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Facial Screening and Visual Occlusion

  • Chapter
Self-injurious Behavior

Part of the book series: Disorders of Human Learning, Behavior, and Communication ((HUMAN LEARNING))

Abstract

Vision is one of the most essential and powerful faculties of organisms, and it seems intuitively plausible that interfering with it and denying it, even if only temporarily, must have a profound impact on a person’s behavior. Systematically blocking a client’s vision has played a small but important role in the treatment of behavior problems in persons with mental retardation particularly their self-injurious behavior (SIB). Visual occlusion as a mechanism of behavioral intervention can be used in two functionally different modes: Either it is administered contingent upon the target behavior, as in facial or visual screening, or independent of the target behavior, as in sensory extinction. Both application modes are covered in this chapter. A literature review uncovered a total of 12 papers1 on the treatment of SIB utilizing visual occlusion. In order to base our conclusions regarding visual occlusion techniques on a large enough sample, studies focusing on behavior problems other than SIB were included as well. This increased the number of articles to 31. Of these, 29 papers involved contingent visual occlusion, and only two employed visual sensory extinction. Naturally, the emphasis of this chapter is on contingent visual occlusion.

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Authors
  1. Johannes Rojahn
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  2. Elaine C. Marshburn
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Psychological and Educational Resource Associates, 40 Bronson Way, 01742, Concord, MA, USA

    James K. Luiselli Ed.D.

  2. Department of Psychology, Louisiana State University, 70803, Baton Rouge, LA, USA

    Johnny L. Matson Ph.D.

  3. Department of Psychiatry, Medical College of Virginia, 23298, Richmond, VA, USA

    Nirbhay N. Singh Ph.D.

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© 1992 Springer-Verlag New York, Inc.

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Rojahn, J., Marshburn, E.C. (1992). Facial Screening and Visual Occlusion. In: Luiselli, J.K., Matson, J.L., Singh, N.N. (eds) Self-injurious Behavior. Disorders of Human Learning, Behavior, and Communication. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-9130-2_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-9130-2_8

  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4613-9132-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4613-9130-2

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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