Chapter 1

Question 1

What is applied behavior analysis?

Answer 1

A science and technology of behavior that applies principles of behavior to analyze and improve the real world.

Question 2

What is basic behavior analysis?

Answer 2

It evolved out of Skinner’s radical behaviorism (philosophy) and experimentally investigates the basic principles of behavior, especially operant conditioning.

Also known as experimental analysis of behavior.

Question 3

What is behavior?

Answer 3

Any activity of an organism that can be observed or somehow measured.

Question 4

What is behaviorism?

Answer 4

A natural science approach to psychology that studies the environmental influences on observable behavior.

Question 5

What is British empiricism?

Answer 5

A philosophical school of thought that maintains that almost all knowledge is a function of experience.

Question 6

What is cognitive behaviorism?

Answer 6

A subtype of behaviorism that uses intervening variables, usually in the form of hypothesized cognitive processes, to help explain behavior.

Also called purposive behaviorism.

Question 7

What is a cognitive map?

Answer 7

The mental representation of one’s spatial surroundings.

Question 8

What is empiricism?

Answer 8

In psychology, the assumption that behavior patterns are mostly learned rather than inherited.

Also known as nurture perspective.

Question 9

What is evolutionary adaptation?

Answer 9

A helpful genetic trait (physical or behavioral) that has been shaped through natural selection.

Question 10

What is functionalism?

Answer 10

An approach to psychology that proposes that the mind evolved to help us adapt to the world around us and that the focus of psychology should be the study of those adaptive processes.

Question 11

What is introspection?

Answer 11

The attempt to accurately describe one’s internal conscious thoughts, emotions, and sensory experiences.

Question 12

What is latent learning?

Answer 12

Learning that occurs in the absence of any observable indication of learning and only becomes apparent at a later time.

Question 13

What is the law of contiguity?

Answer 13

A law of association that posits that events that occur in close proximity to each other in time or space are readily associated with each other.

Question 14

What is the law of contrast?

Answer 14

A law of association in which events that are opposite from each other are readily associated with one another.

Question 15

What is the law of frequency?

Answer 15

A law of association in which the more frequently two items occur together, the more strongly they are associated with each other.

Question 16

What is the law of similarity?

Answer 16

A law of association in which events that are similar to each other are readily associated with each other.

Question 17

What is learning?

Answer 17

A relatively enduring change in behavior that results from some type of experience.

Question 18

What is methodological behaviorism?

Answer 18

A type of behaviorism that asserts that for methodological reasons, psychologists should study environmental influences only on those behaviors that can be directly observed.

Also known as classical behaviorism.

Question 19

What is mind-body dualism.

Answer 19

Descartes’s philosophical assumption that some behaviors are bodily reflexes that are automatically elicited by externa stimuli, while other behaviors are freely chosen.

Question 20

What is nativism?

Answer 20

The assumption that a person’s characteristics are largely inborn.

Also known as the nature perspective.

Question 21

What is natural selection?

Answer 21

The evolutionary principle according to which organisms that are better able to adapt to environmental pressures are more likely to reproduce and pass along those adaptive characteristics than those organisms that cannot adapt.

Question 22

What is neobehaviorism?

Answer 22

A brand of behaviorism that utilizes intervening variables, in the form of hypothesized physiological processes, to help explain behavior.

Sometimes called deductive behaviorism.

Question 23

What is radical behaviorism?

Answer 23

A brand of behaviorism that emphasizes the influence of the environment on overt behavior, rejects the use of thoughts and feelings as private behaviors that themselves can be explained through environmental influences.

Question 24

What is reciprocal determinism?

Answer 24

The assumption that environmental events, observable behaviors, and person variables (including thoughts and feelings) reciprocally influence each other.

Question 25

What is social-learning theory?

Answer 25

A type of behaviorism that strongly emphasizes the importance of observational learning and cognitive variables in explaining human behavior.

Also known as cognitive social learning theory or social cognitive theory.

Question 26

What is stimulus response theory (S-R theory)?

Answer 26

A theory that learning involves the establishment of a connection between a specific stimulus (S) and a specific response (R).

Question 27

What is structuralism?

Answer 27

An approach to psychology that assumes that it is possible to determine the structure of the mind by identifying the basic elements that compose it.