Psychology task 1 Essay

Psychology Task 1
Behaviourists explain behaviour as a response to a stimulus and that of the environment that we live in is the stimulus that we respond. They also they say that the past also affects a person’s behaviour.
Operant conditioning is learning through punishments and rewards for example positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, positive punishment and negative punishment. Operant conditioning can also be described as a new behaviour being introduced into the behavioural repertoire of an animal or human. Classical conditioning is when you learn behaviour through association to something for example you might learn to walk more carefully over ice if you have fallen over previously. The social learning approach means that you learn through others for example the media, peers, family, teachers and people in our environment.
In classical conditioning, people learn to associate two stimuli when they occur together, such that the response that they originally had by one stimulus is transferred to another. A person learns to produce an existing response to a new stimulus. There was an experiment by Ivan Pavlov who studied dogs. He observed that dog salivated in response to food; they also salivated in response to the footsteps of the attendants which fed the dog. Pavlov decided that he was going to see if he could get the dogs to salivate to the sound of music (metronome). Salivations is an automatic response this means that it is not learnt so this is an unconditioned response (UR), food is a unconditioned stimulus (US), Pavlov then used just a tuning fork and this had no salivating response from the dog, he then decided to pair the tuning fork with food this then produced a unconditioned response Pavlov repeated this a number of times, after conditioning Pavlov then only had to play the tuning fork and the dog salivated this is a conditioned response (CR).

In operant conditioning, people learn new behaviours through the penalty of the things they do. If a behaviour they produce is followed by reinforcement then the possibility of that behaviour being repeated increases in the future so the behaviour is strengthened. A consequence can be reinforcing in two ways: either the person gets something good this is called positive reinforcement or they avoid something bad this is called negative reinforcement. On the other hand, if behaviour is followed by a punishment then the likelihood of that behaviour being repeated in future decreases so the behaviour is weakened. Operant conditioning allows people to learn new responses. There is an experiment created by B.F Skinner the experiment was in an operant conditioning chamber also known as a Skinner box, it was used to analyse the behaviour of an animal, the box was used to teach an animal to perform certain actions such as pressing a lever in response to a specific stimuli, for example a light or a sound. When the tester performs the behaviour correctly they are given a reward, if it was not the box delivered a punishment in Skinners experiment this was an electric shock eventually the tester always did the correct behaviour.

In the social learning theory there is observational learning the five factors of observational learning is:
1. Availability
2. Attention
3. Retention
4. Reproduction
5. And Motivation
For the behaviour to be learnt it need to be performed somewhere an individual can see for example on the TV, on a computer game or observing a peer. Also the person must notice the behaviour, the amount of attention we pay is affected usually by the characteristics of the model you are observing, for example you are more likely to pay attention to an attractive, high-status or is powerful but you are less likely to pay attention to someone with a low status and power. The behaviour that we are observing must be retained you would have to old enough or interested enough to keep the information about this behaviour in their brain. The

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