Family Therapy II Practice Exam 2026 – Your All-In-One Guide to Mastering Family Therapy!

Extinction is the process where a previously reinforced behavior decreases in frequency when reinforcement stops. In operant conditioning, when a behavior no longer leads to the expected consequence, the motivation to perform that behavior fades, so it occurs less often over time. Sometimes you’ll see an extinction burst—an initial, brief increase in responding—before the behavior declines. This isn’t about classical conditioning, which is about forming new stimulus–response associations, nor about operant conditioning as a whole; extinction is the specific process of the behavior weakening because reinforcement has been withdrawn.