Negative practice:

Negative practice is a technique in which a problem behavior is deliberately

repeated, or practiced, by a patient to decrease the response in the long term. Negative
practice has been used as a response reduction procedure primarily for habits, such as tics
or nail biting, stuttering; or in the treatment of specific types of anxiety.
In 1928, Dunlap published a brief paper in Science in which he hypothesized that errors
could best be corrected by repeatedly practicing those errors while acknowledging their
incorrectness.
Dunlap then wrote a monograph entitled Habits, Their Making and Unmaking in
1932 that out- lined both his views on the formation of habits and his method to decrease
these behaviors. He defined a habit as any learned way of living or fixed way of
responding. His innovative suggestion for treatment was to repeat deliberately the
response to unlearn it, that is, to implement negative practice.
Conclusive Remarks of monograph Habits, Their Making and Unmaking: Voluntarily negative practice under the conditions of wanting to eliminate the
habit, then the habit could be modified. Voluntarily negative practices are the
initial part of the process of eliminating the habit.
Desire to eliminate the habit is the foundation of the curative process.
Negative practice is not to yield to the impulse but to initiate the practice
voluntarily in the absence of the impulse.
Negative practice was the beginning of the learning process of not performing the
habit.
Negative practice was intended to bring an involuntary behavior under voluntary
control.
Negative practice and paradoxical Intention:
Negative practice has been compared to other techniques such as paradoxical intention
and therapeutic paradox, both of which have their origins in analytic psychotherapy.
Although the techniques vary by theoretical orientation, in each case patients are
encouraged to continue their problematic behavior on a schedule established by the
clinician. A major distinction between negative practice and these methods involves the
71

role of the clinician: for paradoxical intention and therapeutic paradox, the patient
clinician relationship is seen as paramount; in negative practice, patient variables are
considered essential to therapeutic success.
Later theoretical Developments:
Aubrey Yates (1959) suggested a formulation of negative practice based on
Hullian learning principles of reactive inhibition. According to the principle of reactive
inhibition, after any response there is an immediate increase in motivation not to perform
the response. The repeated rehearsal of the target response would lead to reactive
inhibition.
Richard Foxx (1982) offered a more parsimonious explanation of negative
practice. Based on an applied behavior analytic perspective, he suggested that the high
response effort of repeating the behavior served as a punisher for the behavior.
Efficacy:
Frank Nicassio et al. (1972) used negative practice to treat successfully a single tic in one
participant but had no success with a second participant who displayed multiple tics.
Nathan Azrin and Alan Peterson (1988) reviewed the research to that date that had
occurred with negative practice in the treatment of Tourettes syndrome. Negative
practice had a therapeutic effect in 10 out of 18 studies.
In 1976, Richard M. OBrien demonstrated that negative practice in the form of repeated
exaggerations of anxious behaviors could decrease test anxiety and improve course
grades in college students.
The effectiveness of negative practice for improving spelling ability has been researched
with mixed results by Meyn and others in 1963

72