Behaviourist Approach Flashcards
Key features of behaviourism
- Born as a blank slate and all behaviour is learnt
- On nature side of debate
- All behaviour Reduced to a simple stimulus response association
- Results from experiments can be generalised to explain everyone’s behaviour
Classical conditioning
Primary caregiver (neutral stimulus) becomes associated with food (unconditioned stimulus) which becomes a conditioned stimulus producing pleasure (conditioned response)
Operant conditioning of infants
Crying is positively reinforced by attention
Operant conditioning of caregivers
Attention is negatively reinforced by cessation of crying
Positive reinforcement
Increases likelihood of a response occurring because it involves a reward for the behaviour
Token economy
A reward system which in moves tangible rewards for positive behaviour
Negative reinforcement
Increases likelihood of a response occurring because it involves the removal of unpleasant consequences
Extinction
If behaviour is no longer reinforced it will become extinct and no longer repeated
Operant conditioning
A type of learning I’m which a new voluntary behaviour is associated with a consequence
What are voluntary behaviours?
Actions that can be controlled by the organism
Who conducted an experiment on operant conditioning?
Skinner
What did skinner use in his experiment?
Rat Food dispenser Lever Lights Speaker Electric grip
How does operant conditioning explain phobias?
Moving away from behaviour provides negative reinforcement by reducing the anxiety, this maintains the phobia
Who conducted an experiment on classical zconditioning?
Pavlov
What animal did Pavlov use in his experiment?
Dog
What did skinner say learning is by?
Reinforcement
What did Pavlov say learning is by?
Association
What was the unconditioned response in Pavlov experiment?
The dog salivating
What was the unconditioned stimulus in Pavlovs experiment?
Food
What was the neutral stimulus in pavlovs experiment?
Bell
What was the CR & CS in Pavlovs experiment?
CR - dog salivating
CS - bell
Who conducted an experiment for classical conditioning with humans?
Watson and Raynor
What was Watson and Raynors experiment called?
Little Albert
Who put forward the 2 process model?
Mowrer
What is flooding?
More extreme form of behavioural therapy
Who do they do in flooding?
Exposed to the most frightening situation immediately and are unable to avoid it and through continuous exposure anxiety levels decrease
What are the 2 forms flooding can take?
In Vivo - actual
In vitro- imaginary
What is a patient taught in flooding?
Relaxation techniques
Systematic desensitisation
Uses principals of classical conditioning to replace phobia with relaxation response
Three critical components to systematic desensitisation ?
Fear hierarchy
Relaxation training
Reciprocal inhibition
Reciprocal inhibition
Two emotional states don’t exist at same time
environmental determinism
the behaviourist approach sees all behaviour as determined by past experiences that have been conditioned. Skinner suggested that everything we do is a sun total of our reinforcement history. he suggested that any sense of free will is simply an illusion. this makes it an important weakness as it informed any possible influence that free will may have on our behaviour.
real life application
for example, operant conditioning is the basis of token economy systems that have been used successfully in institutions, such as prisons and psychiatric wards. these work by rewarding appropriate behaviour with tokens that can be exchanged for privileges. treatments such as these have an advantage of requiring less effort from a patient because they don’t have to talk about the problem.
carried out on animals evaluation
we are cognitively and physiologically different from animals, humans have different social morals and moral values which mediate the effect of the environment so we may behave differently. so the laws and principles derived from the experiments cannot be reliably generalised to the human population. this is an important weakness as it reduces the external validity of the approach.
