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Behavioral Conceptions
Introduction
•Focus on the level of learning through conditioning
•Began with the study of learning and performance in lower animals in highly
controlled lab situations
•Psychologists at this level studied the learning mechanusms though which
certain events “stimuli” become associated with particular behaviors or
responses
The Behavioral Approach to Psychodynamics: Dollard and Miller
•Psychodynamic behavior theory
o the major effort to integrate some of the fundamental ideas of
Freudian psychodynamic theory with the concepts. Language and
methods of experimental lab research on behavior learning
Neurotic Conflict: The Core
•For Freud, neurotic conflict involves a clash between id impulses seeking
expression and internalized inhibitions that censor and restrain the
expression of those impulses in accord with the culture’s taboos
•Donald and Miller state the same basic idea in the language of learning
•In their view, neurosis, strong fear (anxiety) is a learned drive that
motivates a conflict concerning “goal responses” for other strong drives,
such as sex or aggression—the impulses that also were basic for Freud
•When the neurotic person or even the young child begins to approach goals
that might reduce such drives as sex or aggression, strong fear is elicited
in him or her.
•The neurotic person is stimulated by the frustrated drives and by the fear
that they evoke (simultaneously). The high drive state connected with
this conflict produces “misery” and interferes with clear thinking,
discrimination, and effective problem solving. The “symptoms” shown
arise from the buildup of the drives and of the fear that inhibits their
release.
Recasting Conflict in Learning Terms
•The study of approach-avoidance tendencies has been a big topic since
Freud
•Because these conflicts create anxiety, the individual, according to Freud,
engages in massive unconscious efforts to reduce it which in turn can
produce all sorts of difficulties
•Hypothesized approach avoidance tendencies and anyalyzed them in
experiments with animals: in such conflicts, the organism, at least
momentarily, is torn between two desirable goals.
•Conflict is the center to personality dynamics in this model as in Freuds…but
unlike Freud, who developed his ideas about conflict from inferences
regarding id-ego-superego conflicts, Donald and Miller tested their ideas
in controlled experiments with rats.
•In one study, hungry rats learned how to run down n alley to get food at a
distinctive point in the maze
•To generate ambivalence. The rats were given a quick electric chock while
they were eating. TO test the resulting conflict between approach to the
food and avoidance of the shock, the rats were later placed again at the
start of the alley. The hungry rat started toward the food but halted and
hesitated before reaching it.
•Applied the concepts of goal gradients to analyze these conflicts.
•Goal gradients = changes in response strengths as a function of distance
from the goal object.
•To assess the strength of approach and voidance tendencies at different
point from the goal, a harness apparatus was devised to measure a rats
pull toward a positive reinforcement (food) or away from a negative
reninforcement or punishment(shock).
•The harness allowed the experimenter to restrain the rat for a moment
along the route to the goal and measure the strength of the animal’s pull
on the harness at each test point
•The rats could be given different experiences that led the same response
from them to become associated both with approach motivation (the
food) and with avoidance motivation (the electric shock)
•First they learned approach tendencies, then sometimes they also received
the shock at the end of the maze which led their maze running response
to also become associated with punishment
•. After being shocked, the next time the rat is hungry and is in the maze, it
faces an approach-avoidance conflict
Primary Needs and Learning
•New born begins with a set of innate or primary biological needs (food,
water, oxygen, warmth)
•Satisfaction of these needs is essential for the organism’s survival
•Although these needs are innate, the behaviors required to satisfy them
involve learning
•Through learning, great variability develops in the ways these needs are
fulfilled
•Most human behaviors involve goals and incentives whose relations to
innate needs are extremely remote
•In Donald and Miller’s view, the 4 important factors in the learning
process are drive (motivation), cue (stimulus), response (act or
thought), and reinforcement (reward)
•“In order to learn one must want something, notice something, do
something and get something”
•Learning is the process in which a particular response and cue stimulus
become connected
Drive
•The stronger the stimulus, the greater the drive or motivating function
•Hunger, thirst, fatigue, pain and sex are the primary basis for most
motivation
•The strength of the primary drives varies with the conditions of
deprivation: The greater the deprivation, the stronger the drive.
•Based on hydraulic or steam boiler model (like Freud)
•Social inhibition may prevent direct expression of primary drives. Therefore,
much visible behavior is motivated by already altered secondary or
learned drives.
•Learned drives are based on primary drives, they are elaborations of them
oEx. Fear as a learned drive. A fear is learned if it occurs in response
to previously neutral cues. A learned fear is also a drive in the
sense that it motivates behavior (e.g. escape from the room), and
its reduction is reinforcing
oIn one study, rats were exposed to electric shock in a white
compartment and were permitted to escape to a black
compartment where there was no shock…even when the shock
(primary drive stimulus) was no longer present, the animals learned
new responses, such as pressing a lever or turning a wheel in order
to escape fro the harmless white compartment
•The motivation for this new learning lies in the learned fear of the white
compartment. Thus, fear is conceptualized as both a learned response
and a learned drive and its reduction is considered to be a reinforcement
•Drives, primary and secondary are like Freud’s motives and impulses as the
forces underlying behavior.
•Learned motives—whose roots are in primary drives
Cue
•Cues determine when the person will respond
Response
•Before a response to a cue can be rewarded and learned it must occur
•“initial hierarchy”- ranking the organism’s response according to their
probability of occurrence. Learning changes the order of response in the
hierarchy.
•New hierarchy = “resultant hierarchy”
Reinforcement
•A specific event that strengthens the tendency for a response to be
repeated.
•For Donald and Miller, reinforcement involved drive reduction (tension
reduction)
•The reduction or avoidance of painful, averse stimulation, and or learned
feats or anxieties associated with pain and punishment, also may function
as a reinforcement
•If taking brand x headache pill quickly decreases a severe headache
(aversive stimulation), the reduction of pain will reinforce the behavior of
taking Brand x headache pills.
•Reinforcement is essential to the maintenance of a habit as well as to its
learning
•Extinction is the gradual elimination of a tendency to perform a response;
it occurs when that response is repeated without reinforcement. You take
the brand x headache pills but on many repeated occasions it is no longer
followed by pain reduction.
•The time required to extinguish a habit depends on the habit’s initial
strength and on the conditions of the extinction situation
•According to Donald and Miller, extinction merely inhibits the old habit; it
does not destroy it
•If new responses performed during extinction are rewarded, they may be
strengthened to the point where they supersede the old habit
Conflict
•Individuals may experience conflict when they want to pursue 2 or more
goals that are mutually exclusive
•Miller’s conceptualization of conflict hypothesizes approach ad avoidance
tendencies. For example, in approach-approach conflict, the person is
torn, at least momentarily, between 2 desirable goals. Conversely, people
often face avoidance-avoidance conflicts between 2 undesirable
alternatives: to study tediously for a dull subject or flunk the
examination, for example.
•Some of the most difficult conflicts involve goals or incentives that are
simultaneously positive and negative…these elicit mixed feelings or
ambivalent attitudes. (Want the pleasure of a gourmet treat but not the
calories)
Anxiety and Repression
•Like Freud, but unlike most behaviorists, Donald and Miller accept
unconscious factors as critically important determinants of behavior, and,
again, like Freud, they give anxiety (or learned fear) a central place in
dynamics.
•In their view, repression involves the learned response of not-thinking or
something and is motivated by the drive of fear.
•That is, due to past experiences, certain thoughts may have come to arouse
fear as a result of their association with pain and punishment. By not
thinking, these thoughts the fear stimuli are reduced and the response (of
not thinking) is reinforce. Eventually not thinking (inhibiting, stopping,
repressing) becomes anticipatory, in the sense that the individual avoids
particular thoughts before they can lead to painful outcomes. This is
similar to Freud’s idea that repression is the result of anxiety caused
when unacceptable material starts to emerge from the unconscious to the
conscious but is repressed before it gets there.
•Defenses and symptoms are reinforex by the immediate reduction of fear.
While the temporary effect of the symptom is reduction of the fear drive
and momentary relief, its long range-effects may be debilitating.
Reactions to psychodynamic behavior
•Donald and Miller drew on lab research with animals to devise a personality
theory in learning terms that closely paralleled and in many respects,
translated, Freudian theory. The psychodynamic emphasis on motives, on
unconscious processes, and on internal conflicts and defenses, such as
repression, remained largely unchanged. Freud’s ideas were found easier
to understand in the language of learning.
•Research was based mainly on animals and this troubled some
psychologists
Classical Conditioning: Learning Emotional Associations
•Strong human positive and negative emotions may be acquired through
classical conditioning
•Classical conditioning or conditioned-response learning is a type of learning
first demonstrated by Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov, in which a neutral
stimulus (i.e. bell) becomes conditioned by being paired or associated
with an unconditioned stimulus (one that is naturally powerful).
How Classical Conditioning Works
•A dog automatically salivates when food is in its mouth. The response of
salivation is a reflex or unconditioned response (UCR): it is natural
and does not have be learned
•Stimulus that elicit unconditioned responses are called Unconditioned
stimuli (UCS). The unconditioned stimulus (food in this example) can
elicit behavior without prior learning
•Salivating at the sight of the empty dish that has been associated with food
is an example of a learned or conditioned response (CR). The stimulus
that elicits a conditioned response is called a conditioned (learned)
stimulus (CS), in this case the dish: its impact on behavior is not
automatic but depends on learning
•Pavlov discovered some ways in which neutral stimuli such as lights and
metronome clicks could become conditioned stimuli capable of eliciting
responses like salivating
•In classical conditioning the participant is repeatedly exposed to a neutral
stimulus (i.e. one that elicits no special response) presented closely in
time preceding an unconditioned stimulus that elicits an unconditioned
response. When this association becomes strong enough. The neutral
stimulus by itself may begin to elicit a response similar to the one
produced by the unconditioned stimulus
High Order Conditioning
•When a previously neutral stimulus, such as a light, a bell, or a face, has
become a conditioned stimulus through its association with an
unconditioned stimulus, such as food or pain, it can in turn modify one’s
reactions to another neutral stimulus by being associated with it. This
process is called higher-order conditioning.
•The seemingly irrational fears that some people have may reflect a
conditioned association between previously neutral stimuli and painful
events
•Classical conditioning may influence development throughout a person’s life
•In a classical study, following a strategy that would be ne tolerated now bc
of the ethical issues it raises, Watson and Rayner (1920) induced a severe
fear of rats in a little boy named Albert, who had not been afraid of rats
before. This was done by classical conditioing: just as Albert would reach
for the rat, the experimenters would make a loud noise that frightened
him. After he had experienced the rat and the aversive noise several
times in a close association, he developed a strong fear of rats
•Albert’s fear generalized so that later, when shown a variety of new furry
stimuli such as cats, cotton, fur coats… he responsed with obvious fear to
them as well. His fear spread to the new objects even though they had
never been paired with the noise
•The behavioral view of neurosis is concerned with anxiety and avoidance no
less than the psychodynamic but it tries to link them to external
circumstances rather than to internal conflicts
From Trauma to Anxiety
•After severe trauma, the victim is more likely to respond anxiously to other
stress stimuli that occur later in life.
•The fear evoked by the traumatic stimuli may be reactivated and also may
generalize to stimuli associated with the traumatic episode
•From a learning point of view, anxieties after traumas, like other learned
fears, may be acquired through simple association or conditioning
principles
•Neutral stimuli associated with aversive events or outcomes may come to
elicit anxiety in their own right… such aversively conditioned emotional
reactions may also generalize extensively to new stimuli
Operant Conditioning: B.F. Skinner’s Contributions
How Operant (Instrumental) Conditioning Works: Learning from Response
Consequences
•Behavior is modified by its consequences: the outcome of any response (or
pattern of responses, often called operants for how the organism
“operates” on the environment) determines how likely it is that smiliar
respones will be performed in the future
•If a response has a favoriable (reinforcing) consequence, the organism is
more likely to perform it again in similar situations
•Reinforcers or favorable outcomes are not limited to primitive rewards such
as food pellets or sexual satisfactions
•Almost all events may serve as reinforcers including such cognitive
gratifications such as information or achievement of competence
•Such learning, based on the consequences produced by responses, is called
operant conditioning or instrumental learning
•When consequences of a response pattern change, the probability of it and
of similar response patterns occurring again also changes
Skinner’s Basic Approach
•Skinner rejected the motivational focus of Donald, Miller and Freud
•Skinner wanted to find a level of analysis that was entirely objective and
required no inferences about underlying mental processes
•Skinner believed we can only know people by examining their behavior—the
things they say and do
•In skinner’s approach, the observed behaviors is the basic unit and the
interest is in specifying the conditions and stimuli or situations that
“control” it
•The concept that the stimulus controls the response is called stimulus
control
•The person is what the person does
Importance of the Situation: The Role of Stimuli
•Payed attention to the stimuli and the situation in the regulation of behavior
•Green or red lights or tones that have become associated with certain
qualities manipulated through learning experiences
•In daily life, different people are exposed to extremely different situations,
often in stable ways. Such differences are not limited to occupational and
social role differences. A person with an irritating, defensive style of social
interaction is likely to provoke different reactions from others compared
to a person with a more agreeable style
•Healthy people admitted themselves to a local mental hospital. They were
treated as if they were insane and labeled psychotic by staff who didn’t
know their real identity. Just being there was enough to make normal
people appear like mental patients in the eyes of the staff
Rejection of Inferred Motives
•In Skinner’s view, the tendency to invoke motives as explanations of why
people behave as they do is understandable, bc that is how we “explain”
behavior in commonsense terms. To explain why a child spends an
abnormal amount of time cleaning his room we might say bc he had
strong cleanliness needs… Such hypotheses about motives may sound like
explanations but Skinner insisted that they tell us little unless the motive
is defined objectively and unless the causes of the motive itself are
established.
•Skinner criticized many concepts regarding human needs as being no more
than motivational labels attached to human activities.
•Preferred to analyze behaiors in terms of the observable events and
conditions that seem to vary with them. They refuse to posit specific
motications for behavior. Rather, they try to discover the external events
that stregthen its future likelihood and that maintain or change it.
•Motivation is the result of depriving the organism of something for a given
period of time
•Believed that our behavior is shaped by the external environment, not by
motives or dispositions, or “selves” that are “in” the person
Conditioned Generalized Reinforcers
•Neutral stimuli may acquire value and become conditioned reinforcers
when they become associated with other stimuli that already have
reinforcing properties
•Conditioned reinforcers become generalized when they are paired with
more than one primary reinforcer
•An example of a conditioned generalized reinforcer = Is money bc it
can provide so many different primary gratifications (food, shelter,
comfort, medical help, alleviation of pain…) Generalized reinforcers can
become poten wven when the primary reinforcers upon which they are
based do not accompany them anymore
•Attention and social approval from people who are likely to supply
reinforcement—such as parents, a loved one—often are especially strong
generalized reinforcers
Discrimination and Generalization in Everyday Life
•Discrimintive stimuli indicate when an operant response will or will not have
facorable consequences. Without such signals we would not know in
advance that outcomes to which different behaviors are likely to lead and
life would be chaotic.
•When a particular response or pattern of responses is reinforced in the
presence of one stimulus but not in the presence of others, discrimination
occurs.
•If a response pattern is uniformly rewarded in many conditions or
situations, generalization occurs. It depends on the similarity among
stimulus situations
•From the behavioral perspective, the socialization of children is based on
discriminative training. As a result of discrimination training, the child’s
behavior beings to depend on the specific conditions in which it unfolds
Shaping Behavior by Successive Approximations
•Before a response can be reinforced it must occur
•To try to help an organism form new responses, Skinnerians often use a
procedure called “shaping”
•Shaping is a technique for producing successively closer approximations to
a particularly desired behavior. It consists of carefully observing and
immediately rewarding any small variations of the behavior in the desired
direction as they are spontaneously performed by the organism
•At first a large class of responses are rewarded and they then are gradually
narrowed and reinforcement is given only for closer approximations to the
final form of the desired behavior
The Patterns of Outcomes: Schedules of Reinforcement
•The patterning, sequencing, or scheduling of reinforcement, that is, just
when it does or does not occur in relation to the organism’s behaviors
affects the future occurrence and strength of the reinforced behavior.
•Sometimes the scheduling on which reinforcement is based is more
important than the nature of the reinforcer
•Different schedules have different influences on operant responses
•Operant strength is measured by the rate of responses: the more frequently
a response is made in a given period of time, the greater its rate (and
inferred strength)
•Continuous reinforcement (CRF) is a schedule on which a behavior is
reinforced every time it occurs. Responses are usually learned more
quickly with continuous reinforcement. While this is easy to do in a lab, in
life it is a rare experience. A partial or intermittent schedule in which a
response is reinforced only some of the time is much more common
•Behavior that has received partial reinforcement or intermittent
reinforcement often becomes hard to eliminate even when reinforcement
is withdrawn altogether.
•Many potentially maladaptive behaviors are hard to eliminate because they
are rewarded intermittently
•The persistence of behavior after partial reinforcement suggests that when
one has experienced only occasional irregular and unpredictable
reinforcement for a response, one continues to expect possible rewards
for a long time after the rewards have totally stopped
Superstitions: Getting reinforced into Irrationality
•The relationship between the occurrence of an operant response and the
reinforcement that follows it is often causal. For ex. Turn the door know
and the door opens, the outcome reinforcing the action. Consequently, in
the future, we are likely to turn door knobs to enter and leave rooms and
out behavior at the door seems rational. Often, however, the responsereinforcement relationship may be quite accidental, and the bizarre and
seemingly superstitious behavior and dales beliefs may be produced.
(Primitive tribe may offer human sacrifices to the gods to end severe
droughts bc occasionally a sacrifice has been followed by rain).
•Development of superstition may be demonstrated by giving a pigeon a bit
of food at regular intervals—say every 15 seconds—regardless of what he
is doing.
Punishment
•In operant conditioning, reinforcement strengthens the operant,
punishment weakens it.
•Punishment can take 2 forms: in one form “positive” punishment, aversive
stimulation is given (e.g. an electric shock, a sharp slap to the face); in
“negative” punishment, something desirable is removed (e.g. not being
allowed to go to a party).
•The influence of punishment on personality development in the course of
socialization is important and complex and depends on many variables
•Often aversive stimuli in everyday life and childrearing may be conceyed
subtly by facial expressions and words rather than by brute force, and in
extremely complicated patterns, by the same individuals who also nuture
the child, giving love and other positive reinforcement.
•Often the events that are punished often involve more than specific
responses; they sometimes entail long sequences of overt and covert
behaviors
•When punishment is speed and specific it may suppress undesirable
behavior but it cannot teach the child desirable alternatives. Therefore,
parents should use positive techniques to show and reinforce appropriate
behavior that the child can employ in place of the unacceptable response
that has to be suppressed…so that the learner will develop a new
response
Skinner’s Own Behavior
•He applied his findings to himself
Summary of 2 types of Learning
•Classical conditioning and operant learning: there is an overlap between
these types of learning but eachhas dome distinct features and has a
major place in current learning theory and research.
•LOOK AT CHART ON PAGE 268 that summarize the 2 types of learning!