B.F. Skinners contributions to the psychological world were great in theory and action. The last thing that B. F. Skinner was learning was that, to speed up the response acquisition during operant conditioning is to reinforce successive approximations to desired responses. This approach was called shaping. We might first reward the rat for turning toward the response bar. Once the rat has learned this behavior, we might withhold reinforcement until the rat moves towards the bar.
John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner – Little Albert Experiment The aim of the experiment was to investigate whether fear can be acquired through classical conditioning on human beings. Before conditioning, pre-testing was done to see if Albert was capable of producing a fear response. The checked if he was afraid of different materials, such as: a white rat, a rabbit, a dog, a monkey, masks with and without hair, cotton wool, burning newspapers, etc but he demonstrated no fear. They found that little Albert showed fear when exposed to loud noises. They started conditioning by showing Albert a white rat.
This will help to increase the chance of good behavior. Encouraging a verbal acknowledgment will help to further strengthen the principle since this is a secondary reinforcement. A negative reinforcement is the removal of a negative stimulus once the desired response is seen. This will then increase any chance of this behavior to be repeated. A positive punishment happens wen the negative stimulus is introduced after this undesirable behavior, such a child misbehaving and being sent to their room for it.
) Little Albert was an experiment that took place in 1920 at John Hopkins University by John B. Watson and Rosalie Raynar. John Watson had observed children in the field of behaviorism and was curious to find out whether the reaction that children had from loud noises was due to fear. He believed that by using classical conditioning it would enable a child to react fearfully by another stimulus, which wouldn’t commonly be the prompt of fear. To follow the principles of classical conditioning meant to use a kind of learning that occurred when a specific functional reaction was evoked paired with an unconditioned reaction. Watson and his assistant Raynar aimed to find this out by presenting certain animals or objects to the child and making
Discuss principles of reinforcement and punishment in your response. Operant conditioning is the process in which a human or non-human learns to respond to the environment in a way that produces desired outcomes rather than negative experiences. The central principles of operant conditioning include reinforcement, punishment and extinction that can then be further defined into finer categories. The principle of reinforcement is a consequence that causes behaviour to occur with greater frequency. Positive reinforcement is where behaviour is rewarded (whether intended or not) which will increase the probability of reoccurrence of that behaviour.
In 1941 N.E Miller and associate J. Dollard proposed that one could learn a behavior by observing that behavior in others. They called this theory social learning. The social learning theory of Miller and Dollard also stated that “by imitating these observed actions the individual observer would solidify that learned action and would be rewarded with positive reinforcement.”(Green) Loosely translated this means that if we ape the actions of those around us they will reward us for such actions. In 1954 Julian Rotter broke away from the then popular instinct based psychoanalysis and drive based behaviorism theories. Rotter believed that a psychological theory should have a psychological motivational principal, and that people were motivated to seek out positive reinforcement or stimulus and to avoid the negative of either.
Initial pairing of the rat and banging bar was quite simple. The rat was presented alone at first and each time Albert tried to reach for it or touched it the bar was banged behind him. A sound of banging bar was unconditioned stimulus. The objective was to see if the pairing was maintained for a while, could Albert be conditioned to be afraid of the presence of the white rat (conditioned fear response). After a couple of tests Albert started to show signs of fear and began crying when the rat was presented to him without any sound.
It would stress that he needed to examine what he is feeling and how to use those feelings in a positive way. Psychologists view this type of therapy combined with behavioral therapy as beneficial as you can isolate what is causing the anxiety by examining patient's cognitions and providing ways to alter that behavior into a positive one. The behavioral approach would focus on how negative thoughts were contributing to Jake's anxiety. The behavioral perspective contends that our thoughts affect the way we feel, that our thoughts could more or less contribute to the anxiety such as Jake is feeling. It would examine what would be the best way to modify his behavior.
Outline and evaluate one or more social psychological theory of aggression Social psychological theories, such as social learning theory and deindividuation, propose that the causes of aggression comes from our interactions with others. According to social learning theory, aggressive behaviour is learned either through direct experience or by vicarious experience. Learning by direct experience is derived from Skinner's principles of operant conditioning. It is when you act in an aggressive manor and, as a result, get rewarded for it. The reward acts as reinforcement, therefore you are more likely to act like this again in a similar situation.
Theory of Operant Conditioning Patricia Good PSYCH/900 August 13, 2012 Karen Wilson Theory of Operant Conditioning I agree with the theory of operant conditioning because positive and negative reinforcement has been shown to help change behavior; studies show that operant conditioning helped drug addicts kick the habit. Of course not every drug addict benefitted from operant condition but it did help some. B. F. Skinner is at the forefront of the theory of operant conditioning and believed that in order to understand someone’s behavior you must first look at the consequences and the causes of an action (Olson, 2009). Positive and negative reinforcement are used in Operant Conditioning and this usually is the reason that the behavior changes. Theory of Operant Conditioning When a certain behavior is rewarded or reinforced it is assumed that the action will be repeated and actions that are not rewarded or reinforced will be extinguished or tend to die down (Olson, 2009).