Child Development From Infancy to Adolescence. Laura E. Levine
Conditioned response (the response you have learned):
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Answer: Originally, the UCS always produces the UCR. In this case, the slamming door is the UCS and your automatic flinch is the UCR. However, over time the slam has been paired with your roommate saying “Goodbye!” You didn’t originally flinch when he said it, so “Goodbye” was originally a neutral stimulus. With repeated pairings with the slamming door, “Goodbye” has become a CS and your flinch has become a CR.
One of the dangers of this type of learning is that once the conditioned (or learned) response has been established, people understandably avoid a stimulus that produces the unpleasant unconditioned response, so they don’t have the opportunity to find out that they really have nothing to fear. If you once got very sick after eating asparagus, you avoid it in the future and never find out that it had nothing to do with your illness. Classically conditioned fears can be so powerful that they begin to limit what people who experience them are able to do. This type of unreasonable fear is called a phobia.
Phobia: An irrational fear of something specific that is so severe that it interferes with day-to-day functioning.
People who experience phobias go to extremes to avoid the object of their fears. Psychologists have used classical conditioning to treat phobias by exposing patients to their feared situations in a controlled way. This idea began long ago when Mary Cover Jones (1924) followed Watson’s experiment with Little Albert with a study of a 2-year-old boy who seemed to have the exact phobias of rats, rabbits, and other objects that Watson had conditioned into Little Albert. Jones was able to undo these fears by deconditioning the child; she presented him with candy at the same time a rabbit was brought to him and encouraged imitation when he saw another child holding the rabbit.
Modern Applications of Classical Conditioning
Today, virtual reality is being used in the treatment of children with anxiety disorders to expose them to feared stimuli in a controlled way that they can tolerate. Although the amount of research on this approach has been limited, it has been helpful for children with school phobias and phobias of spiders (Bouchard, 2011; Bouchard, Wiederhold, & Bossé, 2014). Rather than placing the child in a completely virtual environment, it is now also possible to add images of feared elements, such as a spider, to a child’s view of the real environment, a technique that is known as augmented reality (Baus & Bouchard, 2014). This is a promising new way to treat phobias.
Treating phobias with augmented reality. If you were fearful of spiders, would the image of this spider superimposed on your hand via augmented reality help you to overcome that fear?
B. F. Skinner and Operant Conditioning
B. F. Skinner (1904–1990) further developed the theory of behaviorism by introducing the idea of operant conditioning. While studying rat behavior, Skinner noticed that the rats were affected not by what came before their behavior, as was true of classical conditioning, but by what came after (Vargas, 2005). He concluded that spontaneous behaviors are controlled by the environment’s response to them. A reinforcement is anything that occurs after a behavior that increases the likelihood the behavior will continue or happen again. Reinforcement can be positive or negative, and both types make a behavior more likely to happen.
Operant conditioning: The process that happens when a response that follows a behavior causes that behavior to happen more.
Reinforcement: A response to a behavior that causes that behavior to happen more.
B. F. Skinner. Skinner’s theory is based on the process of operant conditioning. Rewards and punishments (or simply ignoring an undesirable behavior) are used to change the likelihood of that behavior continuing to occur.
Everett Collection/Newscom
While it is easy to think of examples of positive reinforcement, understanding negative reinforcement is more difficult. Positive reinforcement occurs when you get something you like and want. Negative reinforcement occurs when something disagreeable is removed following a behavior. For instance, when a parent picks up a crying baby and the baby stops crying, stopping the unpleasant sound of the infant crying reinforces the parent’s behavior and makes it more likely the parent will respond this way again when the baby cries. Figure 2.3 illustrates the difference between these two types of reinforcement.
Positive reinforcement: In operant conditioning, a response that makes a behavior more likely to happen again because it provides a positive stimulus.
Negative reinforcement: In operant conditioning, a response that makes a behavior more likely to happen again because it removes an unpleasant stimulus.
Figure 2.3 Illustration of positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement.
Skinner described several concepts related to operant conditioning that help us understand how the process works. The first is the process of shaping behavior. You cannot reinforce a behavior unless that behavior occurs. For example, you cannot reinforce positive peer interaction with a child who does not interact with his peers. However, Skinner developed the idea that behavior can slowly be “shaped” through reinforcement of behaviors that progressively get more and more like the behaviors desired. To shape the behavior of a child who does not interact with peers, you could use a series of rewards that begin when the child is simply near another child. The next step might be that the child is reinforced only when he looks at the other child, and finally the reinforcement might be provided only when he speaks while looking at the child. Eventually, the reward would be contingent only on true interaction with a peer.
Shaping behavior: Reinforcing behaviors to become progressively more like the desired behavior.
If reinforcement increases the likelihood that a behavior will occur, you might think that the most effective way to establish and maintain a behavior would be to reinforce a child every time she performs that behavior. However, although continual reinforcement does a great job of establishing a behavior, when the reinforcement stops the behavior is likely to stop as well. Skinner found that the timing and frequency of reinforcement determines how effective it is. For example, gamblers at a slot machine are reinforced with winnings on a random schedule, and this is very effective at prolonging how long they stay and gamble.
If reinforcement increases the likelihood of a response, you also might think punishment is intended to decrease it. Punishment consists of administering a negative consequence (such as a spanking) or taking away a positive reinforcement (such as “no dessert because you didn’t eat your dinner”) in response to an unwanted behavior. However, Skinner (1953) believed that it is more effective to ignore undesirable behavior while reinforcing an alternative desirable behavior than to punish it. This is a process that Skinner called extinction. For example, if a child is looking for any response from a parent, even yelling or spanking may unintentionally reinforce the undesirable behavior because behaving this way gets the child the parental attention she wants. In this case, ignoring the child when she misbehaves, but giving her attention when she behaves well, should help extinguish the misbehavior. Figure 2.4 shows examples of punishment and extinction.