Teachers can use shaping techniques to guide students’ behaviors, and they can use interactive media to provide immediate feedback.
In sports, where the accidental timing of rewards can produce superstitious behavior, coaches can nevertheless build players’ skills and self-confidence by rewarding small improvements.
Managers can boost productivity and morale by rewarding well-defined and achievable behaviors.
Parents can reward desired behaviors but not undesirable ones.
We can shape our own behaviors by stating our goals, monitoring the frequency of desired behaviors, reinforcing desired behaviors, and gradually reducing rewards as behaviors become habitual.
We can learn from our bodily responses to manage stress; biofeedback is one studied method.
In operant conditioning, an organism learns associations between its own behavior and resulting events; this form of conditioning involves operant behavior (behavior that operates on the environment, producing rewarding or punishing consequences).
In classical conditioning, the organism forms associations between stimuli—events it does not control; this form of conditioning involves respondent behavior (automatic responses to some stimulus).
Multiple-Choice Questions
Paola has been classically conditioned to fear a red light because it has been paired with a loud noise. If the light is repeatedly presented without the loud noise she will eventually stop being afraid of the light. In this instance, _____ has occurred.
generalization
discrimination
spontaneous recovery
extinction
acquisition
Which of the following is the best advice to give parents whose young children refuse to eat their dinner?
Do not allow them to watch television for a week for each day they do not eat dinner.
Give the children a small reward at the end of a week in which they have eaten dinner each night.
Give the children a small reward each day that they eat their dinner.
Require that the children do extra chores if they do not finish dinner.
Allow the children to have dessert, even if they do not eat their dinner, in the hopes that they will eat dinner the next day.
The reappearance, after a rest period, of an extinguished response is called
acquisition.
spontaneous recovery.
discrimination.
operant conditioning.
classical conditioning.
Superstitious behavior can be produced by
placing a conditioned response (CR) before a conditioned stimulus (CS).
the accidental timing of rewards.
possession of a large number of traditionally lucky items.
cognitive awareness of superstitious behavior in others.
the change in a reinforcement schedule from ratio to interval.
Practice FRQs
The Shin family is eager to train their new puppy a couple of tricks. Explain how the Shins could use the following in their training: