Key Concepts in Psychology: Conditioning, Learning, and Personality
Defense Mechanisms
According to Freud, anxiety is the price we pay for civilization. As members of society, we must control our impulses and not act on them. Thus, we protect ourselves from experiencing negative feelings, like guilt and anxiety, through defense mechanisms. Defense mechanisms are unconscious mental operations that minimize anxiety by denying or distorting reality.
Example: Repression is the basic defense mechanism that banishes anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories from consciousness.
Motivation
Motivation encompasses the general processes that affect the direction, persistence, and strength of goal-directed behavior. Cognitive theorists distinguish between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation.
- Extrinsic Motivation: Performing an activity to obtain an external reward or to avoid punishment.
- Intrinsic Motivation: Performing an activity for its own sake.
Personality
Personality is an individual’s characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting. It is distinctive and relatively consistent, characterizing a person’s responses to life situations. Thoughts, feelings, and actions that reflect an individual’s personality typically have three characteristics:
- Behavioral components of identity.
- Behaviors are viewed as being caused by internal rather than environmental factors.
- A person’s behaviors seem to have organization and structure.
Habituation
Habituation is the simplest form of learning and occurs across species. It is a decrease in the strength of response to a repeated stimulus.
Example: When a couple moves into a new house by some train tracks, they find that the sound of the trains keeps them awake at night. After a while, they become desensitized to the noise and are able to ignore it.
Classical Conditioning
Classical conditioning is a basic form of learning by which all organisms learn to adapt to their environment. The work of Ivan Pavlov provided a basis for later behaviorists like John Watson.
Operant Conditioning
Operant conditioning forms associations between stimuli (e.g., a tone and food). It involves operant behavior, which operates on the environment to produce rewarding or punishing stimuli.
Reinforcement
Reinforcement is anything that serves to increase behavior.
Example: Attention may reinforce a child’s tantrums.
Two Types:
- Positive Reinforcement: Increases behavior by presenting a pleasurable stimulus after a response. Example: A dolphin gets a fish for doing a trick.
- Negative Reinforcement: Increases behavior by removing an aversive stimulus. Example: Taking a pain reliever to reduce pain reinforces pill-taking behavior by removing pain.
Note: Positive and negative refer to the presentation or removal of a stimulus, not good and bad.
Positive and Negative Punishment
- Positive Punishment (Aversive): Decreases behavior by administering an aversive stimulus. Example: Spanking a child.
- Negative Punishment (Response Cost): Decreases behavior by withdrawing a desirable stimulus. Example: A teen is grounded for misbehavior.
Observational Learning
Bandura believes that humans are active information processors and think about the relationship between their behavior and its consequences. Observational learning could not occur unless cognitive processes were at work.
Social Cognitive Theory
People learn by observing the behavior of models and acquiring the belief that they can produce behavior to influence the events in their lives.
Self-Efficacy
Self-efficacy is people’s belief that they have the capability to perform behavior that will produce a desired outcome. It’s a key motivational factor in observational learning.
The Psychoanalytic Perspective
Freud’s theory proposes that unconscious motivations influence personality. It attributes our thoughts and actions to unconscious motives and conflicts and uses techniques to treat psychological disorders by seeking to expose and interpret unconscious tensions.
- Free Association Technique: One method of exploring the unconscious in psychoanalysis. The person relaxes and says whatever comes to mind, no matter how trivial or embarrassing.
- Interpreting Manifest and Latent Contents of Dreams: Another method to analyze the unconscious mind, focusing on what the dreamer remembers and the symbolic meaning of the dream.
Criticisms of Freudian View: Too much emphasis on infantile sexuality and the events of childhood as determinants of adult personality.
Evaluation: Difficult to study psychoanalytic concepts in a controlled laboratory setting. Little empirical support. Difficult to disprove.
Neo-Freudians
While Freud’s ideas were controversial, they attracted many followers, who are now called Neo-Freudians. They all accepted Freud’s basic ideas; however, they differed from Freud in two important ways:
- They placed more emphasis on the role of the conscious mind coping with the world.
- They placed emphasis on social interaction rather than unconscious impulses.
- Alfred Adler: Humans are motivated by social interest, emphasizing the importance of childhood social tension. Striving for superiority: people are driven to compensate for real or imagined defects in themselves.
- Carl Jung: Jung moved beyond Freud’s concept of the unconscious and emphasized instead the collective unconscious. This is how cultures share certain myths and images, such as the mother being a symbol of nurturance.
Applications of Classical and Operant Conditioning
Classical Conditioning
- Exposure Therapies: A patient is exposed to a stimulus (CS) that arouses an anxiety response (such as fear) without the presence of a UCS, allowing extinction to occur.
- Systematic Desensitization: Patients learn muscle-relaxation techniques and then are gradually exposed to fear-provoking stimuli.
- Aversion Therapy: Conditions an aversion to a stimulus that triggers unwanted behavior by pairing it with a noxious UCS.
- Anticipatory Nausea and Vomiting (ANV): Developed by many chemotherapy patients in anticipation of a treatment session. The patient may first be taught how to relax physically.
Operant Conditioning
- Application for Education: Skinner developed mechanical teaching machines that were self-paced learning (similar to current computer-assisted instructions).
- Applications for Specialized Animal Training: Assist people with disabilities, military training, and the entertainment industry.
- Applications for Modifying Problem Behaviors: Applied behavior analysis combines a behavioral approach with the scientific method to solve individual and societal problems. Behavior modification procedures are used to change behavior.
Five Conditioning Processes
The five conditioning processes in relation to classical and operant conditioning are:
- Acquisition:
- Classical Conditioning: The initial stage is associating a neutral stimulus (e.g., bell) with an unconditioned stimulus (e.g., food) so that the neutral stimulus comes to elicit a conditioned response (e.g., salivation).
- Operant Conditioning: Associating behavior with reward or punishment.
- Extinction:
- Classical Conditioning: Diminishing of a CR (e.g., salivation) when an UCS (e.g., food) does not follow a CS (e.g., tone).
- Operant Conditioning: Example of a child crying and the mother not giving in eventually will lead to extinction of the behavior (crying).
- Spontaneous Recovery:
- Classical Conditioning: Recovery can occur if you allow some time to lapse before presenting the tone (the CS) again. In this situation, the CR (the salivation) in response to the CS (the tone) will reappear.
- Operant Conditioning: If a mother gave in, crying will be repeated and most probably at longer times.
- Generalization:
- Classical Conditioning: Tendency for stimuli similar to CS (tone) to elicit similar responses.
- Operant Conditioning: Generalization can take place when the child cries to get something he wants.
- Discrimination:
- Classical Conditioning: This refers to the learned ability to distinguish between a CS (which predicts the UCS) and other stimuli that do not signal a UCS.
- Operant Conditioning: Discrimination would be when the child would discriminate between the behaviors that would lead to punishment or reward.
Four Phases of the Modeling Process
- Attention: We must pay attention to the model’s behavior.
- Retention: We must retain that information in memory so that it can be recalled when needed.
- Reproduction: We must be physically capable of reproducing the model’s behavior.
- Motivation: We must be motivated to display the behavior (reinforcement: internal/external; positive or negative).
Applications of Observational Learning
- Learning academic and sports-related skills.
- Enhancing pro-social behavior.
- Intervention programs addressing global social problems (literacy, AIDS).