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Differentiating Between Punishers, Potential Punishers, Primary Punishers, and Conditioned Punishers
When applied to the task of training your dog, anything that the animal wants to avoid enough to cause him to change his behavior is considered to be a punisher. For example, if your dog dislikes being shouted at so much that he halts the misbehaviors that trigger your shouting episodes, then, for your dog, shouting would be considered to be a punisher. However, if your dog does not respond to shouting by changing his behavior, then, for your dog, we would say that shouting is not a punisher.
Anything that might reasonably be assumed to be a punisher, but that has yet to be proven to actually reduce the rate of the target behavior, is called a potential punisher.
Some punishers, like being smacked, or sprayed with water, or spoken to in an unsettling voice, are naturally aversive. By which I mean that people and dogs want to avoid those things instinctively. Therefore, those stimuli are aversive right from the moment that they are first experienced, without any learning having to first take place. Those kinds of naturally punishing aversives are called primary punishers.
There is another kind of punishing presentation, like speaking the word no to your dog, in which the stimulus is only aversive because, over time it has been paired with a primary punisher to create a paradigm of classical conditioning. Those stimuli that acquire their punishing properties through association are called conditioned punishers.