History of The Token Economy
In the early 19th century, long before there was any knowledge about operant learning, there were some precursors of token economies in schools and prisons. In those systems points could be earned and exchanged for all kinds of things and privileges. Only in the 1960s the first real token economies arose in psychiatric hospitals. Teodoro Ayllon, Nathan Azrin and Leonard Krasner were important pioneers in these early years. The very first token economy, bearing that name, was founded by Ayllon and Azrin in 1961 at Anna State Hospital in Illinois. In the 1970s the token economies came to a peak and got widespread. In 1977 a major study (a randomized controlled trial), still considered a landmark, was published. This study successfully showed the superiority of a token economy compared to standard treatment and specialized milieu therapy. Despite this success token economies massively disappeared from the 1980s on. It became fairly quiet on that front, having to do with a variety of problems and criticism.
Read more about this topic: Token Economy
Famous quotes containing the words history of the, history of, history, token and/or economy:
“The history of medicine is the history of the unusual.”
—Robert M. Fresco, and Jack Arnold. Prof. Gerald Deemer (Leo G. Carroll)
“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“The token woman carries a bouquet of hothouse celery
and a stenographer’s pad; she will take
the minutes, perk the coffee, smile
like a plastic daisy and put out
the black cat of her sensuous anger
to howl on the fence all night.”
—Marge Piercy (b. 1936)
“It enhances our sense of the grand security and serenity of nature to observe the still undisturbed economy and content of the fishes of this century, their happiness a regular fruit of the summer.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)