A control group, which hadn’t received the inescapable shocks, learned the avoidance response relatively easily. From this research it appears that the most important factor in the animals’ behaviour was not the electric shocks, but the failure to learn avoidance. The dogs had learned that they were helpless, so they displayed inappropriate behaviour in the shuttle box and didn’t try to escape. Seligman went on to propose that depression in humans may be due to learned helplessness. For example, stressful situations may be experienced as unavoidable and not under the control of the individual.
This is in principle a learning effect. The contrary is the so-called extinction. If no food follows the bell-ringing for several times, the dog learns not to respond any longer with salivation. The unconditioned stimulus becoming a conditioned stimulus can be used to control human behaviour in the advertisement area. The background music of an advertisement, which is thought to be neutral (unconditioned) can influence the person to buy an article.
While many members of the public welcomed the introduction of this legislation, others argued that although these breeds have a propensity for aggression against other dogs, they are not aggressive towards humans unless trained to be so. This essay will argue that these dogs should not be outlawed, but should, however, be strictly controlled in a number of ways. According to the Dangerous Dogs Act 1991 (Cfidos. 2009) maintenance, sale, breeding and exchange potentially dangerous breeds of dogs is considered as illegal unless court will not give special permission. These dogs must be on a leash and muzzled dogs in public places; they also must have insurance, must be registered, sterilized and chipped.
Even when wolves do bark, the actual form of vocalization differs from a dog, according to Coppinger and Feinstein (1991). Humans probably selected the individuals that barked as barking could alert them to potential danger. About 35% of dog owners complain about inappropriate barking as one of the most common behavior problems, so the ability to identify why a dog barks in certain situations can be extremely helpful in trying to eliminate the behavior (Rudolph & Myers, 2004). This paper will identify excessive barking dogs (Canis familiaris) as an undesired behavior and include an analysis of causation and proposed solutions. Opinions regarding the point at which barking becomes a problem is enormously inconsistent.
However, carrying out research on animals means that important theories can be tested that would otherwise be too wrong to test on humans. As shown by Skinner’s research on operant conditioning that involved pigeons locked in cages and first starved. Another weakness is that because behaviourists believe all behaviour is learnt, sometimes behavioural therapies for disorders cannot actually cure someone, only remove certain behaviours caused by the disorder. For example if someone was suffering from depression, a big part of depression is how the person thinks but the behaviourist perspective may not be able to change the way someone thinks because it ignores cognitive processes; meaning the
Let me cite the example of the man from “Black Cat” and the man from “The Tell-Tale Heart”. The resemblance in both these cases is the madness of the protagonists which is also shown by the sentence structure; for example “very dreadfully nervous I had been and am” and “Yet, mad am I not” represent the disorder of subject and verb. But “the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or not the loftiest intelligence…” The first point which comes into my mind, reading the stories, is assertion which is a human instinct. All the human beings try to say what they believe. So, the dislike for the “vulture eye” and “the cat” made them assert that they were not insane.
Pavlov noted that salivation only occurred in the absence of food and smell, and knew that salivary response was not automatic but a physiological response. http://psychology.about.com/od/classicalconditioning/a/pavlovs-dogs.htm Accessed 10/11/13 Operant conditioning is a type of learning where someone’s behaviour is changed by its consequences it may change in form, strength or frequency. The word operant indicates "an item of behaviour that is initially spontaneous, rather than a response to a prior stimulus, but whose consequences may reinforce or inhibit recurrence of that behaviour"
Weaknesses of Skinner’s theory is that it suggests all behaviour is learned but it fails to give credence to cognitive and biological elements that have been proven to effect behaviour. It has been proven and would seem to be common sense that humans with the ability to reason and observe will inherit traits based on their environment ie: a child from a stable, quiet and non confrontational family will inherit those qualities by a type of osmosis as they grow. By basing research on animals in conditioning studies relies on the fact that an animal cannot extrapolate experiences into the future without considerable and constant conditioning, we cannot generalize that humans are in anyway similar as their anatomy and physiology are vastly different. Humans have the ability to think about their experiences and make conclusions largely based on their cognitive
This short essay hopes to show how the theory behind the CBT model of counselling plays its part in the evolution of the struggle to understand the human psyche. At the beginning of the twentieth century behaviour therapy started to evolve which derived ...from the theories of human learning... p171 (1) Experiments were carried out on animals rather than humans for research. A Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936) ibid. whose interest at that time was the digestive system of dogs, had developed through his research and what is now known as “Classical Conditioning” “that dogs would salivate at the sight of food”. This observation lead Pavlov on to the belief that the dog learnt that at the sight of a stimulus it meant food, therefore it had “learnt” Dogs would normally salivate at the smell of food this is known as “unconditioned reflex” continuing with his experiments he found that by using other stimulus in this case a bell he could condition the dog to salivate on its sound even to the extent of the dog salivating at the sound of the bell though there was no food, “Classical Conditioning”.
Many people argue that it’s better to test on animals so that if anyone gets hurt it’s just an animal, not say, a father of two children. Animal testing is wrong and inhumane, but there are some instances where I would accept it as inevitable, for instance testing a drug to cure cancer. Testing a drug for something like cancer or stem cell research on an animal would be more tolerable. In some instances, we don’t have another way to test the effects of a particular