaviors while ignoring negative ones. Negative reinforcement involves removing an unpleasant stimulus to strengthen a behavior, and positive reinforcement refers to adding a pleasant stimulus to increase behavior, neither of which directly focuses on the concept of differentiating between appropriate and inappropriate behaviors.