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A token reinforcement system for the reduction of institutionalized behavior in a chronic psychiatric ward is described. Quantitative assessments were made of the effects of the system on five types of positively reinforced behavior, two types of unreinforced behavior, and two types of fined behavior. To assess whether these effects were a function of the token procedures, three experiments were carried out, the first removing tokens for a brief period, the second making tokens non‐contingent on behavior, and the third removing fines in one area while maintaining them in another. The token procedures were found to be the source of the observed improvements.

Two socially isolated patients were placed on a program where social reinforcement from staff members was made dependent on social interaction with other patients or staff members. This procedure was imposed in a setting where only limited control was possible. The level of social interaction and a concomitant alternate behavior in each patient was increased when the contingency for social reinforcement was imposed. The study provides another example of the efficacy of social reinforcement where there is little control over other reinforcers. Implications for use of similar procedures to increase generalization in the community are discussed.

A 5‐yr‐old preschool boy with a low rate of interaction with his nursery school classmates was induced to pass out candy as a tactic to increase his rate of interaction with them. Interaction with classmates increased markedly during the periods he passed out choices of candy. These changes may have been due to increases in both his rate of initiating activities with his classmates and to increases in his classmates' rate of initiating activities with him. A total time of less than 1 hr was required of the teacher during the experiment.

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Stable lever‐press responding in rats was reliably produced and maintained by a procedure in which responses could delay shocks without affecting overall shock frequency. Responding was not maintained when the delay‐of‐shock involved an increase in overall shock frequency.

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Observer monkeys were housed next to demonstrator monkeys that were conditioned to respond on a multiple reinforcement schedule whose components were fixed‐ratio 32, variable‐interval 3‐min, and extinction 5‐min followed by an additional 30 sec of extinction during which every response started a new 30‐sec interval. After observational periods from 113 to 210 hr long, during which observers could not perform the response and were given no extrinsic reinforcers, their first‐response latencies to fixed ratio and variable interval were as short as the demonstrators; and their rates of responding were well above pre‐observational baseline levels. About 8 hr later, a temporal pattern of responding appropriate to the multiple schedule emerged, including non‐emission of responses during extinction. Controls lacking the chance to observe did not develop typically patterned responding after 60 hr in one case and, in two other cases, after 80 hr during which, on two occasions, every one of 50 responses was reinforced. In a second experiment, the stimulus lights associated with fixed ratio and variable interval were presented simultaneously. Subjects chose one of the schedules by responding to one of the levers beneath the lights. All subjects initially chose fixed ratio. Seeing the demonstrators switch to variable interval, due to increases in the fixed‐ratio requirement, had no effect upon observers, which continued to choose fixed ratio.

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Experiments on single, multiple, and concurrent schedules of reinforcement find various correlations between the rate of responding and the rate or magnitude of reinforcement. For concurrent schedules (i.e., simultaneous choice procedures), there is matching between the relative frequencies of responding and reinforcement; for multiple schedules (i.e., successive discrimination procedures), there are contrast effects between responding in each component and reinforcement in the others; and for single schedules, there are a host of increasing monotonic relations between the rate of responding and the rate of reinforcement. All these results, plus several others, can be accounted for by a coherent system of equations, the most general of which states that the absolute rate of any response is proportional to its associated relative reinforcement.