Topical Blog Week #9 (Due Thursday)

John B. Watson is known for coming up with the term behaviorism. He viewed psychology as a study of peoples actions while being able to control and predict the actions. He wanted to condition and control emotions. Before he studied human behaviors and emotions he used animals as his subjects. He believed people could be shaped just by their environment alone.
Behaviorism says that behavior is observable and can be connected through observable events. So basically the ABC's of behavior, the antecedent, the behavior, and the consequence. The antecedent is the even that leads to the behavior. The behavior then leads to the consequence. The consequence can be positive (pleasurable) and negative (aversive).
Watson is better known for his Little Albert Study. This study was to show that human could be classically conditioned. Classical Conditioning is used to condition an emotional response. Watson used two stimuli, a white rat, and a loud noise. First Watson emitted the behavior of showing Albert the white rat. Next Watson started emitting the behavior of hitting a piece of metal and showing Albert the rat at the same time and it elicited a crying response from Albert. He then showed Albert the rat without hitting the metal piece and he still cried. Therefor Albert was conditioned to associating the rat with the loud noise. The antecedent is the loud noise, the behavior is showing Albert the white rat and the consequence is Albert crying.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xt0ucxOrPQE

http://psychology.about.com/od/classicpsychologystudies/a/little-albert-experiment.htm

http://www.lifecircles-inc.com/Learningtheories/behaviorism/Watson.html

The individual who I have chosen to do some research on that has made a contribution to behaviorism is John B. Watson. I learned some information from reading about him in the textbook, but I was interested in finding out more. The things that I found were kind of like a review of what we covered in class, but I was also able to find some new facts and information that I had not previously known.

The first source I used shared that Watson is best known for his work in behaviorism and the Little Albert experiment. He truly believed that he could, if given the opportunity, raise children to be whatever he chose for them to be, regardless of who they are or what their background is. This is a pretty bold statement for someone to make, but that is what makes Watson so appealing and exciting. Apparently Watson began his career by teaching psychology at Johns Hopkins University in 1908. He firmly held his behaviorist position by saying that psychology should be the science of observable behavior. He was interested in predicting and controlling behavior. This source touched on his most famous and controversial experiment, the Little Albert experiment. It said that he worked with a graduate assistant, Rosalie Rayner, to condition a small child to fear a white rat. I will go more in-depth about this experiment later on in my blog. Watson stayed at Johns Hopkins University until 1920, when he was asked to leave because of having an affair with Rosalie Rayner. Watson decided to also divorce his wife and marry Rayner. Watson worked for an advertising agency until 1945 and then ended up living the rest of his life in a pretty reclusive way.

The next source I found told me a lot about Watson’s early life, which could be good insight into how he ended up being such a big influence in the realm of behaviorism. Watson was born in 1878 to Emma and Pickens Watson. They were a poor family from Greenville, South Carolina. Watson’s mother was very religious, whereas his father drank, had extramarital affairs, and ended up leaving the family in 1891. Apparently the absence of Watson’s father took a toll on him. He rebelled against authority figures in his life and turned to violence, but was able to turn his act around with the help of his teacher, Gordon Moore. With Moore’s help, Watson was able to succeed in school and attend the University of Chicago, where his interest in comparative psychology and studying animals was piqued. It was here that he got his doctorate and then was able to move on and begin working at Johns Hopkins. Also, he met and married a woman named Mary Ikes, whom he met at the University of Chicago. They ended up having two kids, Mary and John. Watson, like his father before him, had a number of extramarital affairs, including the one he had with his graduate assistant Rosalie Rayner.

The final source that I found on Watson went into detail about his Little Albert experiment. Watson was basing his work off of the prior work of Russian physiologist, Ivan Pavlov, who demonstrated the conditioning process in dogs. Watson wanted to further Pavlov’s work to show that emotional reactions could be classically conditioned in humans. The child that was used to participate in the experiment is known by the world today as Little Albert. He was about nine months old. Initially, Watson and Rayner merely exposed Little Albert to a series of stimuli including a white rat, a rabbit, a monkey, masks, and burning papers. According to their observations, Little Albert did not show any fear when presented with the objects listed above. After that, Albert was once again exposed to the rat, but this time Watson created a loud noise by hitting a pipe with a hammer, which made the child cry. The white rat and the loud noise were repeatedly paired together, which eventually made Little Albert cry simply after seeing the rat.

This demonstrates the process of classical conditioning and how it can be used to condition an emotional response. In this experiment, the neutral stimulus was the white rat, the unconditioned stimulus was the loud noise, the unconditioned response was the initial fear, the conditioned stimulus was the white rat, and the conditioned response was the fear. The neutral stimulus is something that should not normally create any aversion or discomfort for the participant. The unconditioned stimulus is the stimulus that creates a sort of reflex response, and the unconditioned response is the actual reflex response emitted due to the stimulus. The conditioned stimulus is what the participant learns to react or respond to, whereas the conditioned response is the learned response. On top of the demonstration of conditioned emotional response in humans, Watson also observed that stimulus generalization had occurred, which means that Little Albert began to fear other furry objects similar to the white rat after conditioning.

Watson and Rayner’s Little Albert experiment was very controversial because it raises so many ethical concerns. Psychologists today would not be able to conduct this kind of experiment. After the experiment, Little Albert moved away with his mother, so Watson was never given the chance to try to get rid of the boy’s conditioned fear. This elicited many attempts at finding the true identity and fate of Little Albert. Finally, after tracking him for seven years, psychologist Hall P. Beck discovered what had happened. Little Albert’s real name was Douglas Merritte, and he died when he was six years old from hydrocephalus, which is a buildup of fluid in his brain. Beck also found out that Merritte was suffering from hydrocephalus since he was born, which presents convincing evidence that Watson knew about his condition and purposely misrepresented the state of his health. This information definitely deepens the ethical issues of this experiment, but it also casts a shadow over Watson’s legacy.

All in all, Watson really did set the stage for behaviorism, which is still widely used today. Conditioning and behavior modification are still used in therapy and behavioral training to help clients change problematic behaviors and develop new skills, and this is in part because of the work that John B. Watson did for the psychological field. Although there are some questionable things about his legacy, there is no denying that he was a brilliant man that paved the way for psychologists of the future.

Sources:
http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesofmajorthinkers/p/watson.htm
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/watson.htm
http://psychology.about.com/od/classicpsychologystudies/a/little-albert-experiment.htm

Terms: behaviorism, John B. Watson, Little Albert experiment, behavior, Rosalie Rayner, comparative psychology, Mary Ikes, Ivan Pavlov, classical conditioning, stimuli, conditioned emotional response, neutral stimulus, unconditioned stimulus, unconditioned response, conditioned stimulus, conditioned response, stimulus generalization, emit, elicit, Douglas Merritte, hydrocephalus, behavior modification

The person that I chose to research is John B. Watson. I chose him because I think that he has made a great contribution to behavior modification and what he did has built the way for modern day people to get over there phobias. He is one of the most influential psychologists in the beginning of the twentieth century.

John B. Watson grew up in a not so good environment and was able to escape his home town with the help of one of his teacher. Watson went to college at the University of Chicago and went on to be a professor at Johns Hopkins University. At this University he developed the term called behaviorism, which he used to describe the idea of psychology and behavior. Watson saw psychology as the study of people’s actions and how those actions can be predicted and controlled. This became one of his theories called behaviorists theory. Watson gave a famous lecture called Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It. In this lecture is when he discussed what behaviorism is and why he agreed with it. Watson was mainly concerned with the effects of stimuli which he got from Pavlov’s animals studies, which were based on classical conditioning.

In the beginning of Watson’s research he used animals to see what behaviors they elicited. Watson was one of the first people to experiment with very young children. He wanted to condition and control the emotions of human subject and by doing that he started out his most interesting research. Watson had the idea that all humans were born with three emotions. Those emotions are fear, rage, and love. Watson and his assistant Rosalie Rayner decided to test this on a child that is now known as the Little Albert Experiment. In this experiment Watson picked out a child who didn’t show much fear to anything because in this study he was going to see if he could condition the child to be afraid of a rat. He made the child afraid of the rat by pairing the rat with a loud aversive sound. Watson did succeed in making him afraid of the rat but he also made him afraid of anything white and anything furry like the rat. This is an example of stimulus generalization. The one problem with this study is the fact that the child was never desensitized because his mother withdrew him from the study. This means that the child would probably fear small rodents, furry things, and white things for some time of his life, but unfortunately we will never know because it was later discovered that the child died at age 6.

After working at the University he started working at an advertising business to use his theories of behaviorism, and how he could use the three main emotions to affect advertising. While working at this agency and after he retired be published many books about psychology and behaviorism Everything that Watson did opened up the door for B. F. Skinner who focused on radical or operant behaviorism.

Terms: John. B. Watson, Behavior Modification, phobias, behaviorism, psychology, behavior, behaviorist’s theory, elicited, Little Albert Experiment, experiment, desensitized, aversive, Pavlov, Classical conditioning, stimuli, stimulus generalization, Rosalie Rayner, operant behaviorism, radical behaviorism, B. F. Skinner,

http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/watson.htm

http://www.lifecircles-inc.com/Learningtheories/behaviorism/Watson.html

http://education.stateuniversity.com/pages/2543/Watson-John-B-1878-1958.html

The historical person I decided to write about was John B Watson. I found the chapter on him the most interesting to read. Most of his life’s work included three things: research on animal behavior, child rearing, and advertising. He was given credit for creating the term behaviorism. Watson did not start out the best in school. He did a poor job in high school and was even arrested twice while he was in high school. He started to be outstanding in college and received his master’s degree at the young age of 21. He studied psychology under John Dewey at the University of Chicago for a while. Watson had an interest in Pavlov’s work and incorporated some of his principles into his own work. He believed that behavior should be investigated without looking at the consciousness. Watson explained psychology by saying, “Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior. Introspection forms no essential part of its methods, nor is the scientific value of its data dependent upon the readiness with which they lend themselves to interpretation in terms of consciousness.” Watson’s research on animals was about the relationship between brain myelination and the learning ability of rats at different ages in their lives. He ended up finding that there is a kinesthetic sense that helps to control the rat’s behaviors. This work ended up getting him a position at John Hopkins University, where he did his “Little Albert” Study. The idea of this study is that you can classical condition fear. This was shown by making a baby boy fear a white rat. He gets him to elicit the fear of a rat. His assistant in this study, Rosaline Rayner, was the woman he had an affair with. This scandal caused Watson to be asked to resign from John Hopkins. When it came to child rearing, he believes parents should treat children as young adults. He thought it was possible to give a child too much love and affection. Watson was on the nurture side of the nature vs. nurture debate. Later in his career he started to get into advertising. He believed he could use his scientific theories to improve the effects advertising can have on us as consumers. During 1915, Watson served as the President of the APA and later received a gold medal for his contributions to psychology from the APA in 1957. Watson had a very short academic career and considering the amount of contributions he made in that time is really is quite extraordinary.
Terms: Pavlov, elicit, classical conditioning
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Watson
http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesofmajorthinkers/p/watson.htm
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/watson.htm
http://education.stateuniversity.com/pages/2543/Watson-John-B-1878-1958.html

The person I decided to write about is B.F. Skinner. I chose to write about Skinner because I found him to be one of the most interesting historical figures. Skinner was a controversial psychologist who made important contributions to the principles of behavior modification. He is one of the most influential psychologists in the beginning of the twentieth century.

Growing up Skinner lived in a pleasant environment and described his life as “warm and stable”. Skinner enjoyed building and inventing things in his childhood. Some of his inventions were more successful than others. One successful invention Skinner made was a flotation system that separated ripe from green berries.

Skinner received a B.A. in English literature from Hamilton College. He moved back home and decided to become a writer. He struggled with being a writer and entered to what he called his “dark year”. Skinner made the decision to escape to New York City for a few months. While Skinner was in New York City he discovered the writings of Watson and Pavlov. He found this to rather pleasant and was inspired to learn more. This is when Skinner decided to end his career as a writer and enrolled at Harvard University to study psychology.

While attending Harvard University Skinner started to become impatient with what he called “unintelligent ideas”. He was not impressed and began to work on his own ideas. The first experiment Skinner came up with was the “Skinner Box”. This was also known as an operant chamber which studied reinforcement and punishment on non-human animals. Skinner liked to use pigeons and rats for his experiments. The Skinner box for example would measure the number of times a rat pressed a bar to receive a food pellet.
Skinner started to structure what is known as behaviorism. The department of psychology from Harvard University started to become uncomfortable with this. Skinner received his PhD from Harvard and moved to Minneapolis to start his career. During this time he also got married to Yvonne Blue.

Skinner than discovered his own findings on behaviorism and came up with operant conditioning. This is described as the use of consequences to modify the occurrence and form of behavior. This involved reinforcement and punishment which describes either or not the frequency of a behavior will be increased or decreased. This is what started Skinner to really become recognized.

Skinner became known as the one of the leaders to behaviorism and his career contributed to experimental psychology. He made multiple famous experiments, novels, and findings on behavior modification. Skinner introduced; operant conditioning, reinforcement, punishment, superstitious behaviors, schedules of reinforcement, social engineering, and much more.

Skinner is a famous inventor, writer, and researcher who is known for contributions to behavior modification. He is one of the most influential psychologists in the beginning of the twentieth century.

Terms: behavior modification, pleasant, Skinner Box, operant chamber, reinforcement, punishment, behaviorism, operant conditioning, consequences, behavior, superstitious behaviors, social engineering,

Sources:

http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesofmajorthinkers/p/bio_skinner.htm

http://www.bfskinner.org/bfskinner/AboutSkinner.html

http://www.essortment.com/b-f-skinner-behaviorism-35995.html

Like a lot of people I choose to look up more about John Watson. I choose him mainly because I remembered him from my other psychology classes as being the scandalous one. John Watson is known today as being the founder of behaviorism. Watson believed that psychology could be objective and experimental. His goal was to predict and control behavior. John stated that he preferred to work with animals as opposed to humans did a lot of work on rats and their nervous system during his schooling. Watson also believed that the more complex human emotions and actions could be studied through animals and broken up into simpler behaviors. Perhaps the most famous study Watson ever did was the one in which he classically conditioned Little Albert to be afraid of white mice by associating this general stimulus with the aversive loud noise. Little Albert’s fear then became generalized to be afraid of all little white furry objects/animals. Watson actually believed that through conditioning he could turn any healthy baby into any “specialty” regardless of where they came from. Towards the end of his life Watson became involved in advertising. He was actually very successful with this.

As far as his scandalous life, John took after his father who was a drinker and a cheater and often got into trouble with the law. After he became a teacher at the University of Chicago he married his first wife, who was one of his students. However, while his wife stayed at home and had his children he began cheating on her with other female students. The rumors became so bad about his affairs that he had to leave the university in fear of losing his job. He then went to Baltimore to work at Johns Hopkins University where he emitted the same cheating behavior and met a student named Rosalie Rayner. After his wife found out about the affair she gave him an ultimatum that he either end the affair or get a divorce. Watson opted for the divorce and married Rosalie.

Terms: John Watson, behaviorism, Little Albert, classical conditioning, association, general stimulus, aversive, generalization, emit

Sources:

http://www.psych.utah.edu/gordon/Classes/Psy4905Docs/PsychHistory/Cards/Watson.html

http://faculty.frostburg.edu/mbradley/psyography/johnbroaduswatson.html

http://schoolworkhelper.net/john-b-watson-biography-and-contributions/

I believe that Charles Darwin made a solid contribution to what some refer to as behavior modification. Darwin suggested that over time, individuals may modify behaviors, actions, thoughts and emotions to adapt to the environment around them. I believe that thoughts of modification may run parallel to ideas about evolution. I recently saw a commercial that addressed the "coincidence" of one's thumb stretching a similar span as a screen on a new gadget, and I thought of evolution and modification. I do not believe that such behavior is merely a consequence. As groups of individuals repeat a similar motion or behavior time after time, a body begins to adapt. Just as Darwin wrote of finches, a body part changed with its surroundings. Darwin predicted that depending on climate and food sources of the environment, finches showed distinct differences in their facial features, specifically their beaks. Finches that lived a climate with insects as a main food source seemed to have shorter beaks. Finches that fed on nuts and seeds seemed to have stronger more pronounced beaks. Finches that were in a climate where fruit was able to grow showed large beaks. Darwin believed that these birds adapted to their environment, just as humans may adapt to their own individual environments. In relation to the finches, the latest technology and such "coincidences" as thumb span seem to take on a role of their own. With commercialization, peer pressure and a possible need for instant gratification, more individuals may begin to repeat a similar movement (such as having internet available on a phone) which future generation may repeat. Although Darwin's work was not specifically called behavior modification, I feel that his work has much to do with environments, antecedents behaviors, and eliciting and emitting behaviors. I feel that a notion of evolution may be considered in modification.

http://www.hras.org/sw/sw11-04.html
http://darwin-online.org.uk/biography.html
http://www.strangescience.net/darwin.htm

Terms: behavior, modification, antecedent, consequences, Darwin, emit,elicit

B.F. Skinner is one of my favorite psychologists, because he is widely known for his advanced in the field of behaviorism. Skinner made psychology more understandable, and more common to many people throughout the world. Skinner is widely recognized for his research in behavior, and his advances to Watson's behavior research. Skinner is often though of as a psychological revolutionary, as he founded a type of behaviorism known as radical behaviorism. (Rachlin)

Skinner was born on March 20, 1904 in a small railroad town of Pennsylvania. Skinner was the oldest child of William and Grace Skinner. He described his home as “warm and stable”. His father was an up-and-coming lawyer, and his mother a housewife. Throughout his childhood Skinner was always somewhat of an inventor, he often built things; a cabin in the woods, a flotation system to separate ripe berries, and “green dust” to help sweep up dirt. After his primary school days, he went to study at Hamilton College, where he decided to become a writer. After college he moved back home to write books, and later referred to these days as the “dark years”. (Vargas)

Skinner went to graduate at the age of 24; he enrolled in the Psychology Department at Harvard. He considered most of the ideas in these classes unintelligent and quickly enrolled in the Physiology department instead. Skinner’s talent for building things came in handy, and after copious mistakes, and a few lucky finds, Skinner developed the cumulative recorder. This device made record of every response an animal emitted, using an upward movement of a horizontally moving line. This invention lead Skinner to the discovery that behavior was not affected by a preceding stimulus (Conditioned/Unconditioned Stimulus), but rather the reward it received for pressing the bar (Reinforcement). This was unlike the theories that Watson and Pavlov had thought to be true. This discovery sparked Skinners idea of operant behavior, and operant conditioning. (Vargas) “Operant conditioning -- the idea that behavior is determined by its consequences, be they reinforcements or punishments, which make it more or less likely that the behavior will occur again. (Communications)” Skinner spent the next five years studying reinforcement schedules, and types of reinforcement. (Vargas)

Skinner focused his research on realistic questioning (pragmatic questions) instead of mystic, self-centered introspection. Skinner was unlike Freud in that he believed Man could directly represent his own change. Where Freud relied heavily on unchangeable egos, Skinner focused on visible, realistic human and animal behavior. This mystic view psychology had taken elicited Skinner to avoid popular psychology. (Rachlin)

In 1936 Skinner married Yvonne Blue and moved to Minnesota where he taught at the University of Minnesota, during this time he did little to expand upon the science that he had produced. However, in 1944 while World War II was occurring Skinner wanted to do his part to aid the effort so he began research on a missile-guiding program, where pidgins would guide bombs. This top-secret project used reinforcement, to condition pigeons to peck at targets that would keep the missile locked onto the target. The pigeons worked sufficiently even when falling at rapid speed, and surrounded by war noise. Skinner development never got to assist in the war thanks to the discovery of radar, another top-secret project. Skinner chose pigeons for his experiments because they behave more rapidly than rats, and Skinner never used rats again. (Vargas)

After WWII ended Skinner built a device known as the baby tender a crib that was enclosed, and climate controlled. This crib was suppose to be safer, and more comfortable for children; and to prove this Skinner used it on his second daughter, and was plagued with theories about his daughter’s life long success. Deborah said that her father was affectionate, and she is now a successful artist in London, with her husband. (Vargas; Communications) However, the baby tender was not a huge success, so Skinner turned his attention to creating a device that made observing animal behavior easier than the mazes they used currently. (Rachlin)

This lead Skinner to the invention of The Skinner Box “A small, soundproof chamber in which an animal could be isolated from all distractions and outside influences, responding only to the controlled conditions within the box. (Communications) “ Skinner never put his daughter into a Skinner Box, which is a myth people, often mix up the Skinner box, and the Baby Tender. In order to use the Skinner Box, He found that he had to shape animal behavior this was a process that took time and patience, and another device very similar to the Skinner Box.
--“I built a narrow rectangular track about three feet long, and mounted it like a seesaw: it tilted slightly as the rat ran from one end to the other [like a large lever that the rat walks on]. I made a food dispenser by drilling a ring of holes in a disk of wood. Pieces of food were put in the holes, and each time the rat ran around the track, the tilt turned the disk and dropped a piece into a cup. (Zimmer)”--
Do to Skinners invention of the Skinner Box, which is used today; we have been able to discover many things about behavior. Because animal behavior is relatable to human behavior we can relate it to our own behavior. You can always take behavior that is less complex and apply it to something that is more complex, however you cannot apply complex behavior to a creature that does not share the same level of complexity.

Skinner’s advances to psychology, and his creation, and popularization of behaviorism are a few reasons why he is one of my favorite psychologists. Skinner has released five books (The Behaviour of Organisms (1938, nonfiction)
Walden Two (1948, fiction)
Science and Human Behavior (1953, nonfiction)
Verbal Behavior (1957, nonfiction)
Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971, nonfiction) (Communications)) I also consider his expansion of Watson and Pavlov’s research quite inspiring. Especially when you consider that he was a graduate student. Someday I hope to make expansions/improvements to the field of psychology equivalent to Skinner’s.

Works Cited
Communications, Soylent. B.F. Skinner. 2012. Soylent Communications. 18 October 2012 .
Rachlin, Howard. Burrhus Frederic Skinner. 18 October 2012 .
Vargas, Julie S. A Brief Biography of B.F. Skinner. 2005. 18 October 2012 .
Zimmer, Gene. Behaviorsm, B.F. Skinner, Social Control, Modern Psychology, Man as Machine, and Denial of Man's Mind and Soul. 1999. 18 October 2012 .

Terminology: Behaviorism, Radical Behaviorism, Cumulative Recorder, Emitted, Stimulus, Conditioned/Unconditioned Stimulus, Reinforcement, Operant Behavior, Operant Conditioning, Punishments, Reinforcement Schedules, Baby Tender, Skinner Box,

http://www.bfskinner.org/bfskinner/AboutSkinner.html
http://www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/biomems/bskinner.html
http://www.nndb.com/people/297/000022231/
http://www.sntp.net/behaviorism/skinner.htm

Burrhus Fredric Skinner, or B. F. Skinner, is known best for his contributions of operant conditioning. Influenced by John B. Watson, Skinner believed the best way to understand behavior is to look at the causes of an action and its consequences. He also believed behavior is determined by its consequences, whether this is through reinforcement or punishment. These consequences make it more or less likely for these behaviors will occur again . Skinner invented the "Skinner box", a small soundproof chamber in which animals could be studied while being isolated from distractions and/or outside influences. From this "Skinner box", Skinner did experiments on account of operant conditioning. From these experiments, Skinner found 3 types of responses: neutral operants, reinforcers, and punishers. Skinner found neutral operants were responses emitted from the enviornment that neither increased or decreased the probability of the behavior to be repeated. Aside from the neutral operants, Skinner found that reinforcers were responses from the enviorment that increase the probability of behavior repeating. A reinforcer can either be positive reinforcer or a negative reinforcer. Opposite from a reinforcer, Skinner stated a punishers were responses from the enviorment that decreases the likelihood of a behavior being repeated. Meaning a punisher weakens a behavior that is usually aversive.
Aside from doing experiments on animals, Skinner was a writer. Skinner wrote Walden Two, a book about a fictional account of a behaviorist-created utopia.

Terms Used: operant conditioning, reinforcement, punishment, neutral operants, reinforcers, punishers, emitted, positive reinforcer, negative reinforcer, aversive

http://www3.niu.edu/acad/psych/Millis/History/2003/cogrev_skinner.htm
http://www.simplypsychology.org/operant-conditioning.html
http://www.nndb.com/people/297/000022231/

Clark Hull is the psychologist I decided to do more research on. He went to undergrad at University of Michigan and earned his Ph.D at Wisconsin-Madison. Shortly after graduation he worked at the University of Wisconsin. The majority of his career was spent at Yale University. His major contribution to the psychology world was in his drive reduction theory. He was also the first psychologist who studied hypnosis. Hulls theory was influenced by many other psychologists including Pavlov, Thorndike, Darwin, and Tolman. His drive reduction theory states a certain behavior happens because of a response to a (thirst, hunger, sexual, etc.) drive and when the drive is fulfilled it is temporarily reduced. The reduction of the drive acts a a reinforcer in learning. So...learning is an interaction between the drive to survive and the attainment. In other words his theory is reinforcement of learning. His theory goes along with Darwins because in the evolutionary view animals needed to adapt and learn in order to survive. One odd aspect about Hull is that he didn't measure any cognitive aspects such as purpose, intelligence, or values. Instead, he formulated a complex calculation to measure behavior. He chose this because you cant directly observe the cognitive side of behavior. Hull was the first to use quantitative methods to study hypnosis. He wrote Hypnosis and Suggestibility in 1933. Some of his other works were Mathematico-Deductive Theory of Rote Learning, Principles of Behavior, Essentials of Behavior, and A Behavior System. We did not learn about Clark Hull in this class but I find his work to have made a big contribution to the behavioral psychology department. His work and research has been a big influence on generations after him.

terms used: drive reduction theory, hypnosis, reinforcer,

http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesal/p/clarkhull.htm
http://www.bookrags.com/biography/clark-leonard-hull/
http://www.lifecircles-inc.com/Learningtheories/behaviorism/clarkhull.html

Ivan Pavlov was born in Russia in 1849. He went to school and became interested in the physiology of digestion. Eventually this led to the point where many of us can recognize Pavlov from, his experiments with dogs. He classically conditioned his dogs to where they would start salivating to the sound of a bell. What he did was start with an unconditioned stimulus, which would be the smell of food to the dogs. The unconditioned response, or what was natural to the dogs, would be to start salivating. He chose the sound of the bell as the conditioned stimulus and would ring it every time he brought food out to the dogs. The dogs eventually began to associate the bell ringing and food, so they would start drooling at the sound of the bell, the conditioned response. Pavlov’s work in the digestion field earned him the Nobel Peace Prize later and his work is still applicable today.

We can use this when trying to tame our fears of things. We might be conditioned to when we see certain things to become scared of them. Like if we see a pumpkin we might become scared because in the past we had someone with a pumpkin on their head chase us or something. The pumpkin has nothing to do with being scary, but we have been classically conditioned to think like that. Another way that we might elicit or bring out the behavior of being scared is with snakes or spiders. From seeing our parents and modeling their behavior of being frightened or just by associating them from television or something we might become scared of them. A way to overcome this fear would be systematic desensitization, which would help one take baby steps to eventually overcome this fear.

I found a couple of videos to help show Pavlov’s classical conditioning. One of them a woman gets sprayed with water every time she sees a spade card, there is a person across from her holding up cards. She gets to the point where she flinches before she even gets sprayed with water. The other video is in a classroom and whenever a person in the class says a weird phrase someone comes in and distracts the class. Eventually when that person would say something, everyone in the class emits, or performs the behavior of looking in the back of the classroom, expecting a distraction when there isn’t one. These are just some examples to why classical conditioning is a very important contribution Pavlov did for the area of psychology.

http://www.nobelprize.org/educational/medicine/pavlov/readmore.html
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1904/pavlov-bio.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYxUdPj-EEY&feature=
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=co8ytMhw53o

Terms: Ivan Pavlov, physiology of digestion, experiments, classically conditioned, unconditioned stimulus, unconditioned response, conditioned stimulus, unconditioned response, elicit, model, systematic desensitization, emit

The individual that I have picked to discuss is B.F. Skinner. Skinner was a Psychology Department chair at the University of Indiana. He then transferred to Harvard where he finished his educational career. Skinner is most famous for operant conditioning, at which Skinner would elicit certain responses from individuals by presenting a certain stimulus. For example if Skinner gives chocolate to a child every time a bell is rung, after awhile they child will just here a bell and may stick his hand out for a piece of chocolate or at least crave it. Skinner felt that behaviors were dependent upon what happens after them. This could be positive as in receiving a piece of candy to negative where the individual gets yelled at. Skinner called this the operant behavior.
He also invented the cumulative recorder that measured the rate of response after reinforcement. Skinner also thought that they were issues with raising a child such as changing, feeding, etc. so what he did was create a “air bed”. This air bed was an enclosed bed that was at about the same level as a table top. The bed was temperature controlled and easy to clean. The idea is if the crib was at the right temperature the child wouldn’t cry as much and there would be no need for sheets or blankets. He believed in it so much that he actually used his own kid in it. This type of bed would never be able to be used today because it would be seen as morally wrong and cruel. It however is an interesting idea.
The teaching machine was another one of Skinners inventions. This machine would ask questions and if you emit a correct response it would tell you immediately. The same is true if you get the answer wrong. It was made for this automatic and fast response to keep the students attention on learning. There was nothing aversive about this way of learning thus the students wouldn’t stray away from it.
One of the famous publications that Skinner produced was called Walden Two. It is a book about how controlled behavior can lead to a happy and successful society. Skinner believed that the more productive the people were in the community the better off society would be.
Terms: Skinner, elicit, operant conditioning, emit, aversive, Walden Two, cumulative recorder, reinforcement
http://www.stolaf.edu/people/huff/classes/Intro/Skinner.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._F._Skinner
http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesofmajorthinkers/p/bio_skinner.htm

The researcher I chose to write about is John Watson. Watson was born in 1878 in South Carolina. At the age of 13 Watson's father a drunkard left his mother and Watson. Using some connections John's mother got him into Furman University. Afterwards he went to the University of Chicago and received his Masters degree in Psychology. John would later go on to teach at John Hopkins university and would be dismissed after having an affair with a student. John Watson once claimed that if you gave him a young toddler/baby he could turn them into a lawyer, docter, or a thief. Watson is attributed with starting the behaviorist form of psychology. He believed that by pairing two things together (or stimuli) that you could either create or get rid of a desired behavior. This was shown by the little Albert experiment. Little Albert was your standard baby. He was unafraid of anything as shown by his interactions with fire, snakes, and cuddlier things like rabbits, rats, and dogs. Yet one thing Albert didn't like was loud noises. So Watson started making a loud noise when Albert was presented with the rat. Soon enough Albert became scared or aversive to the rat because he associated it with the loud noises. By consequence Albert also became afraid of other similar animals to the rat, so anything fuzzy really. It is unfortunate that Albert was withdrawn before the behaviors could be removed. This shows that with proper reinforcement you can change any behavior, whether its learning to give up smoking, or to cause a child to be afraid of fuzzy things.

http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesofmajorthinkers/p/watson.htm
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/bhwats.html
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/watson.htm
Terms: Aversive, Reinforcement, Behaviorism, Watson, Consequence, Behavior, Punishment.

The person I chose is Albert Bandura. Although he does not identify himself as a behaviorist, his discovery has a broad influence on behavior modification and learning. His contribution to this regard is the modeling theory, also known as the social learning theory.

He was born in northern Alberta, Canada in 1925. He got his bachelor's degree from the University of British Columbia, and his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. He taught at Stanford University, and was the president of the American Psychological Association in 1973.

His social learning theory describes how children learn through observation. The children first watch the behavior of a model, and then imitate the behavior in a similar environment. In this case the behavior of the model and the similar environment would be the antecedent. The consequence also affects how likely the child will emit the behavior. In other words, motivation is influenced by the consequence. Reinforcement promotes the behavior, while punishment prevents the behavior.

There are also few ways for the reinforcement or punishment to work. We can actually provide a reinforcer or punisher as the consequence. Or we could reward or punish the model instead. The children will learn the consequence from watching the model. This process is called vicarious reinforcement or punishment. We could also simply tell a child what will happen if the child emit the behavior, as long as the child can understand us and imagine the consequence. This method is called promised reinforcement or punishment.

The whole modeling process also relies on few cognitive components. It requires attention from the learner. The learner pays attention to attractive models or models similar to himself or herself. It also takes retention or the memory capacity of the learner. Finally the reproduction of behavior is necessary to show that the learner has the ability to reproduce the behavior of the model.

The promise of social learning theory is that we do not need to provide reinforcement or punishment for every organism. Instead we only need to provide enough models for people to relate to. Once the behavior of model is memorized, we can even elicit behavior with a simple verbal statement.

Links:
http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/bandura.html
http://www.simplypsychology.org/bandura.html
http://education-portal.com/academy/lesson/albert-bandura-social-cognitive-theory-and-vicarious-learning.html

Terms: modeling, antecedent, consequence, emit, reinforcement, punishment, reinforcer, punisher, vicarious reinforcement, vicarious punishment, promised reinforcement, promised punishment, attention, retention, reproduction, elicit

Ivan Pavlov was a Russian physiologist who discovered that people and animals could be trained to react to certain stimuli in a certain way. Pavlov’s method became known as classical conditioning, or Pavlovian conditioning. While studying the digestive process of dogs, Pavlov wondered if he could make the dog salivate to an external stimulus in order to help start the digestive process. Pavlov decided to ring a metronome when giving the dogs their food. The dogs eventually began to associate the ringing metronome with the presentation of the food. Eventually, the dogs would begin to salivate to the metronome alone, even without food being presented. Pavlov proved that a response could be conditioned, even if what is being conditioned to elicit a response (the metronome) has nothing to do with what it is being associated with (the dog’s food). This was a very important discovery for behavioral psychology.

Terms: stimuli, classical conditioning, associate, conditioned response, elicit
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/bhpavl.html
http://iemrams.spb.ru:8100/english/pavlov.htm
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1904/pavlov-bio.html
http://www.ivanpavlov.com/

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was born in the village of Ryazan, Russia on September 14, 1849. He is the son of Peter Dmitrievich Pavlov, who was the village priest. Like most other children from Ryazan, Ivan reinforced himself and went to the Church school, and was later enrolled in a theological seminary school. It was after reading The Origin of the Species by Charles Darwin, and the works of Russian physiologist I. M. Sechenov that Pavlov decided to abandon his theological studies and become a man of science. He left the seminary in favor of the University of St-Petersburg, where he enrolled in the Natural Sciences program. Pavlov first focus was on physiology. In 1875 with an outstanding record, Ivan completed his course and was rewarded a degree of Candidate of Natural Science. With his talent, Pavlov received a lot of medals. Pavlov later became interested in research and his main area of research throughout his scientific career was on the digestive process, which brought on a series of experiments exploring the correlation between the nervous system and the autonomic functions of the body. Pavlov experimented with dogs, technically using his own dogs, studying the relationship between salivation and digestion. He applied stimuli to the animals in a variety of ways, using sound, visual, and tactile stimulation, doing this, he was able to make the animals salivate whether they were in the presence of food or not; a phenomenon he called the conditioned reflex. This is how we get the Conditional Stimulus and Unconditional Stimulus. This can be compared with the Law of Effect which states that, when behaviors or responses are followed by positive outcomes, that association is stamped. After doing the experiment and found that it gave a good result, Pavlov continued that behavior. Even though he did not like psychology as we would say he did, most of his work had something to do with this field. John B. Watson cited Pavlov experiment in his work a lot. I chose to write on Pavlov because of the affect that he had on psychology but did not realize that. His experiment have been used for learning for generation now. His work basically explain human nature in that, we too may not salivate as dogs do but salivate in that our heart beats for what we want or are about to get. Below are the sources that I used along with terms.

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1904/pavlov-bio.html
http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesofmajorthinkers/p/pavlov.htm
http://www.ivanpavlov.com/

Terms used:
Pavlov
Reinforced
Unconditional Stimulus
Conditional Stimulus
Law of Effect
Charles Darwin
John B. Watson
Theological Seminary

The American psychologist John B. Watson established the psychological school known as behaviorism. Born to a poor family in South Carolina, Watson got through his masters by the age of 21 at Furman University. Although he was initally interested in pursuing a degree in philosophy for his doctorate, he turned to experiemental psychology. He went on to recieve his PhD in 1903 from the University of Chicago where he focused on animal experimentation.

One on Watson's most important works is called "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It" . This article expresses his new psychological theory known as behaviorism. Watson was also influenced by Ivan Pavlov, another important contributor to the development of behaviorism. His theory developed over some time and today he is considered a founder of this psychological school.

The principles of behaviorism focus on how people react to their surroudings in a particular situation. For Watson this involves observing the external behaviors being emitted in response to situations, not on the internal mental processes. The objective in this case are the behaviors, and this is what matters in Watson's terms.

The famous Little Albert Study was done by Watson. It involved the classical conditioning of a baby. The baby was present many different objects and animals to which elicited no fear. The goal was to turn the white rat into a conditioned stimulus which would elicit the conditioned response of fear when the rat was paired with a loud frightening noise. The noice the acted as an UCS and elicted an UCR of fear, but when paire with the rat, the rat alone become a CS for the CR of fear when no loud noise occurred. Albert was conditioned to fear rats, which he was initally unafraid of.

TERMS: ELICIT, EMIT, UNCONDITIONED STIMULUS, CONDITIONED STIMULUS, CONDITIONED RESPONSE, UNCONDITIONED RESPONSE, LITTLE ALBERT EXPERIMENT, CLASSICAL CONDITIONING, BEHAVIORISM

http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/John_B._Watson

http://www.brynmawr.edu/psychology/rwozniak/watson.html

http://www.forerunner.com/forerunner/X0497_DeMar_-_Behaviorism.html

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was born on September 14, 1849 his father was a priest and his first education was church school. It was in 1870's when he devoted his life to mathematics and science. One thing I found out that I did not know about Pavlov was that before his research with dogs he was first a sergeant. He completed his work in 1879 from the Academy of Medical Surgery. His first independent research focused on the physiology of the circulation of blood. It was during his first independent study that Pavlov began to use dogs, this method became common in Pavlov research. His second independent work centered around digestion. His work was on developing "fistulas" secretions from salivary glands, stomach, the pancreas, and small intestine. It was during this study that Pavlov observed how the sight of food stimulates the salivary and gastric secretion. It was with this observation that his research began to shift. Pavlov called this phenomena Classical Conditioning Theory, he concluded that the salivation was a learned response the dogs would salivate from smelling the food, or seeing the researchers white lab coat. Pavlov broke down this theory into conditioned stimulus and conditioned response. One of his most famous experiments was when he conditioned dogs to emit salivary response to the sound of a bell. Pavlov does this by ringing a bell then presenting the dog with food, while taking salivary response measurements. Soon Pavlov would just ring the bell and the dog would produce saliva.
Pavlov
Conditioned stimuli
classical conditioning theory
conditioned response
emit
http://www.vivo.colostate.edu/hbooks/pathphys/misc_topics/pavlov.html
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1904/pavlov-bio.html
http://psychology.about.com/od/classicalconditioning/a/pavlovs-dogs.htm

Edward Thorndike’s main area of study, his Law of effect, illustrated the behavioral effects of trial and error was interesting to me because it really made me think differently about the process of learning and how we emit different behaviors to achieve desirable outcomes. His studies with animals led Thorndike to assert his Law of effect. He found by looking closely at responses followed by satisfaction in cats that those types of responses to a stimulus are likely to happen again and those responses to a stimulus that are followed by a feeling of discomfort or dissatisfaction are not likely to occur again. This is known as, in laymen’s terms, trial and error. The law of effect proves that when we emit the behavior of trial and error we remember the successful attempts in the task we are trying to accomplish versus the unsuccessful attempts. The reason for this being the behavior is followed by a positive response making the association between the trial and positive response stronger.
Thorndike, later on in his career worked a lot with intelligence in humans. He proposed three different and broad classes of intellectual functioning; Standard (abstract) Intelligence, Mechanical Intelligence, and Social Intelligence.
Standard or abstract Intelligence refers to a person’s ability to understand words, numbers and letters and use them in school settings such as reading, writing and solving academic problems. Four general facets that Thorndike believed existed within Abstract Intelligence are Altitude, Width, Area, and Speed. Altitude is the complexity of the task at hand, Width is the variety of tasks at a particular difficulty level, Area is acts as a function of both Width and Altitude and Speed refers to the number of tasks that can be completed during a certain period of time. Mechanical Intelligence or motor intelligence is an ability to specialize in skilled trades or performing tasks associated with a high level of motor functioning such as learning dances or participating in various sports. Social Intelligence is a person’s ability to form social relations within his or her social and cultural norms. So, if you are socially intelligent you can deal effectively with your environment.
In opposition with Thorndike’s work on intelligence, Lewis M. Terman believed the definition of intelligence should stress the importance of one’s ability to think abstractly whereas Thorndike emphasized learning aspect of intelligence and the ability to give good response to questions. Both however agreed, along with more recent psychologists that adaptation to the environment is the important to understand how intelligence is formed, what it does, and what it is.
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/289766/human-intelligence?anchor=ref937310
http://www.publishyourarticles.net/knowledge-hub/education/classification-of-intelligence-according-to-thorndike.html
http://www.indiana.edu/~intell/ethorndike.shtml