Chapter 10 The Learning Perspective

Question 1

Classical conditioning (Pavlovian conditioning)

Answer 1

*reactions could be acquired by associating one stimulus with another- Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov

Question 2

Reflex

Answer 2

• existing connections between a stimulus and a response, such that the first causes the second
• Unconditioned stimulus and it causes unconditional response
• The stimulus in the reflex must become associated in time and place with another stimulus.
• The second stimulus is usually (though not always) neutral at first.
• It causes no particular response beyond being noticed.
• There are no special requirements for this stimulus.

Question 3

First stage: situation before conditioning

Answer 3

• Only the reflex exists- a stimulus causing a response
• Unconditioned/unconditional stimulus (US): the stimulus
• Unconditioned/Unconditional response (UR): response
• Unconditional: no special condition is required for the response to occur

Question 4

Second stage: conditioning

Answer 4

• Neutral stimulus occurs along with, or slightly before, the US.
• Conditioned/conditional stimulus (CS): neutral stimulus
• Stimulus that’s becoming conditioned
• A response occurs in its presence only under a specific condition: that the US is there, as well.
• When the US comes, the UR follows automatically, reflexively.

Question 5

When the US and the CS are paired frequently, something gradually starts to change

Answer 5

*The CS starts to acquire the ability to produce a response of its own: conditioned response (CR)
*The CR is often very similar to the UR- look identical in some cases, except that the CR is less intense
*If the UR has an unpleasant quality, so will the CR. If the UR has a pleasant quality, so will the CR.
*Ex: Person in the restaurant (US) -> sexual arousal (UR); Background of the restaurant (CSs) -> Conditioned sexual response (CR)
-Present CS without US and see if there is a reaction
Yes -> conditioned
No -> not conditioned

Question 6

High-order conditioning

Answer 6

• The more frequently the CS is paired with the US, the more likely conditioning will occur.
• CS-CR combination acts just like any other reflex
• Ex: Background of the restaurant such as music can be used to condition that arousal to other things; the music can condition a particular photo in the place where you listen the music

Question 7

Generalization

Answer 7

• responding in a similar way to similar-but-not-identical stimuli

Question 8

Discrimination

Answer 8

*responding differntly to different stimuli

Question 9

Extinction

Answer 9

• CRs do weaken
• When a CS appears repeatedly without the US
• Spontaneous recovery
• Classical conditioning leaves a permanent record in the nervous system, and that its effects can be muted but not erased

Question 10

Classical Conditioning and Attitudes

Answer 10

• You develop attitudes through classical conditioning
• People acquire emotional responses to attitude objects exactly that way
• Neutral stimulus (CS) -> emotional reaction (CR); Stimulus (US) -> emotional reaction (UR)
• If the attitude object is paired with an emotion-arousing stimulus, it comes to evoke the emotion itself. This response, then, is the basis for an attitude.
• Razran (1940)
• Slogans and free lunch, inhaling noxious odors, sitting in a neutral setting
• Walther (2002)
• Photos of neutral persons with liked or disliked persons -> positive and negative attitudes
• Higher-order conditioning
• Have not shown whether attitudes are usually acquired this way
• Events arouse emotions -> conditioning
• Preferences are important aspects of personality, conditioning seems an important contributor to personality

Question 11

Emotional Conditioning

Answer 11

• classical conditioning in which the CRs are emotional reactions
• Emotional reactions to properties such as colors
• Andrew Elliot
• -Color red evokes negative emotions in academic contexts
• -Red induced avoidance motivation -> emotional conditioning
• People’s likes and dislikes- all the preferences that help define personality- develop through conditioning.
• Different people have different patterns of emotional arousal
• Different people also experience the same event from the perspective of their unique “histories”
• Children from the same family experience the family differently
• Different patterns of likes and dislikes -> unqiureness of personality

Question 12

Instrumental conditioning/operant conditioning

Answer 12

• Active
• Follows the Law of Effet
• Determines habit hierarchy

Question 13

The Law of Effect

Answer 13

• If a behavior is followed by a better (more satisfying) state of affairs, the behavior is more likely to be done again later in a similar situation.
• If a behavior is followed by a worse (less satisfying) state of affairs, the behavior is less likely to be done again later.
• Linking an action, an outcome, and a change in the likelihood of future action law of effect deduced by E.L. *Thorndike more than a century ago
• Accounts for regularities in behavior
• Some acts come to occur with great regularity, other don’t

Question 14

Habit hierarchy

Answer 14

• as outcomes are experienced after various behaviors
• Derives from prior conditioning
• Some responses are very likely (high on the hierarchy) because they’ve often been followed by more satisfying states of affairs
• Other are less likely (lower on the hierarchy)
• Form of the hierarchy shifts over time, as outcome patterns shift
• Habit Hierarchy can shift for another reason
• Every change in situation means a change in cues (discriminative stimuli)
• The cues suggest what behaviors are reinforced in that situation
• A change in cues rearranges the list of behavior probabilities
• Changing contextual cues can disrupt even very strong habits

Question 15

Reinforcer

Answer 15

• strengthens the tendency to do the act that preceded it
• Can reduce biological needs or satisfy social desires (smile, acceptance)
• Some get their reinforcing quality indirectly (money)
• Primary reinforcer: diminishes a biological need
• Secondary reinforcer: reinforcing properties by association with a primary reinforcer through classical conditioning or by virtue of the fact that it can be used to get primary reinforcers

Question 16

Punisher

Answer 16

• unpleasant outcomes
• Reduce tendency to do the behavior that came before them
• Controversy about how effective they are
• Can also be primary or secondary
• Some events are intrinsically aversive (pain)
• Others are aversive because of their associations with primary punishers

Question 17

Positive Reinforcement

Answer 17

• getting something good

* The behavior that preceded it becomes more likely

Question 18

Negative Reinforcement

Answer 18

*when something unpleasant is removed

Question 19

Positive Punishment

Answer 19

*Adding something bad

Question 20

Negative Punishment

Answer 20

*Taking away something good

Question 21

Time out

Answer 21

• punishing by withdrawing something good- underlies a tactic that’s widely used to discourage unwanted behavior in children
• Short for “time out from possitive reinforcement”
• Takes the child from whatever activity is going on to a place where there’s nothing fun to do.
• Appealing
• Seems more humane than punishments
• Creates a “less satisfying state of affairs” -> same effect on behavior as any other punishment

Question 22

Discriminative stimulus

Answer 22

• a stimulus that turns the behavior on and off.
• Use the stimulus to discriminate among situations and thus among responses
• Behavior that’s cued by discriminative stimuli = “under stimulus control”

Question 23

Continuous reinforcement

Answer 23

• behavior is followed by a reinforcer every single time

* leads to fast acquisition of behavior

Question 24

Partial reinforcement

Answer 24

• behavior is followed by a reinforcer only some of the time

* most resistant to extinction

Question 25

Partial reinforcement effect

Answer 25

*Eventually, even infrequent reinforcement results in high rates of the behavior

Question 26

Reinforcement of Qualities of Behavior

Answer 26

• Reinforcing effort in one setting can increase effortfulness in other settings
• Reinforcement can influence the process of selective attention
• Reinforcement can change not just particular behaviors but whole dimensions of behavior
• Many aspects of behavior at many different levels may be reinforced simultaneously when a person experiences a more satisfying state of affairs

Question 27

Social reinforcers

Answer 27

• people are most affected by

* Acceptance, smiles, hugs, praise, approval, interest, and attention from others

Question 28

Self-reinforcement

Answer 28

*Idea that people may give themselves reinforcers after doing something they’ve set out to do
*Derives from the concept of social reinforcement; you react to your own behavior with approval or disapproval, much as someone else reacts to your behavior
Internal self-reinforcement, and self-punishment-> social-cognitive learning theories of behavior and behavior change

Question 29

Vicarious emotional arousal

Answer 29

• empathy
• When you observe someone feeling an intense emotion and experience the same feeling yourself (usually less intensely)
• Empathy isn’t the same as sympathy, which is a feeling of concern for someone else who’s suffering
• When you empathsize, you feel the same feeling, good or bad, as the other person.
• People differ in how intensely they empathsize
• Experiencing vicarious emotional arousal doesn’t constitute learning, but it creates an opportunity for learning.

Question 30

Vicarious classical conditioning

Answer 30

*vicarious emotional arousal creates a possibility for classical conditioning

Question 31

Self-control

Answer 31

the idea that people sometimes restrain their own actions

Question 32

Bandura and Mischel (1965)

Modeling and delay gratification

Answer 32

• Seeing a model choose an immediate reward made delay-preferring children more likely to choose an immediate reward
• Seeing a model choose a delayed reward made immediate-preferring children more likely to delay.
• One possibility: through vicarious reinforcement
• The model vocalized reasons for preferring one choice over the other -> felt reinforced by his choices
• People obtain information from seeing how others react to experiences and use that information to guide their own actions.

Question 33

Social Learning Theory

Answer 33

One person completes action and receives rewards, other person learns by watching

Question 34

Vicarious reinforcement

Answer 34

• if you observe someone do something that’s followed by reinforcement, you become more likely to do the same thing yourself.
• If you see a person punished after doing something, you’re less likely to do it.
• The reinforcer or punishment went to the other person, not to you -> affect your own behavior
• Leads you to infer that you’d get the same reinforcer if you acted the same way (Bandura, 1971)
• Bobo Doll Study: vicarious reinforcement influences whether people spontaneously do behaviors they’ve acquired through observation
• Involve developing an expectancy- a mental model of links between actions and reinforcers

Question 35

Outcome expectancy

Answer 35

a mental model of a link from action to expected outcome

Question 36

Efficacy expectancy/self-efficacy

Answer 36

• confidence in having the ability to carry out a desired action
• Therapy-> restores the person’s sense of efficacy about being able to carry out actions that were troublesome before
• Wood and Bandura (1989): self-efficacy influenced how weel business students performed in a management task
• Bauer and Bonanno (2001): efficacy perceptions predicted less grief over time among persons adapting to bereavement
• Efficacy expectancies -> whether drug users stay clean during the year after treatment
• Acquiring a sense of efficacy -> positive influence on immune function
• Perceptions of efficacy may underlie the positive effects found for other variables.
• A pathway by which social support gives people a sense of well-being
• Self-esteem and optimism operate through perceptions of efficacy

Question 37

Observational learning

Answer 37

• Social learning theory
• When one person performs an action, and another person observes it and thereby acquires the ability to repeat it
• The behavior should be one the observe doesn’t already know
• The behavior should be one the observer had not previously associated with the context in which it’s now occurring
• Allows people to pack huge amounts of information into their minds quickly
• Occurs as early as the first year of life
• How simple it is
• Require little more than the observer’s noticing and understanding what’s going on.
• fast learning of complicated behaviors
• “The more you already know, the easier it is to learn”
• People learn a great many things that they never do.

Question 38

Acquisition Versus Performance

Answer 38

• Bandura (1965)
• The number of acts the child did was the measure of spontaneous performance- child was left alone in room for 10 minutes
• The number of behaviors shown was the measure of acquisition- was offered an incentive to show the experimenter as many of the previously viewed acts as he or she could remember
• Vicarious reinforcement influences whether people spontaneously do behaviors they’ve acquired by observation.

Question 39

Impact of media violence on real-life aggression

Answer 39

• Three processes
• People who observe innovative aggressive techniques acquire the techniques as behavior potentials by observational learning.
• Observing violence that’s condoned or even rewarded helps promote the sense that aggression is an appropriate way to deal with disagreements.
• -Vicarious reinforcement thus increases the likelihood that viewers will use such tactics themselves.
• Violence is reinforced in the media, a common reply is that the “bad guys” in TV and movie stories get punished.
• The punishment usually comes late in the story, after a lot of short-term reinforcement -> aggression is linked more closely to reinforcement than to punishment
• The actions of heroes usually are also aggressive, and these actions are highly reinforced
• Whether the model is live or symbolic, exposure to aggressive models increases the aggression of observers
• Repeated exposure to violence desensitizes observers to human suffering.
• Long-term: Being victimized and victimizing others is coming to be seen as an ordinary part of life

Question 40

Physiological assessment

Answer 40

• assessment of emotional responses
• Relates to biological process views of personality
• Emotional responses are partly physiological
• Changes in muscle tension, heart rate, blood pressure, brain waves, sweat gland activity, and more

Question 41

Behavioral assessment

Answer 41

• entils observing overt behavior in specific situations
• What kinds of activities people undertake, for how long, and in what patterns.
• Varies widely in how it’s actually done
• Simply counts acts of specific types, check possibilities from a prearranged list or watches how far into a sequence of action a person goes before stopping
• More elaborate procedure- using automated devices to record how long a person engages in various behaviors

Question 42

Social-Cognitive Approaches

Answer 42

• Two characteristics
• Tends to use self-report devices, rather than behavioral observation
• -Role of thoughts, feelings
• What variables are measured
• -Focus on experiential variables
• -Frequently ask people how they feel or what kinds of thought go through their minds, in certain situations
• -Expectancies of coping and expectancies of personal efficacy
• Tend to emphasize responses to specific categories of situations, as does the est of the learning perspective
• -Behavior varies greatly from one situation to another
• -People’s representations determine how they act

Question 43

Behavior modification/behavior therapy

Answer 43

*emphasis is on changing the person’s actual behavior

Question 44

Phobias

Answer 44

• people sometimes have intense anxiety when exposed to specific stimuli
• Can become tied to virtually any stimulus, some are more common than others
• Phobic reactions are classically conditioned
• Leads to idea about how to treat phobias

Question 45

Systematic desensitization

Answer 45

• Work with therapist to create an anxiety hierarchy- list of situations involving the feared stimulus, ranked by how much anxiety each creates
• Visualize a scene from the least-threatening end of the hierarchy -> do this repeatedly until the scene provokes no anxiety at all
• Then, move to next level on the anxiety hierarchy -> gradually, able to imagine increasingly threatening scenes without anxiety
• Eventually, the imagined scenes are replaced by the actual feared stimulus
• As the anxiety is countered by relaxation, you’re able to interact more and more effectively with the stimulus that previously produce intense fear
• Very effective in reducing fear reactions -> particularly fears that focus on a specific stimulus.

Question 46

Counterconditioning

Answer 46

*relaxation= counteract or replace fear in the presence of the phobic stimuls

Question 47

Context plays

Answer 47

• the context of the original conditioning often differs from the context of the therapy
• The response will disappear in the treatment setting but return when the person is in his or her everyday environment.
• Each context is a discriminative stimuli
• The stimuli in the original setting weren’t there during the extinction -> they will serve as cues for behavior

Question 48

Contingency management

Answer 48

• reinforce desired alternative actions and simultaneously reduce even further (if possible) any reinforcement of the undesired action
• Abusing drugs and alcohol

Question 49

Skill deficits

Answer 49

• literally unable to do something that’s necessary or desirable
• Reflect deficits in observational learning- never had good models to learn from
• Can influence the development of expectations
• Anticipate bad outcomes in situations in which the skills are relevant

Question 50

Mastery model

Answer 50

• completely without fear regarding what the person in therapy is afraid of
• Creates vicarious extinction of the conditioned fear, as the observer sees that the model experiences no distress

Question 51

Coping model

Answer 51

• initially displays fear but overcomes it and eventually handles the situation
• Depends on the fact that the model is in the same situation as the observer but is noticeably able to overcome the fear through active effort
• More cognitive
• Seem more effective than mastery models in therapy for fears-> powerful role that cognitive processes can play in coping with fear

Question 52

Participant modeling

Answer 52

• the model (often, the therapist) performs the behavior in front of the other person, who then repeats it.
• Involves a lot of verbalization, instruction, and personalized assurance from the model
• Takes more of the therapist’s time
• More powerful as a behavior change technique