Developmental Psychology

Other examples include the Little Albert Experiment. This was performed by a psychologist by the name of John Watson. In his experiment, he studied a 9-month-old boy who was exposed to a white rat, rabbit, dog and monkey masks (with and without hair). Other items that the 9-month-old was subjected to was cotton wool and other items that the boy had never seen before. At first, Little Albert was not frightened of any of the items that he was subjected to. Prior to Little Albert turning 1 year of age, John Watson begun to condition him. Watson placed a white rat near Little Albert. Since Little Albert had had positive reactions with the white rat, it reached out for it, but when his hand was close, Watson made a loud noise, thus scaring Little Albert. Since the loud noise and the white rat were now combined, Little Albert would cry when the white rat was brought into the room or near Little Albert. • UCS: Loud Noise • UCR: Fear/Crying • CS: White Rat (Previously a neutral stimulus) • CR: Fear/Crying After this experiment was concluded, Watson concluded that Little Albert showed stimulus generalization to all white furry objects, and not just the white rat. Little Albert became afraid of white cotton, fake Santa beards, white rabbits, and a sealskin coat. 1.14 Operant Conditioning B.F. Skinner is known for operant conditioning. This is another aspect of behaviorism. He developed a theory in response to what he thought was a failing classical conditioning. He thought that learning could happen when there was selective reinforcement . He believed in reinforcing some behaviors and not reinforcing other behaviors. • Reinforcement : Actions that increase the probability of behaviors that continually occur. • Punishment : Actions that decrease the probability of behaviors that continually occur. • Positive : Introduces something if the stimulus is positive. • Negative : Removes something if the stimulus is unpleasant. Let’s look at an example. Imagine you are trying to get your teenager to clean his or her room and have attempted this for the past week. You want to positively enforce behavior, so you present something pleasant, and remove something unpleasant like a chore. If after a week as passed, and their room still has not been cleaned, then the teen could be punished by adding something not pleasant such as another chore or taking away something like their cell phone. For punishments to be successful, it is necessary for the punishment to occur after the negative behavior occurs. When the punishment does not occur after the negative behavior it will not be corresponding with the negative behavior, hence there will never be an association between bad behavior and punishment.

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