SAFMEDs Chapter 10: Social Learning and Biological Factors

Question 1

Phobias

Answer 1

• irrational fears

- persistent, excessive, unrealistic fear of an object, person, animal, activity or situation

Question 2

Mary Cover Jones (1897-1987)

Answer 2

• used classical conditioning to reduce fearful responses
• Mother of behavior therapy
• Used desensitization therapy to reduce sensitivity to a feared stimulus
• Gave Peter sweet candy to reduce his fear of rabbits
• work was intially ignored until Joseph Wolpe built upon her original work

Question 3

Behavior Therapy

Answer 3

• Mary Cover Jones
• identify and help change potentially self-destructive or unhealthy behaviors
• all behaviors are learned and can be changed

Question 4

Desensitization

Answer 4

• reducing sensitivity to a feared stimulus

- introducing a series of stimuli that approximated a person’s phobia

Question 5

Joseph Wolpe (1915-1997)

Answer 5

• built upon Mary Cover’s work in behavioral therapy
• expanded it to include reciprocal inhibition
• applied this principle to anxiety, hypothesizing that if a desired emotion is invoked at the presentation of an anxiety-producing stimulus over many repetitions, the undesirable anxiety response can be extinguished because the favorable and unfavorable responses cannot be evoked at the same time

Question 6

Reciprocal inhibition

Answer 6

-a process of extinguishing an undesired response to stimuli by evoking a desired response in its place

Question 7

Systematic desensitization

Answer 7

-a process that trains individuals with phobias in relaxation techniques and then exposes them to progressively more anxiety-provoking stimuli while they are relaxed

Question 8

Anxiety hierarchy

Answer 8

• exposure hierarchy

- a list of feared objects and situations ranked from the least anxiety-provoking to the most anxiety-provoking

Question 9

Biofeedback

Answer 9

• a biofeedback device monitors such functions as heart rate, blood pressure, and respiration
• Biofeedback is used to identify a patient’s relaxed state to compare to their anxious state.

Question 10

Taste aversion

Answer 10

• Taste aversion or the Garcia effect occurs when you lose you taste for a food after having a bad experience with it.
• This phenomenon is unique because it rapidly pairs negative symptoms (nausea, illness, etc.) with eating a specific food, even though the food is not the cause of the symptoms.

Question 11

John Garcia

Answer 11

• Garcia effect/taste aversion

- intial exposure to flavored water followed by a toxic reaction to radiation made rats averse to the water

Question 12

Latent learning

Answer 12

• Learning that occurs but is not apparent until there is an incentive to demonstrate it.

Question 13

Edward Tolman

Answer 13

• a psychologist who tried to teach rats to run through a maze over a series of one day trials
• He used different reinforcement schedules and noticed that the rats learned the maze but were not compelled to use the information without motivation
• This demonstrated latent learning

Question 14

Cognitive map

Answer 14

-a mental representation that allows an organise to acquire, store and recall information both in a real, spatial world or in a metaphorical spatial environment

Question 15

Robert Rescorla

Answer 15

-demonstrated that cognition is at work within classical conditioning

Question 16

Contingency theory

Answer 16

• posits that for learning to take place the stimulus must provide the organism with a reliable signal that certain events will take place
• the predictive nature of the stimulus is key to establishing an effective association between a stimulus and a response

Question 17

Instinctive drift

Answer 17

• a reversion to natural behavior.
• it refers to the tendency of an animal to revert to unconscious and automatic behaviour that interferes with learned behaviour from operant conditioning.

Question 18

Abstract learning

Answer 18

• understanding complex cognitive concepts rrather than concrete stimuli
• same or different, love or hate, honesty or dishonesty

Question 19

Insight learning

Answer 19

• A type of learning that uses reason, especially to form conclusions, inferences, or judgments, to solve a problem.
• Unlike learning by trial-and-error, insight learning is solving problems not based on actual experience but on trials occurring mentally.

Question 20

Premack principle

Answer 20

• a person will perfom a less desirable activity in order to perform the more desirable activty as a consequence
• “Grandma’s rule” no dessert until you finish dinner

Question 21

Gestalt psychology

Answer 21

-psychology based on the view that perceptions are oganized wholes rather than a summary of their parts

Question 22

David premack

Answer 22

-premack principle

Question 23

Learned helplessness

Answer 23

• Martin Seligman
• The organism becomes helpless because they have learned that, regardless of their actions, they have no ability to change the outcome

Question 24

Problem-focused coping

Answer 24

-when we attempt to take control of a situation by changing our behavior or changing the situation

Question 25

Emotion-focused coping

Answer 25

• seeking out the support of others
• trying to find the positive side of a stressor “silver lining”
• taking our minds off the problem
• altering mood by using alcohol, drugs, food, sex

Question 26

Locus of control

Answer 26

-the perception of where control over life events resides

Question 27

Self-control

Answer 27

-the ability to delay the satisfaction of immediate desires for a long-term benefit

Question 28

Albert Bandura

Answer 28

-influenced both behavioral psychology and social cognitive theory with his social learning theory

Question 29

Social learning theory

Answer 29

-postulates that people learn behaviors through observational learning- watching and mimicking others

Question 30

Observational learning

Answer 30

-watching and mimicking others

Question 31

Modeling

Answer 31

-demonstrating behavior to show how something is done and its profound implications

Question 32

Reciprocal determinism

Answer 32

-the belief that the environment influences the organism and its cognition which in turn influences the environment forming a cycle of mutual influence

Question 33

Vicarious learning

Answer 33

• learning something by watching someone model a behavior

- vicarious: experienced in the imagination through someone else’s actions

Question 34

Vicarious reinforcement

Answer 34

-observing the consequences of behavior therefore learning them without the need for direct reinforcement

Question 35

Social cognitive theory

Answer 35

• the idea that part of what people know results from observing others.
• Learning is influenced through attention, retention, reproduction and motivation.

Question 36

Self efficacy

Answer 36

• the degree to which a person believes in his or her own ability to complete tasks or reach goals and influence situations
• Can impact social, profession, romantic, etc. situations

Question 37

Mirror neurons

Answer 37

-nervous system cells that fire both when an organism itself is doing a behavior and when observing another organism doing the behavior