'Psychology Learning Essay\r'

'Introduction\r\n The following depict should probably come under the heading â€Å" rum but True.” It describes a psychologist’s using up of self-administered penalization to convert a socially unacceptable manner.\r\n A person once knew a psychologist who, for reasons which will be discovered shortly, shall remain anonymous. For the sake of the study, this person is named Richard. Richard had a bad usance. He chewed his nails. Well, that’s not rattling correct; he chewed his nails off and then knife them pop, usually succession he was lecturing. at a time in a great while, this practice was called to his at tennertion, and it always embarrassed him. He said that he wasn’t aw be that he was doing it. It had pass away such an ingrained habit that he could chew off all ten nails, spit in all directions, and still be totally unconscious of what he was doing.\r\n Richard was a prise acquirement theorist, and he decided that if any unrivaled could devise a demeanor-modification technique to eliminate his habit, he would. The next daytime he arrived, all smiles, and said he had a request: If any of those around see him bitter his nails, this should be brought to his attention. It wasn’t long that before individual said, â€Å"Uh, Richard, you’re doing it.”\r\nHe stopped and supposeed at his nails and said, â€Å"So I am.” Then as everyone was watched, pulled up his shirtsleeve, grabbed keep up of a heavy-duty rubber eraser band that had clothed around his wrist, stretched it out a distance of nearly ten inches, and let is go. There was a poisonous snap. He yelled, cursed, and shook his fall. Everyone looked on amazement. Surely acquisition theorist were all a little insane. â€Å"Punishment,” he said. â€Å"Punishment is the answer!”\r\n What happened to the concourse around Richard was interesting. well-nigh took relish in pointing out that he was bi ting his snails, just to see him snap the huge rubber band around his wrist; other(a)s preferred to veer his habit, because they couldn’t stand to see him in that overmuch pain. Happily, aft(prenominal) two days, Richard’s habit had been broken.\r\n maven person asked him how he thought his program worked. He said, â€Å"Well, if I unconsciously unlearn it. Whenever I was sacramental manduction my nails, I administered this punishment. Pretty soon my wiz wise to(p) that nail chewing consequenceed in something very unpleasant.” He said that the last time he r severallyed his hand up to his mouth (quite unconsciously), he got a noble sinking feeling that something awful was active to happen. â€Å"It do me aware.” he said. â€Å"I looked at my hand and saying it was approaching my mouth. Somewhere deep in my brain the little gray cells were screaming, â€Å"Don’t do it!”\r\n It was reported that some days later Richard wa s corroding rubber bands around his ankles, but nobody cute want to ask why (Dworetzky, 1994).\r\nDiscussion\r\n training pervades wad’s lives. It is involved not exclusively in mastering a new scientific discipline or academic subject but similarly in emotional development, social inter execution, and even character development. People learn what they attention, what to love, how to be polite, hoe to be intimate, and so on. Given the pervasiveness of training in lives of people, it is not surprising that there stupefy been instances of it †how, for example, children to perceive the area around them, to identify with their own sex, and to control their mien according to adult standards (Atkinson, 1993). However, there is a to a greater extent systematic abridgment of learning.\r\n Learning may be define as a relatively immutable change in manner that results from practice; behavior change that are due to maturation (rather than practice)or unstab le conditions of the organism (such as fatigue or drug-induced states) are not included. All cases of learning are not the same though.\r\n Psychology is the study of behavior. Psychologists study learning because among most animals, especially humans, the vast majority of behavior is learned. Learning may as well as be define as a relatively permanent change in behavior resulting from experience (Dworetzky, 1988). Experts, however, tell that when soul says â€Å"relatively permanent change,” this excludes the centers of such factors as fatigue. Fatigue, which occurs because of experience, may change behavior, but only temporary, whereas learning implies a more lasting change.\r\n Learning is defined by Craig et al., as a process through and through which one’s capacity or electric pig is changed as a result of experience. Whitaker (1972) defines it also as the process by which behavior originates or is modify through experience, while Wittig (in Berns tein et al., 1991) and Hilgard (1975) view it as behavior that occurs as a result of experience.\r\n Apparently while learning can be defined as a process and as a product, more definitions stress learning more as a process. This idea suggests that it is not the product but the process that is important since the products of learning both what one is loose of and what one is predisposed to. Changes resulting from development and experience are emphasized; changes resulting from maturation such as increment older, innate tendencies standardized reflexes and conditions cause by fatigue, drugs, and diseases are rigorously not considered as learned behavior.\r\nAdaptive elevator care for of Learning (Classical Conditioning)\r\n~Overeating: Taste-Aversion Learning\r\n Taste-aversion learning involves associating picky sensory cues (smells, essays, sounds or sights), with an unpleasant solution, such as nausea or vomiting. Taste-aversion learning can also occur from overin dulgence. For example, children report taste aversions to regimen after overeating and becoming sick. Similarly, the majority of college students’ report taste versions after drinking too much inebriant and getting sick. In these examples, taste aversions to food or drink developed after a maven trial and lasted an average of four to five geezerhood (Logue et al., 1981).\r\n~Conditioned Emotional Response: Why a original Christmas song kick upstairss pleasant childhood memories.\r\n In the conditioned emotional response, one feels some domineering or negative emotion, such as happiness, fear, or anxiety, when experiencing a stimulus that initially accompanied a painful or pleasant event.\r\n For example, many couples have a special song that becomes emotionally associated with their relationship. When one in the absence of the other hears this song, it can elicit strong emotional and romantic feelings.\r\n In other cases, conditioned emotional responses may develop into superstitious fears that are called phobias.\r\n A phobia is an anxiety trouble characterized by an intense and irrational fear that is out of all proportion to the danger elicited by the object or situation. In comparison, a fear is a realistic response to a ill situation (Bernstein, 1991).\r\n About 73 percent of people with phobias were able to trace the start of their phobias to fearful, painful, or traumatic situations that involved true conditioning (Atkinson et al., 1993 in Kleinknecht, 1994 and Kuch et al., 1994). For example, about 5 victims involved in moving car accidents had developed fears of sitting or riding in cars, and another third developed the corresponding phobias (Kuch et al., 1994). estimable as classical conditioning can result in fears and phobias, however, it can also be used to reduce them.\r\n~Prejudice\r\n In the mid-1940s, psychologist Kenneth Clark held a bare gentlewoman and a smock maam in his hands and asked the fo llowing questions of young white children donjon in the South:\r\n â€Å"Which shuttle looks standardized you?”\r\n â€Å" now tell me which doll is the unspoiled doll?”\r\n â€Å"Which doll is the bad doll?”\r\nThese children knew that the white doll looked like them. most children also indicated that the white doll was the â€Å"good doll” and the black doll was â€Å"dirty” or â€Å"ugly” ( Clark and Clark, 1947). How had these southern white children learned to draw and quarter such tie beam? During the decades of racial prejudices that had come before, darer skins had become associated with poverty and with universe â€Å"inferior,” not just in the South, but generally throughout the United States. The white children had learned to attribute these characteristics to black people.\r\n The racist mental attitude is what the white children had been taught; it is also what the black children had been taught. T he black had been embossed in the same general environment, the same coun take heed. They, too, had seen that the whites had dampen and they had worse. And, as the Clarks discovered in further research, a majority of black children also chose the white doll as the good one and the black doll as the bad one.\r\n A conditioning audition conducted by researcher Staats (1958 in Atkinson et al., 1993) helped to show how association process could be responsible for the prejudice, Dr. Clark observed. In their experiment, college students were asked to look at one word while pronouncing another. Without being aware of the purpose of the experiment, the students were manoeuvred into pairing pleasant linguistic communication or unpleasant words with a picky name (Tom or Bill) or a certain nationality (Swedish or Dutch). In short, subjects revealed obvious differences in attitudes towards these name calling and nationalities, simply because those words had been paired with positive or negative words.\r\nAdvertisers, politicians, cinema makers, and just about everyone else try to use this kind of conditioning to affect people’s emotions. Then a politician associates himself with a positive symbol such as the flag, or when a movie maker uses dramatic music, or when someone dresses well for a job interview, all(prenominal) is invoking the same process: Each is attempting to render something †the politician, the movie maker, or the job seeker †more likable through association with positive stimuli.\r\n What appears to be occurring in the instances of association, like those just described, is a kind of higher(prenominal) order conditioning (Dworetzky, 1998).\r\nConclusion\r\n In classical conditioning, the conditioned response often resembles the normal response to the unconditioned stimulus: salivation, for example, is a clink’s normal response to food. But when you want to memorize an organism something novel †such as tra ining a dog new trick †you cannot use classical conditioning. What unconditioned stimulus would make a dog sit up or hair curler over? To train the dog, you must first bow it to do the trick (Bernstein et al., 1991).\r\n Much of the real-life behavior is like this: responses are learned because they operate on, or effect the environment. Referred to as an operant conditioning, this kind of learning occurs in human individuals, as well as in animals. Alone in a crib, a bollix up may kick and twist and coo spontaneously. When left(p) by itself, a dog may plug away back and forth, sniff, or perhaps pick up a ball, drop it, and play with it.\r\n Neither organism is responding to the onset or offset of a particularized external stimulus. Rather, they are operating on their environment. Once the organism performs a certain behavior, however, the likelihood that the action will be repeated depends on its consequences. The pamper will coo more often if each such occurren ce is followed by parental attention, and the dog will pick up the ball more often if petting or a food reward follows this action. If we think of the baby as having a gaol of parental attention, and the dog as having the mark of food, then operant conditioning amounts to learning that a particular behavior leads to attaining a particular aim (Rescorla, 1987).\r\nReference:\r\nAtkinson, R.L., R.C. Atkinson, E.E. Smith, D.J. Bem, and S. Nolen-Hoeksema, 1993. Introduction to Psychology, 13th ed. in the buff York: Harcourt College Publishers.\r\nBernstein, D.A., E.J. Roy, T.K. Srull, and C.D. Wickens, 1991. Psychology. New Jersey: Houghton Mifflin Company.\r\nBootzin, R.R. 1991. Psychology. New York: Gilford Press.\r\nClark, L., A.D. Watson, and S. Reynolds, 1995. Diagnosis and classification of psychiatry: Challenges to the current system and future directions. Annual criticism of Psychology 46: 121-53.\r\nDworetzky, J.P. 1988. Psychology.3rd Ed. Mew York: We st create Company.\r\nLogue, A.W., I.Ophir, and K.E. Strauss. 1981. The Acquisition of taste aversions in humans. Behavior look into and Therapy,19:3:19-35.\r\nMorgan, Clifford T. 1977. A Brief Introduction to Psychology. second ed. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company.\r\nRescorla, R.A. 1987. A Pavlovian analysis of goal-directed behavior. American Psychologist 42:119-129, 265.\r\n \r\n'