waldentwo

     This year I have realized a lot about how the world views different areas of life. When you look around, people interact differently, react differently, and hold different moral values. These changes are hard to navigate, especially since things used to seem much simpler. If this is how adults are feeling, I can't help but wonder about the impact on children while maintaining their thoughts. Unlike adults, children do not have the same networking skills, which means they require more guidance throughout their years of growing up. In saying this, looking at school districts, I can see they are not doing a good job of directing the children down the path they should. Mental health rates are worse than ever, and the stigma behind it will not change unless the minds of the youth are constructed better. In addition, they should be able to freely construct their views on different topics where school districts and the public shove down their thoughts. The confusion in the ...

                                              When one thinks of animal use in the sciences, the first animal that comes to mind is often a rat. Although it is true that rats are used, there are an array of different animals used in scientific research. Why is this? Animal use for research dates back to as far as 500 B.C. There is evidence of ancient Greeks dissecting live animals to learn not only the anatomy but the psychology of the animal. In this course we specifically learned about Bruce the Kea and his journey of using innovative tool use for preening. Humans share about 90% of their genes with other mammals making them the perfect candidate for research subjects. But before a researcher can use an animal they must acquire three separate licenses; a personal license, project license, and an establishment license.     Animals have been used for groundbr...

Dieting is difficult for many individuals to not only start but be consistent with for a duration of time that will insight results. Many people believe that they must completely eliminate certain foods or behaviors in order to achieve the desired goals they have set for themselves. As both a former athlete and someone who constantly goes to the gym multiple times a week, having a "cheat day" or rewarding yourself after a long week's work is important in lasting long enough to see the results you want.  By putting yourself on a fixed duration or fixed interval schedule, you can set boundaries and circumstances around both the cost and rewards involved in your dieting. For example, for someone who is just starting off, being able to have your favorite food after working out 3 days is a reward centered around completing a challenging task. As a few weeks go by, push your limits to every 4 days, then 5 days, etc. so your body will still be able to cut calories and fats out o...

A fundamental theory in educational psychology, operant conditioning holds that rewards and penalties have an impact on behavior. This theory is implemented in classrooms by using strategies like rewarding good actions and discouraging undesired ones. Operant conditioning has drawbacks even if it works well in some situations. It may overlook intrinsic motivation and cognitive processes that are essential for deep learning because it oversimplifies the complex factors influencing student behavior. Over-reliance on outside rewards can eventually erode inner motivation as well, raising ethical questions for the educational system. Instructors need to incorporate cognitive theories and operant conditioning to accommodate individual variances and a range of learning styles. Developing more successful teaching tactics is aided by an understanding of the differences in students' motivations and learning preferences. Teachers can design environments that support deeper knowledge and lifel...

Chapter nine of the text discusses escape, avoidance, and punishment. These are aspects of behavior reinforcement that can be manipulated, instinctual, or modernized. The introduction of this chapter follows the general understanding of reinforcement. This specific chapter, however, focuses on the termination of an unwanted entity that creates a habit, otherwise known as negative reinforcement. Historically, psychologists have used simple matters to understand this behavioral technique. Most commonly there were experiments done on rats with different aspects of environmental manipulation--shocks, lights, loud noises, food, etc. In a modernized sense, negative reinforcement can be understood through the myopic lens of mental health crises.  I was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder at sixteen years old. This did not come as a shock to anybody around me. I was described as a "cautious child," who was sensitive, hyper-aware of social interactions, and, at times, volatile...

OCD is a disorder marked by repeating ideas, feelings, or visions (obsessions) and conventional, repeated behaviors (compulsions) that come out in reaction to the obsessions (Powell, p. 343).  Anorexia Nervosa is an eating disorder that displays a person's inability to maintain a reasonably healthy weight for their height or their inability to eat enough food. There has previously been evidence linking OCD and anorexia nervosa to one another. OCD appears in 35–44% of patients with anorexia nervosa while anorexia nervosa is present in 10% of female patients with OCD. A study produced by HHS Public Access examined 732 women with current anorexia nervosa or recovered from anorexia nervosa who participated in the study to discover if there is a connection between OCD and anorexia nervosa among these participants. The research concluded that obsessions were heavily and positively constructed by cognitive impulsivity  (ß = 0.16, p < .001) and that compulsive tendencies were ...

  The reason behind avoidance behavior is that an individual experiences an initial trigger that causes them to become fearful, and they then avoid that trigger completely.  Past studies have shown that avoidance behavior is linked to variables that are related to impaired driving abilities, such as a lack of confidence and driving experience. The study's participants demonstrated that increased avoidance behavior was moderately associated with more severe on-road driving skills and that the female sex was also moderately associated with greater avoidance behavior (rpb = −.27, p = 0.2). Exposure therapy could possibly improve poor driving skills among the female sex participants.  Philipp Schulz, Thomas Beblo, Stefan Spannhorst, Kirsten Labudda, Thomas Wagner, Volkmar Bertke, Sebastian Boedeker, Martin Driessen, Stefan H Kreisel, Max Toepper, Avoidance Behavior Is an Independent Indicator of Poorer On-road Driving Skills in Older Adults,  The Journals of Gerontology:...

In teenagers and young adults, the pursuit of love is never-ending. Social media and modern dating culture have created an unhealthy understanding of compassion and empathy. I remember asking my friend to hold my phone for hours at a time so I didn't check the notifications tab for a response from a boy I liked. This can also create potentially dangerous situations for naive people, those who believe the words of a person they met on Snapchat. Most of these situations lack a single, yet vital aspect of   behavior: self-control. Self-control is a behavioral concept that is learned in early childhood. The general idea of want vs. need can be frustrating for even the most advanced minds. In children, though, self-control is primarily based off of the nature vs. nurture concept. Nature vs. nurture relies heavily on genetic expectations, biological factors, and childhood environment. A child's nature concerns their temperament, risk for mental illness, and addiction status. A child...

 Classical Conditioning Addiction   Addiction is a rampant problem in our society that has affected nearly everyone’s lives in one way or another. I am in recovery and am working as a counselor in the field and have struggled with answering the question why do addicts do what they do knowing the negative consequences awaiting them.    Though one may say getting their lives and family back would be a good reinforcement for getting recovery, however it is what positive and negative affects are going on inside the person is what matters. Functionalism shows how we have adapted our lives to obtaining more dopamine. When we have sex or eat something good, we get a rush of dopamine, where now our elicit behaviors revolve around obtaining dopamine. Now what if I told you that doing a bag of heroin gets you 10x as much dopamine as eating your favorite food. Addicts have been classically conditioned to associate the use of a substance with immense pleasure and satisfaction an...

  Operant conditioning is a form of instruction where the outcomes of an activity increase or decrease the probability of a requested behavior in the future. For example, when your child is using his or her phone for an excessive amount of time you may decide to take away his or her phone for an hour or two, or you may give them a dollar each time they put their phone down. This example will either increase or decrease your child's awareness of his or her smartphone usage.   According to a study done on the Dutch population, operant conditioning has contributed negatively to the general worry about the epidemic of smartphone addiction. Smartphone usage has increased due to the accumulation of likes, a reduction in social anxiety, and an increase in positive emotions. After taking this research into account, we can draw the conclusion that by establishing limits on our use of texting and social media, we can reduce smartphone usage among Dutch people and improve their...

     In psychology, the idea of positive punishment is to reduce the probability of a behavior's recurrence by following it with a negative stimulus. Positive punishment uses an unpleasant stimulus to discourage undesirable behavior, as opposed to negative punishment that removes a favorable stimulus to accomplish the same purpose. The concept of positive punishment is similar to positive reinforcement but this time following the behavior with a negative stimulus rather than a positive one.       A classic example of positive punishment is when an individual touches a hot stove. The action of touching the stove will burn them and in the future they will not touch the hot stove due to the pain they felt from doing it the first time. The action that occurred from touching the stove will discourage the individual from doing this again.      There are many reasons why positive punishment can be beneficial. I believe that when this happens na...

 The use of rewards or good outcomes to reinforce and enhance the probability of an individual's behavior's recurrence is known as positive reinforcement, which is a well known concept in psychology. Positive reinforcement occurs by providing something good or rewarding after a behavior occurs. This helps the individual associate the behavior with something rewarding and therefore will cause the individual to repeat the behavior.       The reason positive reinforcement is so successful is its capacity to establish a causal relationship between actions and their outcomes. A person is more likely to repeat a behavior in order to keep receiving positive reinforcement, which can take the form of praise, a treat, or a reward, after the behavior. This reinforces the brain connections linked to the behavior, making it more likely to happen again in future situations that are similar.      Positive reinforcement is helpful in life beca...

      There are many reasons why psychology is an interesting subject. One of the topics that interests me the most is classical conditioning. Classical conditioning is a fundamental principle in behavioral psychology. The dog experiment by Ivan Pavlov is a common example of this. The idea of this affects many parts of our daily lives, from advertising to therapy, and it also defines how we learn. This experiment a dog was used as well as a bell. The sound of a bell was rung when the dog was presented with food. This is an example of classical conditioning because after the food was removed the dog began salivating at just the sound of the bell. Ivan Pavlov laid the groundwork for classical conditioning in the late 1800s; it is the foundation of modern psychology since it shows how associations between stimuli influence behavior.      In his famous dog experiment, Pavlov demonstrated that, with enough repetition, a neutral stimulus—like ...