waldentwo

Overview: As a psychology major I thought “Learning Theory and Research” was a great class. I was familiar with the basics of classical and operant conditioning but I never realized how much more depth there was to the topic. In addition to the history of how these theories came to be, I found it interesting to learn about different ways psychologists do their research and how they form their ideas. Even if you did not want to study psychology in depth the class still explains many things that would help even the ordinary person, whether a parent, teacher, or student through challenges that are presented daily. What I liked Best: The thing I liked best about the class was definitely how easy the textbook is to follow. I like the way the author explains it with the definition and then gives you real life examples to illustrate how the concepts can be seen every day. Also, “Advice for the Lovelorn” and “And furthermore” sections were great and keep you involved in the reading. My f...

Overview: This class explained so many things to me that I often have sat and thought about but never knew that their was an explanation that went with it. Everything that we do as people has a purpose and makes perfect since after you really read and analyze the things that are going on around you. This course really broke down learning to me in a whole new light. When learning about classical and operant conditioning in other classes I never knew that there was a lot of information being left out because of the sake of the class. While reading the lecture slides for this class I understand how both operant and classical conditioning so so important. Not just for running experiments and testing different reactions but in everyday life. Things that we experience on a daily basis is conditioning us in one of another way to get ready for what might possibly be ahead of us whether it be good or bad. It was very interesting to learn how fear is much more that what the mind tells us it is. ...

Growing up like every other child the word punishment never was associated with anything that was positive. A punishment in my house was always bad and the worst punishment for me was not being able to go outside of having my phone privileges taken away from me. How could this possibly be positive. I have always considered it torture. It is so funny how when your parents have disciplining you, they tell you " You might not understand now, but you will thank me for it later." "Please" is what was always running through my head, "I will never thank you for this." But now I can look back on things and thank them for a lot of the punishing that they did to me. Although I did not like it, numerous positive things have come from it. Positive punishment:making you uncomfortable with your actions so that you won't make the same mistakes. I can really appreciate this logic.

As a child before I really became interesting in psychology and how that mind works I always thought that phobias where just something that people made up because they were scared of a particular thing. When different talk shows came on TV like Maury, they would always have a segment on about people who had these crazy phobias. I thought that it was so funny because I would tell myself that there is no way that someone could be scared of something like cotton or foil paper. After going through the lecture slides I started to realize that nothing about having a phobia is funny. Although it might seem ridiculous to someone on the outside looking in, but the person with the actual condition is far from laughing. It seems to me like a phobia is sort of like an extreme over extension of fear and without fear could we really call ourselves human. Everyone is not scared of the same things but without fear we would never know when to fight or flight or anything else. People with phobias should...

By: Natalie Knight This particular Psychology class “Learning Theory and Research with Professor Berg was filled with a variety of concepts from Historical Background of studying learning and behavior to Classical Conditioning. The textbook alone went in to great detail of how each theory stands alone but how each theory was built upon another. Research methods as well as its results were greatly noted and later tested for their validation. This course also reviewed many well-known and important psychologists that posed great impact on learning, behavior, and research. That was needed to further and promote success throughout history. A few of these very such psychologist are Hull, Skinner, Pavlov, among many others. I feel that this psychology class has offered me a small glimpse of how important psychology is to my everyday life and for its ultimate existence. Like it was written in the first few lines in our classroom textbook that many principles will be discussed and learned and...

Overview This course addressed the workings of some of the most well known psychologist such as Albert Bandura, B.F. Skinner, Freud, Darwin, and Watson. We touched base with a bunch of different topics and received a lot of insight pertaining to each of them. The breakdown of vocabulary was very helpful also because in order to completely understand the material you had to know what certain words meant such as convert behavior, functional relationships, appetitive stimulus, contiguity, and the list continues. Also abbreviated words that were introduced, US, CS, UCS, CR. The different chapters went in depth with information but I really enjoyed the chapter that covered operant conditioning. Operant conditioning was mainly proposed by B.F. Skinner and the use of his Skinner box. He had an experiment with a bird that should learn that certain stimuli and reactions result in a positive outcome (being fed). Reinforces then took place, being positive or negative, and primary or secondary. Th...

Babies tend to learn at a very young age how they can get their way without even talking. Many times babies will cry out for attentions whether they want to be held, if they are hungry, or if something hurts. Babies are big attention seekers and if they find anyway to sucker their parents in any way they will. Some people may argue that picking up babies all the time are just a simple way of showing affection and others see it as a way of spoiling a baby. If a baby learns that at the moment that they cry the parent will run to them then that's just a simple way for them to do it all the time. Some parents find different methods to stop the baby from crying whether it by playing music or just simply letting the baby cry out to show the baby who is in charge. For the common parent picking the baby up is the only motive.

Overview This course was definately eye-opening and interesting. I learned a lot about different types of research methods and different types of reinforcers and punishments. As as parent, learning about these different methods are important to me and it was interesting to see what different types of punishments are positive and negative and how they affect those being punished. This course seemed to cover more material than most psychology courses that I have taken and has also been a lot more appealing to read the information and I actually wanted to know more about it. I enjoyed learning about different types of conditioning and responses to stimuli. Everything that I have learned in this course can easily be applied to real life situations and as a result of taking this course, I feel that I will be more readily able to handle such situations. Favorite Part My favorite part of the course by far has been learning about the different types of punishments. I picked this topic to do a ...

I have taken many psychology courses over my college carreer, being that my major is psychology. After taking this course and reading the text I could almost kick myself for not taking it sooner. I must say that I will most likely keep the textbook for further refrences because I learned so much from it and have even used some of the things I have learned already in my everyday life. Wheter it be how to parent my daughter or the reason my guniea pig squeals when she hears the fridge open, I have learned a lot. My favorite part of the course would have to be classical conditioning. I know that classical conditioning is part of almost every college psychology course you will take but it still interests me everytime. I am actually in the process of classical conditioning my kitten. My fiance and I just recently got a kitten for our daughters third birthday. We got the kitten around the same time that I started this course, which sort of provoked me to classically condition my ...

Overview of Learning and Behavior: At first glance through our text book I thought I knew and was familiar with most concept titles in our book. I was not aware of the depth, extensiveness, and breakdown of each concept. After the first couple chapters, I discovered this, and was really glad that this class went over the specifics of behavioral psych concepts such as operant and classical conditioning. When you first learn of conditioning it can be hard to grasp. Usually, in Psych 101 you are made to learn the vocabulary, memorize definitions and repeat. However in this class the breakdown of each part of the conditioning process helped me to fully understand conditioning and vocab. such as the US, CS, UCS, CR, Extinction, Stimulus discrimination, ect. After learning the major concepts of conditioning most everything else in the course grew off of the vocab and workings of conditioning. My Favorite Part: One of my favorite things I learned and was most interested in in the course was...

Throughout this course I learned a bunch of different things. We were introduced to the book through different psychologists some of which I did not know. William James was one of the new psychologists I learned about and who I did my first post on. We also reviewed the classics like Freud, Darwin, and Watson. We went into research methods and reviewed terms such as variables, stimulus and response. When I started going into the chapters I thought things would be review, but I was introduced to a bunch of new terms like overt and convert behavior, functional relationships, appetitive stimulus, contiguity, and the list continues. I was pleasantly surprised at how this book took a different approach to most psych books and learned about a lot of different things. As a psych major, classes can sometimes be very repetitious, but this book was refreshing and new. O ne topic that I really liked was learned helplessness. This video gave a great perspective on it and made the topic make a l...

Like some of you at first I expected this class to be very much the same as the majority of my other psychology courses. However, while some of the material was already familiar to me, I discovered shortly into chapter 1 that the text had an array of topics I had never covered before. More specifically none of my other classes have ever covered Aristotle's theories and the laws of association which is mentioned as soon as page 6. While the debate mentioned between Aristotle and Plato eventually boils down to nature versus nurture, something we have all studied, I found the way in which the text approached the topic to be interesting and refreshing, which is something I experienced many times throughout reading the book. The topic I found to be most interesting was the section of chapter 5 on understanding phobias. As I mentioned in a previous post both myself and my sister have had to deal with a phobia for a large part of our lives so it was great to see how these fears may ha...

The course began by reviewing the work of influential psychologists like Albert Bandura and B.F. Skinner. With the study of such psychologists' work, we learned about the different types of behaviorism. Two covered chapters related to the concept of classical conditioning and its many aspects. Next, we learned about phobias and how they can be treated through methods of counter-conditioning, reciprocal inhibition, systematic desensitization, imaginal flooding, and in vivo flooding. The following chapter covered operant conditioning, mainly proposed by B.F. Skinner and the use of his Skinner box, where a bird would learn that certain stimuli and reactions result in a positive outcome (being fed). This led to the concept of reinforcers, being positive or negative, and primary or secondary. The next chapter discussed schedules of reinforcement and how they are classified as continuous or intermittent. Besides those, others schedules include fixed duration, variable duration, th...

Learning Theory and Research at first seemed like a research class, like Experimental Psychology. Skimming through the book before the orientation, I thought the chapters would be a review from Introduction, It took the same topics but expanded on them such as classical conditioning, reinforcement, and extinction. The chapter I enjoyed the most was Reinforcement because it can be applied to every aspect of life like raising a child, not just in experiment situations. There are multiple types of reinforcement such as positive and negative reinforcement, positive punishment, and shaping. Positive reinforcement "consists of the presentation of a stimulus following a response, which then leads to an increase in the future strength of that response". On the other hand negative reinforcement is the removal of an unpleasant stimulus that leads to an increase in the future response. Shaping was the most interesting part of the text. Positive and negative reinforcement is a good tool,...

Learning Theory and Research has been a very interesting class for me. It’s different than all the other psychology classes I have taken. The text really goes into detail about subjects that were only briefly touched on in other classes such as classical conditioning, positive and negative reinforcement, operant conditioning, and shaping. The way the topics were detailed and explained in the text really made me feel like it focused more on the science of these subjects which I enjoyed a lot. I did feel in the beginning that it was going to be another review of things previously learned, but I was definitely wrong. One of my favorite topics covered in the text was Extinction. I had never heard of the term like this before. Extinction is defined as “the non reinforcement of a previously reinforced response, the result of which is a decrease in the strength of that response.” This can be a helpful tool when it comes to time outs. Instead of yelling at the child causing more of a scene ...

I came across a few clips on youtube about a man named Alfie Kohn who wrote the book "Punished by Rewards: The trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive plans, A's, Praise, and other bribes". In the first clip, he talks about how too much praise can do the opposite of the intention and in this case, cause the child to be less likely to share his toys. He believes that the desire to be generous and share is less likely to occur when there is no one around to praise them for it. On the other hand, he also talks about punishment. He views it very unlikely for children to learn their lessons in a time-out situation. He comically rattles off the scenerios of what might be going on in a childs mind during these punishments to show how they are ineffective. Alfie Kohn believes that a student that has already recieved the A that they were looking for, all the motivation to keep going is lost. They seem to be less interested in learning the material and more interested in the A to show t...

Self-Control SELF CONTROL : The meaning of self-control is one's ability to control one's emotions, behavior and desires in order to efficiently manage one's future. I would have to state that returning to college after years away, which labels me as a Non-traditional student here at Stockton has been very stressful but in many ways, but in other ways very satisfying and personally fullfilling. I feel that as an adult student I am able to maintain self-control better then if I were to have attended college at a younger age.My self-direction has proven to be a very significant attribute that has allowed me to maintain a 3.6 . Most college students are experiencing "Erikson's 'identity vs. role diffusion" stage were maintaining self-control is a little bit more diffucult. Were for explain a student such as myself (36) seek education for personal fufillment or financial requirements such as family commitments. For each groups of the traditio...

Negative punishment consists of the removal of a certain event following a response, which then leads to a decrease in the future strength of that response. A loss of employment for being obnoxious and a loss of dessert for complaining at the dinner table are both examples of negative punishment. There are two types of negative punishment: time out and response cost. Time out involves the lossof access to positive reinforces for a brief period of time following the occurence of a problem behavior. Time out has become popular with modern-day parents, who frequently attempt to punish a child's misbehavior by sending them to the bedroom or making them stand in a corner for several minutes. I am in favor of time out as a negative punishment because it really makes a child upset that they are taken away from an activity that gave them enjoyment.

Positive Punishment is used to decrease certain events from happening again. When a person or animal acts in a way that is not acceptable the parent, owner or boss may reprimand them in a way that they don't like. For example a employee talks back to his boss so his boss screams at him and threatens him, the employee does not like getting yelled at so he probably wont talk back to his boss again because he is scared to get yelled at again and fears for his job. When using positive punishment you make the person you are punishing do something that they do not like and they will likely not do it again.

At a very young age parents instill in children of what sex they are, what are the proper behaviors of each sex and that they could never be the opposite sex. Labeling children at early ages could be at a disadvantage to a child because they will feel some sort of restriction if they were based to do certain aspects. For example girls wear dresses and males wear pants as a quick way of identification. Here in the Us it may not be a norm but in certain countries it is strictly enforced, and if not followed you are being rebellious. Kids get a lot of these ideas from their parents. Many parents have a tendency to "correct" their kids' choices and actions when they don't fit gender norms. Kids pick up on it quickly that straying outside the stereotype is a "bad thing."

Taste aversion conditioning is a version of classical conditioning where food is purposely prepared with some type of illness and from then on the food is associated with the illness and will be avoided. This is a common occurrence among many people. For example, I used to really like checkers fast food and then I got food poisoning and no longer will I eat checkers. Even when I smell it, it just reminds me of that incident. Another example for me would be tequila, for what should be obvious reasons, I will never drink tequila ever again. According to the textbook on page 422 and 423, there are many undergraduate students who feel the same way. There is also more information on a typical experiment that is done involving rats and poisoning them if you would like to read more about it. I understand why they are necessary but I am still trying to get past all the horrible animal tests. Latent inhibition occurs because we are more likely to associate a relatively novel item, such a...

In chapters 5 and 9 of our book we learn about phobias. More specifically we learn about how they develop and how they can be treated. This is of particular interest to me because I have dealt with a phobia for most of my life. At the risk of not sounding manly in a class full of girls, spiders seriously freak me out! Treating a phobia is normally done with 1 of 2 techniques. Systematic desensitization or flooding. Systematic desensitization works by exposing the patient to increasing levels of stressful stimuli while at the same time using relaxation techniques. This is counter conditioning. Flooding simply works by exposing the patient to the stressful stimuli, and taking away the option of avoiding the stimuli. These techniques can be gradual and take a certain amount of time. I'm assuming the length of the treatment depends on the level of stress the patient feels when exposed to the stimuli. However the video I found shows a therapist who claims to be able to treat a ...

Learning: Theory and Research has been a course that consistently found ways to keep me interested and invested in taking in as much information as possible. At the start, when going through the chapter on classical conditioning, I really didn't believe that I was going to walk away with knowledge that was new to me. How much can you really learn about classical conditioning? But I was wrong. As soon as the text delved into portions about appetitive and aversive conditioning, I was hooked. The portion of the course on phobias was very interesting to me as were the ways in which you can overcome a phobia. I had no idea that there were so many methods, some that work better than others, to rid yourself of something that you are truly fearful of. One of the most interesting topics to me, covered in the text, was high order conditioning. High order conditioning is defined as when a stimulus is associated with a conditioned stimulus, it can become a conditioned stimulus itself. ...

Many parents have different beliefs when it comes to allowing their children to cry it out. The term means different things to different people. Some believe that babies should cry until they exhaust themselves, when it comes to a battle of wills between the child and the parent. Others believe that it should only be used to a certain extent, while some people don't believe in it at all, feeling that it affects your child's self confidence, security and self esteem in the future. A typical example is getting your child to sleep through the night. You put your baby to bed in their crib and, at some point, they begin to cry. A lot of parents implement an extinction method of letting the child "cry it out." Instead of running to their child's whimper, they allow the child to see that their mom or dad is not going to jump every single time, and this signals that it really is bedtime. This method takes a few days to fully implement but, as with any extinction, d...

People have always said yawns are contagious, but who knew that there was actually something called contagious behavior! Contagious behavior is defined as a more or less instinctive or reflexive behavior triggered by an occurrence of the same behavior in another individual. The first example in the text was yawning. (pg 459) Contagious behavior is apparent in humans and also in some animals. Fear is another thing that is ‘contagious.’ Ducks are another example, when a flock of ducks are together and one duck flies off, all the other ducks follow, even if there is not potential danger. Laughing can also be seen under contagious behavior. People usually do not laugh all that much when they are alone for example watching a funny movie, but when with a group or crowd of people laughing is contagious. Television programs know this and that is why there are laughing tracks or live audiences laughing in comedy shows.

We learned about the Premack principle in chapter five that states a high- probability behavior can be used to reinforce a low-probability behavior. For example, if your class is always unfocussed during reading you would give them the option of a game of kick ball only if they stay focused during your reading lesson. Well, the same can be applied to punishment in chapter nine. Take, for example, a child who hates school. It would be much easier for this child to do his homework if each time he didn't he would lose his recess time, and be forced to complete his homework while his peers were outside playing. Simply, this principle states that punishment is the opposite of reinforcement: If reinforcement strengthens behavior, then punishment weakens behavior.

Avoidance conditioning plays a critical role in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). OCD is when an individual expresses impulses or thoughts that lead to repetitive actions in response to the obsession. Obsessions may include getting contaminated by touching something with your hands, so repetitive hand-washing serves as a way to "rid" oneself of such contaminations. Since the obsession tends to increase anxiety, the compulsion is drawn out to decrease anxiety. Avoidance plays a role when an OCD-sufferer, after a contamination episode, later avoids touching the initially contaminated item a second time. This is when phobias against, say, garbage can appear. According to the two-process theory, feeling contaminated by touching something is the classically conditioned response whereas the compulsive hand-washing is an operant response. This two-process theory does not explain every detail about OCD, as many people cannot pin-point the exact cause of their OCD symptoms. ...

Violence is a huge issue in our world. Everywhere you turn there is some kind of violence. In chapter 12 of our text they discuss “Social Learning and Media Violence” and the effects it has on children. Children are exposed to violence everyday through watching TV and playing video games. Even what seems like an innocent cartoon can expose them to some sort of violence. This exposure to violence is causing children to become increasingly aggressive. Our book talks about multiple studies that have been conducted that directly correlates aggressive behavior in children to TV and Media influences. For more information you can read the section of the text on pages 473-475. Here is an interesting video that discusses this topic:

Chapter 9 discusses the topics of escape and avoidance. The concept of avoidance behavior was interesting to me. Avoidance can be defined as performance of a behavior which prevents an aversive stimulus from occurring . The author states that escape is the easier of the two to understand and researchers generally show more interest in studying avoidance. The two-process theory shows that there are two distinct steps to avoidance behavior. First, an individual is classically conditioned to a fear or anxiety response to a conditioned stimulus (CS). Then, operant conditioning takes effect in which avoiding that same stimulus is negatively reinforced by a reduction of fear or anxiety. But what if the CS are memories and thoughts? In the "and Furthermore " section in the textbook on pages 346-347 the author talks about the idea of repression as avoidance. It suggests that the classically conditioned response of fear to the stimulus of traumatic memories will cause the op...

As in classical conditioning, the opposite of stimulus generalization in operant conditioning is stimulus discrimination, the tendency for an operant response to be emitted more in the prescence of on stimulus than another. Discrimination training , as applied to operant conditioning, involves reinforcement of responding in the prescence of one stimulus and no another. The latter is called a discriminative stimulus for extinction, which is a stimulus that signals the absence of reinforcement. There are videos on youtube that use a lab rat to illustrate this type of stimulus but I'm not too familiar with uploading videos to blogs. Check it out if you can.

Dr. Matthew Israel, Director of the Judge Rotenberg Center, has a different method of teaching. He deals with problem chidren with a variety of issues, many needed some sort of behavior modification. The specific therapy that he uses with about half of his students is shock therapy. Students are hooked up to a backpack from different points of their body, and when their aggressive behavior emerges, a buzzer sounds and they are shocked as a consequence to their actions. The doctor's belief is that this is helping the students learn that aggressive, violent behavior is not tolerated, and eventually they begin to act differently to avoid the shock. His beliefs are based on work that he did with B.F. Skinner. Many protest this, feeling that it is inhumane and unethical, to the point where the UN has stepped in debating whether or not this is a form of torture. Many parents back the Center up, claiming that their children have benefited from this type of treatment. I personally feel tha...

In chapter 8 of our text book we learn about extinction and its side effects. When implementing an extinction technique it is possible for the subject to display some emotional behavior, become agitated, use techniques that were once used to obtain reinforcement which is called resurgence or even become depressed. The subjuct will often experience extinction burst and an increase in variability. When the extinction technique is first used the frequency of the subjects response will increase.

According to the text book classical conditioning is when one stimulus that does not elicit a certain response is paired or associtated with a second stimulus that does elicit a response so therefor the first response also elictits a response. An example of this that happens in my own home is that I have a guinea pig named Meatloaf and she chirps really loud and runs to her food bowl when she hears the fridge open or when she hears a bag ruffling. This stems from Meatloaf being fed after hearing the fridge open and bags ruffling.

Extinction is a non-reinforcement of a previously reinforced response, the result of which is a decrease in the strength of that response. In chapter eight the book mentions an example of a child that whines in order to get candy. The child's parents have given in so many times it is now expected that if the chid wines he will receive candy, ice cream, ect. In order to extinguish this response you must not reward the whining. If you successfully do this (refusing to provide the candy when the child whines) then the whining will decline. I found a video that I think is rather amusing- Watch how this child whines and surprisingly yells and demands ice cream and soda from his mother. She desperately needs a lesson in extinction...

Phobias are an interesting phenomena in that the alarm is much larger in proportion to the actual threat. It causes fear and anxiety towards a situation or object. Phobias can be attributed to many causes, including overgeneralization and classical conditioning (how can we forget Little Albert?), but many people report not knowing the particular cause of their phobia. In treating phobias, systems include systematic desensitization (training in relaxing), counter-conditioning, reciprocal inhibition, and different types of flooding therapy. Phobias are very real and serious as they can affect any human, but what is really alarming is the various array of phobias people express. The following video shows a somewhat humorous portrayal of random phobias.

Unschooling is an educational philosophy centered around allowing children to learn through everyday occurances such as play, household responsibility, and social interaction rather than a traditional school curriculum. Educator John Holt coined the expression in the 1970s and regarded as the 'father' of unschooling. The following clip is about a mother of three that has been unschooling her children. It seems like even she does not know if being unschooled is the right decision or not.

Positive reinforcement is an important tool is helping to build your child's self esteem. It is important that it is used properly in order to help strengthen the desired response. If it is overused it may lead to the child looking for the reinforcement and not concentrating on learning the desired behavior. Here is a good video that demonstrates this.....

Why should families talk to their children about 911 calls? This video proves it! Five year old Savannah takes the phone for her dad after he can not speak due to shortness of breath. Other interviews on the news with Savannah, mom, and dad say how they had practiced what to do if she had to call 911. Luckily, Savannah remembered what she had learned and was able to save her dads life. Not only is that is wonderful learning experience of why we should talk to our children about emergencies, but also an adorable video!