Psychological approaches to understanding people
Dominic Upton in Introducing Psychology for Nurses and Healthcare Professionals, 2013
Classical conditioning (see Figure 2.2) is a process of learning whereby an initially neutral stimulus comes to elicit a particular response, as the result of being paired repeatedly with an unconditioned stimulus. So let us break this down: The food (in the demonstration above) is an unconditioned stimulus (UCS) because it naturally evokes an unlearned reflexive response (salivation) which is known as the unconditioned response (UCR).The sound of the laboratory assistant’s footsteps is a neutral stimulus that comes to be linked with the food when the two events repeatedly occur close together in time. Once the two events become associated with one another the footsteps become a conditioned stimulus.After satisfactory repetition this conditioned stimulus will produce a salivation response. When the salivation response is produced by the conditioned stimulus as opposed to the unconditioned stimulus, salivation becomes a conditioned response (CR).
MRCPsych Paper A1 Mock Examination 4: Questions
Melvyn WB Zhang, Cyrus SH Ho, Roger Ho, Ian H Treasaden, Basant K Puri in Get Through, 2016
A 50-year-old man suffered from prostate cancer 2 years ago. He came to the hospital daily to receive chemotherapy. However, when he received chemotherapy, he threw up because of side effects. From that point forward, whenever he was in the hospital, he felt sick to his stomach. The chemotherapy was stopped 1 year ago, and the nausea associated with hospital environment also disappeared. Which of the following statements regarding the disappearance of nausea associated with hospital environment is correct? This process has no treatment implication.This process only applies to biological responses (e.g. nausea) but not psychological responses.This process was developed in conjunction with both classical conditioning and operant conditioning.The response (i.e. nausea) disappeared suddenly.The response (i.e. nausea associated with hospital environment) would never occur again.
Questions and Answers
David Browne, Brenda Wright, Guy Molyneux, Mohamed Ahmed, Ijaz Hussain, Bangaru Raju, Michael Reilly in MRCPsych Paper I One-Best-Item MCQs, 2017
Answer: C. Skinner’s ideas of radical behaviourism made the effects of the environment a central feature of learning. Operant conditioning is a form of learning in which behavioural frequency is altered through the application of positive and negative consequences. Thorndike preceded Skinner in identifying the relationship between appropriate behaviour and experiences of success and failure. Pavlov and Watson are associated with classical conditioning, the association of a neutral stimulus with an unconditioned stimulus such that the neutral stimulus comes to bring about a response similar to that originally elicited by the unconditioned stimulus. Pavlov performed experiments examining the idea that learning occurs when two events occur closely together. Watson demonstrated classical conditioning can give rise to phobia-like behaviour in a famous experiment involving an 11-month-old infant in which he paired a loud noise with the sight of a white rat, leading the child to fear the rat and also similar objects, an example of stimulus generalisation. Bandura advocated social cognitive learning theory, which argues that the influence of environmental events on the acquisition and the regulation of behaviour is primarily a function of cognitive processes. [E. pp. 417–20]
The New Genetic Evidence on Same-Gender Sexuality: Implications for Sexual Fluidity and Multiple Forms of Sexual Diversity
Published in The Journal of Sex Research, 2021
Of course, the notion of learned or conditioned sexual responses may bring to mind the unfortunate history of behavior-modification approaches to “extinguishing” undesirable sexual impulses (Hoffmann, 2017), which has had particularly harmful effects on sexually-diverse individuals who have been subjected to “conversion” and “reparative” therapies (APA Task Force on Appropriate Therapeutic Responses to Sexual Orientation, 2009). Perhaps because of this history, sexual orientation is commonly (if inaccurately) described as fundamentally immutable (Diamond & Rosky, 2016). Yet from a basic developmental perspective, the role of learning and exposure in human and nonhuman sexual development is well established (reviewed in Hoffmann, 2012, 2017). As Hoffman summarized, conditioning is quite simply “a process by which organisms, including humans, learn about the relationship between events. Through conditioning, we can learn to predict events, we can learn signals for biologically significant stimuli, we can learn the value of stimuli, and we can learn the consequences of our actions. Hence, sexual conditioning can prepare us to respond sexually and can contribute to our erotic preferences and to how we behave sexually” (Hoffmann, 2017, p. 2213).
“Make Them Dance”: Shoshana Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism, Behavior Modification and Fraser’s “Abnormal Justice”.
Published in Journal of Technology in Human Services, 2021
“Conditioning,” reflects the usual understanding derived from the likes of Skinner, where reinforcers (rewards) are used to magnify desired behavior. Governments and companies of all kinds are involved in both subtle and blatant attempts to influence behavoiur. But new technologies, their powerful owners and secretive development allow these concepts to be both “scaled up”and hyper-individualised in unprecedented ways, especially via the detailed, personalized data feedback given to people by their smartphones, wearable devices such as watches and the “always-on networked nodes” that combine personal data and provide real-time feedback. We may choose to quantify ourselves, but the software company decides how that quantification is fed back to us to reinforce behavoiur deemed desirable to profit maximization. It is this latter step that makes such practices inimical to personal autonomy—not the devices themselves, nor their data, but the ways they are networked, their data mined, their use to us reliant on the agreement to their data being on-used, and that on-use focused on economic gains for the owner, not us. In fact, a study of 13 such apps that engage in behavioral change concluded they cannot be simply designed by and for the consumer, but instead such apps “lend themselves … to various types of surveillance” and that “official methods” of securely and simply transmitting data “do not appear to currently exist” (Lyons et al., 2014, p. 3469). Under surveillance capitalism, the “means of production” serves the “means of behavioral modification” (Zuboff, p. 351).
Future projection therapy: Techniques and case examples
Published in American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, 2022
Joseph Tramontana, Anna Sharkey, Savannah Hays
In the 1960s, behavioral therapies such as Behavior Modification became popular. Behavior therapy was based on the concepts of learning theory. The tenet is that there is the acquisition of a functional connection between an environmental stimulus and a subject’s response. In classical conditioning (Pavlovian or respondent) a stimulus elicits a response, and the subject emitting the response to the situation alters its frequency of occurrence in the future by congruity. In operant conditioning, reinforcement of the emitted response leads to learning desired responses. Skinner’s book About Behaviorism (1974) gave a good description of what was called the science of behavior. Eysenck (1960) gives a comprehensive review of behavioral approaches in treating neuroses, and Ullmann and Krasner (1966) edited a book titled Case studies in behavior modification which shows how behavioral approaches can be used to change behaviors with many other clinical issues.
Related Knowledge Centers
- Associative Memory
- Behaviorism
- Operant Conditioning
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- Stimulus
- Experiment
- Punishment
- Neural Substrate
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