Topical Blog Week #10 (Due Wednesday)

After having read the section on John B. Watson and his use of animals such as white rats and pigeons as test subjects for psychological research I became interested in how the use of animals became prominent as well as the ethical issues that have come to light since. There is no doubt that much good has come from the use of animals in testing but since its inception there has been controversy between animal rights activists and those testing on animals of whether it is right or wrong.

The history of using animals as research subjects is one that spans back hundreds of years even to the 9th century when studying the behavioral characteristics of ants. This idea of studying animal behavior and how it relates to humans spawned a new field of psychology called comparative psychology. After many years the use of animals in behavioral psychology as well as many other fields such as biopsychology became very common. Many famous discoveries in behavioral psychology have been discovered through the use of animals as test subjects such as Pavlov’s classical conditioning.

As many discoveries that have been made through the use of animals as subjects there has always been controversy on the ethical issues about the treatment of the test subjects. Seeing as not all experimentation is harmful to the subjects themselves the arguments for the use of animals as test subjects is very positive because even the small percentage that are injured or sacrificed for advancements in psychology are worth it. An example of a study where animals are left unharmed would be Watson’s Little Albert study where there was a discovery made in behavior where the animal used was not harmed.

Over the years organizations such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) have arisen in the defense of animals used in research and added to the controversy on whether it is ethical or not. Such organizations will argue that the life of a rat in a laboratory is just as valuable as a young boy’s and each should be treated with care. However, even with the outcry from groups such as PETA there are not many legitimate ethical issues when it comes to the testing of animals. What the general public may not be aware of are the very strict animal welfare laws put in place by the federal and state government. These laws such as the 3R’s ensure that all animals used for any type of research are placed in the best type of environment. The 3R’s consist of Replacement, Reduction, and Refinement. The replacement factor states that research that is able to be done without the use of animal test subjects must be done so while reduction states that the number of test subjects used must be kept at an absolute minimum and refinement ensures animals used for testing are given the most stimulating environment possible.

Even with all of the controversy in the use of animals in any kind of research there are plans to completely eliminate the ethical dilemmas. The Humane Society of the United States and other non-profit organizations are making plans with lawmakers in order to end the use of animals in testing in hopes of finding other alternatives. Among these alternatives is the use of stem cell generated human cells for research or more practical ways to study human behavior. There hope is to end all animal research by the year 2050.

Terms: John B. Watson, Behavior, psychological research, ethics, Little Albert study, Refinement, Replacement, Reduction, and

http://speakingofresearch.com/facts/animal-welfare-the-3rs/
https://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2012/04/animal-research.aspx
http://www.neavs.org/research/cbt

In this week’s reading New Year’s Resolutions were mentioned a few times throughout the section. It noted that people may have difficulty keeping their resolutions because they tend to be broad. This means that they are representing a behavioral class rather than a specific target behavior. I decided to focus my concentration for this topical blog on researching other reasons individuals may no longer keep their resolutions and suggestions for more successfully attaining goals.

According to research approximately 50% of the population makes resolutions each New Year, but only about eight percent of these are successful. The most common resolutions tend to be to lose weight, exercise, stop smoking, better money management, and reducing the amount of debt. Making resolutions that continue through the intervention and back to baseline involves changing behaviors, which requires the person to change their thinking, which may be difficult.

A professor at Carleton University, Timothy Pychyl, believes that resolutions are a form of “cultural procrastination” as a way to reinvent oneself. People are not ready to change the habits they have in place, especially their bad habits, which results for a high rate of failure. In the context of using the ABCs, if people are not motivated to change the antecedent or the behavior, the consequence will not change either. This means that people set unrealistic goals and expectations and do not emit behaviors that are consistent with the goal that has been set. Also, these undesirable behaviors, such as overeating, may be self-reinforcing to the individual, because it is desirable to eat the foods he or she enjoys.

Individuals may not stick to or even make a New Year’s resolution because they believe they are incapable of maintaining the goal, so they will disappoint others and cause embarrassment or disappoint themselves which causes shame. Both embarrassment and shame are aversive consequences. Other reasons a person’s resolution did not last is because he or she failed to make a plan or simply forgot. Thus, there was no monitoring of his or her baseline performance or keeping track of daily activity during the during the intervention phase through the use of a behavioral diary.

Peter Bregman indicates that people are taught to set specific, measurable, and time-bound goals. Unfortunately, it can easily elicit a cheating response, because it may not offer a stimulus that is reinforcing the behavior, and it is not intrinsically valuable to the individual. Through differential reinforcement of other (DRO), an individual is reinforced by the incompatible behavior, rather than being punished for it. It is beneficial to use reinforcement rather than punishment when trying to set and maintain a goal, because it is more pleasurable for the person.

These are some tips on how to make a New Year’s resolution work: 1. Focus on one specific resolution at a time rather than several. 2. Be sure it is specific and realistic. For example, losing weight is not a specific goal, but losing 10 pounds in 90 days is. This means, determine what the target behavior is, rather than a behavioral class. 3. Make it a yearlong process rather than waiting until New Year’s Eve to make resolutions, which is consistent with what our text says. 4. Take small steps. If a goal requires too much effort and action all at once, people are likely to quit. 5. Use someone who is close to you as an accountability buddy. 6. Do not wait until the goal is finally completed to celebrate success. This could be done by using a variable ratio or variable interval schedule of reinforcement to promote consistent change. 7. Finally, this should be self-directed behavior that the individual is choosing to increase or decrease.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wired-success/201312/why-we-dont-keep-our-new-years-resolutions
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/just-listen/201312/why-most-people-dont-keep-new-years-resolutions
http://storylineblog.com/new-years-resolutions/

Terms: behavioral class, target behavior, intervention, baseline, behavior, ABCs, antecedent, consequence, emit, self-reinforcing, desirable, aversive, behavioral diary, elicit, stimulus, reinforced, intrinsically valuable, differential reinforcement of other (DRO), punished, reinforcement, punishment, variable ratio schedule or reinforcement, variable interval schedule of reinforcement, self-directed behaivor

I chose to do my assignment on classical conditioning. Classical conditioning fits into what we have been learning so far because it has been discussed largely in some of our latest sections. Classical conditioning also goes hand-in-hand with behavior modification because it directly has to do with modifying a response or a behavior. I find classical conditioning very interesting because it does have to do with modifying a response or a behavior and, to me; I find the modification of a response or a behavior, no matter how it is done, to be very interesting.

Classical conditioning was one of the first types of conditioning to be discovered, it was discovered by Ivan Pavlov and his salivating dogs. What I find to be most interesting about classical conditioning is that no new behaviors need to be learned. Instead classical conditioning is all about association which is developed through pairing. One thing that I also found very interesting after researching more on classical conditioning is that it can also be used for educational purposes. In classroom learning however classical conditioning is mostly used to change or influence emotional behaviors. Educators try to associate certain feelings with neutral stimuli that can then gain our attention.

Classical conditioning is all about dealing with our reflexes or behaviors that we elicit because of a certain stimulus. We as individuals are trained in this everyday even when we may not realize it. This can be elicited by a sound, picture, or even a phrase. This is exactly why classical conditioning can be so effective in education. We may be learning things or associating stimuli with different things and not even recognize that it is happening. This can be especially effective when the educator or teacher is consistent and repetitive with the stimuli. When consistency and repetitiveness are carried out learners or the students will eventually respond or behave properly. This is probably something that is quite obvious if one takes a step back and analyzes a classroom environment, but personally I did not realize this myself until I did this research. I find it very interesting that something such as classical conditioning, which has been around for quite some time, can be used and be effective in so many instances.

Another area that I found interesting in classical conditioning being used in the classroom was trying to reduce a negative emotion. For example, a negative emotion that can be common in students is test anxiety. For some students this can be very severe to the point that they feel they cannot continue with the test. A way to repeat this in a classical conditioning perspective is to complete a test repeatedly in a timed manner until it is done correctly. The student is then usually to overcome the anxiety becomes they now know they can successful complete a test in an anxious state (otherwise known as the timed conditioned).

I have found that after doing this little bit of research that classical conditioning is something that can be used successfully in a lot of different areas and not just on nonhuman subjects. I find it fascinating that we can change our response or behavior so easily just by associating it with something new. I feel that if more people understood this concept many undesired behaviors that we may have in our society could be changed for the better.

Terms: elicit, classical conditioning, response, behavior, undesired behaviors, stimuli, behavior modification, Ivan Pavlov

http://www.edpsycinteractive.org/topics/behavior/classcnd.html
http://www.slideshare.net/JamieRBourret/classical-conditioning-in-the-classroom-15195207
http://www.education.com/reference/article/classical-conditioning/

I've decided to use the topic of positive reinforcement. This fits into pretty much every topic we have covered so far because the main thing I have learned about behavior is that all behavior is either reinforced or punished in some way; and that being the reason we do the behavior to begin with. Just to state a very common definition of positive reinforcement "In behavioral psychology, reinforcement is a consequence that will strengthen an organism's future behavior whenever that behavior is preceded by a specific antecedent stimulus." (Wikipedia).

We may not even realize how much we use reinforcement, I know that I didn't fully realize until this class made me start thinking about it. For example I recently read an article on how much reinforcement is used in childcare. Whether it is your own child or a child you are taking care of something as simple as the positive reinforcement of a new sticker could change a child's behavior for the better.

I found this quote which really puts reinforcement into perspective:

"Positive reinforcement is the most important and most widely applied principle of behaviour analysis"

- Cooper, Heron and Heward

We recently had a speaker in class come in and talk to us about autism, an article online states that those who suffer from autism are 75% more likely to listen to an adult or caregiver when some type of positive reinforcement is involved. I think the topic of reinforcement is so important because no matter who you are, where you are from, how old you are or what disabilities you may suffer from we all look for some type of positive reinforcement in our actions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement
http://www.positivereinforcementforkids.com/
http://www.educateautism.com/behavioural-principles/positive-reinforcement.html#.UzMl2DVOXrc

The topic I have selected is self-directed behavior. This fits in with section 4, the need for it, the steps of it, and also the importance of goals. Everyone uses this behavior in their lives, we mainly think of it when we start our New Year's Resolutions to better ourselves, and have that behavior become automatic. This topic interests me since I want to better myself and have a routine of desirable behaviors instead of aversive ones.

What is great about this topic is that it consists of free will. The person can set their own goals and structure it however they want, and one can use trial and error technique to see what does not work, and what does accomplish the goal by changing our contingencies and interventions.

I discovered that there are not always six steps, but can modify the behavior in just five steps. For example, the five steps are establishing realistic goals, identify target goals, self monitor, create a plan for change, and lastly evaluate your action plan. These steps are similar to our textbook, but those steps are as follows; set a goal, define/specify the goal as a set of target behaviors, keep a record, graph a baseline, determine contingencies, determine antecedents, and implement and adjust the contingencies. Using reinforcement will aid in modifying the behavior that is desired or that you want to extinct. Using punishment usually results in failure to accomplish this goal.

There are very many examples for self directed behavior that influence people's daily lives. Such as; quit cussing, stop smoking, stop drinking alcohol, stop doing drugs, exercise more, lose weight, become more tan, be a better friend, a better family member that is involved, manage finances better, get out of debt, learn something new, enjoy life more, be on time more often, pass classes instead of failing, studying more, counting calories, be more organized, and the list goes on an on.

For me personally, I am going to modify my lifting and workout pattern to where it focuses more on cardiovascular exercise instead of just lifting free weights.

http://panicdisorder.about.com/od/livingwithpd/a/Self-Modificati.htm
http://www.uni.edu/~maclino/bm/book/sec4.2.pdf
http://webel.net/walden/s5-4.pdf
http://pittsburgh.about.com/od/holidays/tp/resolutions.htm

I want to discuss the impact making New Year's Resolutions has on behavior changes. Many people make NYR because their behavior bothers them or other people. This coincides with the four reasons we should change behaviors. However most of the people making NYR have some problems creating realistic goals. At times the goals are two simplistic and are not fully defined. For example, a person may make a goal to increase their exercise patterns. This is setting a goal in its most basic sense. What would make the goal more measurable and attainable is to add a time frame. Perhaps the person wanted to increase the amount of time they spend running on a daily basis. It is important to allot an amount of time that the goal will be completed. A better goal would be I want to start running over the next two months for a total of 30 minutes per day, 4 times a week.

These self-directed behaviors would also benefit more from reinforcement. In the case of the running goal, it would make sense to reinforce after completing the behavior. It is important to find a meaningful reinforcer, one that is satisfying and prompts the goal setter to want to keep emitting the behavior. Also the person should not reinforce BEFORE emitting the behavior nor while participating in the behavior. It is crucial to reinforce AFTER emitting the behavior because the strongest association will occur. Another point to bring up about self-directed behaviors is the fact that punishment should be avoided at all costs. Since our NYR is to increase running behavior, the person would have no problem finding reinforcers. For example, he/she could simply eat a chocolate cookie after finishing their run. However if our NYR was to decrease a behavior, reinforcement becomes difficult. Therefore it is imperative to find behavior that are incompatible with the target behavior. Reinforcing the incompatible behaviors creates a stronger association than punishing the target behavior.

New Year’s Resolutions fail for a variety of reasons. Researchers have deemed this “false hope syndrome” in that people set significantly unrealistic goals that are out of alignment with their internal view of themselves. If I wanted to increase my running behavior but have never used running as a form of exercise, it becomes difficult to want to continue the behavior. Another aspect of failed resolutions deals with the cause and effect relationship. The person in our example wants to increase their running behavior why? In hopes of losing weight? To improve mood? If the behavior is not met with results, the person may become discouraged and revert back to old behaviors. The cause and effect relationship is almost directly related to Edward Thorndike’s Law of Effect. The Law of Effect states that if behaviors are met with positive outcomes, the association is stamped in. In this case weight loss and mood improvements could be seen as secondary reinforcers because they are occurring after successful pairings with exercise. In addition to the secondary reinforcers present, the primary reinforcer in this case also increases the likelihood of a behavior reoccurring.

Statistics do show that those who make NYR are more likely to make improvements than someone who hasn’t made a resolution. What is interesting about exercise and weight loss goals is that reinforcement can still be obtained elsewhere rather than with just a primary reinforcer. Like I discussed above, weight loss is reinforcing in and of itself. If the person can see the benefits of exercising, reinforcement is no longer needed. Where people can become discouraged and stop their self-directed behaviors is when the results do not meet their expectations. Educating individuals not only about behavioral strategies but also with facts about their particular behavior can help eliminate extinction.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wired-success/201012/why-new-years-resolutions-fail

http://www.statisticbrain.com/new-years-resolution-statistics/

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/sunday-review/new-years-resolutions-stick-when-willpower-is-reinforced.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Terms: self-directed behaviors, reinforcement, punishment, Law and Effect, behavior, extinction, emit, secondary reinforcer, primary reinforcer

I chose to do more research on John B. Watson and his Little Albert Study from section 3.4 because of the controversy society placed on it and the idea that children are able to be molded into anything their parents want them to be. The idea of training them into any kind of specialty was shocking to me and something I wanted to look more into. This fits into what we have already learned because it brings up the idea that through behavior modification a child can be shaped into all different types of people based on their learned behaviors and classical conditioning. It also fits into the idea that some people believe behavior modification is manipulating someone and this study brought about many controversial questions regarding that.

Albert B., now known as Little Albert, was nine months old when he was introduced to the study done by Watson and his graduate student Rosalie. Watson was interested in Pavlov’s experiments and wanted to show that emotional reactions could be classically conditioned in people much like dogs. Little Albert was exposed to a variety of stimuli including a white rat, a rabbit, a monkey, masks, and burning newspapers. He initially showed no fear to the objects that were shown, but when paired with a loud noise the consequence was crying. Stimulus generalization soon occurred and Little Albert was not only afraid of the white rat but variety of similar white things including a Santa Claus beard and a fur coat.

A question I asked myself after reading about Little Albert was what became of him as he got older? Soon after the experiment ended Little Albert moved away with his mother, and Watson and Rosalie were unable to attempt to eliminate the boy’s conditioned fear. Recently the fate of Little Albert and his actual identity were discovered. It took a seven year search led by psychologist Hall P. Beck to get the truth behind what became of him. Little Albert, whose real name is Douglas Merritte, only lived six short years and died on May 10, 1925, of buildup of fluid in his brain known as hydrocephalus. Throughout the experiment Watson described the boy as healthy and normal, when he actually was far from it. He had suffered from hydrocephalus since birth and there is convincing evidence that Watson had known about the boy’s condition and intentionally misrepresented his health.

The Little Albert study was already controversial before the news that Watson knew about the health state of the boy. The boy was exposed to repeated loud noises that eventually led him to be afraid of harmless objects including adorable bunny rabbits and even a child’s best friend, the teddy bear. He was caused unnecessary distress for the purpose of research. With this new information it changed the way many view him as not only a psychologist but a person as well. It cast a shadow over his legacy and deepened the ethical and moral issues of this experiment.

Terms: John B. Watson, behavior modification, behavior, classical conditioning, stimulus generalization, Pavlov, consequence

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

http://www.psychologicalscience.com/2008/10/little-albert---john-watsons-famous-study.html

http://whatispsychology.net/the-little-albert-experiment-summary/

The topic that I chose to research today is self directed behavior. I chose this because I think it is more relevant to people our age than the other directed behavior because we are at the time in our lives where we are probably living on our own and motivating ourselves to do things.

Self directed behavior is basically when you are using reinforcement techniques on yourself instead of others giving you reinforcement. This would be like goal setting and people making new years resolutions. This is something that I think people struggle with is actually achieving a goal they set for themselves and that is another reason why I chose this topic.

There are seven steps to maintain good self directed behavior. These are 1) Set a goal, 2) Define or specify the goal, 3) keep a record, 4) graph a baseline, 5) Determine contingencies 6) Determine antecedents and 7)apply the contingencies. If you follow these steps it will help you stay on track with your goal and see the small steps you are achieving rather than just focusing on the big picture.

For many reasons, people fail while using self directed behavior especially with new years resolutions. Every year people make new goals and then after a couple months they are back to where they started. One reason for this is that the goal/target behavior is too broad. Some of the top 10 New Years resolutions are things like "lose more weight" or "quit smoking" and these are fine things to want to focus on and change. But it would be more helpful if you set limits or were more specific on what you wanted to do like work out 4 times a week or smoke only a certain number of cigarettes per day or week. Focus on something that is meaningful and reasonable so that way the goal isn't so far out of reach that you give up because you have too far to go.

Another reason that keeping up on self directed behavior is hard for people is that we get busy and forget or make excuses that we don't have enough time. This can be easier if you keep track of your progress so you always remember how far you have come and how far you have to go so you don't forget. When times get busy you can look back and see how far you have come and all the progress you have made so far. Telling people about your goal is another small way that others can be small motivator for you as well.

Terms: self directed behavior, other directed behavior, reinforcement, target behavior

http://www.uni.edu/~maclino/bm/book/sec4.1.pdf
http://storylineblog.com/new-years-resolutions/
http://pittsburgh.about.com/od/holidays/tp/resolutions.htm

This week I decided to focus on the topic of New Year’s Resolutions and self-directed behavior because these two complement each other. I decided to do this topic because NYR interest me and I’ve always sort of wanted to know why we only make big changes at the beginning of the year; and most of the time, don’t stick to it anyway. I worked in a gym for a couple years and I always noticed we would be very busy at the beginning of the year and only a couple months later we wouldn’t be as busy. Working out, losing weight, becoming more fit, etc., is a really common NYR.

Making a NYR is usually for one of four reasons; the four reasons to change a behavior discussed in an earlier chapter. We change our behaviors because they bother ourselves, they bother someone else, they are lead to trouble or they are illegal. Although this seems like four great reasons to change behaviors, even though only about 19% of people stick with their resolutions. Obviously, if you set realistic goals, you are more likely to succeed. A lot of the time, we are setting goals that are unrealistic or too broad. Some also fail because they involve a punishment, not a reinforcer.

There are tricks to help us succeed in sticking with our resolutions. Short-terms goals for long-term results is a great way to stay on track. If you want to save money, try saving a certain amount every week rather than shooting for a large money sum at the end of the year. It’ll be easier this way. Some other tricks could refer to keeping your goals specific, using the buddy system, keep records, and make time for your goals.

There was a study done by psychologists in 1985 involving 200 Americans and keeping track of their NYR. One week into the study and the new year, 77% were on the right track and keeping up with their goals. After one month, that number decreased to 55% and two years later at the end of the study, only 19% of Americans had stuck to their original goals.
Terms: self-directed behavior, punishment, reinforcer

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/12/why-we-make-resolutions-and-why-they-fail.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeanette-pavini/10-tricks-to-help-you-actually-keep-your-new-years-resolutions_b_4550549.html

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116075/new-years-resolutions-psychologists-study-successful-techniques

Interestingly, a simple search engine result for “self-directed behavior steps” instantaneously returns Dr. Maclin’s book section as the first result. The second result was a comparison of teacher directed and self-directed behavior modification. This is an area I am particularly intrigued with as I recently had the opportunity to discuss it with a central Iowa middle school behavior disorder teacher.

In my opinion, self-directed behavior is most eloquently defined by Kolb & Boyatizis (1970), whom stated, “The self-directed person seems to gain his self-control by construing his world in such a way that the opportunities of the future (stated as goals) become more important determinants of his action that the events of the past.” In perhaps simpler terms, self-directed behavior involves a variety of different steps (depending on which site you consult) including: establishing realistic goals, recognizing target behaviors, self-monitoring, creating a plan, reviewing action plan, reinforcement, recognition of triggers, and an adjustment period.

While self-directed behavior in college students is arguably easier to self-enforce and monitor for these adults than their younger, primary and secondary counterparts, this is a behavioral approach becoming more prevalent in school districts across the country. Teacher directed strategies take time. They are the primary enforcers while implementing behavior strategies and must identify, monitor, and reinforce. However, when the power is placed in the students hands, as a form of self-directed behavior, they are seen as the primary enforcers (which frees up the teachers’ specified attention, allowing them to attend to other students). The teacher still plays a role of guidance, but the students themselves control their behavior.

When the student becomes part of the behavioral change, they affirm responsibility. The teacher helps the student identify a behavior that needs work, but then the student plays the main role. Rather than the teacher coming up with an arbitrary reward, the student is able to select a form of reinforcement that they will be motivated to work toward. In order to receive this form of reinforcement, however, the student must demonstrate trustworthiness. This means that the student must accurately and honestly record that he/she executed the agreed upon behavior. If the individual measures up to the agreed standards, he/she then has the opportunity to be rewarded.

The benefits of self-directed behavior are especially outstanding for these younger students. In addition to changing their own lives while learning trustworthiness and honesty, these students now have incentive to demonstrate the correct behavior, allowing them to establish and exhibit self-control. Not only is it teaching these and other valuable life skills, but students are also being provided with a sense of empowerment.

Terms: self-directed behavior steps, behavior disorder, goals, target-behaviors, self-monitoring, creating a plan, reinforcement, adjustment, self-enforce, strategies, reward

http://iris.peabody.vanderbilt.edu/module/sr/cresource/what-might-ms-torri-consider-to-help-her-students-stay-on-task-and-also-help-her-regain-some-lost-instructional-time/sr_01/

http://hum.sagepub.com/content/23/5/439.extract

http://panicdisorder.about.com/od/livingwithpd/a/Self-Modificati.htm

For this assignment, I chose to talk about self-directed behavior. I found this topic to be very interesting in this week’s reading, especially when it came to New Year’s resolutions. People have a very hard time keeping resolutions, as well as keeping themselves from participating in undesirable habits. This can be due to many things, such as not having a specific enough goal, or aiming too high when creating one. However, reading about self-directed behavior helped me to realize that reaching personal goals aren’t as complicated as they seem. There are plenty of people that want to be successful with their New Year Resolutions, and I was interested in learning about reasons why they don’t follow through, as well as ways to make it easier.
It’s important to realize that people often fail when trying to break bad habits and follow through with New Year’s resolutions because they aren’t specifying a target behavior, but rather falling into a behavioral class with their goal. About half of America makes a resolution each year, and less than ten percent are successful with their new behaviors. These self-directed behaviors fail for numerous reasons. A lot of people set goals that are unrealistic and too hard to reach. It is also possible that people don’t see the results that they want right away, and begin to fall back into their old habits. This is related to the Law of Effect which states that associations are created when behaviors are met with positive outcomes. If people who want to lose weight aren’t shedding the pounds in the first few weeks (or even days), they may give up completely.
People may become more successful with their New Year’s resolutions if they are reinforced. Because exercising more is a common goal that people have, we’ll use that as an example. Some people are satisfied with losing weight, and that is their secondary reinforcer. Other people are not, and may be more successful if they reinforce themselves for exercising and eating healthy, or any other techniques that they are doing to help themselves lose weight. If people are able to find a reinforcer that is meaningful to them, they are going to be more likely to emit their behaviors. It is also important to remember to create specific goals that elicit a target behavior, rather than a broad goal that can be manipulated.
My research brought up a great point that I failed to think about before regarding punishment. When it comes to self-directing behavior, people should not punish themselves or allow themselves to be punished. Reaching goals is a process of change and cannot happen overnight. Punishment does not help reach the goal, and in fact can deter people from reaching their ultimate resolution. Like I talked about before, the behavior should be reinforced instead.

http://www.statisticbrain.com/new-years-resolution-statistics/
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wired-success/201012/why-new-years-resolutions-fail
http://www.health.harvard.edu/newsweek/Why-its-hard-to-change-unhealthy-behavior.htm

Terms: self-directed behavior, behavior class, target behavior, primary reinforcer, secondary reinforcer, elicit, emit, positive reinforcement, punishment, Law of Effect, undesirable

The topic I chose is New Year’s Resolutions (goals). This relates to sections 4.0-4.2 in that using self-directed behavior steps will increase the likelihood that a person will fulfill their goal. As the text stated, the reason people make goals that involve changing behavior is because the behavior bugs us or others around us. According to a study out of the University of Scranton 8 of the top 10 resolutions made for 2014 would directly address problems that stem from a person wanting to change a behavior for the reasons stated above.
But of the 45% of people who made New Year’s Resolutions, only 8% actually succeed. This means that a lot of people fail every year, and I wanted to find the most common reasons people failed at succeeding and try to find way to correct for that. Two of the main reasons people fail to reach goals that is the goal is too broad or they make it up as they go, this can avoided by doing step 2 of the self-directed behavior steps. By Defining exactly what behaviors will lead to the goal being accomplished, the goal seems doable. Not keeping track is another reason New Year’s Resolutions fail. If it seems like the goal is not being reached because the person has no proof of improvement, the goal will be dropped: step 3 of self-directed behavior would solve this problem and help insure success. Another reason goals fail is that the goal is kept a secret, having as few as one other person know that Jane (for example) is going to stop drinking pop will help insure the goal is successful because they can provide support and may even join which would create solidarity. The last reason is a lack of a positive reward system, punishing oneself for failing/not acknowledging small achievements within the goal will only lead to aversive feelings and outcomes: so reinforcing behavior with a pleasurable valence will increase the chances the goal will be met.
Then I started to wonder how often people decide to make goals to change behavior. It turns out that “the first of (week, month, year)” is the most common time. They do this by using “nudges” to change the environment (antecedents) in a way that will support the desired behavioral changes. With this new knowledge, I can make my New Year’s Resolution of getting slimmer happen.
Terms: Antecedents, nudges, behavior, reinforcing, pleasurable valence, aversive, outcomes, self-directed behavior steps, punishing

http://www.statisticbrain.com/new-years-resolution-statistics/
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/12/why-we-make-resolutions-and-why-they-fail.html
http://psychcentral.com/lib/rethink-those-failed-new-years-resolutions/00018625

The topic I am doing is on New Years Resolutions. This topic is has been covered in the self-directed behavior sections 4.1 and 4.2, because a resolution is one of the key examples of this type of behavior modification. I am interested in this because as a future guidance counselor if I could possibly pass on information to students how they themselves can change a troublesome behavior own their own. I also would like to know how to better change some of my habits, like lifting more and eating properly.
The first few websites I visited mainly discussed why resolutions fail. One of the main themes of failure was vague goals. This has a lot to do with our readings because it has to do with how the goal is a behavioral class and not a target behavior. This is significant because when it comes to positive reinforcement you need a specific behavior you can reward and measure in order for a change to occur. An example is if you want to become more physically fit, it is hard to reinforce every activity of physical fitness. You need to break it down to specific goals like go to the gym everyday after class.
The articles also talked about other variables to predict failure. One of these is celebrating success between milestones and not wait till completed. This means that you are on a reinforcement schedule, to be reinforced during your efforts to change behavior into more of a habit. The other thing is to monitor your progress. This has to do with recording your behavior before by making a baseline, and seeing how much your efforts are making a difference. The article also talks about not being discouraged if you do not see results; I connect this with when our text talks about just having to change your contingencies until you see improved results. One of the last things that both articles talked about was having an accountability buddy, which I related to setting the antecedent. If you have a friend everyday making sure you are achieving your goal that sets up a good environment for change.

Once you are done with your post make list of the terms and terminology you used in your post.

Self-directed behavior, behavior modification, behavioral class, target behavior, positive reinforcement, reinforcement schedule, baseline, contingencies, antecedent, environment.

I chose the topic of goal setting this week, both self-directed behavior goals and other directed behavior goals. This topic interested me because I have had many times where I failed to keep up on my New Year's resolutions and other sorts of self directed behavior goals, like quit swearing, spend less money on pop, exercise more, draw more, etc. I wanted to see how setting goals can be accomplished and what steps others can do to help make ends meet.

One website I visited introduced me to the concept of S.M.A.R.T., which stands for specific, memorable, achievable, relevant and time-specific. These mnemonic devices relate to the text, especially section 4.2, in that the desired target behavior cannot be vague, must be able to fit in our daily schedule, and must be actually realistic. These goals can indeed be challenging, like deciding to go for a 15 minute jog every morning, but they need to be goals that can actually be achieved, as opposed to going for an hour jog every morning.

The importance of recording the progress we make has also been stressed multiple times in the articles I found. Not only does it serve as concrete evidence of progress that we may have forgotten about, but it also helps relieve stress. If we are frustrated or despondent about having to meet with these goals daily, we can take it out with our writing. It helps psychologically and memorably.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goal_setting
http://www.exrx.net/Psychology/Goals.html
http://womensfitness.lifetips.com//cat/63191/goal-setting-and-motivation-for-women/index.html

Terminology - self directed behavior, other directed behavior, target behavior

Punishment

My topic is punishment, and it came from section 2.3. I picked it randomly from the various lectures, but I was also very curious about the kinds of information I could find about punishment, especially considering its use in child rearing, POW military situations, and everyday life (like parking tickets and other laws).

At my job, we interview people about health habits and the such--one of our questions is about aversive childhood experiences and asks "Before the age of 18, did a parent or adult in your home every hit, beat, kick, or physically hurt you in any way--do not include spanking." Spanking was also talked about in some of the information I came across and was referenced as appropriate as a form of punishment if it is attached to an extremely aversive behavior and the consequence of being spanked is adequately explained to the child. As a child, I was also spanked. There were different forms of punishment used in my household, but none were detrimental to my mental health and definitely weren't to my physical well-being. Many of the forms of punishment were what one article called "logical consequences." This means that the punishment was related to the aversive behavior that my mom or dad wanted to decrease. An example was that when my siblings or I would swear, we would have to drink a Dixie cup full of vinegar. It was disgusting, but not harmful, and relevant to the fact that our mouths had uttered the swear words, so our mouths endured the nasty tasting punishment. An example of negative punishment from my research included a child coming home late for dinner, so he were not allowed to play beyond the property limits for a few days so that he would not be late for dinner. The child was then allowed to play in the neighborhood, and the punishment would be repeated if he was late again. It's the concept of teaching the child to be aware of time by assuming they do not have that skill, and taking away the responsibility of the child to be aware of time by limiting situations in which he would need this skill.

There was also talk of natural consequences, which are a kind of punishment that an authority doesn't have to give out because it's a naturally occurring consequence of the behavior that was emitted. An example given was that a child rode his bike down the stairs at his childhood home. He had a few injuries, and his mother comforted him instead of punishing him. However, he never repeated that behavior again because the natural consequence of being injured was enough of a punishment for him, and he learned his lesson.

However, punishment can come with the cost of a child resenting the parent, or the behavior only decreasing the when the punisher is around--in other situations, the behavior may continue to occur because the child knows that they will not be punished. The same goes for grown-ups--every time we decide to speed a little bit, we're constantly looking around for a police car. We know we can get away with an aversive behavior when the punisher is not around.

I also learned that punishment is a form of operant conditioning--I'm not sure that that distinction was made in the text, but it makes sense because operant conditioning focuses on reinforcement or a punishment after the behavior has occurred to make an association between the behavior or the consequence--either to increase or decrease the behavior. But as we had discussed in section 2.5, Schedules of Reinforcement, punishment is most effective when applied consistently. If there were cameras that monitored the road consistently and could read license plates, find your address and mail you a ticket every time you disobeyed a traffic law, people would drive a heck of a lot safer. But the punishment is not consistent--instead it is like a variable interval kind of deal, in which the police may or may not be there at the exact time that you are emitting an illegal speeding behavior.

http://www.cyc-net.org/cyc-online/cycol-0605-stein.html
http://psychology.about.com/od/operantconditioning/f/punishment.htm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVbGSVhKGwA

Terms: aversive, punishment, emitting, variable interval, reinforcement, operant conditioning, behavior, consequence, schedules of reinforcement, punisher, negative punishment, logical consequences, natural consequence

I wanted to research about the use of animal testing in psychology, because I found Pavlov’s, Skinners, Watson’s and Thorndike’s experiments interesting. Psychologist test animals to answer their questions about behaviors. Researchers have learned much about vision, pain perception, taste, and hearing through studying animals. They have also learned about adaptation change. Animals are also studied for cognitive-behavioral research as well, this research can give an inside human emotions that are complex. When it comes to behavioral research animals are tested for stress, aggression, fear, substance abuse, and more. Diseases and disorder conditions are put in the animal that is being tested. When it comes to the medication side of psychology, rats are used to track the amount of dependency a drug can create. One thing I found to be interesting is that Animal Research has also helped with restoring the population of animals that are endangered or in threat of being endangered. I like how they do this, because they are taking populations of animals to do their testing, so I feel it is a good way to give back to the environment.
There was an interesting study done on spiders that showed how their webs would turn out when they were given different types of drugs. I think this is a great website for people to check out and it is a good visual in helping to understand how different drugs could affect a person. When the spider was on LSD the web that was made by that spider shows how people are “strung out” and they have no perception of the space time concept. The web with the spider that was drugged with marijuana, seems like it shows the spider got “lazy” and seemed to do a more relaxed not as structured web, which would be comparable to a person on marijuana being more stress free and relaxed. The web that was made on caffeine was more disorganized. It was all over the place, and people talk about how others on caffeine or who drink too much soda are “bouncing off the walls.” The web that was made while the spider was on Benzedrine/Speed appeared to be done very quickly and untidy. In a human who is on Speed everything thing is more fast pace. It is disorganized like caffeine, but way more intense.
The percentage of animal use in psychological research is around 7-8%. Breakdowns of the different animals are used is: about 90% are rodents or birds (usually rats, mice, and pigeons), 5% are monkeys or primates, and the usage of dogs or cats is very rare. There are codes of ethics that must be followed when doing research for the safety of the animals, and it must be considered “humane.”
Pavlov, Skinner, Watson, Thorndike, behavior,
https://www.apa.org/research/responsible/research-animals.pdf
I chose this website because it gave a breakdown of the animals that are used in psychological research along with some of the things they are used for, such as vision, pain perception, taste, and hearing.
http://www.neavs.org/research/cbt
This website talked about how animals are used for cognitive behavioral research.
http://www.trinity.edu/jdunn/spiderdrugs.htm
A friend showed me this website at an earlier time and while I was writing my paper I thought it tied in pretty well. This website shows how spider webs turn out when the spider is subjected to a certain drug such as LSD, marijuana, ect.

The topic I decided to research this week is behaviorist's views on addiction. I chose this because I am an addict (nicotine) and was very curious what the behaviorist perspective on addiction is.

One of the articles I read cited a study done about American soldiers in Vietnam. The study found that 20% of servicemembers in Vietnam were addicted to heroin. They were then "cleansed" before returning home and when they followed up with them after returning home, they found that only 5% of the soldiers were still using heroin.

From the behaviorist perspective, the results are explained because the soldiers returned home and were no longer in the presence of antecedents (people, places, etc.) that would elicit the behavior of doing heroin. The returning soldiers were also being reinforced by behaviors incompatible with using heroin--many of them were spending time with their families, getting jobs, etc. This is an example of differential reinforcement of other behaviors (DROs).

Drugs often cause a feeling of pleasure after they are administered, which increases the likelihood they will be repeated again. For example, if someone is bored when they take a drug they will be reinforced with feelings of pleasure after they take the drug. This will increase the likelihood that they will take the drug again when they are bored. To break it down using the ABCs:
A=Bored
B=Takes drug
C=Feels pleasure

A study done by Dr. Carl Hart showed similar results. In one study he recruited heavy crack users and found that they would choose small payments of money or vouchers over crack very frequently. Hart's research also found that mice who were addicted to cocaine would only use it in moderation when other options were available such as food, sex or an interesting environment to explore.

It does appear that differential reinforcement of other behaviors is a way to treat drug habits. Also changing environments appears to have a very large effect on reducing drug use behavior.

Terms: antecedents, behavior, ABCs, DROs

URLs: http://www.behaviorismandmentalhealth.com/2012/01/19/heroin-addiction-is-not-a-illness/
http://www.behaviorismandmentalhealth.com/2010/09/30/drugs-and-alcohol/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jacobsullum/2013/11/04/everything-youve-heard-about-crack-and-meth-is-wrong/

.

The topic I have chosen to write about this week is schedules of reinforcement. This topic fits into what we have been reading about self-directed behavior because most people would rather change their own behavior with reinforcement rather than punishment. I am interested in this topic because I want to know more about how to effectively apply a schedule of reinforcement to a behavior modification process.

A schedule of reinforcement refers to how often a reinforcer is given to an organism for emitting a target behavior. Reinforcement can be on a continuous schedule in which every emission of the target behavior is reinforced, or on an intermittent schedule in which reinforcement can be delayed in several ways. For example, intermittent reinforcement can be based on ratio, or number of emitted behaviors, or based on interval, or time between emissions of behaviors. Either ratio or interval reinforcement can be fixed, using a constant number of emissions or length of time, or variable, using a changing number of emissions or length of time.

Topical Blog Week #10 (Due Wednesday)
I chose this time to do my research on the topic of the man that is Burrhus Frederic Skinner. I chose him because he was a huge part in the development of the study of psychology. I also wanted to do my research on him because he was an inventor and I am also really interested in inventing things. I think that he is different from most other scientist because didn’t just do paper work and have people take test to collect their data. While many others did that Burrhus was inventing new things that would help me study the psychology of the subject. He was not repetitive he didn’t do what everyone else was doing he came up with new things to help me study. Burrhus was born in 1904 in a little town in Pennsylvania. He had a stay at home mom and a dad that was a lawyer and he also had one sibling. Burrhus grow up and went to college to be a writer.
He ended up not wanting to be a writer so he then decided to study psychology instead. A lot of his early work was on memory and perception. He went to Harvard University to study psychology. There can developed one of this inventions that his most famous for which is the Skinner box. He studied animals and how they interacted to their environments. He used operant conditioning in his studies with first rats and than pigeons. From his studies he learned that reinforcement was crucial in learning new behaviors. He studied about reinforcement and punishment. The also broke down into positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, punishment
After he got his doctrine from Harvard wrote books about psychology. Throughout his life he published many books someone them including The Behavior of Organisms (1938) Walden Two (1948) and Beyond Freedom and Human Dignity (1971). Later on in life when he was teaching at University of Minnesota he started a study that was cancelled that was trying to train pigeons to serve as guides for bombing runs during World War II. In 1943, he built a new type of crib for his daughter and it was called the baby tender. It was heated so the baby didn’t need a blanket and it didn’t have slats in the sides so it was safer. Skinner was a teacher and many different universities. Skinner became interested in education and developed a teaching machine to study learning in children.
He published many other things and he keep on doing experiments. He was the president on the Midwestern Psychological Association at one point and later became the president of the Pavlovian Society. Later he received the Humanist of the Year Award by the American Humanist Association. A few years later he retired as Harvard's Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology and he Published Enjoying Old Age. And a few years later he died in Massachusetts in 1990.
URLs
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/skinner.htm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-d6jypCsUw
http://www.goodtherapy.org/famous-psychologists/bf-skinner.html#

terms and terminology you used in your post.
Memory, perception, skinner box, operant conditioning, reinforcement, positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, punishment, baby tender.

For this week’s topical blog I decided to dig deeper into the concept of self-directed behavior. Self-directed behavior fits into the section we just covered on Monday because it talked all about these behaviors specifically. I chose this topic because it is something that I have struggled with over the years in regards to a multitude of situations, one being a weight loss program. I feel like these behaviors can be directly targeted at my age group because we do struggle with many goals and we find it hard to find ways to be successful with the particular goal as well. Being college students we are on our own and are just starting to find out how to be successful and failing many times before that even happens. This is a topic that I personally feel can benefit for all age groups and males and females. So, I wanted to learn more about self-directed behaviors to better educate myself on how to become successful with my goals in life and everyday occasions. Also in this section, it directly talks about New Year’s resolutions that tend to go sour because of how poorly we are using tools that can help us be successful and such. This was a great example because it allows me to directly relate to a certain situation like a resolution; something that most people try to obtain every year.
I researched this topic in depth and found some extremely helpful information that further explained what self-directed behaviors are and the process that goes along with it. I found that most people find it extremely hard to modify behaviors and obtain goals, but in reality it’s not as hard as people think it is. Changing a behavior is a such a broad topic because there are so many different behaviors that a person can change and everyone is different in their own way, but obtaining goals is a possible outcome, people just need to understand six simple steps to help obtain them. The great thing about goal setting is we have the ability and opportunity to set our own goals that pertain to our own daily lives. We can make goals that work for us individually.
The first step in modifying a behavior is making sure the goal we set is an extremely specific goal. A lot of people fail right from the start because they are too broad or vague when it comes to a certain goal. It is important to be clear on what you’re trying to accomplish. The next step is to recognize target goals and behaviors. The third step seems to be another really important technique or step in the right direction and that is to make sure that you’re recording or self-monitoring your goal. Keeping a journal of all the food you each day or how long you exercise is key! Graph a baseline so you can see the progress that is being made and determine contingencies. The last step is it to determine the antecedent and then modify the behavior in a successful manner.
There are other important things to consider when creating a goal as well. It is important that the goal that is being made is not only extremely specific, but that it is realistic. A goal that is measurable and practical are two important keys that will lead you to an accomplished goal. I found that using punishment results in failure to achieve the goal in most case, and using reinforcement helps modify the desired behavior; which makes complete sense if thinking about it logically. There are so many self-directed behaviors because like I stated before everyone is different and everyone has their own unique behaviors that they personally might want to change for their personal gain. Some examples that I found included, quitting smoking, eating habits, losing weight, drinking less booze, improve financials, improving school habits, being more organized or relaxed, time management, and etc. There are so many I could go on for days. But the thing that is important to take away from these behaviors is the fact that there is a way to get the desired behavior you want from them and it’s not as hard as everyone thinks it is.
Terms: Self-Directed Behaviors, Psychology, Behavioral Modification, Goals, Target Goals, Recording, Antecedents, Contingencies, Baseline, Graph, Self-Monitor, Reinforcement, Punishment, Desired Behaviors
URLS:
1. http://www.slideshare.net/MatSouthwell/self-directed-behaviour-change
2. http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/48019/goalsettingselfd00kolb.pdf?s
3. http://www.uni.edu/~maclino/bm/book/sec4.2.pdf

A.S

My topic this week was to investigate the role of behavior modification within rehabilitation facilities. I decided to research on this topic in hopes to find information about techniques and/or programs different rehab facilities offered. At first I was going to research locally within the state, but I decided to investigate the high-profile and commercial facilities instead. I have noticed more commercials about rehabilitation facilities promoting more of spa services than addiction detoxification.
My first google search attempt was for popular rehab facilities in the US. I was disappointed, to say the least, at the search results on the first page. Without going into detail, the page was filled with the top extravagant rehab centers for the rich and famous. Sure enough these websites flaunted the cost per stay, celebrity clientele, and why it’s extravagant. Personally, I think these facilities should be labeled as resorts instead of rehabilitation centers. The individual websites also hardly offer any information regarding the actual treatment services.
However I finally struck real information offered by The Ranch in Tennessee and The Burning Tree in Texas; until I actually read the words on the page. The Burning Tree provides the public with textbook descriptions of behavior modification terms: negative and positive reinforcement, imposing environmental limitations, goal setting, and conditioning. And unfortunately I discovered more textbook style descriptions on The Ranch’s website, but this was describing the history and principles of cognitive behavioral therapy. But like I said, the writing is generic it really makes me question why it is so difficult to locate facts about establishments that supposed to in control of people’s lives and futures.

http://www.recoveryranch.com/articles/therapy/cognitive-behavioral-therapy/
http://www.quitalcohol.com/guides/top-10-alcohol-treatment-centers.html
http://www.burningtree.com/contact/resource-links/behavior-modification-programs-treatment/
http://www.businessinsider.com/best-celebrity-rehab-centers-2011-9?op=1
Vocab: cognitive behavioral therapy, negative reinforcement, positive reinforcement, imposing environmental limitations, goal setting, conditioning, behavior modification, techniques.

I chose the topic of self-directed behavior. Self-directed behavior is when we use our own free will to increase or decrease a target behavior. I found this topic interesting and wanted to learn more about it. I have a very bad habit of biting my nails. I really want to stop because I hate how my nails look when they are all stubby. I have tried keeping them painted. I have also tried chewing on different things to keep my mouth busy such as pencils or gum.
I took this opportunity to try to figure out how to break my bad habit. I already know about the six steps involved in changing a behavior, but I wanted to see what other techniques were out there. In my research I found that it is important to make the habit conscious, write about and then replace it with a new behavior. I think this could work because I like to write about my frustrations to get rid of them. I also think replacing an old habit with a new one is good idea…unless it is an unhealthy replacement such as eating candy. I also found that it is important to involve others in your quest for a new habit or to break an old. It is important to reward yourself.
I also found a couple ideas of how to make a new habit stick. It take three to four weeks to form a new habit. Get a partner to help you and do it with you. Set an alarm to remind you. This relates to our class because it is modifying and creating a behavior.
Terms: self-directed behavior, target behavior

B.F Skinner
Burrhus Frederic Skinner (also known as B.F Skinner) was born on March 20, 1904 in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania. His mother’s name was Grace and his Father’s name was William. His father was a lawyer. B.F Skinner had a younger brother named Edward but he passed away at the age of six due to cerebral hemorrhage.
B.F Skinner went to Hamilton College in New York with the intention of becoming a writer. He had a disadvantage at the hospital due to his intellectual attitude. B.F wrote for the Hamilton newspaper but because he was an atheist, he was critical of the religious school he attended. After Skinner received his Bachelors degree at Hamilton he attended Harvard in 1926. At Harvard he did research and taught and eventually became a prestigious board member of the college. While Skinner was at Harvard and doing his research he invented the Skinner Box.
This box was an operant conditioning chamber that was used as a laboratory apparatus to experiment on the analysis of behavior in animals. This box was used in the study of operant conditioning and classical conditioning. Skinner created the operant chamber as a variation of the puzzle box originally created by Edward Thorndike. He was a psychologist who created a puzzle box. Skinners operant conditioning chamber permits experimenters to study behavior conditioning by teaching a subject animal, usually rats, to perform certain actions in response to a certain stimuli. The action is usually a lever press and the stimuli are usually a light or a sound signal. When the subject emits the target behavior they are rewarded with food. If the behavior is emitted incorrectly the subject gets an adverse punishment. This is usually a shock.
After Skinner graduated from Harvard in 1936, he unsuccessfully tried to write a great novel while he lived with his parents. Skinner called these his Dark Years. Also in 1936, Skinner married Yvonne Blue. Skinner researched at Harvard until 1936. After this he taught at the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis and later at Indiana University. At Indiana University, Skinner was chair of the psychology department from 1946 to 1947. In 1948 Skinner returned to Harvard as a tenured professor. Skinner remained at Harvard for the remainder of his life. Skinner and his wife had two daughters named Julie and Deborah. Skinner died of Leukemia in 1990. Skinner is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery.
Terms: operant conditioning, Classical conditioning, aversive, punishment, reinforcement, operant conditioning chamber, puzzle box, stimuli, emit, and target behavior
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._F._Skinner
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skinner_Box
http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesofmajorthinkers/p/bio_skinner.htm

I would like you to say what your topic is:

My topic is Pavlov.

how exactly it fits into the section we have covered so far:

It fits in to our class because we have an entire section about Pavlov that we read about. Pavlov has a lot to do with conditioned reflex, classical conditioning, and learned helplessness which can be related to behavior modification as well.

and why you are interested in it:

I am interested in this topic because I have learned about Pavlov before and now that he has been brought up in class again, I would love to learn more about him. He sounds like an intelligent and extremely interesting person to researched based on his experiments of learning.

Next, I would like you to take the information you found related to your topic, integrate/synthesize the topic, and then write about the topic. At the end, please include working URLs for the three websites.

While doing research on Pavlov, I ran across a few concepts that were similar to what we have read about in class. For one, Ivan Pavlov was first studying digestive systems in animals when he came across classical conditioning. Also, he started studying the way dogs would salivate when seeing food which in this case means the unconditioned stimulus is food and the unconditioned response is when the dog salivates. We also discussed in class how there are many different types of learning but the most basic type is associate learning and the two types of associate learning are first off what Pavlov came up which consists of classical conditioning and then there is also operant conditioning. When doing research I learned a lot of random facts for example, the reason we salivate is to help the food we eat go down easier. I had not thought about this before therefore it was interesting to me.

Something I learned from doing research that is not mentioned in the section we read about Pavolv is the reason why Pavlov became so interested in the dogs salivating. It started when he discovered the dogs would still salivate even when there wasn't any food. He figured out it was because of the lab coats that the research assistants were wearing because the dogs were associating food with the lab assistant. After this Pavlov realized he reached an important scientific discovery and began to do experiments. This is known as psychic secretion which we did learn about in the Pavolv section we read for class except it said that the researcher's footsteps are what caused the dogs to have psychic secretion. So really, the lab assistant was originally a neutral stimulus because they did not produce a response. Then what happened was the neutral stimulus or lab assistant became associated with an unconditioned stimulus which was food. I also read on a different website that the meat powder was actually the unconditioned stimulus and the dogs salivation is the unconditioned response. The previous website I did research had not discussed anything about meat powder. Either way, since then Pavlov did experiments using bells as a neutral stimulus and other techniques to associate them with food. Since the dog gained an association with the bell that caused a learned response it is known as conditioned response.

When doing research I also learned that classical conditioning could be used as a reward system for good behavior. One example of this could be giving students participation points if they stay in their seat when the school bell rings. This trains students to perform a particular task through a familiar reflective response. Classical conditioning would be good to use when trying to create a desired behavior or outcome. With this being said, classical conditioning could also back fire if the person does not have any motivation to learn on their own. Overall, I have learned quite a bit more about Pavlov and he continues to be an interesting person who I will always have fun learning more about.

Websites:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0vLy41Hubw
http://www.simplypsychology.org/pavlov.html
http://www.learning-theories.com/classical-conditioning-pavlov.html

Terms: Pavlov, conditioned reflex, classical conditioning, behavior modification, learned helplessness, unconditioned response, unconditioned stimulus, operant conditioning, psychic secretion, neutral stimulus, conditioned response, reflective response, behavior, motivation

My topic is Satiation as a behavioral technique. This topic fits into many of our previous topics because it is something people often need to be aware of when effecting behavioral change. I am interested in this topic because it has been hiding in many of the chapters we have read but I was curious about learning more.
Satiation is when a reinforcer is presented too frequently or in excessive amounts to a subject and they become no longer effected by or have an aversive reaction to the reinforcer. It is common to use primary reinforcers like food because they work well as satiation tools. Secondary reinforcers such as praise and attention are less likely to satiate and therefor are not used very often in behavioral modification techniques that involve satiation. It should be mentioned that satiation is usually temporary.
Satiation techniques can be used in a couple different ways. One of the most common is as an intervention tactic to reduce the value of certain things, which serve as reinforcers for maladaptive behavior. Again, these interventions are typically temporary but very effective. An example of this method would be if a student were constantly rocking back and forth on their chair so that is made excessive noise. The intervention would be telling the child to constantly rock their chair for an inordinately long period of time so that the previous reinforcer now has become something aversive for the time being. Satiation can be used also in many different teaching methods but is also get in the way of reinforcement.
Stimulus satiation is another form or this behavioral technique. Stimulus satiation is the reduction in reinforce effectiveness that occurs after a large amount of that reinforce has been obtained. It then becomes aversive or ineffective depending on the situation and if it is experienced to quickly or often. The concept of satiation seems to be allusive in some of our institutions. Many schools are still run on set behavior management systems that don’t change when the students have become satiated and then proceed to wonder why their system is not working. It is so important to provide alternatives and options when giving a reinforcer for an extended amount of time.

Terms: Satiation, behavioral technique, reinforcer, aversive, primary reinforcers, secondary reinforcers, maladaptive behavior, interventions, stimulus satiation.

http://apeachfortheteach.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-satiation-principle-it-feels-little.html

http://books.google.com.tr/books?id=7rvZT5J3osYC&pg=PA1925&lpg=PA1925&dq=Satiation+behavior+modification&source=bl&ots=SEX4Dvq3K6&sig=Ps88KBetWcvcJyv-3ey1yl6ltDQ&hl=en&sa=X&ei=R8NOVL-SLYm8yQT1jIKQAg&ved=0CGIQ6AEwCQ#v=onepage&q=Satiation%20behavior%20modification&f=false

http://books.google.com.tr/books?id=NkB6t5w5LiYC&pg=PA102&lpg=PA102&dq=Satiation+behavior+modification&source=bl&ots=dSk9xiRBoI&sig=nJlnNziLwdwNM-cwGZyFhKkpSMU&hl=en&sa=X&ei=9cNOVIztJoezyQSy8IKADA&ved=0CFwQ6AEwCA#v=onepage&q=Satiation%20behavior%20modification&f=false

Choose a Topic: Social Engineering
How it fits into previous sections: It fits directly into Section 3.5 (Skinner). Because Skinner introduced the idea of social engineering and it's benefits. He also introduced his theory and book entitled "Beyond Freedom and Dignity".
Why it interests you: It interests me because it reminds me a lot of classical conditioning. I find the concept(s) fascinating. To be able to change a person and their behavior simply by altering their environment in any given way to get them to do what you want them to do.

Social Engineering is both revered and approached with caution by many. As noted in my source about the risk of social engineering on information security, it can be used negatively as well as positively. People can obtain very personal information from individual persons or large corporations. They define social engineering in these terms,
"Social Engineering is the act of breaking corporate
security by manipulating employees into divulging
confidential information. It uses psychological
tricks to gain trust, rather than technical cracking
techniques. Social Engineering includes scams
such as obtaining a password by pretending to be
an employee, leveraging social media to identify
new employees more easily tricked into providing
customer information, and any other attempt to
breach security by gaining trust."
The point is, social engineering, like many other manipulative techniques, can be used both positively and negatively. Brian Brushwood says the same thing, just in simpler terms. He states it as "Using dirty psychological tricks to get people to do what you want."
At first glance to some, you may see this as a technique to use to get your kids to start eating their vegetables. But, as it turns out, it can get much more complex than that. It can be used in phishing scams, most common with large corporations. The scammers will use this technique in order to obtain an employees information to hack into the system to get the information they want from the company. This is most common in new employees, as they are less likely to know the signs and red flags when it comes to social engineering. Most commonly this is due to lack of training in the subject. It's becoming more and more of a common issue these days with growing technological advances. And without proper training, we're always going to be one step behind the scammers in their quest to single-handedly undermine the population in order to get what they want.

Sources:
http://www.checkpoint.com/press/downloads/social-engineering-survey.pdf
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY-lMkeZVuY
http://www.haciendapub.com/articles/critique-psychologist-b-f-skinner%E2%80%99s-beyond-freedom-and-dignity

For this weeks topic I choose to write about B.F. Skinner. This relates to class because we have learned about operant conditioning in a few sections along with some information about Skinner. I am very interested in learning more about Skinner because he has had such a huge impact to the field of psychology. I decided to learn a little bit about his background and where he came from, along with Skinner’s invention of operant conditioning, followed by his theories.
A little background information on Skinner, he was born in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania. He attended Hamilton College in New York where he originally wanted to become a writer. He also attended Harvard University and received his B.A. in English literature. After graduation he spent years writing but was going nowhere with it due to his little world experience and no strong personal perspectives to write about. He later encountered with John B. Watson who led him back to school to study psychology and to the development of his own operant behaviorism.
Skinner first invented the operant conditioning chamber, also known to some as the Skinner box. He was a firm believer in the idea that, “human free will was actually an illusion and any human action was the result of the consequences of that same action. If the consequences were bad, there was a high chance that the action would not be repeated; however if the consequences were good, the actions that led to it would be reinforced” also known as reinforcement. Skinner also discovered the rate of response as a dependant variable in psychological research along with inventing the cumulative recorder to-“measure rate of responding as part of his highly influential work on schedules of reinforcement.”
Some theories that Skinner had, had been a particular brand of behaviorism with one being called “Radical behaviorism”. Radical behaviorism is simply the philosophy of the science of behavior. It is said to understand the behavior as a function of environmental histories of reinforcing consequences. It does not accept private events such as thinking, perceptions, and unobservable emotions in a causal account of an organism’s behavior. Most of Skinner’s theories were supposed to be based on self-observation which is why he became a supporter of behaviorism.
Skinner, self observation, radical behaviorism, consequence, reinforcement, operant behaviorism, operant conditioning, Watson.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._F._Skinner
http://www.simplypsychology.org/operant-conditioning.html
http://www.biography.com/people/bf-skinner-9485671?page=2

The topic that I decided to research was self-directed behavior. Self-directed behavior is when you are free to make your own goals and either reinforce or punish yourself. Specifically, I researched New Year’s Resolutions and why they always seem to fail. I wanted to see what others thought about why they failed and how it can be solved. I found many answers to this seemingly simple question! I am interested in this topic for a few reasons. I enjoyed reading about the New Year’s Resolutions in Section 4 about Self-Directed Behavior. It explained how if you google New Year’s Resolutions you can get over 63 million results! I thought it was crazy how big of a deal it is across the globe. I wanted to know about the appeal of resolutions and why the New Year is when people choose to change habits. I wondered why people wait to start being who they want to be at the start of a new year. I was also interested because I make New Year’s Resolutions every year and it is very rare that I keep up with them. One year, I just so happened to go to the gym on New Year’s Day and the gym was completely packed! So many people were working out because it was part of their New Year’s Resolutions. The next few weeks, the gym was still pretty busy, but over time less and less people would be at the gym. I found this very interesting.

Through my research, I found many different reasons for why resolutions fail so often. According to the researcher Richard Wiseman, 88 percent of people fail to meet their New Year’s Resolution each year. That is approximately 156 million failed resolutions and disappointed people each year! One main reason I found for failing is that people had vague aspirations. We discussed this in class as well. People would use a behavioral class instead of a target behavior. Goals need to be specific so it is easier to accomplish them and stick with them. Another main reason that it fails is because the brain does not have enough willpower. The pre-frontal cortex handles willpower and this part of the brain is like a muscle; it needs to be trained to build up willpower. The last main reason I found is that we do not put ourselves in an environment to succeed. With proper antecedents, our behaviors and consequences will be more likely to succeed. We need to set ourselves up for success if we ever hope to succeed.

Through my research, I found many ways to help people succeed in their New Year’s Resolutions. It is important to pick one resolution at a time. This way, the pre-frontal cortex does not become overwhelmed. Also, break down your goal into habits that can be maintained. In other words, take baby steps! When something becomes habit, it is more likely you will keep it up for a long period of time. I also found that positive feedback and rewards increase people’s chance for success. This goes along with what the class has learned about positive reinforcement. People should try to use reinforcement whenever they can instead of punishment. Last, I found that resolutions are more sustainable when they are shared. Finding a buddy to set goals with can help because you can hold each other accountable.

Terms: self-directed behavior, reinforcement, punishment, behavioral class, target behavior, antecedent, behavior, consequences, positive reinforcement

http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/30/health/new-years-resolutions-different/index.html

http://blog.bufferapp.com/the-science-of-new-years-resolutions-why-88-fail-and-how-to-make-them-work

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Year%27s_resolution

I have decided to do a little more research on Watson and more specifically introspection and systematic desensitization. Introspection is the examination of one’s conscious thoughts and feelings. The process of introspection relies on the observation of one’s mental state. In the spiritual context it may refer to the examination of one’s own soul. Introspection is related to human self-reflection and is contrasted with external observation. During Watson’s time psychology was divided into the structuralists and the functionalists. The structuralists were interested in breaking psychology down into its elements using introspection. Systematic desensitization is a behavioral method used to help people overcome fears and phobias. There are three main steps in systematic desensitization. First you must identify the cause of the anxiety. Next you must learn coping mechanisms or incompatible responses. And finally use counter conditioning to connect the stimulus and coping mechanism. It is known as one of the most effective therapy technique. It is not used as much anymore as flooding has taken its place.
Terms: Watson, introspection, systematic desensitization, observation, psychology, structuralists, functionalists, behavioral method, stimulus, counter conditioning, flooding.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introspection
http://www.uni.edu/~maclino/bm/book/sec3.4.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_desensitization

My topic for this blog assignment is animal intelligence and this fits into this class because often animals are used to study behavior because they are consider part of the learning continuum of animals and humans. This means that animals learn in similar ways as humans do, so we can study their behavior and learning experiences to gain insight about human’s behavior and learning experiences. I’m interested in this because my brothers dog recently had puppies(If anyone wants one, or knows someone that would, they are for sale by the way) and he is going to start training one for my mom. We often get into disagreements about how to train dogs because he believes he has it all figured out since he has trained a fair amount. I disagree with his methods however and believe any animal is capable of learning whatever you want to teach it as long as it’s possible for them to physically do. He says that these dogs are really hard-headed, won’t listen well, and require punishment often. I think that’s ridiculously untrue and he just doesn’t know how to use reinforcement right. So, after doing some research on animal intelligence I have figured out where it started and what has been discovered.

Animal intelligence is also known as animal cognition, and refers to the mental capabilities of animals. It started with research on animal conditioning and learning. The persons that sparked and drove this early research were Thorndike and Pavlov with their puzzle boxes and drooling dogs. Then came along Watson and Skinner with their writings, experiment, and operant chambers and they discovered research that more clearly defined Thorndike and Pavlov’s conditioning methods of operant and classical conditioning, respectively. Research in animal’s intelligence spurred on from this point and discovered many things. Of these things, a study found the volume of an animal’s brain has connections to the animal’s intelligence level by showing high levels of self-control and cognitive power. However as this may have some significance, research has also discovered very small brains performing specific and intelligent tasks. Such examples are bees who can count, categorize, and differentiate between stimuli and fish who can tell the different between pitch and timbre of different classical composers. It’s been discovered that dogs can learn up to 250 words and signals and understand arithmetic. This varies by bread but the average dog can learn up to 165 words. Elephants have learned speak, and also understand, some words in Korean. These words were often commands given to the elephant, such as sit down, lay down etc. Red deer have been shown to learn and teach other deer lessons in the Czech Republic. Red deer in this area will not cross a line that was once habited by an electric fence in the Cold War that stood 20 years ago. With these deer dying and reproducing each 15 years, this shows that the deer learned this area was bad, more than likely throw punishment, and taught the young generations the same.

All of this can be related to the animals experiencing some form of operant or classical conditioning with their environments, and obviously animals can possess a higher level of intelligence then is required for them to survive. For example, why would goldfish need to be able to tell Bach from Beethoven in order to survive? But yet they can, and dogs can be trained to “Go to bed” and that 1 + 2 doesn’t equal 5. Overall, animal intelligence is a growing field of interest still, and should be noted when regarding animals, because they are more then what they seem, and can even teach us something about ourselves when it comes to learning new behaviors. As far as my brother’s puppies, I know for sure they can at least learn 165 words now and that it doesn’t require punishment to do so.

URLs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_cognition
http://news.discovery.com/animals/10-surprising-facts-about-animal-intelligence-140402.htm
http://www.calacademy.org/explore-science/animal-intelligence

Terms: behavior, classical conditioning, operant conditioning, Pavlov, Skinner, Thorndike, Watson, reinforcement, punishment

I decided to look into how goal setting and behavior modification are tied together. I think that they are very closely related because to set goals you must find a target behavior that you want to increase or decrease and follow a plan to achieve the outcome you want. I thought it would be interesting because most goal setting procedures are self-directed and it would tie in nicely with the project we are beginning.

People set goals so they can see improvement in themselves and to be motivated to make a change. Goals help direct your life and make the ideal version of life possible. They give you long-term vision and short-term motivation. Setting lifetime goals gives you perspective and shapes the rest of the smaller goals you will make. So say a goal is to be healthier, that is a very broad lifetime goal within that goal you could say I want a healthier diet, and even within that goal you could say I want to cut out processed foods. Goals can be put on a scale of size.

One easy way to make good goals is to follow the "SMART" criteria. Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely. All of these factors greatly influence the success rate of goals. All goals should be positive statements, that are very precise. Being as specific as possible will only be helpful in the long run. Goals should also be realistic. It would only be frustrating to set a goal where there is very little chance of achieving it.

Goals are a type of behavior modification that many people take part in. They might not be following a very strict set of guidelines but they are nonetheless going to experience some of the same things. Once a goal has been achieved it is important to remember to reinforce yourself for keeping with the plan you set for yourself.

Terminology: target behavior, reinforce
URLs: http://www.mindtools.com/page6.html
http://www.sparkpeople.com/resource/wellness_articles.asp?id=696
http://www.exrx.net/Psychology/Goals.html

The topic that I decided to write and learn more about is social engineering. This fits into the class because B.F. Skinner was a big proponent of this. It is also one way that behavioral modification could be used, this is more of a controversial way for behavioral modification to be used. Social engineering is the thought that by controlling the environment we could control the persons behavior and even change it radically. I chose this topic because it simply seemed interesting, I have also read books like 1984 by George Orwell and this is the exact world that could come from social engineering. Learning more about the science behind books like these seemed very interesting to me and the more you educate your self the easier it is to spot that you are being manipulated.

Social engineering on the surface sounds wonderful. If we control how everyone behaviors then things like crime, war, and racism disappear. That also means that we would live in a world run by one person or a group of people, this could be seen as a problem and I personally think that it is a problem. we do this to a point today and more in the past with propaganda. Propaganda is a form of communication aimed at influencing the attitude of the people towards one cause. We do this a lot with wars if the person supports it they are reinforced by the feeling that they stand on the correct side of the issue. If they do not support it they are punished for being on the "wrong" side of the issue. This propaganda is made to elicit the behavior to support what they the propagandist wants us to support. This is a form of social engineering that clearly works. The media of today is also a form of social engineering, there is a lot of fear mongering in the media to put the people into a state of fear and follow the governments instructions blindly. This clip of the John Stuart show expertly points out the fear mongering of the media to control the people's fear levels. I believe this is the biggest way that we see social engineering in our country to day to get people to emit the behavior that is wanted.

Terms used-B.F. Skinner, Social engineering, behavior modification, elicit, behavior, emit, reinforced, punished,

Links
http://www.uni.edu/~maclino/bm/book/sec3.5.pdf
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wH7kBUHnJlY
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda

I chose to do my topic for this assignment on the ethics of experiments, mainly of psychology experiments. I became interested in this topic after reading about the section on Watson, but more importantly, when I read about his Little Albert Study.

Some of the questions I wanted to know were: How was it that this was allowed, as it was clear that Albert was very frightened? What other experiments have been found unethical? and What makes an unethical study? Also a little about animal use in research.

I found that ethics are referred to as the correct rules of conduct necessary when carry out research. That there is a moral responsibility had by researchers to protect the participants from harm. Some of the ethical issues that researchers must address are as follows: informed consent, debriefing, protection of participants, deception, confidentiality, and withdrawal from study. Informed consent means getting permission to use the person in the experiment after the researcher has outlined what the research is about. Debriefing is letting the participant know at the end of the study what the researcher was looking for and why. Protection is obvious, but those involved in the research must not be caused any distress, and are protected from any physical or mental harm. Deception refers to not misleading the participants or wrongly informing them of the aims of the research. A famous case for this was the obedience study done by Stanley Milgram. Confidentiality refers to the participants information and data well be kept anonymous, unless they gave full consent. Withdrawal from the study refers to the fact that at anytime within the study if a participant feels they need to stop, they can.

As I stated in the above paragraph, Stanley Milgram's study on obedience was an example of an unethical study because it included deception of the participants. Some of the more famous unethical studies include Monkey Drug trials (1969), and the case of David Reimer (1965-2004). These were studies found unethical for different reasons. The Monkey Drug Trials were found unethical because the monkeys were taught to inject themselves with drugs (cocaine, morphine, codeine, and amphetamines). The animals became so disturbed that they broke their arms trying to escape. Some died after just 2 weeks. The experiment was done to figure out the effects of addiction and drug use, and in most cases animals are okay to experiment on, but in this case the study should have not required such a brutal treatment of the animals. The case of David Reimer was unethical because a psychologist wanted to prove nurture not nature determined gender identity. This is because David was born a male, had his genitalia burnt off, the psychologist suggested having him grow up a girl, and then David learned his true birth gender and went back to male. He later committed suicide at age of 38. This was unethical in so many ways because the psychologist never got consent and ruined the lives of the parents and of David.

As we saw how even animal studies can be found unethical, how is it that animals can be tested on? Well, from my understanding animals are used alot in research, and they have helped scientists have been able to learn alot from their use to be able to help improve quality of life, new medicine and treatments for many people. There are groups that advocate for the abolition of animal use in experiments. PETA is one of those groups. In the United Kingdom they have gone further than any other country to write an ethical framework into law on the use of animals in experiments.

From the research I did online I was able to gain a better understanding on the ethics of experiments.

While reading the last section of the reading; I came across the idea of self-directed behaviors and how someone can easily change their behavior based on how they are feeling and how much someone wants to change. For example when we talk about New Year’s Resolutions, how many times do we put a resolution out there but how many times do we actually follow through with them. I feel as if more people than not cancel out their resolution plans. I know I sure do.

According to Forbes only 8 percent of people achieve their New Year’s Resolution goals. They actually have a desire for the improvement and the actions. 40-45 percent make a goal but only out of that 8 percent achieve that. Most of those people make the resolution that they would like to lose weight. The funny thing is that most of these resolutions begin to lose their maintenance and their percentages begin drop. From 75 percent during the first week down to 46 percent within the past 6 weeks after starting their resolutions.

I believe that these resolutions fell through because of they weren’t simple enough or tangible enough. You want a resolution that is going to be easy and not so hard that you wouldn’t be able to finish it or even begin it. The person also needs to have faith in themselves and believe they can do it. We talked about in our reading journal that the new behavior must be something that we want and something that can easily be changed. It may not be exactly what we want to change but it is most likely for the better. Self-directed behavior is always something is put on us and not anyone else. We want to increase or decrease the behavior but most of the time we want to decrease our weight or our smoking habits.

Self-directed behavior, increase, decrease,

http://www.statisticbrain.com/new-years-resolution-statistics/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/dandiamond/2013/01/01/just-8-of-people-achieve-their-new-years-resolutions-heres-how-they-did-it/

http://ideas.time.com/2013/12/30/new-years-resolutions-are-bad-for-you/

For this topical blog I choose to research superstitious behavior. I choose this topic because in class I found it very interesting to look at superstitions as behavioral. It is important to research different aspects of superstition such as being positive and negative and being possibly related to different psychological disorders. I was interested in looking at how superstitious behavior relates to OCD and whether they are separate entities or are they comorbid. I also was interested in seeing how superstition influenced people’s lives both positively and negatively. This topic relates to class because we discussed superstitious behavior as it relates to operant conditioning. A person is reinforced for random behaviors that they believe were reinforced for a reason and this leads to superstitious behaviors.

In doing research, OCD and superstitious behavior are not the same thing but are correlated with one another. People with OCD often have compulsions to do rituals over and over again, often interfering with everyday life. Superstitious behavior is not compulsions but rather behavior that occurs over and over due to unintentional reinforcement. Wanting more control or certainty is the driving force behind most superstitions. We tend to look for some kind of a rule, or an explanation for why things happen. While some of the symptoms of OCD can mimic superstitious behavior research shows that they do not relate to one another. Researchers state that they don't think of anxiety disorders, such as OCD, as superstitious thinking. They think of anxiety disorders as irrational thinking. However some people with OCD can develop superstitious behavior based on being reinforced by their environment. Some people may develop thoughts about the fear of thinking about something will cause it to happen which is superstitious thoughts.

A sense of security and confidence are perhaps the greatest benefits we get emotionally from superstitious thinking or behavior. Superstitious behaviors can lead to a positive placebo effect. This means that people think something will help them or be beneficial for them and it appears to be that way but there is not real evidence to back that up. Superstitious behavior is the idea that there is power in belief. This belief could be that you’ve done well due to wearing your lucky shoes, for example, it might prove wise to wear those shoes again. This repetition of behavior and reinforcement then relieves anxiety and promotes positive thoughts. Superstitious behavior is very similar to the affect that placebos have on our bodies. It can be reasonable to imply that in the same way, the body elicits a response to a placebo and gives us faster reactions our body may do the same thing with our superstitious behaviors. Our body's reaction can make us physically perform better. This suggests that superstitious behavior can be beneficial and should be used at times when we feel highly-pressured and feel that the consequences of our actions are uncertain. This may trick our bodies into enhancing our performance and lowering our anxiety.

Superstitious behavior can also have a negative effect on a person. If a person loses their lucky object then they are more likely to believe that they will not do well. This may bring about the opposite affect and cause the person to have a self-fulfilling prophecy and do bad because they believe they have it. The power of suggestion is very influential and can have a negative effect on people. Superstitions can also play a negative role in our lives, especially when combined with a bad habit such as gambling. If you're a compulsive gambler who believes that you can get lucky, then that belief may contribute to your problem. The idea of being lucky and feeling like the next hand or slot machine will make you lucky can cause a person to spiral into debt and more gambling problems. Phobic superstitions can also interfere with our lives, and cause a lot of anxiety. For example, people who are afraid of the number 13 might change go out of their way to avoid the number to avoid unnecessary anxiety. These types of superstitions offer no benefit at all.

URLS:
http://www.webmd.com/mental-health/features/psychology-of-superstition
https://afshinpsychology.wordpress.com/2012/02/18/superstition-the-irrational-placebo-effect/
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/theory-and-psychopathology/201310/superstition-psychological-anarchy

TERMS: superstitious behavior, OCD, comorbid, operant conditioning, reinforcement, placebo effect, elicits, anxiety, self-fulfilling prophecy, behavior,

This week I chose to discuss the manipulation that’s taking place that most of us are barely aware of. Adding taxes and creating tax credits affect all of us in America and while they are producing revenue, they are shaping our behavior as well. I know I have thought of this before, but it must have been years since I’ve put much thought into this topic. After reading about this in this week’s text, I began wondering of ways this affects us. You mentioned things such as cigarettes, so I decided to go explore others. I’ve always been interested in politics and government, and have always tried to stay up to date with things going on. I like the debate aspect in these areas, and knew researching this topic would bring up plenty of information from both sides of the spectrum.
Last year was the 100th anniversary of the modern tax. Yes there was a time when April had another meaning other than tax month. Before a price sticker wasn’t really what it cost, and before participating in certain purchases could give you money back. We are told that tax revenue is what our country runs on, with that in mind a time without taxes seems impossible, but yet it was. Before February 1913 there was a very different system; A very simple one. Before 1913 the government got its money from one main source, tariffs. A tariff is a tax that is placed on imports and exports. That one tax was able to cover the nation’s expenses, and it was actually able to get the nation out of national debt. Why does this still not work? Well many reasons why this wouldn’t work in these times. We now have a much larger expense as a nation. We now include things like welfare, social security and medicaid in our expenses. We also have a much larger population. Add a large population and a huge amount of extra expenses, and taking care of that with tariffs alone would be impossible. So okay we see there is a need for taxes, but how much? How far do we have to go to cover these expenses or could it be the government is trying to do more than one thing with taxes? While you mentioned cigarettes, and the sin tax that is applied to things like cigarettes and alcohol because they’re bad for our health. The government is hoping adding an extra cost to something with deter you from doing it, because ‘they’ve’ decided it isn’t good for you. What they have decided was morally bad for us, they thought it was morally okay to make money off of. So basically, we’re taking moral advice from somebody with no morals. Other ways taxes affect us is things such as charity. You don’t have to count money you’ve given to charity on your taxes, which makes giving to charity more alluring. You’ll get tax breaks on buying energy efficient cars, solar panels, and other things that are good for the environment. Well you may not have thought of buying a Prius before, now it may not sound like such a bad idea. I am not one to decide whether what the government is doing is ‘bad’ or not. You taught us in the beginning of the semester that just because it’s manipulation doesn’t mean it’s bad. Looking through material especially during election time brought plenty of biased cut throat information. Whether it’s truly to be beneficial to society, or just to make money, we’ll be paying come April either way.

http://reason.com/archives/2014/04/09/tax-code-manipulation
The above link was useful by pointing out how exactly the government manipulates us into certain behaviors.

http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/history/item/14268-before-the-income-tax
This was very informational in the historical part of my writing, discussing times before we paid taxes and how things were handled.

https://www.udel.edu/htr/American/Texts/macro.html
This website went much more in depth about how the government works and the taxes we've acquired.

My topic for this assignment is potty training, specifically techniques for potty training children. This topic fits into the material we have covered so far for two main reasons. One reason it fits is potty training is an example of other-directed behavior, where it is other who control the availability of reinforcers. Reason number two why this topic fits into what we have covered so far is this process of potty training involves reinforcement. The behavior of a child going to the bathroom on the toilet directly results in the receiving a reinforcer. I am interested in this topic because recently I have been babysitting a lot for kids who are in the process of being potty training which has got me thinking and wondering about what the best technique is for potty training children.

In order for any potty training to begin, the child must be ready. Parents should look for behaviors the child emits that signals they are ready to be potty trained. For example, the child is interested in the potty. After the child is showing signs of being ready, a plan must be developed, and this plan must be carried out by all caretakers. There are many different ways a parent can go about potty training, a few of the most researched and most frequently used techniques are the child oriented approach, parent-led potty training, bear-bottom approach, and fast-track approach.

In child-oriented approach to potty training the parent waits to begin the training until the child shows signs of being ready. This approach is done in a series of steps, and each step must not begin until the child shows interest. The first step is taking the child to the store to pick out a potty. The next step is to encourage the child to sit on the potty with his or her clothes on. Next, the parent can empty the child’s diaper into the toilet so they understand what the potty is for. The next step is when the child sits on the potty bear bottomed and goes to the bathroom. To encourage this, children can be allowed to play in the house with underwear on and the potty visible with the goal for the child to make the connection. The rest of the steps, like emptying the potty chair into the toilet, flushing, and washing their hands should also wait to be done until the child shows interest. This approach is often associated with potty training at an older age.

In the gradual, parent-led potty training several different approaches are combined. The approach begins with getting the child prepared to begin potty training months ahead of time. This can be done by taking the child to the store to pick out a potty chair, leaving the chair out at home, and encouraging the child to sit and play on the potty while clothed. After the child is used to the potty and comfortable with the chair is when training begins. The actual training process begins with practice runs by looking for signs that the child needs to go to the bathroom and when these signs appear, taking the child to the potty. Encouragement is given to the child to use the potty and if the child does go to the bathroom in the potty, the child should be given reinforcement in the form of praise and maybe rewards. If the child sits on the potty for more than five minutes and doesn’t go to the bathroom, the child should be taken off the potty. Practice runs should not be used too often, and after practice runs are successful, periodical reminders should be used.

The bare-bottom approach is used for children over 30 months who have used the potty with assistance before. This approach allows children to run around the house naked, allowing them to figure out for themselves when they have to go to the bathroom. This approach is based on the idea that children don’t like wetting themselves. This approach must begin with a large amount of time blocked out. The child’s clothes are removed below the waist and the child is encouraged to play and drink lots of fluids. It is easiest if the child is contained to a specific room and the potty is nearby. The parent must be present with the child during this process. If the child has an accident the parent has a mess on their hands, so this approach should be performed in a place that is easy to clean, it is often done outside if it is nice. When you clean-up the messes, it is really important for the parent to still be positive with the child.

Fast track approach can come in various lengths. There are approaches out there meant to potty train a child in one day and some in three or more, but all of these approaches have the same goal: to potty train and to potty train fast. Fast track approaches greatly vary depending on the child, some children they work easily, and others require a method of lengthier use. The first step to these approaches is to develop the right communication with the child on what going to the potty looks like. The fast track approaches require commitment not to use diapers, having the child go straight to underwear or the bear bottom method. The parents need to schedule a time where day(s) can be devoted to potty training. The child’s day must start off by right away being put on the potty. The child should then receive lots of liquids throughout the day, with the parents consistently asking if they have to go to the bathroom, never leaving the child’s side. If the child starts to go to the bathroom, the parent should ignore the accident mess and immediately the child should be taken to the potty and instructed on this is where they go potty. This process continues as the designated days continue on, with the hope that by the end of them they will be potty trained.

With each different potty training approach, positive reinforcement in the form of praise is key. With each step the child makes in the training process, the child must be encouraged and told what a great job they are doing. This positive reinforcement is often taken a step further in various approaches by giving the child a physical reward after each step, like a sticker or a treat. Another characteristic of all potty training approaches is the withholding of punishment. The child will have accidents no matter what approach is used, and when this happens, the parents need to practice remaining calm, not getting mad or punishing the child, but instead reacting with grace and encouragement.

Terms: other-directed behavior, reinforcer, behavior, reinforcement, punishment, positive reinforcement, emit

http://pottytrainingearly.com/potty-training-methods/how-to-potty-train-toddlers-the-fast-track-method/
http://www.babycenter.com/0_potty-training-what-works_4397.bc?page=2
http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-living/infant-and-toddler-health/in-depth/potty-training/art-20045230
http://www.parentingscience.com/potty-training-techniques.html

My topic is on self-directed learning. Self-directed learning fits in with self-directed behavior which we have been learning about in class. I am so fascinated by the way our brain works and how we can influence our own behavior and our own learning skills. This fascination is what drove me to research self-directed learning.
Self-directed learning includes desiring to learn something. Studies have shown that if students are not interested in the topic, they will more than likely forget the things they had to learn for that class. When students use self-directed learning, they remember things very easily. I know from experience that this is true. All of my history classes I had to take in high school were not fun and I did not desire to learn about them. Now in my humanities classes here on campus, I know that I have learned about many of the things we are talking about, but I do not remember the facts about it because it was not interesting to me. I remember all of my art classes and everything I did in art in high school. This not only is because I love art, but because my teacher gave me the freedom to self-direct my learning. He let us draw, paint, or sculpt whatever we wanted as long as he approved of it. He was an easy going teacher and would only disprove of a picture you chose if he knew it would be too challenging for you. This allowed me to enjoy the class and learn a lot. I still remember most of the things we did, the terms we used, and the things to look for for improvement. The thing that schools do to stop this self-directing learning to is to emit learning the information being taught as something that they want us to learn. They are so focused on what they want us to be and not letting us explore ourselves that we end up not self-directing our behaviors. This defeats the purpose of learning. Students will only remember things that they want to learn. Students need to learn how to think for themselves as well as do activities and make decisions on their own. If teachers could help students to do this, students would retain more of the topics they are taught.

TERMS: self-directed learning, self-directed behavior, behavior, emit

http://www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/issues/students/learning/lr200.htm
http://www.eiconsortium.org/reprints/self-directed_learning.html
http://www.education.com/referen\ce/article/Ref_Self_Directed/

I am very interested in the topic of self-directed behavior as I know many people are, and how it works when it comes to modifying eating behaviors. This topic applies directly to section 4.1 which covers self-directed behavior, other-directed behavior and a variety of other topics. I am very interested in self-directed behavior because I am constantly trying to change behaviors in life to better myself, but I constantly struggle with my eating behaviors. There are long periods of time, where it is great and I hardly have to think about my eating habits, they just come naturally, while other periods of time, it is very difficult and a daily struggle to get my eating where it needs to be-well rounded and just right.

There is so much to take into account when changing a behavior, but with following guidelines, discipline, and a desire to change many changes can occur. One of the first things to do when it comes to self-directed behavior and eating (many of these are applicable to a variety of aspects/behaviors) is to start small with your diet. Which means, taking small steps towards your goal. It would be very difficult and may not change your behavior in the long run if you say, I want to cut out all sweets for the rest of my life. Instead it may be good to have one sweet a day and then go from there. Taking one step at a time will help set you up for success. Stick to it, master it, and then you can move on!

Another aspect of behavior modification is don't rely on willpower to change your behaviors especially those that you want to last for a long time. It is a lot for your brain to take it when you are going to quite something cold turkey. There are times this works, but generally it is not a successful route to take in behavior modification. A method that will help instead of willpower would be to look at your antecedents such as environment. Do not ignore your environment. If you are in a setting that elicits poor eating choices or overeating, you may need to remove yourself. If you are constantly surrounded by people who make poor eating decisions, it will be that much harder to change your own behaviors. Environment plays a large role in behavior change. What you pour in to your mind and body influence you.

Change your thinking as well. Convincing yourself that eating healthy is beneficial and not just eating healthy and then eating a dessert, but complete healthy eating has tremendous health benefits! Don't focus on the hard things, but focus on success and moving forward. Where you focus your mind plays a large role in self-directed behavior and the necessary change you want to see.

If eating healthy and cutting out desserts is important enough to me, I will be diligent and committed to doing so. If I am not committed, I may do poorly on changing my behaviors or may give up completely. Find what motivates you to change your behavior. If you follow the right process it won't be so hard to change your behavior either. Following the right process such as setting goals, keeping records, etc. will help significantly. If you just say I want to eat less and no more desserts that is it, what are the defining lines? It would be better to say. I can only have one large plate of food a meal and the food cannot be stacked on top of each other. I can only have one dessert a day which includes all items with unnatural sugars that can be 1 ounce or smaller.

Self-directed behavior also includes a need to change your daily routine. Stimuli will otherwise elicit certain (habitual) behaviors. When I go to the dinning center it is a habit to walk around the whole dinning center and evaluate all of the foods and then after dinner I always go look at the desserts. I need to break my daily routine but choosing the first food item I think looks good and taking it, then only looking at desserts if I am craving them and have not had my one dessert for the day. Get out of the bad habit and get into the good habit that you would like.

Some other necessary aspects when it comes to self-directed behavior and food do not just become educated about healthy food and actions, but act. If you know a wealth of information, but do not live it out, it is useless to your cause (unless you are teaching others). Make sure these goals/target behaviors are concrete behaviors because otherwise it will be hard to know if you are actually executing them/acting on them. Goals have to be specific so you know your plan of action.

Of course flaws will occur along the way with self-directed behaviors, we are human and take into account the frequency and duration for the modified behavior. There are many components to take into account when changing a self-directed behavior, but if you are devoted and follow the guidelines such as those talked about above and those listed in the section(setting goals, specify target behavior, keep a record, graph a baseline, determine contingencies, determine antecedents, implement and adjust the contingencies), success should hopefully be sweet!

Terms:self-directed behavior, modified behavior, other-directed behavior, antecedents, elicit, goals, target behavior, contingency, baseline, stimuli

URL's:
http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/49021/selfdirectedbeha00kolb.pdf?sequence=1

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

http://www.slideshare.net/MatSouthwell/self-directed-behaviour-change

The topic I chose for this week's assignment is New Year’s Resolutions (goals). This relates to sections 4.0-4.2. Self-directed behavior steps will increase the likelihood a person will fulfill their goal. As the text stated, the reason people make goals that involve changing behavior is because the behavior annoys us or others around us. It is usually a negative behavior.

According to a study from the University of Scranton, 8 of the top 10 resolutions made for 2014 would directly address problems that stem from a person wanting to change a behavior for the reasons stated above. Of the 45% of people who made New Year’s Resolutions, only 8% actually succeeded. This means that a lot of people fail every year, and I wanted to find the most common reasons people failed at succeeding and try to find way to correct for that. Two of the main reasons people fail to reach goals, is the goal is too broad or they make it up as they go. This can avoided by doing step 2 of the self-directed behavior steps. By defining exactly what behaviors will lead to the goal being accomplished, the goal seems doable. Not keeping track is another reason New Year’s Resolutions fail. If the goal is not being reached because the person has no proof of improvement, the goal will likely be dropped: step 3 of self-directed behavior would solve this problem and help insure success. Another reason goals fail is that the goal is kept a secret, having as few as one other person know that Tom (for example) is going to stop drinking pop. People will help insure the goal is successful because they can provide support and may even join which would create solidarity. The last reason is a lack of a positive reward system, punishing oneself for failing/not acknowledging small achievements within the goal will only lead to aversive feelings and outcomes: so reinforcing behavior with a pleasurable valence will increase the chances the goal will be met.

Along that same page, I started to wonder how often people decide to make goals to change behavior. It turns out that “the first of (week, month, year)” is the most common time. They do this by using “nudges” to change the environment (antecedents) in a way that will support the desired behavioral changes. With this new knowledge, I can make my 2015 New Year’s Resolution of being able to exercise 3 days per week (minimum) possible.

Terms: Antecedents, nudges, behavior, reinforcing, pleasurable valence, aversive, outcomes, self-directed behavior steps, punishing
http://www.statisticbrain.com/new-years-resolution-statistics/
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/12/why-we-make-resolutions-and-why-they-fail.html
http://psychcentral.com/lib/rethink-those-failed-new-years-resolutions/00018625

APLK
The topic that I chose to do my blog over this week is Self-Directed Behavior Modification. Although I learned a lot from reading the sections provided to use this week, I wanted to further my knowledge on the topic. I’m interested in self-directed behavior modification because I have several behaviors that I believe could be changed to make my life more positive and I prefer to do things on my own when it comes to changes aspects about myself.

Self-directed behavior modification is just another method for changing certain behaviors and is sought out and carried out by you. This method modifies a targeted behavior and takes a series of steps to do so. A big part of the success of this process is to keep track of your baseline data to determine what aspects of your behavior need to be changes and what aspects are contributing to your behavior. Self-directed behavior modification also relies on reinforcements to help you reach your ultimate goal. It is important that you identify your targeted behavior and make sure that it is concrete and observable. You also need to identify specific situations that the certain behavior occurs in and choose something that you are motivated to change. You also need to identify whether the goal is short term or long term in order to map out the length of time your process will be.

In most cases, this process should be observed for a week or so. You can use some principles of classical and operant conditioning when doing self-behavior modification. A week or so should be spent keeping track of your behaviors in a journal or diary. It is also important to make sure that your goal is obtainable for you and that you focus on one problem at a time. It is normal to become discouraged when you fail during this process but you need to expect mistakes, don’t blame any failures or mistakes on your personality and always prepare for temptations. The success you will get with self-directed modification depends greatly on your own willingness to go slowly and stick with the process.

During self-directed behavior modification, you can choose to increase a behavior, such as drinking more water every day or getting more exercise, or you can work towards getting rid of an undesirable behavior, like biting your nails. For example, if you want to stop biting your nails, you can stop the behavior by becoming aware of the situations that bring on the behavior and making sure that you have a way to occupy your hands in those situations to keep from biting your nails. Examples of reward systems can be to keep tallies in a journal or maybe carrying around toothpicks in your purse to keep track. There are unlimited amounts of reinforcements and rewards depending on the behavior you wish to modify.

Terms: reinforcement, self-directed, targeted behavior, classical conditioning, observant conditioning, behavior modification

http://www.mhhe.com/cls/psy/ch14/behmod.mhtml
http://www.slideshare.net/MatSouthwell/self-directed-behaviour-change
http://www.psychologicalselfhelp.org/Chapter11.pdf

After having read the section on John B. Watson and his use of animals such as white rats and pigeons as test subjects for psychological research I became interested in how the use of animals became to be as well as the ethical issues that have come to light since then. There is no doubt that much good has come from the use of animals in testing but since the start there has been controversy between animal rights activists and those testing on animals of whether it is right or wrong.
The history of using animals as research subjects is one that goes back hundreds of years to the 9th century when studying the behavioral characteristics of ants. This idea of studying animal behavior and how it relates to humans spawned a new field of psychology called comparative psychology. After many years, the use of animals in behavioral psychology as well as many other fields such as biopsychology became very common. Many famous discoveries in behavioral psychology have been discovered through the use of animals as test subjects such as Pavlov’s classical conditioning.
Tons of discoveries have been made through the use of animals as subjects and there has always been controversy on the ethical issues about the treatment of the animals involved. Although, not all experimentation is harmful to the subjects themselves, the arguments for the use of animals as test subjects is very positive because even the small percentage that are injured or sacrificed for advancements in psychology are worth it. An example of a study where animals are left unharmed would be Watson’s Little Albert study where there was a discovery made in behavior where the animal used was not harmed.
Over the years organizations such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) have arisen in the defense of animals used in research and added to the controversy on whether it is ethical or not. Such organizations will argue that the life of a rat in a laboratory is just as valuable as a young boy’s and each should be treated with care. However, even with the outcry from groups such as PETA there are not many legitimate ethical issues when it comes to the testing of animals. What the general public may not be aware of are the very strict animal welfare laws put in place by the federal and state government. These laws such as the 3R’s ensure that all animals used for any type of research are placed in the best type of environment. The 3R’s consist of Replacement, Reduction, and Refinement. The replacement factor states that research that is able to be done without the use of animal test subjects must be done so while reduction states that the number of test subjects used must be kept at an absolute minimum and refinement ensures animals used for testing are given the most stimulating environment possible.
Even with all of the controversy in the use of animals in any kind of research there are plans to completely eliminate the ethical dilemmas. The Humane Society of the United States and other non-profit organizations are making plans with lawmakers in order to end the use of animals in testing in hopes of finding other alternatives. Among these alternatives is the use of stem cell generated human cells for research or more practical ways to study human behavior. Their hope is to end all animal research by the year 2050.
Terms: John B. Watson, Behavior, psychological research, ethics, Little Albert study, Refinement, Replacement, Reduction

http://speakingofresearch.com/facts/animal-welfare-the-3rs/
https://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2012/04/animal-research.aspx
http://www.neavs.org/research/cbt

My topic is parenting from a differential reinforcement standpoint. The information I found was mostly positive with those with disabilities so I imagined that not only would these strategies work on your children in the future or present, but would also work on your infants and very young children. Differential reinforcement of alternative behavior (DRA) is very effective in combating undesirable behaviors. Even though I use the word “combating,” the very process of DRA is non-aversive. There are many variables that can be tweaked with DRA and one includes magnitude of the reinforcement. The higher the magnitude, or perceived pleasure to be received from the reinforcement, the more likely that the magnitude of the alternative behavior will also increase. You can then play around with the magnitude, so that you only have to give high magnitude reinforcement at certain variations of intervals or ratios. This would keep emitted behavior relatively similar in quality and quantity. Interval-based reinforcement has shown to be one of the most popular and effective ways to administer reinforcement. By using constant DRA and then moving to discontinuous DRA like we just talked about, you will see a continuation of the behaviors, but by using interval DRA you will be able to get the most out of your reinforcement and target behavior. Fixed-time intervals of reinforcement are incredibly powerful and useful techniques for preventing resurgence of problematic behavior and promoting alternative pleasurable behaviors. However, while spaced‐responding DRA, “in which a reinforcer (is) delivered contingent on each response if a specified interval had passed since the last response” is very similar to full‐session DRA, “in which a reinforcer (is) presented at the end of an interval if the response rate (is) below criterion within the specified interval,” the spaced-responding DRA is much more effective. While the full-session DRA will still allow for continued alternative behavior more so than ceasing reinforcement and allowing for extinction, if you don't reinforce them contingent upon their behavior, they will tend to cease the alternative behavior or go back to their initial undesirable behavior because they will receive the reinforcement either way.

Differential reinforcement, aversive, pleasurable, contingent, reinforcer, extinction, emitted, interval-based reinforcement, ratio

http://web.b.ebscohost.com.proxy.lib.uni.edu/ehost/detail/detail?sid=1855c55c-b0df-4c1c-ba33-4e2af3cc705c%40sessionmgr114&vid=0&hid=115&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=psyh&AN=2014-41242-001

http://web.b.ebscohost.com.proxy.lib.uni.edu/ehost/detail/detail?sid=b6c87279-95ae-4e78-bb35-ca83f5009e1d%40sessionmgr112&vid=0&hid=115&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=psyh&AN=2014-21361-001

http://web.b.ebscohost.com.proxy.lib.uni.edu/ehost/detail/detail?sid=9afade2d-bc0b-4cc3-bd65-0b80efcbc8d5%40sessionmgr113&vid=0&hid=115&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=psyh&AN=2014-17530-001

I chose to learn more about conditional emotional responses. The only very briefly touched on this subject, not even giving a definition for the term. I was curious as to what role this played in classical conditioning because it was obviously seen as important enough to put into the text.

Conditional emotional responses are learned emotional reactions to a once neutral stimuli. Conditional emotional responses play the same role as conditioned responses except that the response in not an emitted behavior but an emitted emotion. When learning this definition I realized that we have been using the concept of conditional emotional response from day one whenever we described an unconditioned stimulus that elicited an unconditioned response of an emotion such as feeling angry, scared, anxious, or happy after being exposed to that stimulus. This ties into the recent readings when it explained Watson's Little Albert experiment because this is the first documented case of using conditioned emotional response. Watson conditioned Little Albert to have conditioned emotional response of fear that eventually was generalized to all furry things. Conditional emotional response also ties into the discusstion of phobias beacuse all of such are examples of conditional emotional respones. In phobias a neutral stimulus is conditioned to produce an aversive response of emotion in which elicits the person with the phobia to stay away from that conditioned stimulus. Another example in which incorporates one of the philosophies of our class is the occurance of aversive conditioned emotional responses that relate to school and test taking. One example given in the readings is a professor walking into class and telling his students to clear off their desks and get out a writing utensil and then he observed the reactoins of his students. They all imediatly showed an aversive conditioned emotional response to the stimulus of the teacher's instructions as shown by the anxiety that came across the classroom.

Due to the fact that Dr.O didn't go into great detail about this topic and in class mentioned that it was a more advanced term in classical conditioning I would like to know if there is more to this term that I found with the little research required for this assignment or if we will be convering in more depth later on in the term. I feel as though it is a simple term to comprhend but also understand that there very well could be another aspect to it that I did not uncover in my search.

Terms Used: condtitional emotional response, classical conditioning, neutral stimuli, emit, conditioned response, unconditioned stimulus, elicit, aversive, conditioned stimulus

http://www.intropsych.com/ch05_conditioning/conditional_emotional_responses.html

http://www.education.com/reference/article/classical-conditioning/

http://exploring--psychology.blogspot.com/2011/09/conditioned-emotional-reactions-case-of.html

The topic of self-directed behavior modification is one that I find very interesting. I was intrigued to know why some people can find success in shaping their own individual behaviors while others are unable to develop a method to change their specific targeted behavior. Is it the persons will power or did they simply develop a better behavior modification strategy? When I was trying to research this topic I kept stumbling across a lot of self-help websites, or website that help people keep track and monitor their goal. I am more curious as to which personal traits are more beneficial when a person is attempting to elicit or emit a behavior.
A lot of the information on this was related back to ideas of Watson and Tharp and their book about self-directed behavior. One of the most reoccurring piece of information I found was people have more success if they are able to shift their mind set to the process rather than the outcome. People who are able to see concrete examples or reason are more successful in changing their desired behavior. As it said in the section, detail is a huge part of the success of self-directed behavior modification. Those who are able to see more of the smaller details are able to achieve success in a much faster pace than those who do not pay attention to the details.
A huge part on the success of an individual making the choice to alter a behavior is based around how they view that behavior. The information I collected talked about how humans can easily become unfocused and emotionally charge which causes them to see the behavior in a different, more negative way. People tend to be overly critical of themselves and if their behavior does not change at a fast pace, they often lose sight of the goal and experience behaviors that seemed similar to extinction burst (in my opinion). One key trait in experiencing success in changing your own behavior would be to always try to look at the behavior in a logical manner. A lot of behavior occurs subconsciously and in order to change the consequences of the behavior, people need to become more self-aware of the antecedents, according to the information I found.
Lastly, the information I found about self-directed behavior continually stressed that people have greater success in this area is they develop a reward system rather than punishment. People who are not overly critical and hard on themselves are able to distinguish the changing behavior as a process and are able to achieve their desired outcome much more effectively.
URLs: http://www.mhhe.com/cls/psy/ch14/behmod.mhtml
http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/rev/84/2/191/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAcCbPSe-Dw
Terminology Used: self-directed behavior, shaping, targeted behavior, behavior modification, emit, elicit, extinction burst, antecedents, consequences, reward, punishment,

I decided to research systematic desensitization since I find the process of overcoming a phobia very interesting and so far in class we have discussed how people learn behavior or modify current behavior, and this is the first time we have studied how to unlearn a behavior. When starting systematic desensitization it is important to understand what the phobia is, in other words, it is important to monitor what specific object/situation elicits a fear-response in the individual and the type of behavior they emit when confronted with that antecedent. For example, if someone has a phobia of birds, it is important to know if it is one specific bird or any type of bird, whether they are flying or simply walking around, and even if just a feather will elicit a fear response. All of these different factors are important when creating a fear hierarchy for the individual because you want to create a hierarchy from the least fear-provoking situation to the highest fear-provoking situation. Continuing with the bird phobia example, the lowest fear-provoking situation may be listening to the sound of birds cawing and chirping or it may simply be looking at a picture of a bird; the highest fear-provoking situation could be holding a bird. It is important to know these discriminative stimuli so that you don’t flood the individual during the first relaxation session. Flooding is when you overwhelm them with a stimulus and can actually make a phobia worse instead of treating it.

Once you have established a fear hierarchy, it is time to identify some relaxation techniques such as deep breathing or progressive muscle relaxation, which is where you tighten up certain muscle groups while breathing in and then when you exhale you relax those muscles and you continue doing that until you have relaxed all the muscles in your body. Once the individual has mastered the chosen relaxation technique you then begin to pair that with the fear hierarchy, slowly working the individual through each situation (either imagined or real) until they are able to remain relaxed during the highest fear-provoking situation. This does not happen in one instance, systematic desensitization takes anywhere from 4-12 sessions of relaxation depending on the severity of the phobia.

I have attached a video with a partial of example of systematic desensitization to this blog. In the video there is a man who has a phobia of riding in an elevator (he has not been in an elevator for 6-8 years) and he is involved in a support group for phobias. During the video we see his support group cheering him on as he climbs in the elevator with a bottle of lemonade and a brown paper bag—these are the items that help keep him relaxed. The lemonade is for comfort (in case he gets stuck in the elevator) and the brown paper bag is to help him breathe if he starts to feel anxious. We also see him singing to himself in the elevator, these are all relaxation techniques that he has practiced to help him work through his fear hierarchy. And we see that he makes it to the third floor of the building with no problems, and while he is still shaking the systematic desensitization process has helped him be able to ride in an elevator and remain calm while doing so.

URL’s:
http://www.simplypsychology.org/Systematic-Desensitisation.html
http://www.guidetopsychology.com/sysden.htm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jpg_y14-tSs

Terms: systematic desensitization, elicit, emit, antecedent, behavior, fear hierarchy, discriminative stimuli, flooding, progressive muscle relaxation

Positive punishment is a concept used in B. F. Skinner's theory of operant conditioning. The goal of punishment is to decrease the behavior that it follows. In the case of positive punishment, it involves presenting an unfavorable outcome or event following an undesirable behavior. Positive punishments work to decrease the likelihood of a undesirable behavior reoccurring by adding an unfavorable consequence.
The concept of positive punishment can difficult to remember, especially because it seems like a contradiction. How can punishment be positive? The easiest way to remember this concept is to note that it involves an aversive stimulus that is added to the situation. For this reason, positive punishment is sometimes referred to as punishment by application.
While positive punishment can be effective in some situations, B.F. Skinner noted that its use must be weighed against any potential negative effects. One of the best-known examples of positive punishment is spanking. Defined as striking a child across the buttocks with an open hand, this form of discipline is reportedly used by approximately 75 percent of parents in the United States.
Aversive stimulus, punisher, and punishing stimulus are somewhat synonymous. Punishment may be used for (a) an aversive stimulus or (b) the occurrence of any punishing change or (c) the part of an experiment in which a particular response is punished. However, some things considered aversive (such as spanking) can become reinforcing. In addition, some things that are aversive may not be punishing if accompanying changes are reinforcing. A classic example would be mis-behavior that is 'punished' by a teacher but actually increases over time due to the reinforcing effects of attention on the student.
One variable affecting punishment is contingency, which is defined as the dependency of events. A behavior may be dependent on a stimulus or dependent on a response. The purpose of punishment is to reduce a behavior, and the degree to which punishment is effective in reducing a targeted behavior is dependent on the relationship between the behavior and a punishment. Punishment is most effective when contingency is present between a behavior and a punisher.
A second variable affecting punishment is contiguity, which is the closeness of events in time and/or space. Contiguity is important to reducing behavior because the longer the time interval between an unwanted behavior and a punishing effect, the less effective the punishment will be. One major problem with a time delay between a behavior and a punishment is that other behaviors may present during that time delay. The subject may then associate the punishment given with the unintended behaviors, and thus suppressing those behaviors instead of the targeted behavior. Therefore, immediate punishment is more effective in reducing a targeted behavior than a delayed punishment would be.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punishment_(psychology)
http://study.com/academy/lesson/positive-punishment-definition-examples-quiz.html
http://psychology.about.com/od/operantconditioning/f/positive-punishment.htm

This assignment has elicited me to emit the target behavior of conducting further research on New Year’s Resolutions. I chose this topic because for as long as I can remember, all of my new year’s resolutions have failed. This is probably because I’m not determined enough to use the self-directed behavior, and I would rather not use other-directed behavior for a personal goal. After doing some research, I have come up with three main reasons why so many New Year’s Resolutions fail.

The first main reason why New Year’s Resolutions fail is because people set unrealistic goals. “I’m going to lose 20 lbs by summer, so I’m going to work out 90 minutes a day!” or, “I want to save a lot of money for my kids’ college, so I’m going to put $10 in savings each day!” These goals are possible, but not realistic. Psychologists have found that the biggest problem with setting unrealistic goals is that failure may discourage future attempts. If the man who is trying to lose 20lbs by summer can’t lose 2lbs in the first month, he is going to either quit, lose motivation, or completely give up on his goal all together. A more attainable goal for the man would be to work out for 30 minutes 3-4 times a week, and then increase his work out frequency as he becomes more fit and want to progress in his goal.

The second main reason why New Year’s Resolutions fail is because people are not quite ready to change. Unfortunately, the success of our goals is contingent upon our motivation and the quality of our behavior modification. While a man may want to work out 90 minutes per day starting January first, is his positive or negative reinforcement going to be enough to keep him determined? Is he going to use negative or positive punishment when he does not work out for 90 minutes on a given day? Maybe this man has implemented a schedule of reinforcement, and uses the Fixed Ratio technique so after three times of working out he rewards himself with by watching a movie on Netflix. While his goal may be desirable, the man might not be ready to commit to working out 90 minutes every day. This is a lot of work, and will require an abundance amount of motivation. If he is not an athletic/fit person, working out may have a negative valence. Randomly starting to work out for 90 minutes each day will take a toll on his body if he hasn’t prepared himself at all. Before a NYR is made, a person needs to decide if they are ready to make the commitment.

The third main reason why New Year’s Resolutions fail is because people set too broad of goals. How can you expect yourself to implement a variable ratio schedule or give yourself consequences if you’re not sure what the exact behavior is? Some examples of New Year’s Resolutions that are too broad include: lose weight, eat better, text less, don’t procrastinate, etc. These things are incredibly difficult to measure, which is why almost 92% of New Year’s Resolutions are failures. The best goals are the kinds that can be measured. In order to modify some of these goals, one could say, “I’d like to lose 10lbs in the next 90 days” or “I’d like to keep my texting bill less than 600 per month”. When a person sets a goal for themselves that can’t be measured, they’re basically setting themselves up for failure.

Terms used: elicit, emit, target behavior, self-directed behavior, other-directed behavior, negative valence, contingent, positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, positive punishment, negative punishment, fixed ratio schedule, variable ratio schedule, consequence.

The topic that I chose to discuss in my topic blog post this week comes from section 4.2, Self-directed behavior steps. The self-directed behavior modification details the steps taken in order to chance a behavior; setting, defining, recording, graphing, contingencies, antecedents and implementing of goals make up the behaviors according to “The ABC’s of Behavior Modification”. I felt that the step 3: Keeping a record was one of the more interesting of the steps due to the various ways other psychologist recommend and explain how and why keeping a record is important.
Using a step-by-step approach to explain behavior modification seems to be common as I was able to find several sources that list similar steps with only slight variations between them. The ABC’s suggest keeping a behavior diary. In addition to explaining record keeping as important in order to learn the baseline performance, which should only be tracked while on a stable routine. The ABC’s also expresses the need to record when the behavior is fresh in your mind in order maintain accuracy.
“Becoming an Informed Consumer of Psychology” explains that behavior modification techniques typically follow a series of similar basic steps. This book list designing a data-recording system and recording preliminary data as the second step of the behavior modification. There were very slight differences between “ABC’s” and “Consumer’s” detail of the initial recording mainly consumers did not express keeping records only on a stable schedule, everything else was virtually identical.
A third source that I found referred to behavior modification as self-control but explained the process in a similar fashion, step-by-step with the third step being learn to become a self-watcher by gathering data about your problem. This one differed from both “ABC’s” And “Consumer’s” by suggesting a person read why psychologist have written about the behavior they wish to change followed by asking family and friends to observe the behavior and finally keeping a written record themselves. Similarly it details the amount of data needed for a baseline.
When it comes to shaping behavior having records will always be a necessary step that can be taken in many different ways. The most important part of keeping records is having a baseline in order to compare future results after behavior modification has taken place.
Terms: self-directed behavior, recording, step-by-step, behavior modification, baseline, schedule.
Sources:
http://www.uni.edu/~maclino/bm/book/sec4.1.pdf
http://www.caleblack.com/psy5493_files/Beh%20mod%20tips.pdf
http://academic.pg.cc.md.us/~wpeirce/MCCCTR/bell7.html

Since in our last section we talked about self directed behavior I decided to look into this for my topical blog. In the section we were asked about a desirable behavior we wished to increase for our behavior modification project. I decided that I wanted to increase the amount of time I exercise/workout. So in reading the sections it said that reinforcement is always preferred over punishment. It is important that if your goal requires punishment by not completing it that you break down the target behavior into different pieces from the large behavioral class into thing that can be rewarded. Otherwise our goals become difficult to reach.
In my research I looked up using reinforcement to build better workout behaviors. Of course I was flooded with multiple different articles. Like in the section, all the articles stated that one must start off a goal and create a plan.
When going about working out it's hard to stay motivated if it's not a rewarding task. The articles state that it's important that the individual goes about achieving their goal by doing an activity that is rewarding for them. So if the antecedent is the gym, and you like running, you should create a workout of running behaviors/cardio, and the consequence will result in a positive outcome...therefore increasing the likelihood you will do it again. If you enjoy a workout it will be less difficult to motivate yourself for the next time you must do it.
The articles also talked not only about this immediate reinforcer but internal and external rewards. An internal reward is something we can not necessarily see first hand or only we know. This could be that the workouts become easier each time, or your weight scale starts to show you are losing some extra pounds. These can also serve as reinforcements to increase the behavior. An external reward is something that is visible and is used to maintain the behavior. It's almost like schedules of reinforcement. This means every so often, after the goal has been achieved, we would reward ourselves with something to keep the behavior constant or increasing. This could be a food we have cut out of our diet to eat healthier, but let ourselves have a small amount because we worked out for a certain amount of times that week.
Negative reinforcement is also used as a way to reinforce the desirable behavior. This is explained through an example of a money jar. For every time you skip your workout you must put a certain amount of money in the jar. Once you finally get back to doing your regular workouts again, you get to spend the money in the jar on something to reward yourself (external rewards) to reinforce the behavior.
Natural reinforcements play a huge impact on increasing workout behaviors because you nor does another individual have to administer it! These things will come just by doing the behavior. In working out a natural reinforcer could be weight loss, increased self-esteem, better physique, and overall improved general health (mentally, physically, and emotionally).
After some time all these reinforcements will turn exercising into a fixed habit, in which you no longer need to reinforce yourself for it. This is called extinction; when a once reinforced behavior is no longer being reinforced. But because you have modified your behavior, if the process was successful, the workout routine has now just become a regular daily habit in your life, and shouldn't need as much motivation or scheduling or reinforcing to do so. Especially when natural reinforcement will play as a continuous reinforcer so long as you act on the desired behavior.

Terms: self directed behavior, desirable behavior, behavior modification, reinforcement/punishment, target behavior, behavioral class, goal, antecedent/behavior/consequence, schedules of reinforcement, negative reinforcement, natural reinforcement, extinction, continuous reinforcement.

http://www.livestrong.com/article/413525-reinforcement-for-initiating-exercise-habits/
http://healthyliving.azcentral.com/reinforcement-initiating-exercise-habits-10312.html
http://www.sparkpeople.com/blog/blog.asp?post=3_psychology_tricks_to_make_your_workout_plan_stick

I am choosing to write about behaviorism. While Watson was a popular psychologist, functionalism and structuralism were two great schools of thought in psychology. However, he rejected both. Instead he and Skinner helped to form what is now considered behaviorism (coined by Watson), which was popular between the 1920s and 1950s. Watson believed that it was based in stimulus and response, giving us the study of behavior modification.
Watson was adamant that psychology was a science and should be utilized and studied as such. This is reflected in his behaviorism. Behaviorism states that people are born without free will and with a blank slate (tabula rasa). All behaviors are product of their learned environment. This school of thought believes that all behaviors are stimulus-response and that we learn through either operant or classical conditioning.
Behaviorism is especially interested in outward behaviors, things we can see rather than internal behaviors like thinking. Because of this, behaviorism is limited. Watson also suggested that we can study animals the same way we study humans even though our thought and behavior processes are different. Behaviorism also ignores multiple things, like other reasons why behaviors might occur (hormones, free-will, psychological factors, etc.). Behaviorism is also critiqued for not considering the unconscious or conscious mind and only looking at outward behavior.
However, behaviorism is very applicable in many instances, like in gender role development, behavior modification, addiction counseling, phobia treatment, education, and more. Because of this behaviorism is still studied and used although it is not one of the most popular schools in psychology. It is mostly utilized in addiction/phobia counseling and in school/work settings when behaviors need to be modified.
Behaviorism works because it is based on the idea that behaviors can be controlled by modifying antecedents and consequences of behaviors. So in school settings, you can eliminate the behavior of talking during down time in class if you eliminate the down time in class (the antecedent to the behavior) or you could punish the behavior. Behaviorism indicates that reinforcing good behavior rather than punishing bad behavior is more effective. Another option would be to reinforce students for not talking during down time at the end of the day with a treat. This would reinforce the likelihood that the behavior will not occur, making it positive reinforcement. This process is called shaping. This process is also seen a lot in animal training.
Watson believed that he could take any infant and shape them into being anything he wanted: a lawyer, doctor, astronaut, you name it. He believed his process of behaviorism allowed for this. This was also illustrated in Skinner's book, Walden Two. In Walden Two, there was a Utopian society created by social engineering. Social engineering is basically creating the right environment to control and predict all behaviors.
While behaviorism is not in it's prime, it is still widely used today. One great benefit of behaviorism is that it is easily applied to the "real world." You do not have to be a certified clinician or behaviorist to utilize behaviorist principles correctly. Animal trainers, teachers, managers, and many others utilize these techniques daily. Most of the time they are not even aware that they are doing so.

http://www.simplypsychology.org/behaviorism.html
http://www.uni.edu/~maclino/bm/book/sec3.4.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYDYzR-ZWRQ
http://psychology.about.com/od/behavioralpsychology/f/behaviorism.htm

Terms: behavior, behaviorism, Skinner, Watson, antecedent, consequence, reinforcement, punishment, positive reinforcement, tabula rasa, functionalism, structuralism, stimulus, response, operant conditioning, classical conditioning, behavior modification, modify, stimulus-response, social engineering, Walden Two, behaviorist, shaping

http://www.mentalhealth.gov/basics/recovery/index.html
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/notes-self/201308/how-set-goals
http://www.successconsciousness.com/steps-to-achieve-goals.htm

And here are my links :)

I choose to look into the process of extinction and how a behavior becomes extinguished. This interests me because of all the applicable things that we learn about in behavior modification; I think this could be the most useful. Getting people to stop doing annoying things is something that I find interesting.

My search started with examples of extinguishing behaviors. But first, I will give a brief refresher of what extinctions means. Extinction of a behavior occurs when that behavior is no longer reinforced. The conditioned behavior was associated with reinforcement but with an extinction procedure, it no longer gets reinforced. This is a deliberate attempt to get a target behavior to stop.

So back to the examples. One of the first, and most simple, examples I found was about a kid shouting on the playground to get attention. The target behavior that the extinction procedure was trying to get to stop was the shouting. The kid would only shout when he was left alone, so he was reinforced when people ended up giving him attention. So to extinguish his behavior, you stop giving him the reinforcement. People stop giving him attention on the playground when he shouts, and his behavior decreases. Eventually, the association between shouting and getting attention is gone and his behavior is extinguished.

After reading this and a few other examples, I began to expand my research. I expanded because extinction is a process. It is not something that can be simply implemented, and it is something that has many caveats. The thing about extinction is that it is not perfect. Before it gets better, it gets worse. An extinction burst occurs shortly after the process begins that. This means that before the association between target behavior and reinforcement decrease, the target behavior increases. This is basically a last attempt by the individual to get reinforcement. In the example I discussed, an extinction burst would be when the kid shouts even louder to get attention. Once the reinforcement has stopped, the kid shouts louder in a last ditch effort to get reinforcement.

After a while the extinction procedure begins to work and the target behavior decreases. It will keep decreasing until it is extinguished. That is, it will keep decreasing until there is spontaneous recovery. The target behavior is decreasing in frequency, then spontaneous recovery occurs when out of the blue the target behavior occurs again. This is because the target behavior was conditioned and it is not completely forgotten. In the example I discussed, spontaneous recovery occurs when the kid shouts after a couple of days of not shouting. He had gone a couple of days and the target behavior of shouting seemed to have disappeared. Then one day he starts to shout again. This is spontaneous recovery.

I was interested in extinction because I think it is useful to get annoying people to stop doing things you don’t want them to do. Like getting my mom to stop bugging me about things. I just have to implement an extinction procedure and this target behavior will decrease. I thought it was that simple. I thought it was easy and straightforward. But I found that extinction is not easy. In fact, it elicits more of the target behavior at first. Then out of nowhere after you think the target behavior has been eliminated, it is recovered. Only with steadfast resolve and no lapses in withholding reinforcement can behaviors actually be extinguished.

http://www.educateautism.com/applied-behaviour-analysis/extinction-procedure-aba.html
http://www.intropsych.com/ch05_conditioning/extinction_and_spontaneous_recovery.html
http://examples.yourdictionary.com/examples-of-spontaneous-recovery.html
http://psychology.about.com/od/eindex/g/extinction.htm

Terms: extinction, extinction burst, extinguished, target behavior, elicits, reinforcement, spontaneous recovery, conditioning.

I chose to emit the behavior of looking up and writing about classical conditioning, punishment and reinforcement. Classical conditioning is a term that was first researched by Ivan Pavlov. Pavlov looked at how you could condition dogs to salivate without presenting a stimulus. A link below is for a video of Pavlov doing his experiment with dogs and salivation. Reinforcement is the addition of something desirable or the removal of something unpleasant in order to increase the likelihood of emitting a behavior in the future. Punishment is the addition of something unpleasant or the removal of something desirable in order to decrease the likelihood of a behavior occurring in the future. There is a link to a diagram that describes Pavlov's experiment. Pavlov would first present a dog with unconditioned stimulus or a bowl of food, this created the unconditioned response of salivation. Pavlov then blew a whistle at the dog which is a neutral stimulus and this created no conditioned response or no salivating. Next, Pavlov presents the dog with the whistle and the bowl of food which triggers the unconditioned response of salivation. Finally the dog is whistled at (conditioned stimulus) which triggers the conditioned response of salivation. Now we can say that the dog has been conditioned to salivate when he hears the whistle because he thinks he is going to be presented with a bowl of food. Pavlov won a Nobel Peace Price for his work. An article that I found on The Huffington Post is about a little league team that won the National Title and was then stripped of the title because administrators found out that the adults in charge of the team had lied about the location that some of the players lived, therefore making those players ineligible to play on the team. This is an example of negative reinforcement because it involves the removal of something desirable in order to decrease the likelihood of the behavior occurring in the future. I think if you combine classical conditioning with reinforcement you could reach goals more effectively. Take Pavlov’s dog experiment for example. Once the dog is conditioned to salivate without being presented the bowl of food. The way I look at it is that the whistle is a form of positive reinforcement because it increases the likelihood that the dog with salivate in the future.
TERMS- positive reinforcement, Pavlov, negative reinforcement, behavior, UR, US, CR, CS, classical conditioning, punishment, reinforcement, stimulus

For this topical blog post I choose to look more into B.F. Skinner and some of the things that he has contributed to the psychological community.

Skinner was born in Pennsylvania in 1904, attended Hamilton College in New York and graduated in 1926. He went back to school and attended Harvard University until he graduated with his master’s degree in psychology and then received his doctorate in 1931. B.F. Skinner was known as the father of operant conditioning, although most of his research was based off of Thorndike’s earlier research with his puzzle box. Skinner found that if a behavior is reinforced, or rewarded, that behavior is more likely to happen again in the future, and behaviors that are not rewarded are more likely to become extinct. In order for Skinner to collect his research, he put animals into boxes, which were called a “skinner box”. How his experiments work is like this; a rat is put into the box and left alone. In this box are buttons or levers that when pressed will release a food pellet. As the rat begins to realize that this button or lever is reinforcing he pushing of the button/lever, they will begin to associate the pushing with the food pellet, and therefore will begin to emit the behavior of pressing the lever more often.

After awhile, or as he says, he began to run out of rat pellets, he began to give the rats less and less pellets. When the rats weren’t being reinforced for pushing the lever they began to go through an extinction burst and continually push the lever. Skinner would then reward them every so often, after say 5 pushes of the lever. When the rat caught on that he had to push the lever 5 times in order to receive a pellet, skinner would again up the amount of times the rat had to push the lever again, thus forming a schedule of reinforcement.

As we look at the opposite of reinforcement, which is punishment, we see that Skinners views on it were strongly against it. His research showed that punishment was an ineffective way of shaping behavior, thus he did not believe in it. An example of his dislike for punishment, he talked about the prison system and how ineffective it is. If the prison system were an effective way to correct or change a person’s behavior, the risk of imprisonment would cause criminal activity to become completely extinct.

Because of Skinner’s discovery of shaping behavior through the use of operant conditioning people can now shape their children into much more respectful, responsible young adults. His theories on shaping, operant conditioning, and behavior modification changed the world for the better.

http://www.simplypsychology.org/operant-conditioning.html

http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/Skinner.html

http://www.psychologistanywhereanytime.com/famous_psychologist_and_psychologists/psychologist_famous_b_f_skinner.htm

Terms: Behaviors, emit, reinforcer, reinforce, operant conditioning, behaviors, extinction, extinction burst, schedule of reinforcement.

For this topic I chose to research new years resolutions and why they are frequently broken. As disgusted in section 4.2 many people set a goal or new years resolution for themselves that is too broad or might be too challenging. Many people pick a behavior class as their new years resolution instead of a target behavior. The more specific the better .
Forbes shares some great tips on how to make and keep a new years resolution. Keep it simple, it's more sensible to set small and attainable goals thought the year than one singular overwhelming goal. Keeping the goal short simple and too the point so they are easier to reach and you are able to eventually change the behavior.
Making the new years resolution tangible will ensure that the goal is achievable. Although ambitions resolutions are fun and inspiring if they are too difficult it can create frustration.
When setting up a goal that is specific to what you want to accomplish it is good to state why you want to change the behavior so later down the road when you're feeling like you don't want to work out or eat healthy you can resort back to the why you came up with in the beginning. It is always good to start into things and work your way up to your goal because no one likes a big change.
Any behavior you want to change is manageable if you follow the self-directed behavior steps by setting your goal then defining it and specifying the goal as a set of target behaviors. You also need to keep a record of the behavior so you can graph a baseline this will allow you to see any contingencies and decide why some days worked better than others/antecedents. After determining antecedents you can implement and adjust the contingencies. Choosing a reinforcer that works for you is good and sometimes it takes a couple tries, sometimes it also loses its effects and then you need to find another one.

Terms: behavior class, target behavior, antecedent, consequence, self-directed behavior, reinforcer, reinforcement, contingencies, baseline, goal, implement

Sources:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5XVSaSrAfo
http://www.forbes.com/sites/dandiamond/2013/01/01/just-8-of-people-achieve-their-new-years-resolutions-heres-how-they-did-it/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffboss/2014/12/26/4-simple-goal-setting-ideas-for-2015/2/
http://www.uni.edu/~maclino/bm/book/sec4.2.pdf
http://www.uni.edu/~maclino/bm/book/sec4.1.pdf

For the purposes of this blog post I chose to do more research on B.F. Skinner. Skinner was a behaviorist who believed that there is a such thing as a mind but it is more useful to study observable behaviors. He also believed that best way to gain an understanding of behaviors is to look at the root cause of the action and the consequences of the action. Skinner is probably most known, however, for his radical ideas such as free will being merely an illusion and that all action is actually the result of conditioning.

Skinner also developed the idea of operant conditioning which is basically defined as the changing of behaviors by reinforcing after a desired response is emitted. Skinner's idea of operant conditioning was based off of Thorndike's Law of Effect that developed through his work with animals in devices known as puzzle boxes. Skinner also studied and developed his own idea of operant conditioning through the use of Skinner boxes which were also much like that of Thorndike's puzzle boxes. Skinner believed that there were only three different ways in which a response can follow a behavior. The first is known as neutral operants, or a response from the environment that will not increase or decrease the likelihood of the behavior being repeated in the future. The second response is reinforcers. Reinforcers are responses from the environment that increase the likelihood of the behavior being repeated in the future. the last response is punishiers which are responses from the environment that decrease the likelihood of the behaviors being repeated in the future.

Within Skinner's research on operant conditioning, he also developed the idea of schedules of reinforcement. A fixed- ratio schedule is when a behavior is only reinforced after a specific number of responses. A variable-ratio schedule is when a response is reinforced after a random number of responses. A fixed-interval schedule is when the first response is only reinforced after a specified amount of time has gone by. Finally, a variable-interval schedule is when a response is reinforced after a random amount of time has passed.

Terms: B.F. Skinner, behaviorist, behaviors, operant conditioning, Thorndike, Law of Effect, puzzle boxes, Skinner boxes, reinforcing, emitted, neutral operants reinforcers, punishers, schedules of reinforcement, fixed-ratio schedule, variable-ratio schedule, fixed-interval schedule, variable-ratio schedule

Sources:
http://www.simplypsychology.org/operant-conditioning.html
http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesofmajorthinkers/p/bio_skinner.htm
http://psychology.about.com/od/findex/g/def_fixedratio.htm
http://psychology.about.com/od/vindex/g/def_variablerat.htm
http://psychology.about.com/od/findex/g/def_fixedinterv.htm

I chose to emit the behavior of researching the topic of self-directed behavior. This week the reading was about self- directed behavior. I thought it would be interesting to look at different studies and research the topic further. Though, it seems that it would be pretty self explanatory to learn more about how to change our own behavior I found some interesting articles that I did learn. Self-directed behavior is when the individual changes their own behavior. There are 4 reasons to change a behavior and they are if the behavior bothers us, if it bothers others, if they lead to trouble, or they are illegal. Any of these reasons might be why someone wants to change their behavior.
There have been many studies done about self-directed. Some studies are done on different age levels and some are done to figure out different techniques that are helpful for changing the behavior. There is a study where they tested children who were ages 6 or 7. They observed them and whether they had a majority of structured time in their lives. They found that when the children had less structured time in their lives they were better at doing self directed behavior modification later in life. This is interesting because many parents become very frustrated with having to tell their children to do something repeatedly. For example, if the parents continuously have to tell the child to put on a coat before they go outside and they have to fight about it, it often gets really old. This study suggests that if you stop telling them to do it all the time and let them go outside and freeze their butt off, they will learn quicker. I like this approach because it forces the punishment on the child and relates directly back to their behavior. They will learn faster through experiencing the punishment themselves, than you trying to prevent the punishment. The goal is to elicit the correct response from the child on their own.
There are other things that tie in with the idea of children learning on their own and how that increases the likelihood that they will be successful at self-directed behavior modification. It is said to be better to let your toddler choose how they are going to play and how they are going to act in certain situations. The reason that it is better to do this than to direct your child into something that you think they want to do is because it encourages them to be independant and self thinkers. This connects with the previous point. If you let your child be independent they will be able to self- direct in the future. This is good knowledge for me to learn because I think that I would be the parent who tells her child when to breathe. Now I know that it is best for them to learn on their own.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4060299/
http://www.janetlansbury.com/2011/09/dont-cramp-your-toddlers-style-the-power-of-trust/
http://www.empoweringparents.com/yelling-at-your-kids-why-it-doesnt-work.php

Terms: self-directed behavior, punishment, emit

My topic for this blog is self directed behavior. I found this topic very interesting because is topic were we can focused on ourselves. We are not trying to change anyone’s behavior, we are just trying to improve ourselves. Self-directed behavior occurs when we exert our free will to choose a behavior that we want to increase or decrease. Another reason I choose to make this blog about self directed behaviors because of showing ourselves what are we capable of. We structure our own behavioral interventions and contingencies. Numerous strategies, based on theory and research, equip students to apply their new skills to different behaviors and in different settings. Learning about how to achieve our own desired behavior help students achieve whatever life goals they set for themselves.



A self directed behavior is commonly used when we are trying to loose weight or reach a healthy life style. One reason people might have trouble with keeping resolutions, especially this one, is that their resolutions tend to be broad representing a behavioral class rather than a specific target behavior. This topic is relevant in our society in many ways because of the idea of being skinny as having to deal to fashion, healthy living. In my opinion this is right, overweight is not usually the right answer to have a healthy life styles but being too skinny is not a sign of being healthy. All this ideas come from tv shows, magazines, and a lot of social media. There are many diets around the world to promise to loose 20 pounds in 2 weeks which is really not healthy and you will probably gaining the weight back. Self-directed weight control attempts are common, but little attention has been given to providing guidance for such efforts in the population. The crash diet always fails. Why? Because you’re trying to break years of your own eating habits while going against human evolution all in one swoop. 



There are different steps to achieve this behavior change. 

1) Set goal: Set a goal that will involve reinforcement and keep in mind it should be something you are self aware you can make it. For example, cut down soda because is unnecessary liquids are body needs. Instead drink water.


2) Define the goals as a set of specific target behaviors. Keep in mind the target behaviors need to be: 1) Precise, 2) Manageable, 3) Measurable, and 4) Fit with our everyday life. For example Workout at least 30 minutes a day for a week and keep increasing this amount. 



3) Keep a record. Write down somewhere your initial weight and the weight you are losing per week. 



4) Graph a baseline including time and the amount of water you want to consume per day or the amount of weight you want to loose. There are many items that can be in this graph including, the amount of vegetables and sugars you are consuming. 



5) Determine the contingencies, reinforcers that will help us to keep this behavior constant for example, having at the end of the week a chocolate or something that will encourage us to keep going. If this involve food, make sure you don't over eat.



6) Determine the antecedents in this case why you want to make this changes. A picture of how you look, clothes you want to wear. 



7) Implement and adjust the contingencies. Adjust the reinforcers according to your progress.

All this steps are the key for a daily healthy eating behavior.

The decision, the target behavior we want to achieve only depends on us. If we are strong enough and if we really want the change we will make it. When others direct behaviors, it can feel manipulative. When we self-direct we feel as though we are exerting free will. What you eat reflects in everything you do. Eating well helps you be more creative, productive, and enjoyable to be around. The hard part about eating right is that there's no plan that's perfect for everyone. The only way we know what is right for us is trying and see how it works. This steps are not only for loosing weight, it is to achieve any desire target behavior and can be applied in many ways. Just remember to follow this steps because usually new years resolutions may fail because they involve punishment rather than reinforcement or they fail because there is not really an specific target behavior. We are the owners of our own decisions and dreams. Every decision of your life starts by you saying yes or no. Changing behaviors by your own does not make you weak, but makes you strong to show how capable you are. 



http://www.goallab.nl/publications/documents/Papies%20Hamstra%20Health%20Psychology%202010.pdf



http://www.psychologicalselfhelp.org/Chapter11.pdf



http://www.webmd.com/diet/6-steps-to-changing-bad-eating-habits


Terms: Behavior, self directed behavior, punishment, reinforcement, target behavior, elicit, emit, antecedent, consequences, contingencies.

My topic is the connection between dating and the reinforcing power of food to individuals attempting to diet. Many successful therapies to lose weight involve behavior modification principles and techniques.

Some tips for dieting to lose weight or changing eating behaviors in behavior modification terms are: to record your habits or baseline before attempting to modify behaviors, one website recommends recording eating behaviors for 2 weeks prior to , it also recommends to record the antecedents of these behaviors and the consequences; to make dieting have a positive valence and to not make dieting a miserable experience; and to control the antecedents of undesirable eating behaviors by putting tempting situations or objects out of sight, this may involve making one room of your house or the dining room table a discriminate stimulus for meals.

Additional tips could be: to set a goal for your return to baseline that is measurable, precise, attainable, and realistic; and to set a range of what an acceptable return to baseline would be so as to avoid being discouraged and enter into extinction if the original goal is not met. This site also mentions that changing behavior in the long run is not easy, and it often takes years to establish new habits.

Many of these tips are supported by research that has found that reinforcer satiation can help to reduce the reinforcing power that foods, and specifically the high-fat/high-caloric foods, have over them. Reinforcer satiation is seen in the everyday example of the response rate decline in the eating behavior during a meal, where you begin the meal eating at a faster rate than you do towards the end of the meal when you are beginning to get full or satiated.

Another tip that I found in my research on dieting was to go all in and to diet with someone or have someone to keep you accountable. It is much harder to engage in self-directed behavior when you have control of the reinforcers rather than another person engaging in other-directed behavior. The other person can determine if the conditions have been met for a given behavior to be reinforced; they can serve as a source of interrater reliability. This person can also serve as a support system and can elicit desirable behaviors by participating in them with you.

Another interesting perspective to consider when dieting is the rewarding and reinforcing aspect of food itself. The American Obesity website mentions that many who become obese later in life were reinforced for desirable behavior with food of some sort. Food became a very salient reinforcer for these individuals, many of whom would never have this extinguished. This is a very good real world example of Thorndike’s Law of Exercise, that the association between food and reinforcement is strengthened each time. This reinforcing value of food is echoed in the research that tested whether altering the schedule of reinforcement would alter the response rate that was emitted. The research showed that if the response rate necessary to be reinforced with food was increased the amount of responses emitted would also increase. This positive reinforcement is a useful technique to use in working towards reaching a goal.

Another potential avenue to explore in dieting is to use a variety of forms of differential reinforcement. Differential reinforcement of other could be used in reinforcing desirable behaviors, such as choosing a salad instead of a burger. Differential reinforcement of high rates (DRH) could be used to reinforce high rates of taking the stairs instead of using the elevator. Differential reinforcement of low rates could be used to reinforce low rates of skipping a workout class, or DRH could be used to reinforce high rates of attending. You could also use differential reinforcement of alternative or incompatible behaviors. The possibilities are endless.

Terms used in this post: baseline, reinforcing, antecedents, consequences, positive valence, extinction, return to baseline, reinforced, salient, reinforcer, extinguished, reinforcer satiation, response rate, satiated, self-directed behavior, discriminate stimulus, Thorndike’s Law of Exercise, reinforcement, interrater reliability, other-directed behavior, elicit, schedule of reinforcement, emitted, response, positive reinforcement, differential reinforcement of other, differential reinforcement of high, differential reinforcement of low, differential reinforcement of alternative and incompatible

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2219695/#!po=3.80435
http://www.americanobesity.org/behavior.htm
http://strengthfromfocus.com/tag/behavioral-dieting/

I chose to look up more about New Year’s resolutions or just resolutions in general. We often try to change behaviors but do not look at specific behaviors. This is setting us up for failure. Like our book says: we need to look at target behaviors to improve something. For example if you want to exercise more start with a baseline (as recommended for behavioral change) and then look to improve the number of times you exercise a week.
We also have to keep these resolutions narrow. Often, resolutions fail because they are too broad or just unrealistic. If your goal is too lose weight, don’t expect to be losing 10 pounds in a week. Set goals for yourself and realistic expectations. As the psychology today article mentions 10 pounds in 90 days is a realistic target, but still makes you work a little. Another good idea would be to have someone there to help you be accountable and either reinforce or punish you when necessary. We know that other-directed behavior can be a good thing to help increase or decrease certain behaviors (in this case eliciting the subject to emit more exercising behaviors).
We know that the best way to increase behaviors is to positively reinforce. According to the third article and backed by our class discussions/book is the best way to increase desirable behaviors. While positive reinforcement is not the only way to increase behaviors, it is the most effective. Regardless whether your adding something desirable with positive reinforcement or taking away something aversive with negative reinforcement, it is important to keep at it and make sure you have something to motivate you to keep at your “resolution”. Most resolutions fail, but if you keep at it and use the proper steps you can succeed.

Behaviors, target behaviors, baseline, behavioral change, other-directed behaviors, elicit, emit, positive reinforcement, desirable, aversive, negative reinforcement,

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wired-success/201012/why-new-years-resolutions-fail
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/31/new-years-resolutions_n_6396324.html
http://smallbusiness.chron.com/advantages-disadvantages-positive-reinforcement-11036.html

What we would like you to do is to find a topic from what we have covered so far in class that you are interested in and search the internet for material on that topic. You might, for example, find people who are doing research on the topic, you might find web pages that discuss the topic, you might find youtube clips that demonstrate something related to the topic, etc. What you find and use is pretty much up to you at this point. But use at least 3 sources (only one video please).

For topical blog post number 9, I decided to do more research on classical conditioning as well as operant conditioning. Classical conditioning was the initial type of learning that was discovered and studied within behaviorist tradition. Classical conditioning is a learning procedure that occurs when two stimuli are repeatedly combined. A response that is first elicited by the second stimulus will eventually be elicited by the second stimulus alone. Associative learning is the most basic form of learning used in classical conditioning. This type of learning includes making a new association among events that occur in the environment. Associative learning can be used in both classical conditioning and operant conditioning.
A Russian scientist, Ivan Pavlov, is one of the major theorists in the development of classical conditioning. Ivan Pavlov was born in September 14, 1849 at Ryazan. He studied chemistry and physiology at the University of Petersburg where he later received his doctorate in 1879. Ivan Pavlov then began doing his own research on digestion and also blood circulation. During his research on digestion, Pavlov began looking at the digestive process in dogs. This started his experiment on salvation in dogs.
Ivan Pavlov is known for his work in classical conditioning by doing research on dogs. Pavlov believed that the dogs did not need to learn how to salivate whenever they would see food. Salivating would be an unconditioned response that follows an unconditioned stimulus (food). Ivan Pavlov displayed the existence of the unconditioned response by showing a dog a bowl of food and then he would measure the dog’s salivary secretions. Through his experiment, Pavlov discovered that when an object or even that the dog associates with food it would trigger the same result in the animal’s salivary glands. When the dogs began to associate the lab assistant with food, Pavlov realized that a change in the behavior had occurred. The lab assistant had started off as a neutral stimulus (since it did not cause a response) in the environment. The neutral stimulus became associated with the unconditioned stimulus. During this experiment, Pavlov would ring a bell whenever he would give the dogs food. After awhile, Pavlov would use the bell on its own. By using the bell on its own this would cause an increase in saliva in the dogs. This would be an example of a conditioned response. The neutral stimulus had become a conditioned stimulus.
Operant conditioning is different from classical conditioning in that it focuses on using either punishment or reinforcement after a behavior occurs. B.F. Skinner is known as the “Father of operant conditioning”. Skinner was born in Pennsylvania in 1904. During his childhood, Skinner would build various things. He had built a cart with steering that worked backwards, built a cabin with a friend, designed a floatation system, and he also created a perpetual motion machine (this was unfortunately unsuccessful). He had enrolled at Harvard to study psychology after he had become a professional writer in 1926. B.F. Skinner then received his doctorate degree at Harvard. During his lifetime, Skinner had been a professional writer, inventor, and researcher.
In Skinner’s experiment over operant conditioning, he would place a hungry rat in his “Skinner box”. This Skinner box had a lever on inside of the box. While the rat would move around the Skinner box and unintentionally knock the lever a food pellet would drop into a small container next to the lever. The rats quickly learned that knocking the lever is what would give the rat food. This would be a form of positive reinforcement. This is a form of positive reinforcement because it rewards the rat with something desirable. In this case, the something desirable would be food. This type of positive reinforcement would increase the frequency of the behavior to occur again if the subject would receive a reward.
There are specific differences between operant conditioning and classical conditioning. Some key differences between these two types of conditioning is that classical conditioning does not involve the use of incentives in order to receive a reward like operant conditioning does. In classical conditioning, the subject is passive, while in operant conditioning, the subject has to actively participate and implement an action in order to be reinforced or punished.
Operant conditioning and classical conditioning is still used today by psychologists, parents, animal trainers, and teachers, etc. When animal trainers use classical conditioning, it isn’t uncommon for an animal trainer to use a clicker sound paired with the taste of food. After a while, the sound of the clicker will produce the same response as the taste of food did. Teachers may use stickers as a reward for the student emitting good behaviors. These students can then use these stickers to receive a reward- such as an item or being able to play a few minutes longer.

URLS:
http://www.learning-theories.com/classical-conditioning-pavlov.html
http://www.edpsycinteractive.org/topics/behavior/classcnd.html
http://psychology.about.com/od/behavioralpsychology/a/classical-vs-operant-conditioning.htm
http://www.simplypsychology.org/operant-conditioning.html
http://www.bfskinner.org/archives/biographical-information/
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/bhpavl.html
http://www.simplypsychology.org/pavlov.html

Terms- classical conditioning, stimuli, stimulus, response, elicited, operant conditioning, unconditioned response, unconditioned stimulus, behavior, neutral stimulus, conditioned response, conditioned stimulus, punishment, reinforcement, positive reinforcement, rewards, emitting

For this week’s reading, we learned about our need for self-directed behaviors and the steps that are involved. With self-directed behavior, we set our own goals and administer our own interventions and reinforcers and/or punishers. It occurs when we exert our own free will to choose a behavior that we would like to either increase or decrease. One example that was discussed in the text was the idea of New Years resolutions, and I found the entire thing really interesting because it talked about why it is so hard for people to keep their resolutions. One reason is that their goals might be too broad and representing behavioral class instead of a specific target behavior. Another reason is that they may involve punishment instead of reinforcement, and punishment is far less effective than reinforcement. So, for this blog, I chose to research more about self-directed behavior.
I am very interested in this topic because I love learning and thinking about how and why we set goals and change our own behaviors. There are seven steps to changing a behavior. They are: 1) set a goal, 2) determine the target behaviors, 3) keep records of your behaviors, 4) make a graph, 5) determine contingencies (reinforcers), 6) determine the antecedents for the target behavior, and 7) implement and adjust the contingencies (reinforcers) if they are not successful.
An example using the seven steps could be that I want to go on more runs (daily runs). For step one, I would set a goal. My goal is to go on more runs. The second step says to determine specific target behaviors. For that step, I could say that my target behaviors are to go to the gym more and to stop lying on the couch when I have free time. Keeping records of your behaviors is the third step. For this one, I would just have a notebook where I would keep track of every day and how much I ran/didn’t run each day.
I would then make a graph of my baseline (do a week without reinforcers) as well as my success (or lack thereof) with reinforcement to satisfy step number four. Step five is determining contingencies. I would use a couple hours of Netflix at the end of each week to relax and reward myself if I ran daily. Step six is determining the antecedents. The antecedents for the behavior of going on more runs would be to get up and dressed for the gym, actually go to the gym, and drink water/stretch before I run. Step seven is actually implementing the contingencies (in this case, start using my reinforcement of Netflix) and adjusting them if necessary to make sure they are successful.

Terms: self directed behavior, interventions, reinforcers, punishers, reinforcement, target behavior, punishment, antecedents, contingencies, baseline

Resources:
http://www.mhhe.com/cls/psy/ch14/behmod.mhtml
http://www.ode.state.or.us/opportunities/grants/nclb/title_iii/32skills-for-self-directed-learning.pdf
http://www.slideshare.net/MatSouthwell/self-directed-behaviour-change

Topic: Self-directed Behavior

This topic fits into our Behavior Modification class in that it is in regard to using behavior modification techniques to implement behavioral change for one’s self. We have so far covered the steps involved in making a self-directed behavioral change. Within the reading we have discussed setting a goal, defining the goal as a set of target behaviors, keeping a record of the behavior(s), using a graph for baseline data, determining contingencies, determining antecedents, and implementing and adjusting the contingencies. The reason I am interested in this topic is because I am motivated to learn more about self-directed behavior in order to better understand how to make the most effective behavioral change within my life. I would like to continuously improve my personal behavior and become a more disciplined and self-regulated person in order to better reach my long-term goals.

In self-directed behavior modification it is possible to use principles from both classical and operant conditioning. Successful self-directed behavior modification starts with self-knowledge and a desire to want to make a change in one’s behavior. Making a self-directed behavioral change is done by selecting a behavioral problem, developing a goal, and making a commitment to make a change. Make observations about the target behavior(s) associated with one’s behavioral change goal. The target behavior(s) need to be precise, measurable, manageable, and they need to to fit within the range of one’s day-to-day life. Collect a baseline of the normal behavior(s) by keeping a journal to define what aspects of the behavior(s) need to be changed, as well as what feelings and actions (antecedents) factor into the behavioral problem. One should note how much they engaged in the behavior, whether the behavior was done so alone or with others, where one was when the behavior was emitted, how one felt before, during, and after the behavior, and any other aspects that might have been in relation to the behavior. Consider the ABC’s (Antecedent, Behavior, Consequence) of behavior modification.

Antecedent: When did it happen? Whom with? Where? What was being done at the time? What self-communication was happening? Thoughts? Feelings?
Behavior: Self-communication? Thoughts? Feelings? Target behavior(s)?
Consequence: Result of the behavior? Pleasant? Unpleasant?

One should determine contingencies and develop a plan. Expect mistakes, do not blame one’s self, simply readjust the plan. When using behavior modification techniques, such as stimulus control, one may begin to master the forces that compel one to engage in habitual acts. One can support stimulus control efforts by using a schedule of reinforcement for meeting certain behavioral goals. One can also modify one’s own actions behaviorally by changing the order of events, by doing things in a unique order, and thus disturbing the stimulus-response pattern that may be sustaining the behavioral problem.

Antecedent: “You can change the triggering events for a behavior by building in antecedents that lead to wanted behavior, and removing antecedents that lead to unwanted behavior”
Behavior: “You can change actions, thoughts, feelings, or behaviors by practicing desired acts or substituting desired alternatives for undesired actions”
Consequences: “You can change the events that follow your behavior to reinforce desired acts, and not reinforce undesired actions”

It is important to take steps to maintain gains. It is also important to keep in mind that it is necessary for success to keep baseline records and consistently use the selected behavior modification technique. An understanding of the basic behavior modification principles is essential before beginning a self-directed behavior modification project.

TERMS: behavior modification, target behavior, goal, record, baseline, contingencies, classical conditioning, operant conditioning, self-directed behavior modification, self-knowledge, behavior, behavioral change, behavioral problem, observation, antecedents, consequence, ABC’s of behavior modification, emitted, stimulus control, behavior modification techniques, habitual acts, schedule of reinforcement, stimulus-response pattern

URL’s:
http://www.mhhe.com/cls/psy/ch14/behmod.mhtml
http://www.slideshare.net/MatSouthwell/self-directed-behaviour-change
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sL1ZGAQo6J4
http://cognitivebehaviouraltherapythoughts.blogspot.com/2011/11/self-directed-behaviour.html

The topic that I wanted to learn more about that really caught my attention was systematic desensitization. I was interested in how fears and phobias can be treated as this was one of the most famous ways. Systematic desensitization is stated by acknowledging the fear in the individual. After this has happened, you then create a hierarchy of fear. This is created with the patient of starting from least fearful to most. For example, if an individual has a chronic fear of heights. They might consider the least fearful to be standing a thirty feet away from a high ledge. They would then consider the greatest fear to be right next to the ledge, looking down. They might also have certain activities, such as riding a roller coaster or looking down a large flight of steps to be somewhere in the middle.

After establishing the hierarchy of fear, the patient will then begin by starting at the least stressful and fearful area and practice relaxation techniques in order to stay calm. These relaxation techniques are used to help regulate the heart rate and to help the patient realize that they are in no sort of danger. Such techniques include autogenic relaxation, in which you use visual imagery to try to help you relax. Often times, patients will imagine a calming image or repeat words that help them relax. Another technique that is used is called progressive muscle relaxation. This is the process of consciously tensing and relaxing your muscles, getting yourself into a habit of relaxing when stressed. A third techniques used to help relax is visualization. This is when you visualize yourself going into a calming, peaceful place. This is a great way in order to help the body seek a calming mindset and to not focus on the stressful stimuli.

After the patient becomes comfortable with at the least fearful area on the hierarchy, they move the next one above. Repeating their relaxation techniques until they no longer feel uncomfortable about the situation. They would continue to progress through the hierarchy until they confront their fear and are able to successfully stay relaxed and can keep from being stressed.

If a patient is deathly afraid and is not ready to confront the fear head on situation, you might want to expose them in vitro. This means that the individual isn’t physically in the presence of the fear, but they use imagery to imagine confronting that fear. If an individual is successful and feels no more discomfort in vitro, then they may be ready to confront the fear in vivo. This means that they confront the fear in real life.

These techniques are great ways in order to help modify behaviors for fears. You may also add in reinforcement to such behaviors, as confronting fears can be very stressful. These reinforcements can help keep a patient motivated into confronting their fears and helping progress into a healthier relationship with them. As we know already, reinforcement has been proven to be very successful with operant and classical conditioning. I believe using it with systematic desensitization can be a very good tactic to help modify the behaviors of patients.

Terms: Systematic desensitization, behavior, reinforcement, hierarchy of fear, in vitro, in vivo, operant conditioning, classical conditioning.

http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-living/stress-management/in-depth/relaxation-technique/art-20045368?pg=2

http://www.simplypsychology.org/Systematic-Desensitisation.html

http://www1.appstate.edu/~beckhp/genthesystematicdesensitization.htm

For this week’s research I decided to look more into self- directed behavior. Since we just read about this and New Year’s resolutions in sections 4.1 and 4.2 I decided to look more into both of these things and the reasons why most people struggle with this kind of behavior modification and how to more effectively stick with the goals that we set for ourselves.
This is a broad topic and there isn’t a whole lot to be found on it, but from the reading we learned that self-directed behavior is when a person chooses to manipulate their own behavior for the purpose of changing something that either bothers them or the people around them. The most common time that we see people using self- directed behavior is around New Years when everyone makes their resolutions to better themselves in the following year.
To ensure the success of a New Year’s resolution it must be specific and manageable. Making a goal that is overly ambitious or not specified makes it easier for a person to not stick to. If you go from never working out to wanting to work out every day for an hour and a half, most likely the individual will get frustrated and give up before any progress is made. If a person is choosing to quit something, quitting cold turkey is probably not going to be effective and the individual will end up relapsing.
By following the self- directed behavior steps to reach the target behavior anything is possible. Wanting to change a behavior and being able to specify exactly what you’re wanting to change, as well as having an effective reinforce, reaching any kind of goal is manageable. Knowing why a person wants to change a certain behavior can also ensure that they continue towards their target behavior. Many times when the goal is hard to reach individuals will hit a wall and start to wonder what was wrong with their previous behavior in the first place at this time it is important to remember why the modification began. Another helpful thing to do at this time is to look back at the diary or blog that has been kept. This will show the individual where they have started and how far they have come when they begin to doubt their success.
The 7 steps of the self- directed behavior are important to follow because they make it easier for an individual to track progress and stick to their plan. Many people get discouraged when trying to reach new goals and many times this is because they have too many doubts in their mind. By setting realistic goals little failures are less likely to happen and therefore an individual will stay positive and continue to make progress. When a person starts to fail or slip out of their goal mindset, that is when they begin to give up and never reach any type of goal.

Terms: self-directed behavior, modification, target behavior, reinforcement, behavior

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk8G9368TiQ
http://academic.pg.cc.md.us/~wpeirce/MCCCTR/bell7.html
http://healthyliving.azcentral.com/reinforcement-initiating-exercise-habits-10312.html
http://www.uni.edu/~maclino/bm/book/sec4.2.pdf
http://www.forbes.com/sites/dandiamond/2013/01/01/just-8-of-people-achieve-their-new-years-resolutions-heres-how-they-did-it/

Being a coach to young athletes, I am always curious about what I can do to make them more confident and successful. One of the topical blogs, I decided to talk about why using conditioning as punishment was not helpful; and for this one, I have decided to talk about how positive reinforcement helps young athletes.
This fits into the sections we have covered so far because we have talked a great deal about reinforcement and how it affects our behaviors.

Positive reinforcement should be used every single time after the athlete emits the desired behavior. For example, I coach gymnastics, and every time my athlete points her toes, I can say, "Good job for pointing your toes." Positive reinforcement does not have to be anything crazy; it can be as simple as saying a desirable statement to the athlete to let them know that they are doing the proper behavior. Where I coach, we have a gem box. When an athlete emits a behavior that is correct, we reward them with a gem to put into their box. Whoever has the most gems at the end of the month gets a special prize. I have noticed that the gymnasts work harder and are always asking if their skill was "gem material." Positive reinforcement helps motivate the athlete to keep trying as hard as they can. I try to use positive reinforcement as much as I can around my kids.

Athletes will not be willing to try harder or learn more if their coaches are using any form of punishment. If the athlete is performing aversive behaviors, there are other ways to correct the problem rather than scolding them or making them run. The consequence of punishment is the increase the athlete's anxiety and decrease of their confidence. Positive reinforcement is the key to their success.

1. https://books.google.com/books?id=rtpTVfjuvNUC&pg=PA103&lpg=PA103&dq=how+to+reinforce+gymnasts&source=bl&ots=tyPX0MEdgM&sig=Eeh-7EOjUz_bjP9bwHm7dqorHn4&hl=en&sa=X&ei=YZQcVbuBCNPhoASboYGoBA&ved=0CC4Q6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=how%20to%20reinforce%20gymnasts&f=false
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xDr2tPJCUY
3. https://usagym.org/pages/home/publications/technique/1999/6/angertrap.pdf

Once you are done with your post make list of the terms and terminology you used in your post.
punishment, positive reinforcement, behavior, emits, desirable, aversive, consequence

For this topical blog, I have decided to talk about Edward Thorndike and some of the contributions he made to field of psychology and behavior modification. Thorndike was a psychologist who became famous from his work on learning theory which eventually helped the development of the operant conditioning theory within behaviorism. Although Skinner was the one to put operant conditioning into practice, it was actually through Thorndike’s ideas that helped Skinner succeed in proving his behavior modification method operant conditioning. Thorndike was also famously known for working with animals especially cats. Most of his major contributions came through his study with animals.

One of his contributions is the creation of a “puzzle box” which helped him with his extensive research on animal behavior modification. These puzzle boxes were created to work on the animal’s intelligence and it works on the basis of trial and error. However controversial it may be, we learned a lot about behavior through his experiments with the puzzle box. What was learned through these experiments is that when an animal makes a response and is rewarded for that, the response is learned. However, if it is not rewarded the behavior gradually disappears

Through the use of the puzzle box, Thorndike developed a theory called the Law of Effect and this states that any behavior that is followed by a pleasant consequence is more than likely to be learned and repeated, whereas the behavior that is followed by unpleasant consequences are most likely to be stopped.

Finally, included together with the Law of Effect were a number of other laws that Thorndike came up with that together came to be known as the Laws of Learning. These laws have contributed a lot to understanding how organisms learn. The three main laws in the Laws of Learning are Law of Readiness, which means a person can learn when physically and mentally adjusted to receive stimuli, Law of Exercise, which shows that repetition is key to the development of basic responses, and of course the Law of Effect which we discussed above.

Terms: operant conditioning, behaviorism, puzzle box, trial and error, reward, Law of Effect, consequences, Laws of Learning, Law of Readiness, Law of Exercise

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

http://www.drillpad.net/DP_IRL_Laws.htm

http://www.simplypsychology.org/edward-thorndike.html

1) Once you have completed your search and explorations, I would like you to say what your topic is, how exactly it fits into the section we have covered so far, and why you are interested in it.
I chose to look into goal setting as well as New Year's resolutions. I want to look at why peoples goals do not usually happen and they do not ever fully reach the outcome that they want. I think this is interesting because I am one of the many people who have not only set New Year's resolutions but have set goals throughout the year on either to start eating healthier or start working out more. Another main goal that I have tried to set is to spend more time a week on school work. This is something that I will use throughout my whole life because everyone wants to set goals for themselves. This will also be something that I use throughout my career because I will be working with juvenile delinquents and they will need to set goals while in the correctional facility in order to be released.

2) What are three aspects of the topic you want to talk about for this assignment?
The main thing I would like to find out is why goals don't work. I want to know if it is just because the person has a set back and they feel like giving up afterwards or if it is because the goal is not properly established. I would also like to see why people think New Year's is the best time to set a goal and would not just set the goal today, if they really want it accomplished. I have also heard that New Year's resolutions are less likely to be accomplished than actual other goals. It will also be interesting to see what goals are the most set and which are the ones that actually followed through with and done.

2) Next, I would like you to take the information you found from the various sources and integrate/synthesize* them into the three aspects of the topic, and then write about the topic.
The first thing I wanted to look up was to see how many New Year's resolutions were actually made per year and to see the other statistics behind making them. I found that these were the most popular New Year's resolutions set (in order); lose weight, get organized, spend less and save more, enjoy life to fullest, staying fit and healthy, learn something exciting, quit smoking, help others in their dreams, fall in love and spend more time with family.
After being in behavior modification I am very surprised with these New Year's resolutions and I can sort of laugh to myself about the "target behaviors" that were made. The one that I found most funny was fall in love because this doesn't seem like something that you can control. This is also something that would not be easy to track according to the steps in behavior modification. I do not see how this could be graphed off of a baseline and could be recorded. This is also not clear on what you are trying to fall in love with. A person? A hobby? A sport? A city?
I then found that there are only 8% of people who are successful in making New Year's resolutions. There were about 75% of people who make it throughout the first week and only 46% who make it past six months.
This lead into my next thing I wanted to look at which was why do people not follow through with resolutions. Before looking into this, and with just my own experience I thought it was because of the one time setbacks for goals like eating healthy or working out more. But I found that there is "false hope syndrome" which means the goal is unrealistic and they actually are hurting your self-worth by setting them. Many people procrastinate until the New Year and tell themselves that at the beginning of the year they will either just quit something cold turkey or get into something all at once. With behavior modification and class discussion I now see that this is not the best thing to do if we want to reach a goal. Something people could try is to reinforce themselves one day of the week by having desserts instead of just cutting out all sweets at once. Another thing I found that I already did not know from class discussion and reading the ABC's book was that we have to "rewire" our brains. This seems like it would be common sense when setting a goal however I along with many people, I'm sure, do not do this. Throughout psychology classes and my clinical psychology class I heard many times that people cannot change unless they want to which is I believe is partially true. If a person "wants" to quit smoking they will not actually until they really want to and know they need to for themselves. The website that gave me this information also listed their own steps on how to set New Year's resolutions that were similar to the ones in the ABC's book.
Next I found that I was wrong in why I expected most people's New Year's resolutions do not work. I figured it was because setbacks and people would be discouraged because they messed up maybe once or twice. I found that they have a lack of understanding of the goal setting process and they do not know how to set goals properly. They also have a lack of commitment to the goal and do not do like behavior modification says and record their results and track how they are doing. For many people they are probably trying to break habits that they have had for a long time and so they could easily forget about the goal they set and just go back to the habit that they have known for however long.

3) At the end, please include working URLs for the three websites.
http://www.statisticbrain.com/new-years-resolution-statistics/
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wired-success/201412/why-people-cant-keep-their-new-years-resolutions
http://www.reliableplant.com/Read/8259/fail-achieve-goals

Once you have completed your search and explorations, I would like you to say what your topic is, how exactly it fits into the section we have covered so far, and why you are interested in it.
-The topic that I have chosen to talk about on this topical blog are New Year’s Resolutions. This topic fits into the section we have covered so far because it was a big subject in our 4.1 reading for this week. I am interested in researching on New Year’s Resolutions because it interests me to know why people set goals to “change” or modify a behavior but never end up following through with it. Also, it interest me to know how businesses use New Year’s Resolutions as a sales pitch to increase their sales at the end and the beginning of the New Year.
2) What are three aspects of the topic you want to talk about for this assignment?
-The aspects of the topic that I would like to talk about for this assignment are what resolutions are, how New Year’s resolutions started, why they fail and ways to possibly make them successful
2) New Year’s Resolutions are goals that people set for themselves the year prior (usually at the end of the year) or at the beginning of a new year saying that they “promise” themselves that they will complete this goal in the New Year. There are many popular New Year’s resolutions that are the most popular like losing weight, getting toned (body), quitting an aversive behavior like smoking or drinking or starting pleasurable experiences for themselves like helping others or providing more random acts of kindness. But according to livescience.com they found a CBS News Poll in 2013 that claimed, “ 68 percent of Americans don’t make New Year’s resolutions. Two years ago, that number was 58 percent. People under the ago of 30 were more likely than older folks to make resolutions- but only about half of resolution makers keep their promises.”
It is said that New Years resolutions have religious origins. Babylonians made promises to their gods at the start of each year that they would return borrowed objects and pay their debts. Also, the romans began each year by making promises to their God, Janus which is where the name January came from. In the Medieval ear, the knights took the “peacock vow” at the end of Christmas season each year to re-affirm their commitment to chilvary. There are many different religious parallels to the New Year’s resolutions and there isn't a right or wrong answer as to where it really came from but that all of these religious beliefs have just believed their own thing and ended up doing it at the same time.
The reason why many people may not have successful resolutions are because people seems to set unrealistic goals, people don’t keep tract of their progress, people just plain forget of the promises they make to themselves or people just make too many unsuccessful resolutions that they just stop promising to themselves each year all together. It is said that men are more known to achieve their goals more when they engaged in goal setting while women succeeded more when they made their goals public and got support from their friends (definitely true on my part). I also believe that people don’t reach their goals because they don’t track their behaviors and people don’t know how to modify them correctly. Some people try their resolutions for a week or maybe even shorter or longer period of time and then it fades away because they give up because they are not seeing results quick enough (for those losing weight or getting fit for sure). I don’t think a lot of people use reinforcements or punishments enough in their resolutions to make it more successful. I believe that people are not aware on how to modify their self-directed behaviors and when people try so hard to reach their goal in a short amount of time and they don’t see results, extinction and extinction bursts can occur. Also like we learned during our reading, people make their resolutions way too broad! Some of us don’t focus on a target behavior and work towards that goal. A lot of people say “This next year I want to lose weight.” OK? So how much weight do you want to lose? Since we don’t have a way to track how we are succeeding it is easier to lose motivation. I feel like if people noticed all of the reason why we don’t successfully complete our resolutions, they may notice different ways to make them successful. Like setting specific goals, finding motivation to fulfill your goal and tracking it. And I particularly like what I found during my research, that our goals have to be S.M.A.R.T. Which this stands for specific, measurable, achievable, result-focused, and time-bound.

3) URL’s:
http://www.livescience.com/42255-history-of-new-years-resolutions.html
http://www.history.com/topics/holidays/new-years
http://topachievement.com/smart.html
http://topachievement.com/smart.html

4) Terminology: New Year’s Resolutions, modify, behavior, aversive, pleasurable, reinforcements, punishments, self-directed behaviors, extinction, extinction bursts, target behaviors

1) Once you have completed your search and explorations, I would like you to say what your topic is, how exactly it fits into the section we have covered so far, and why you are interested in it.
For this week’s blog, I decided to look further into New Years resolutions. I find it interesting that this is a topic that so many people take seriously, but they only follow through with it for a few weeks. Because of what we have learned previously in this class, I think one of the main reasons so many fail is due to the broadness of the topics. As we have previously discussed “lose weight” is too broad of a topic for someone to be able to successfully follow through with. I also think that this could be a good thing to look into because it will help to further my knowledge of goal setting, which is something that if done right, can help me be more successful throughout my life.

2) What are three aspects of the topic you want to talk about for this assignment?
The big thing I want to learn about is why goals don’t work. I am curious if it has to do with a lack of motivation or effort. Because New Years resolutions are goals we can personally set, it seems as though we should be able to be fairly successful with these goals. The other thing I want to discuss is how New Years resolutions got started and what some of the popular resolutions are.

3) Next, I would like you to take the information you found from the various sources and integrate/synthesize* them into the three aspects of the topic, and then write about the topic.
A New Years resolution is something that a person makes as a promise or act of self-improvement. These resolutions are something that many of us have previously heard of in the past, we may have even participated in this tradition. But if you’re like many American’s you often also probably have failed at your resolution. So why is it that something so popular among our culture is also something so many of us have failed at? Some researchers believe that this is because this happens to be a cultural presentation we all participate in because it is the “norm” but not because we are really wanting to change. Another reason researchers believe so many fail is due to cause and effect relationship. With this, it is believed that people are expecting their lives to drastically change when they lose weight, but when it doesn’t they get discouraged and return to their previous behaviors. In research, I looked at a few of the top new years resolutions that are broken. They included losing weight, drinking less, eating healthier, learning something new, and traveling to new places. One thing that I noticed all of these things had in common is that they are all fairly broad topics. With what we have learned about behavior modification, in order to have a successful modification a person needs to have a clear and concise goal in mind. Another thing that a person could do to make their goal more successful is to participate in reinforcement strategies to help elicit that certain behavior. During this research, I also learned that New Years resolutions originally were born as a religious thing where people would make a promise to their god in hopes of self improvement for that year. In one of the articles, they made several suggestions to help make a successful resolution. First of all, they say you should focus one resolution. The next big thing is to narrow your topic, don’t say ‘lose weight’. Instead set a goal like, “lose 10 pounds in 3 months.” The last big thing that they say you should focus on is making small steps to reach your ultimate goal. When I was reading about these suggestions, the only thing I could think about is that this is much of what we discussed in this class in order to modify a certain behavior. Another thing that I think would make a successful resolution is for you to start at a different time, besides the beginning of the year. I found it interesting to see that this isn’t just something that is discussed in this class and that stuff we learn in this class is able to be applied outside of this class as well. One category that all of these resolutions have in common is self directed behavior. Self directed behavior is something that was discussed in this past chapter. I think it is important to have these traits in order to help contribute to a successful modified behavior.

3) At the end, please include working URLs for the three websites.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wired-success/201012/why-new-years-resolutions-fail
http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,2040218,00.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Year%27s_resolution#Religious_origins

Words used: behavior modification, new years resolutions, goals, reinforce, elicit, modify, target behavior, and self directed behavior.

1) For my topical blog this week I decided to look more into the topic of New Year’s resolutions and why so many of them fail, and how people can effectively follow through with them. The reason why I chose this topic is because the subject is interesting to me, and is relatable as well since I have tried to complete a New Year’s resolution and things didn’t go so well. The topic fits well in this section, because it was not only mentioned in the chapter, but also is a great example of how behavior modification fits into real life. While most of the examples have been about changing the behaviors of other people, or children, or animals, this topic is about self-directed behavior and improving yourself.

2) The three aspects that I wanted to discuss about my topic are why New Year’s resolutions seem to almost always fail, what people can do to help make their resolutions actually happen, and what a person can do if they actually do fail at their resolutions. These characteristics are important to look into because understanding what resolutions are, and why they normally fail, can help improve the way that new resolutions will go the next time, and how to actually stick to a resolution and change behaviors for the better.

3) New Year’s resolutions are actually a very popular thing for our society because we are always feeling the need to improve ourselves. But actually no one ever thinks of a New Year’s resolution as being successful, but they associate the resolutions with failure. In fact these resolutions could actually be doing more harm than good because the problem is that instead of improving ourselves like we try to do, we just set ourselves up for failure. And failure is not a very good motivator. People who make New Year’s resolutions tend to set unreasonable goals for themselves, and then when the goals aren’t reached, they experience negative emotions and then end up lacking motivation to try and keep going. This failure that we set ourselves up for can actually take a negative toll on our self-worth.
When I looked up the facts, about a little over half of Americans end up making a New Year’s resolution for themselves, but then 88% of them end up failing and giving up on ever reaching that change. But the problem is pretty simple, New Year’s resolutions are too abstract and are more of a behavior class, rather than a specific target behavior like we have learned in this last section. The abstract goal is difficult for the brain to focus on and since it is so large, it makes it difficult for the brain to achieve this new goal because it’s not instinctual. So instead of making this large goal for yourself and setting yourself up to fail, the idea is to make the goal a smaller one, and try and make it a habit first.
Setting small, attainable goals throughout the year, instead of a singular, overwhelming goal at the beginning of the year can help you reach whatever it is you are eventually striving for. It’s not the extent of the change that matters, but rather the act of recognizing that lifestyle change is important and working toward it, one step at a time. By making your resolutions realistic, there is a greater chance that you will keep them throughout the year, and then start to improve your overall life.
If you break down the abstract goal into small steps and start to see them as tiny new habits can tremendously increase your chances of actually following through with your resolution. Some of the ways that you can break these resolutions down are to make sure you pick only one goal that you want to complete, instead of a bunch of different ones. In order to achieve this goal, instead of diving right in, you should take small baby steps towards the ultimate goal in order to help make it a habit. Another way to help make sure that you keep on the right path, you should try to hold yourself accountable by telling others about your goal or to keep record of your progress. And the last thing that can help ensure success when making a New Year’s resolution is by constantly reinforcing yourself for taking those small steps and keeping up with the goal. Rewards instead of punishment makes it a positive situation instead of punishment having a negative effect and feeling down about not staying on track.
But perfection is unattainable and sometimes there are setbacks when to reach a goal. Many people have ups and downs and instead of giving up because of a mess up you should resolve to recover from the mistake and get back on track. The New Year’s resolution topic is a difficult one, but with the right plan, changing behavior can become easier and more attainable.

11) Sites:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/31/new-years-resolutions_n_6396324.html
https://blog.bufferapp.com/the-science-of-new-years-resolutions-why-88-fail-and-how-to-make-them-work
http://www.apa.org/helpcenter/resolution.aspx

Terms: New Year’s resolution, behavior modification, self-directed behavior, behavior class, target behavior, change, reinforcing, punishment, reward

AAW
Topical Blog Week 10
Many people in the world on January 1st have their New Year’s resolution, but most never continue with their resolution. I am fascinated with the idea of people making these resolutions and the fact of them usually not continuing with their resolution. In Chapter 4.1 they discuss the idea of New Year resolutions and the fact that some people have trouble continuing them because of many reasons. In this blog I am going to look at a video and two articles. The three aspects that are going to be looked at in this blog are: why are New Year’s resolutions hard to obtain and continue?, what can be done to continue your New Year’s resolution?, and are New Year’s resolutions beneficial?. From the readings and the videos I have watched during my research I would say if a person follows the steps in the aspect of what can be done to continue a person’s New Year’s resolution they will see progress.

New Year’s resolutions start out being a positive outlook on a person’s life and having the chance to improve ourselves. However, after a few weeks and even days the resolutions become harder for people to continue. Why are New Year’s resolutions hard to obtain and continue? According to the YouTube video the women mentions 3 main reasons to why people fail to continue. The first being there are too many goals. The second is people are too broad about their goal. Lastly, she mentions people give up after they make a mistake with following their new behavior. Another problem stated in the article Auld Lang Syne: Success predictors, change processes, and self-reported outcomes of New Year’s and non-resolvers is that people are wanting to change their behavior and not making a true resolution. This leads to not being planned and stuck in a situation. According to the article Break that Habit people wait till January 1st to change a behavior. If someone truly wants to change a behavior they would do it right away. People waiting till January 1st either do not truly want to change a behavior or wait till it is a social acceptable thing. With this information we know keeping a resolution is difficult, so how do we succeed in this task people ask?

The video and articles give solutions to these problems stated above. During the YouTube video the women gives solutions to her reasons why people fail to continue. Those solutions contain first stick to one to three goals. This gives a person more focus on those goals and being more productive in those. The second thing to do is to be specific about the goal you are wanting to improve. That way it will be easier to develop into your daily schedule and soon become a routine. The last thing she mentions is to forgive yourself when you make a mistake in your resolution. People make mistakes and that is normal and should continue the resolution. In the study in the article Auld Lang Syne: Success predictors, change processes, and self-reported outcomes of New Year’s and non-resolvers they found that people that are in an action stage when planning a resolution have more success than those who just want to change a behavior. The results of the study show that resolvers are more successful than non-resolvers from after 6 months showing 46% success for resolvers and 4% for non-resolvers. Simply stated in the article Break that Habit all that needs to be done is to change the behavior when it is recognized. This does not need to be waited to January 1st. This way it is a behavior you truly want to improve and the other ideas of how to improve a behavior above can still apply. We have now been shown ways to improve our New Year’s resolutions, but is this actually beneficial?

Every year on January 1st everyone is ready to start a new life with a resolution, but it is known to many that these resolutions do not stick around long, so are New Year’s resolutions actually beneficial? From the way people typically present themselves with the way they want to do their resolution they will not benefit most people. According to a Journal of Clinical Psychology out of the 45% of Americans who usually make a resolution only 8% will succeed. This shows that the original way people look at New Year’s resolutions are going to not succeed. However, with the new information provided above along with in others books to support the statements improvements can be made and others can succeed. Another area of beneficial with these solutions are that shown in the Auld Lang Syne: Success predictors, change processes, and self-reported outcomes of New Year’s and non-resolvers article it shows that at least two-thirds of pledges concern life-threatening health behaviors. This can help improve people’s overall health.

This New Year’s if people were to look at the areas of the reasons people do not succeed, how a person can succeed, and see that it is beneficial I would expect to see more resolutions continued for some time. Making the resolutions more specific and even if you mess up sticking with the resolution this could become a regular process. There are simple mistakes that everyone makes when deciding there new resolutions for the New Year, but with the small adjustments others can succeed in their resolution and could even have it become a normal routine. Overall, these reasons and solutions can be applied to New Year’s, but they can also be applied to changing a behavior any time of the year. A person does not need to wait till January 1st to change their life, start now.

Auld Lang Syne: Success predictors, change processes, and self-reported outcomes of New Year’s and non-resolvers
http://web.a.ebscohost.com.proxy.lib.uni.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=c6a5a78a-8095-45e4-a05e-ac5695c4e2e9%40sessionmgr4001&vid=7&hid=4207

Break that Habit
http://eds.a.ebscohost.com/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=6&sid=3f199226-fb17-446e-9413-38a74a4f7e06%40sessionmgr4005&hid=4213

How to Keep Your New Year’s Resolution
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xH9gmmOkZV8

I decided to do my research in resolutions because I find them interesting since everyone has them at some point in their life. The example about the New Year’s Eve resolutions in the first section gave me the idea; the section talked about them since they are self-directed behaviors which are those behavior modifications that people use in them. I believe this is an interesting topic because who hasn’t thought about losing some weight after Christmas meals, or learn a new language in the upcoming year, or visit more times the family? The three aspects I would like to talk about are the reasons why we make resolutions, why we’re mostly not successful and what are the most common resolutions.
Dr. John Norcross is a psychologist that has studied the behaviors behind New Year’s resolutions for some years. In the 1980s he found that more than fifty per cent of Americans made some resolutions, but after six months the people who had stuck with them were less than fifty per cent of them; this amount of people even dropped to nineteen per cent in the next few years. So, if the behavior of making resolutions doesn’t stop, it makes me wonder why people keep doing it if they mostly don’t achieve them. The reason why people don’t usually achieve their new year’s resolutions is because of the “false hope syndrome”. This term was created by psychologists Polivy and Herman and it refers to the fact that we set unrealistic expectations about a behavior we’d like to modify, so when the action takes place we realize how difficult it is and end up giving up. Of course if we would set more realistic goals, with specific behaviors, we would have more chances of succeeding. This has been confirmed by a study of psychologist Jones about the role of expectations in exercise, where people with more modest expectations were more likely to finish a twelve week workout program.
In order to be more successful we should have concrete resolutions but also remembering the abstract ones according to psychologist Kelly McGonigal. One example of this would be the resolution of losing weight. The goal is set but we need to define this goal as a set of target behaviors, making them concrete. This way we are able to manage them, but we should never forget the “big why” which is the reason why we’re doing it. For example a “big why” would be that you would want to lose weight because you need to be healthy in order not to get tired from walking ten minutes. On the other hand a weak “big why” would be that it’s because you want to look better for your boyfriend/girlfriend. McGonigal also mentions how important the support system is. All you have to do is find a partner, and this doesn’t mean that this person necessarily has to do the action with you, but just be there when you need it. Studies show that texting someone when you are acting triples the rate of success in your desired behavior. A third point to consider when making a resolution apart from being realistic is that it needs to fit you and your lifestyle. If you plan on working out every morning before school you may find that you don’t pay as much attention in class because you are already tired, so maybe you should change the exercise schedule to after classes so your goal doesn’t interfere in your studies. McGonigal also gives some sort of pre-resolution suggestions that would make them easier for everyone who wants to make a change when the New Year comes. These are: listing the favorite memories and triumphs of the past year, this way you can focus on repeating what made you happy and what you’d like to change; making a list of what you are grateful full, this will help you embrace the positive effects that you already have in your life; and writing a letter to your future self.
Among all the possibilities for resolutions there are some more common than others. Eating healthier and working out is the first one in the top ten failed New Year’s resolutions followed by drinking more water, be on time to class and learn how to cook. The key to success appears to be in ourselves and the right choices we choose. Each new year just brings up hope and desire to be a “better us” and that’s why many people make resolutions and the fact that many people fail doesn’t mean that many other achieve their goals. The truth is that most of us have the capacity to achieve our goals if we focus on our personal strengths, weaknesses, and clarity about priorities. Failing shouldn’t either stop you from trying again because you can learn from your mistakes from one resolution to the next one. Everyone has the tools to do this and following the right steps should make it easier to the way to success. There was a god of beginnings in the ancient Roman religion named Janus that pictures this philosophy of looking at the past to learn from your previous mistakes but you also need to look at the future and picture you where you want to be.
Self-directed behaviors, goal, achieve, concrete, target behaviors, Norcross, false hope syndrome, modify, expectations, resolutions, define goal.

http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/why-we-make-resolutions-and-why-they-fail
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2015/january/resolutions-succeed-mcgonigal-010615.html
http://scribe.uccs.edu/?p=949
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqbAsr6wN_I

Self-Directed Behavior Modification.
I picked this topic because I can see the advantages of monitoring, directing my own behavior in an attempt to modify it. When it comes to changing my behavior, I am the one responsible for doing so. When others direct my behavior in an attempt to modify it I just see them as being manipulative, and that encourages me to continue, or often increase the targeted behavior.
An advantage of self-directed behavior is the sense of control and free will we have during the redirection of our behavior. If we are determined and steadfast then we can curb, end, or reinforce target behaviors. We are in control of our goals and interventions. If we accomplish our goals we experience accomplishment for ourselves.
To self-direct our behaviors we must establish realistic goals based the behaviors that we are targeting. Once, we have set up these goals we must enforce a self-monitoring system that we can follow easily. We also must find the discipline to stick to our plan, and follow it. Then we must self-monitor ourselves. You can do this a number of ways. The graph for water consumption that we’ve been using in class is a perfect example of a way to self-monitor. It’s easiest to self-monitor when we can record measureable data. To remain disciplined to our plan we must also plan for small setbacks, and deviance from the plan (to help us return to our methods if we have a slip up in the reinforcement, or discipline in our targeted behaviors). Antecedents, and contingencies also must accounted for and determined. Reinforcements should be included if necessary. Once you begin to keep record of your measurable behaviors you need to graph a baseline, and observe the results. You can use this information to influence your modification of behaviors.

http://www.uni.edu/~maclino/bm/book/sec4.2.pdf
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-clear/breaking-habits_b_3540148.html
http://panicdisorder.about.com/od/livingwithpd/a/Self-Modificati.htm
http://www.mhhe.com/cls/psy/ch14/behmod.mhtml

1) Once you have completed your search and explorations, I would like you to say what your topic is, how exactly it fits into the section we have covered so far, and why you are interested in it.
The subject I have decided to cover is the difference between self-directed behavior and other-directed behavior. This is interesting to me because I can see a pattern in the way people learn and behave and their personality and how they fit into society. Some people are better at self-directed behavior modification and others are better and other-directed modification.

2) What are three aspects of the topic you want to talk about for this assignment?
I would like to cover what both self-directed behavior and other directed behavior are. I also want to cover how these two idea can be applied to real life and where they are seen.

3) Next, I would like you to take the information you found from the various sources and integrate/synthesize* them into the three aspects of the topic, and then write about the topic.
Our latest reading covered the idea of self-directed behavior modification and this made me think of how the different ways one can have their behavior modified. Self-directed behavior modification is done by one’s self and is started by targeting an undesirable behavior or the want to incorporate a desirable behavior into your life. After that behavior is identified it is best to set a baseline by recording your behavior without any changes. It is best to do this completely honestly as to not skew your results. After your baseline is set the behavior has to be worked into your life. This can be done by self-punishment, reinforcement, or by adopting a counter behavior that prevents an undesirable behavior. This continues for as long as required, the end result should be a shift in your behavior an ability to remove your reward or punishment and keep the behavior.
In other directed behavior the key thing is that you are unaware of the changes being done to you. This is when someone other than yourself sets out to change your behavior. This is usually because your behavior is undesirable but there can be positive reasons for others to change your behavior. This is the classic idea of training a rat or a dog. They have no idea what you are doing as a whole but change behavior because of a stimulus or reward for a behavior being performed or extinguishing.
I did research to find which of these is most effective in changing ones behavior and found that other-directed is usually more effective but less common than self-directed in humans. We usually like to have control of our lives are resistant to others influencing our behaviors therefore we lean toward self-directed modification. Self-directed can be seen in many places such as diets, study habits, and exercise programs. These are all voluntary for the person and required the person involved to put out their own efforts to adhere to the change. This is a common problem because a lot of people tend to lose interest in the change quickly especially if the change punishes them. This is why other directed behavior is more effective because the other is more likely to keep up on the program than you. I can see how these two modification techniques come together when multiple people choose a thing to change. There is self-directed change and other-directed change being done at the same time. Others effect you to continue with the change like a diet and you encourage them to continue. But there is always a self-directed aspect when alone.

3) At the end, please include working URLs for the three websites
http://www.ldonline.org/article/6030/
http://www.mhhe.com/cls/psy/ch14/behmod.mhtml
http://www.artofmanliness.com/2012/06/11/becoming-an-autonomous-man-in-an-other-directed-world/
Terms/ behavior, modification, punishment, reinforcer, self-directed, other-directed, stimulus

1) Once you have completed your search and explorations, I would like you to say what your topic is, how exactly it fits into the section we have covered so far, and why you are interested in it.

For this I wanted to construct an applied scenario where I would instruct someone to use self directed behavior and to use it properly. In this scenario I will take the role of someone who is working with a person who is trying to increase the amount that they exercise. In this scenario we are trying to help them set up a self directed routine and how they can work out more without others forcing them to or reinforcing them to do so. I want to work with them to set up a proper workout goal, how to properly track their progress, and how to properly reinforce behavior as to keep you motivated and succeeding in your goals. I think that this fits into this section because I am directly applying the information from this section to a real world scenario. I think that the reason I take classes such as this one is so I can apply what I learned from this class into my job and life in the future. Weight loss is a big thing that people try to achieve and working out more is a major part of that. People often have a hard time succeeding and staying motivated in working out more and behavior modification techniques. I am interested in it since it is such a big issue and I myself have made efforts before to exercise more.

2) What are three aspects of the topic you want to talk about for this assignment?
Setting goal, tracking progress, reinforcement.

2) Next, I would like you to take the information you found from the various sources and integrate/synthesize* them into the three aspects of the topic, and then write about the topic.

To start out when building a routine you want to set a goal of a behavior that you want to do. You want the target behavior to be specific and objective as to be able to track. You can not simply say that you want to “workout more” and have the be it. When you target behaviors and goals are not specific then you are more likely to have them fail. A goal that a person picks should be specific, manageable, measurable, and fit into a person's daily life. For example a person just starting to try and exercise should not try and run 5 miles a day. It is not a reasonable expectation for a person who is not in shape to be able to run that much. Also a person with a job and a family should not have a goal that they want to workout for 3 hours a day. A person would not have that much time in any practical manner on top of 3 hours being a large amount for someone just starting. What a workout would be for each person would also need to be considered. A workout could range from any exercise from running, lifting, playing a sport and it is up to each person to decide what they would want to do in order to establish a workout that is effective and reasonable. A goal that might be recommended to a person starting to workout would be to jog or run 1.5 miles per day. This is a good goal because it would be specific, trackable, reasonable for a person to accomplish starting out, and also would not take an extremely large amount of time from their day.
On top of having a good goal you also need a method to track progress of working out. Tracking progress should measure if you did the target behavior on a specific day and overtime. Good ways of tracking progress would be to have a diary or graph of your progress that you fill out everyday if you completed your target behavior. Your diary should be easy to understand and to manage and likely would be very simple. A good start would be to have a date and mark if you achieved your target workout on that day. You could also put in a section with notes that you can make note of special events or if you had insights you wanted to record. Good tools to use for a diary for someone working out would be a notepad or your cellphone could have a notepad or app to track progress. After you get a long period of information you can see trends of your progress and you can see if you want to adjust or change your goal at all. You can see if you are successful or if change is needed. If you are exercising it is logical to think that the more you exercise the more in shape you will be and may need to change your target behavior to something more difficult or intense.
Reinforcers are also a good way to keep someone motivated and to continue a behavior. A reward should be significant to you and also be attached to each time you do the behavior. You want that to be so because you want it associated with the act of the target behavior and each target behavior should be reinforced. The reward should also be productive to your goals and not get in their way. For example deserts or unhealthy food would be a bad idea for someone trying to exercise and it is counterproductive to getting in better shape and sometimes bad foods can decrease the desire to workout or make it harder to do so. Good options might be to have the working out behavior enable to do a leisure activity or something you wanted to do. For instance, you might not allow yourself to watch television or play video games until you have already recorded into your workout diary that you have done the target behavior for that day. You could also possibly establish a fund that you put money into each time you work out. You could use the fund to purchase something that you like, such as a new book, movie, or new clothes that you would need if you are in better shape.

3) At the end, please include working URLs for the three websites.

http://www.health.com/health/gallery/0,,20558029_6,00.html

http://www.nerdfitness.com/blog/2011/07/07/how-to-track-progress/

http://www.sparkpeople.com/resource/motivation_articles.asp?id=86&page=2

Terms
target behavior, goal, reinforcement, diary, graphing, tracking behavior, self directed behavior, contingencies, motivation, behavior, behavior modification.

1. I found great interest in the psychology behind making New Year’s Resolutions, and the reason behind why it is so difficult for individuals to keep them. This is interesting to me and relates to my life directly because my mom is a prime example not sticking to resolutions. I think this is the main reason why I do not believe in making New Year’s Resolutions because I just don’t really see the point and it seems as though everyone breaks them after a week or so.
2. The three aspects I am going to focus on in this blog is why it is so difficult for people to stick to their resolutions, how can behavior modification change individual’s motivation to keep their goals, and I am going to talk about why it is important to accomplish smaller goals that build up to achieving the end goal.
3. I found multiple articles about the success rates for resolutions, I found that the first two weeks usually go along smoothly, but by February people are slipping up and backsliding. When the year comes to a close at the end of the next December, people are most likely going to have the same resolution as they have had for the past years. Resolutions is a form of a term I read in an article called cultural procrastination. This means people make resolutions as a way of motivating themselves, but these individuals are not necessarily ready to change. Another new term that I came across is the false hope syndrome. This means that an individual’s resolutions is very unrealistic and different from their internal view of themselves. The whole idea of making a resolution is to help improve someone’s life, but it often gets mistaken for the idea that if that one aspect of an individual’s life is changed then everything else will fall into place. This is not true. If I were to lose weight, that would only fix one aspect of my life, it would not change the fact that I am still in debt and still need to improve on my self-worth. By using the six steps in self-direct behavior, extreme resolutions can be split up into categories that are more likely to be successful and accomplished by an individual. I also think it’s very important to only use the self-direct behavior idea instead of the other-direct behavior type. I believe this because, in order to accomplish something as big as a resolution, an individual needs to be in full control. This will make them feel more confident and give this individual a sense of being independent and successful. If someone else was in charge of how an individual felt during the process of attempting to accomplish a resolution, that is less likely for the individual to accomplish their goal. By going by these six steps is a more realistic way at going about it. Instead of wanting to go crazy at the gym every day, it is more realistic to go three times a week. Focusing on one resolution instead of several ones, it’s accomplishable if someone sets one specific goal they want to work towards. I feel like the main reason why people give up on resolutions so quickly is that in the United States as a society want to get fast results, the quicker the better in this aspect. If someone is working towards becoming fit and losing weight, it’s going to take more than just a few times at the gym. Being healthy is a lifestyle, Roam wasn’t built in a day and losing 50 pounds won’t happen in a day either. This is a difficult subject for people to grasp because it takes dedication to change a behavior about yourself, it honestly may be one of the hardest things you will ever do, but in the end it is worth it. Another reason why New Year’s Resolutions fail fairly often is because people are using punishment instead of reinforcement. If someone’s goal was to eat healthier, and they backtrack and eat a dozen cookies, they will most likely punish themselves. Punishment is not the right way to go about this because punishing yourself for eating a pan of cookies is not the worst thing in the world. This person probably ate the pan of cookies because they were depriving themselves of desserts for the past few weeks. Moderation and reinforcement is key, punishment should never be the way to change a behavior. By punishing yourself because you took a step back in the process of becoming healthy will get you nowhere, actually it will get to where you started or even more farther back. When you choose the apple instead of the donut, you should reinforce yourself by maybe eating one bite sized snickers. Substitution is also key. Changing a behavior doesn’t have to be the worst experience in the world, it is what you make it and it can honestly be a good experience.
Terms: cultural procrastination, false hope syndrome, self-direct behavior, other-direct behavior, punishment, reinforcement.
Urls: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wired-success/201412/why-people-cant-keep-their-new-years-resolutions
http://www.everydayhealth.com/denise-austin/10-tricks-for-setting-and-sticking-to-your-healthy-new-years-resolution.aspx
http://amihungry.com/successful-new-you-resolutions-in-ten-strategic-steps/

1) Once you have completed your search and explorations, I would like you to say what your topic is, how exactly it fits into the section we have covered so far, and why you are interested in it.
I have decided this week to discuss and discover more about the topic of self-directed behavior. I have decided to do this because I want to understand better the ideas of self-reinforcement, self-punishment, and the downfalls and shortcomings of it. This is also a very common method of behavior modification as seen by new year’s resolutions, pacts made to significant others, among many other times that people decide to start something new.

2) What are three aspects of the topic you want to talk about for this assignment?
In this assignment I would like to talk about, what self-directed behavior is and how it works, the shortcomings of using this approach as compared to other-directed behavior approaches, and its relation to real world examples.

3) Next, I would like you to take the information you found from the various sources and integrate/synthesize* them into the three aspects of the topic, and then write about the topic.
Self-directed behavior is simple the overview of one’s self and applying reinforcement and punishment to one’s self. It works the exact same as the previous form of conditioning in operant conditioning The differences between operant conditioning and classical conditioning are fairly simple to comprehend at this point, operant conditioning, as aforementioned, is the use of consequences, these being through reinforcers and punishers, where classical conditioning is the pairing of a stimulus to produce a desired behavior. The major difference between normal people’s views on operant conditioning and self-directed behavior is that self-directed is the person controlling the consequences themselves instead of someone else being that person. With people being in charge of this operation, it requires an extensive knowledge of not just behavior goal setting, but self-follow through. With behavior goal setting, it requires a person to list a behavior to change, instead of the typical behavior class. An example is exercise as a behavior class, and running three miles as a behavior. Once they figure out the goal or desired behavior, they then set upon the actual designing of the plan. These plans involve multiple easy to follow steps and are related in part to SMART Goals. The desired behavior must be, specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely. Once these steps are set, the consequence can be laid out for the proper use of the behavior. Using the self-directed approach however has its problems, this is because people are easy to bend the rules for themselves and cheat on definitions.

These problems occur in every human being in the world, they are lighter on themselves when it is just them, and are more apt to reinforce a halfhearted attempt at the behavior instead of what the goal clearly states. Another issue with self-reinforcement and watching over one’s self is that some people are not ready to be responsible to not just monitor their own behaviors, but respond accordingly to them. It sounds strange, but some people are not either mature or had been coddled in early ages, and thus makes it difficult for someone to be that resource. People spend years working on how to reinforce others at the proper schedule, and those who constantly have someone else doing it for them, are typically not ready to do it themselves. This is one reason why new year’s resolutions fail, it is because people are not used to thinking of the consequences and self-monitoring. Also they tend to start at a generic behavior class and instead of reinforcing the activity of it, i.e. working out, they start high as in going to the gym, and then slowly reinforce less and less until they stop doing any activity in the slightest and end where they started. These are just some of the problems associated with self-directed reinforcement, beyond that; the real world is another area where this is completely prevalent.

In the real world, there are many examples of people who self-direct their behaviors; generally these are in the workplace. When a person goes from having a boss that deals out the consequences to workplace behavior and then it is changed to self-supervision, these people generally become lackadaisical in work after months because what was once a stern figure gets changed to an empathetic being. Generally this will lead to a decrease in work force efficiency. Another example would be in the classroom. In school, the teacher is the person who dolls out the punishments and reinforcements to students and this is how it is done until the graduation of high school. Once college is hit, professors still use some of these practices; however it is generally up to the student to control their own behavior. This typically has poor performances the first years of college as the person adjusts to the newfound “power” or “freedom” in their lives. Self-directed behavior has many upsides and can work, but I feel that it is more of a problematic thing among the general population.

4) At the end, please include working URLs for the three websites.
http://www.exforsys.com/career-center/self-supervision/disadvantages-of-self-supervision.html
http://study.com/academy/lesson/self-directed-teams-definition-advantages-disadvantages.html
http://www.hr.virginia.edu/uploads/documents/media/Writing_SMART_Goals.pdf

Terminology Used: self-directed behavior, other-directed behavior, behaviorism, reinforcement, punishment, consequences, operant conditioning, classical conditioning, reinforcers, punishers, stimulus, behavior, behavior class, schedule of reinforcement,

1)For the assignment of this week since both readings assigns are related to self-directed behavior I have decided to talk about self-directed behavior. I find it a really interesting concept since like everybody I also have goals that I want to reach and after the readings of this week I feel convince to reach them.

2)For this assignment the three aspects that I am going to talk about are the definition of self-directed behavior, the importance of picking a target behavior in order to self-directed behavior to be effective and successful and the steps for self-directed behavior.

For the definition of self-directed behavior I found a webpage that includes a summary of all the process that takes place when we use self-directed behavior modification. The webpage talked about the possibility of using some principles from classical and operant conditioning when using self-directed behavior modification. It after talked about the steps that have to be followed in other to change a behavior which are setting a goal, keep a daily diary in order to later on do graph with all the data collect in that diary. This data is used in order to know what makes should be introduce to be successful in changing a behavior. The results are going to show what the factors that increase the behavior are and we are going to have to introduce stimulus control in order to reduce the undesired behavior. Stimulus control should be accompanied by reinforcement that motivates us to reach the goal. The success achieve in self-directed behavior modification depends on our willingness to change that behavior. The reading talked about self-directed behavior modification as the process of changing a behavior that is not desired by ourselves in order to reduce its likelihood and therefore increase the frequency of emitting the desired behavior. The reading said that self-directed behavior is important because everyone has goals that want to reach and by using self-directed behavior modification we do not need of anybody to change the target behavior.

For target behavior I found a webpage that gives a brief and concise definition of the concept. The webpage defined it as the behavior that is chosen to be changed. The reading talked about the importance of defining target behaviors in order be aware of the behavior that we want to change. It is impossible to change a behavior that we are not aware that we want to change. Another important thing about target behavior that the reading pointed out is that it has to be specific in order to actually know the behavior that we really want to change. We all have new Year’s Resolution but they are too broad such as drink less or lose weight, those target behaviors are too broad so it is easier that we will stop trying to reach them that if we say lose weight by eating less junk food and more fruit and vegetables then the target behavior is specific so whenever we are going to eat we are going to think I have to eat fruit and vegetables instead of junk food and we will be more willing to do it and therefore to lose weight.

For the steps of self-directed behavior I found a video that talked about the stages of change which were pre-contemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, maintenance, and relapse and it use drink less as an example. For the pre-contemplation stage the video talked about the fact that in this stage we are not aware that we have a behavior that we have to change because we think that all of the behaviors that emit are perfectly fine so we do not think we have a problem with alcohol. In the contemplation stage we start to be aware that maybe not all of the behaviors we display elicit a desirable response in others or in ourselves and we decide that we want to change those behaviors by making them our target behaviors. The video talked about when we get hangover and it is not the first time so we start to think that we may need to reduce the alcohol intake. For the preparation stage we set some goals to reach and we create the way that we are going to follow in order to change the target behaviors. We start to reduce the alcohol intake. In the action stage we actually look for ways to change those target behaviors which can be through stimulus control or through outside help if needed. In this stage we start to go to AA meetings and avoid places where alcohol is present. The maintenance stage is the one that we all want to stay in because that means you have reached your goals, change your target behaviors and you now emit a behavior that does not elicit an aversive response in others or in ourselves. For this stage we keep going to AA meetings and avoiding the presence of alcohol. Sadly not everyone is able to stay in the maintenance stage leading them to the last possible stage which is relapse. For this stage people generally is not able to keep the new behavior and they come back to the old target behavior. For the example we stop going to AA meetings and then start to get in contact with alcohol and ending drinking again. The section talked about the steps of self-directed behavior modification in a little different way but it can be classify in the same category. The steps that the reading talked about were set a goal, define and specify the goal as a set of Target Behaviors, keep a record, graph a baseline, determine contingencies, determine antecedents, and implement and adjust the contingencies. Using the same example that the video for the first step we will decide that we need to stop drinking or at least reduce the alcohol intake. Next, we will keep a record of the daily amount of alcohol that we intake and later we will do a graph. With the results we will decide what the factors that affect our alcohol intake are and we will avoid them. Finally, we will find programs or ways to reduce that intake in order to reach the goal of reduce the alcohol intake or stop drinking alcohol.

3)http://www.mhhe.com/cls/psy/ch14/behmod.mhtml

http://psychologydictionary.org/target-behavior/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uit1e92fko

Terms and terminology used: Self-directed behavior modification, aversive response, desired behavior, undesired behavior, target behavior, emit, elicit, behavior, classical conditioning, operant conditioning, stimulus control, reinforcement, desired behavior.

For this week’s Wednesday Assignment I chose to take a deeper look at New Year’s Resolutions and why they typically fail. After my previous post for Monday's assignment I took a special interest in the ways in which behavior modification was related to New Years Resolutions. As discussed in this week’s reading, specifically section 4.1, there are various reasons as to why people are unlikely to succeed with creating New Year's resolutions. These resolutions represent goals that we as human’s would like to achieve and be able to maintain as a part of a better lifestyle. Some of the resolutions mentioned in the reading consist of losing weight, getting organized, spending less money/saving more money, and living life to the fullest, just to name a few. What was unfortunate to was that these resolutions were also on the list of top 10 resolutions most likely to fail. Why is this? Well, it is due to a lack of self directed behavior and the inability to clearly/specifically define goals.
In this post I plan to look at the three aspects that pertain to this New Year's resolution dilemma. I intend to cover why resolutions are so prone to failure, as well as the processes that take place inside of the brain when we write goals. Then I will take a look at ways to identify a habit versus a true resolution. Finally, I will explain ways in which you can set some realistic goals and how to make them successful.

For some reason, on New Years we all decide that this would be the ideal time of year to plan out new goals for the year. The theme “New Year, New You” rings loud and proud as weight loss commercials and financial planning advertisements flash across our television screens. This idea that the New Year means you have “fresh start” on life or a chance to wipe the slate clean is quite bizarre to me. Why do you need to have only one day out of the year where you can decide to make changes in your life. Why can’t you change today? Tomorrow? Waiting until New Year’s will not make your resolution more likely to succeed. Actually, the odds of a New Year's Resolution ever becoming successful are quite grim. In one of my articles, it showed that 45% of Americans usually make resolutions but only 8% of those people are actually able to achieve their resolutions. Why does this happen? Well, the goals that are being set are often unrealistic and not specific enough. For example, the resolution of “lose weight” is very broad, and can often be interpreted more of as a hopeful idea to motivate that person to change. There actually is a scientific term for this line of thinking called “false hope syndrome” where the resolution, although it may appear optimistic, is so unrealistic that it does not match up with the person's internal view of themselves. This is where the person holds onto this optimism as a motivation to change, but deep down inside they feel that they cannot ever achieve the goals they have set for themselves. The effects of this often lead to feelings of inadequacy, and lowering of self esteem. A way to counteract this is by writing out specific behavioral goals that can help to you achieve your ultimate goal. By isolating some target behaviors and making changes to your environment in order to promote these behaviors, you are assisting yourself in achieving your end goals. Also by monitoring your progress and accomplishments of these mini “sub goals” so to speak, you can continue to motivate yourself. This is especially crucial in the weeks following the creation of your resolution. In one of my articles, it said that 75% of the people who made a resolution were able to maintain it for a week, but only 25% of the people were able to maintain their resolution through the second week.

Well, now that we discussed some ways to keep up the motivation, let’s discuss a key factor in the role of achieving goals: the brain. As a human being we have this lovely component called willpower and that willpower can help us to overcome obstacles in our lives. Willpower is oriented in the prefrontal cortex of your brain, or more commonly identified as the forhead area. This part of your brain is crucial to succeeded with goals because it also impact your ability to focus, to solve abstract tasks, and most importantly, houses your short term memory. In order to achieve your goals, you need to stay focused on the task at hand, and when you are focusing on a task, you utilize this part of the brain. When we are trying to focus on something, our brain is still processing other information. Making new years resolutions and executing them involves us to change the patterns of behavior that have been hardwired into our brain. When we are trying to learn a new behavior such as developing a workout routine, it is easy for our brain to switch to default and revert back to old behaviors. Say you plan to work out on Monday Wednesday and Friday of every week at 3 o'clock. For the first week you remember to work out, but the next week you forget on Wednesday and Friday and instead use that time to watch television like you always would. In order to change, we need to make the mental effort to alter our behaviors. As you are training your muscles while you work out, you are training the prefrontal cortex to slowly remember your newly altered pattern of behavior.

Developing these patterns of behavior are quite difficult, especially when your end goal is to make them into a habit, in which the behavior is so ingrained into your brain you don’t have to focus on it in order to achieve it. Habits are a very important part of the process of achieving goals, but they are vastly different than resolutions. Resolutions are what I would consider to be a broad representation of the behavioral class we intend to alter. Habits are a series of broken down behaviors that occur without much mental thought, and can be used in order to achieve the desired resolution. For example: Your resolution this year is to “get fit”, one of our top ten resolutions. You take this broad behavioral class and you break it down into target behaviors, (such as working out for 30 minutes on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday) that can be turned into habits through repetition over time.

When looking at ways you can make your new year's resolution succeed, you must remember to decide on only one resolution to target at a time. Trying to alter multiple patterns of behavior will be too much for your brain (and you) to handle an in turn will most likely result in failure. Another way to make your resolution succeed is through support of others. By sharing your goals with others you are setting the standard that you will be (need to be) held accountable for your actions. Other methods of holding yourself accountable for your goals is by writing your goals down and posting them where they are visible. I have personally found that writing down my goals and posting them on my mirror help increase the likelihood that I will succeed.

Terms: self directed behavior, false hope syndrome, habits,

www.recovery.org/pro/articles/new-years-resolution-should-you-make-one-or-not/
www.statisticbrain.com/new-years-resolution-statistics/
www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/scienceandtech/columns/forscience/12835-Psychology-This-Is-Why-Your-New-Year-s-Resolution-Will-Fail.2
www.lifehacker.com/5928698/how-our-brains-stop-us-from-achieving-our-goals-and-how-to-fight-back
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wired-success/201012/why-new-years-resolutions-fail

1) Once you have completed your search and explorations, I would like you to say what your topic is, how exactly it fits into the section we have covered so far, and why you are interested in it.
I chose to look into the group AA (alcoholics anonymous). My sister has issues with substance abuse and is currently serving time for it, so I wanted to see how it related to what we have talked about in class/read in our book.
2) What are three aspects of the topic you want to talk about for this assignment?
I want to talk about substance abuse/dependency, the group AA, and how it relates to what we are talking about with self-directed behavior.
2) Next, I would like you to take the information you found from the various sources and integrate/synthesize* them into the three aspects of the topic, and then write about the topic.
I think that this subject fits in greatly with AA. We, this week, have begun to really focus in on using behavior modification methods on ourselves. This is what groups like AA strives to do with those who suffer from some form of addiction or substance abuse. Substance abuse very quickly becomes substance dependency. At this point it is very hard to over come and change your ways. You have to change many things: your habits, your friends, your environment, etc. While many people seek the help of groups like AA for guidance, what these groups do is try to teach the skills to be able to modify your own behavior for the better. The classic saying or prayer of AA is: “Lord, grant me the serenity to change the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to tell the difference.” What we have been learning in this class is that with the right tools all of us have the power to use self-directed behavior modification to change our behavior for the better. This is also what AA teaches. Using reinforcement and punishment, as well as learning the antecedents for certain behaviors and changing those antecedents to avoid those behaviors, is what they are taught in AA in order to change the things that cause them to fall into the trap of substance abuse and dependency. Maybe a certain friend or a certain location is more likely to trigger this behavior. They are taught to try to avoid that antecedent, just like we discussed in class. They are taught to self administer consequences for their behavior, in a healthy way. These groups help people use behavior modification and the principle of self-directed behavior to change themselves for the better.
3) At the end, please include working URLs for the three websites.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZHtM8QFyks
http://www.aa.org
http://www.mhhe.com/cls/psy/ch14/behmod.mhtml

This week I was excited to do the reading for a couple different reasons. First, it meant that we were in our 10th week and that we only had 6 more weeks of class left. Second, it was interesting in that it gave us the ground work to start our final project. While our final will and should incorporate more than self directed behavior related things, it is a big part or the next few weeks. Today, I will discuss self directed behavior more.
Self directed behavior is when we use behavioral modification techniques on ourselves. In this blog, I will discuss what I intend to try to change in myself and how I plan on doing so, along with other self directed behavioral things. This to me is a big part of behavioral psychology, because ultimately, if the self does not want to change, it will not.
For the next few weeks, we will be charting and following a behavior that we would like to change for better or worse. We will then instill interventions that should prompt us to change those behaviors. Well, my behavior that I would like to change would be: become more physically active.
When choosing a target behavior, one should always be as specific as one can. For me to simply say that I want to become more physically active is not specific enough. How do I want to become more active? For how long and when would I be physically active? My revised target behavior would be this then: I want to become more physically active doing Yoga 3 days a week for at least 1 hour a day. With this target behavior, my time amount and action is very on point. I chose Yoga for two reasons. One is to relax me, and the other is to help lose weight. I have been on track with losing 15 pounds this year with diet changes alone, and I would like to continue with a low impact exercise program.
This brings me to something I dug up in my research. It was a very interesting study that allowed patient to use self directed behavior on weight control. This study asked the participants what they would like to change about their weight, diet, or exercise to control weight. Many activities were chosen, such as a stricter monitoring schedule, walking, or fasting. They were then expected to do a self evaluation and report for 24 weeks with the amount of times they weighed themselves that week and the results. It also included the diet they had and amount of physical activity the achieved. This was all mailed in, making the participants solely responsible for their own goal and changes in behavior. I found this study interesting because they were asked to take it upon themselves to make this change. After 6 weeks, a little over half of the original participants continued to send in their reports seriously. However, after results were tallied, there was a significant loss in weight. There was also an increase in people weighing themselves.
Let’s look at this from a different perspective. I found a video that showed a few different groups of monkeys and gorillas that were looking at their reflection in the mirror. They at first, had a very aggressive reaction to the reflections, and would try to beat and break the glass. But as they sat there, they learned that they were not being attacked, but were being left alone. They then began to change their behavior to a more speculative one, and would just stare at their reflections in the mirror, no longer angry. They used self directed behavior to change their aggression into curiosity. They changed a series of events by disrupting the stimulus response pattern.
There are many things people can do to change a behavior. They can use self reinforcement for losing each pound to help motivate and keep them on the treadmill. They could use incompatible behavior to distract from the target behavior that they would like to change or stop, like when smokers chew gum instead of smoking. But, if one is going to try to change a behavior, they need to stick to their guns. If they falter and go right back to their old ways, it could be worse than before. They need to keep detailed records of their data, continue doing the interventions and self reinforcement as they choose, and keep doing (or not doing) the chosen behavior. If they don’t use it, they will lose it!
Target behavior
Self directed behavior
Self reinforcement
Stimulus disruption
Interventions
http://www.mhhe.com/cls/psy/ch14/behmod.mhtml
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4306570/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwkXtrfHz4s

1) Once you have completed your search and explorations, I would like you to say what your topic is, how exactly it fits into the section we have covered so far, and why you are interested in it.
For my research this week I decided to look at New Year’s resolutions. This applied to what we have talked about so far in the course because resolutions are a form of behavior modification.
2) What are three aspects of the topic you want to talk about for this assignment?
I am going to look at the aspects of what the most common New Year’s resolutions are and how often they are successful, why these resolutions might fail, and how to make a resolution that is more likely to be successful.
2) Next, I would like you to take the information you found from the various sources and integrate/synthesize* them into the three aspects of the topic, and then write about the topic.
The articles and video I looked at all had one thing in common and that was that they discussed that about 40% to 41% of people in the United States say they have a New Year’s resolution and most of them have common things that are desired behavioral changes people attempt to make for New Year’s. Some of the most common are losing weight, quitting smoking, keeping in contact with people, saving money, volunteer, or to stop drinking. According to Forbes only 8% of people are successful with their New Year’s resolution but in the video I watched it said that 46% of people who said they wanted to make a New Year’s resolution were still on track after six months. Although the video does state that they think there was bias because these people knew they were being studied, I wonder how many of these people who still be keeping up with their resolution after one year.
The next thing to look at is why the people who did not succeed with their self directed behavioral change, were not successful. The biggest issue is that the goal is often too broad. As the sections from this week discussed many of these are often behavioral class instead of a specific target behavior. Saying that you want to lose weight is a behavior class. Do you want to lose weight by eating better or by exercising more? Is this goal accomplished when you lose one pound or when you lose fifty? If something absolutely awful happens and you lose a body part does that count as reaching your goal?
There are many ways we can not only help ourselves be more successful in New Year’s resolution but also to guide others to help themselves. First we need to give credit to the people making New Year’s resolutions because they are setting a very specific start date which allows the antecedent to be more likely to encourage the target behavior. The next thing people need to do is chose a very specific target behavior. For example “I want to go from smoking a pack of cigarettes a day to smoking two cigarettes a day.” This is a realistic and tangible goal because they have set a limit that is not completely extreme. Going cold turkey or extinguishing the habit of smoking often results in an extinction burst where people develop a different “bad” habit smoke more than they did in the first place. I liked the example from the video about how viewing people who are successful in self directed behavioral change are much more like plumber’s and not CEO’s. Plumbers show up with tools they know will help them while CEO’s often set out big plans but do not know where to start or rely on others to help them achieve these goals. The last thing most people need to change when they are attempting a New Year’s resolution is that they need to reinforce target behaviors instead of punishing undesired behavior. As we have discussed in this class punishment only displaces the undesired behavior instead of stopping it.
3) At the end, please include working URLs for the three websites.
http://www.health.com/health/gallery/0,,20452233_9,00.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqbAsr6wN_I
http://www.forbes.com/sites/dandiamond/2013/01/01/just-8-of-people-achieve-their-new-years-resolutions-heres-how-they-did-it/

Terms: Behavior Modification, behavior, self-directed, behavioral class, target behavior, antecedent, extinguishing, extinction burst, reinforce, punishing

1) Once you have completed your search and explorations, I would like you to say what your topic is, how exactly it fits into the section we have covered so far, and why you are interested in it.

The topic I am choosing for week 10 is Self Directed Behavior. Self directed behaviors fit into the section we covered because in section 4.1 they discuss how a New Year's Resolution is a great example of a commonly used self directed behavior in an attempt to increase or decrease one of our behaviors at our free will. I am interested in it because I usually come up with a New Year's Resolution and I try to follow through with it every year.

2) What are three aspects of the topic you want to talk about for this assignment?

Three aspects I would like to talk about for this assignment are common New Year's Resolutions, why people can't seem to stick with their resolutions, and my latest new years resolution.

2) Next, I would like you to take the information you found from the various sources and integrate/synthesize* them into the three aspects of the topic, and then write about the topic.

New Year's Resolutions are a commonly done practice done at the end of every calendar year to self direct our behavior. For the most part, we try to enforce ourselves to improve ourselves. Some of the most common resolutions involve losing weight, getting more organization in your life, spending less money and saving more, living life to the fullest, and staying in shape and becoming more healthy. These resolutions are done by about 48% of all Americans, however only about 8% of those people are successful with them. Why is that? In Psychology Today, they say our first two weeks of the new year go great but after that we go into a steep decline. Once December comes we are often even worse than when we started. We succumb to a false hope syndrome. We think we can overcome so tasks that take more effort than we are willing to put into them. The positive affirmations we make about ourselves that we don't follow through with and complete only end up hurting our self worth. I know I have failed at some new years resolutions. I make them and I am good for them for about a month or so. Eventually I start to slowly stop doing it. This year I thought would be different, I even set a reminder on my phone to do it every day. Eventually I told myself I was too busy or I couldn't at the time. Once I deleted the reminder so it would stop bugging me it pretty much meant the end of it. I hadn't even thought about it until this assignment. It may not be with everyone, but I can see how someone would feel down on their self for not being able to follow through with it.

3) At the end, please include working URLs for the three websites.

http://www.statisticbrain.com/new-years-resolution-statistics/

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wired-success/201412/why-people-cant-keep-their-new-years-resolutions

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/new-years-resolutions/

positive affirmation, self directed behavior, self worth,

1) Once you have completed your search and explorations, I would like you to say what your topic is, how exactly it fits into the section we have covered so far, and why you are interested in it.

The topic I am choosing for week 10 is Self Directed Behavior. Self directed behaviors fit into the section we covered because in section 4.1 they discuss how a New Year's Resolution is a great example of a commonly used self directed behavior in an attempt to increase or decrease one of our behaviors at our free will. I am interested in it because I usually come up with a New Year's Resolution and I try to follow through with it every year.

2) What are three aspects of the topic you want to talk about for this assignment?

Three aspects I would like to talk about for this assignment are common New Year's Resolutions, why people can't seem to stick with their resolutions, and my latest new years resolution.

2) Next, I would like you to take the information you found from the various sources and integrate/synthesize* them into the three aspects of the topic, and then write about the topic.

New Year's Resolutions are a commonly done practice done at the end of every calendar year to self direct our behavior. For the most part, we try to enforce ourselves to improve ourselves. Some of the most common resolutions involve losing weight, getting more organization in your life, spending less money and saving more, living life to the fullest, and staying in shape and becoming more healthy. These resolutions are done by about 48% of all Americans, however only about 8% of those people are successful with them. Why is that? In Psychology Today, they say our first two weeks of the new year go great but after that we go into a steep decline. Once December comes we are often even worse than when we started. We succumb to a false hope syndrome. We think we can overcome so tasks that take more effort than we are willing to put into them. The positive affirmations we make about ourselves that we don't follow through with and complete only end up hurting our self worth. I know I have failed at some new years resolutions. I make them and I am good for them for about a month or so. Eventually I start to slowly stop doing it. This year I thought would be different, I even set a reminder on my phone to do it every day. Eventually I told myself I was too busy or I couldn't at the time. Once I deleted the reminder so it would stop bugging me it pretty much meant the end of it. I hadn't even thought about it until this assignment. It may not be with everyone, but I can see how someone would feel down on their self for not being able to follow through with it.

3) At the end, please include working URLs for the three websites.

http://www.statisticbrain.com/new-years-resolution-statistics/

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wired-success/201412/why-people-cant-keep-their-new-years-resolutions

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/new-years-resolutions/

positive affirmation, self directed behavior, self worth,

1) Once you have completed your search and explorations, I would like you to say what your topic is, how exactly it fits into the section we have covered so far, and why you are interested in it
I have decided to look more in depth into New Years’ Resolutions. This fits into this section because New Years’ resolutions are a great example of self-directed behaviors. I am interested in it because as a majority of people, I too vow to change January first and just like clockwork I give up on my resolutions within the first month. Every year though, I still make resolutions even though I know beforehand that I will probably not succeed. This year can be different with the help of learning behavior modification.

2) What are three aspects of the topic you want to talk about for this assignment?
I would like to find out more about the statistics on New Year’s resolutions, why people fail, and ways to actually succeed.

3) Next, I would like you to take the information you found from the various sources and integrate/synthesize* them into the three aspects of the topic, and then write about the topic.
A lot of Americans make New Year’s resolutions each year. The ten most popular New Year’s resolutions are lose weight, get organized, spend less, enjoy life to the fullest, staying fit and healthy, learn something exciting, quit smoking, help others in their dreams, fall in love and finally spend more time with family. Even though, typically, we see a lot of people make resolutions and fail those who make resolutions are ten time more likely to succeed than those who do not. Depending on your age people will have a better chance of completing their New Years’ resolution. People in their twenties who complete their New Year’s resolution complete it thirty-nine percent of the time while those who are fifty drops down to fourteen percent.
When I think of New Years’ Resolutions, I see crowed gym that last for a couple months, but then it ends. The first week of resolution, seventy-five percent of people maintained it through the first week. Seventy- one percent of people lasted throughout two week. Sixty-four percent lasted a month and at the sixth month mark there was only forty-six percent still having stuck with their New Years’ Resolutions. Those who have started and failed are typically farther behind than where they had started in January.
Timothy Pychyl, a professor of psychology at Carleton University which is Canada, stated that resolutions are part of a cultural procrastination. They are not ready to change habits, so they wait until a certain time to attempt to change them. This also goes hand in hand with another term Pychyl coined, false hoped syndrome. This means that resolutions are unrealistic. This makes positive affirmations of yourself that you do not actually believe which in the end damages your self-esteem. Some people when they think about their new years’ resolutions, they believe once they start changing their whole life will change, but when it does not they get discouraged and give up. People also get too upset with themselves while they try to change their behaviors. Changing behaviors is hard and people will mess up and go back to old habits, but the key thing is to keep trying and not being too hard on yourself because you will eventually get there.
The last website I looked at talked about how to actually succeed in keeping your new years’ resolution and it broke it down into four easy steps. The first step after you have your goal is to break it down into achievable benchmarks. So, let’s say you want to lose 50 pounds. Instead of just saying that, you should break it down, so the first month try and lose five pounds. As the book stated you need to have specific target behaviors.
The second step is to schedule check ins. After the hype of the New Year has passed, people sometimes forget all about their goals. If you schedule a day a month or a couple days a month to reflect on your progress, everyday busy life will not get in your way. Some things to think about during this reflection is how close are you to achieving your goal, what have you done to achieve it, and if that is not working what can you do to reach it.
The third step which I think is personally the hardest, is do not allow failure to stop you. People get so concerned with doing everything correct and making progress that if you make a mistake and do not move forward that they believe that they have failed. As I stated above, changing behaviors is hard and there will be set backs, but you have to keep moving forward and you will get there.
The last step is to measure everything. If you measure everything you will know where you stand each week. Watching the pounds come off, the money grow in your back account will be worth it in the end when you reach your goals.
4) At the end, please include working URLs for the three websites.
http://www.statisticbrain.com/new-years-resolution-statistics/
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wired-success/201012/why-new-years-resolutions-fail
http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/241494

5) Terms used
Self- directed behaviors, behavior modification, false hope syndrome, cultural procrastination, target behaviors,

1) Once you have completed your search and explorations, I would like you to say what your topic is, how exactly it fits into the section we have covered so far, and why you are interested in it.
The main topic from the chapters from this week’s reading is self-directed behavior. Self-directed behavior refers the process of modifying our behavior where we control the behavior ourselves and are also typically in control of the reinforcers and punishers. This differs from other-directed behavior where a person is responsible for modifying another person or animal’s behavior. For this topical blog, I would like to talk about how a person would start eating healthier using self-directed behavior modification. Many people have set goals directed to losing weight whether that be an New Year’s resolution or they may just want to work on their summer bod. For many reasons, some people do not meet their goals There are many aspects that go into losing weight but what a person eats is the key to being healthy. I am interested in this topic because I have tried to lose weight and didn’t take the steps in self-directed behavior modification, and as a result, failed to reach my goal.
2) What are three aspects of the topic you want to talk about for this assignment?
First, I would like to talk about the reasons why many people fail at reaching their weight loss goals. Next, I would like to talk about defining the target behavior for eating healthier, and lastly, I would like to talk about the importance of keeping a food journal.
2) Next, I would like you to take the information you found from the various sources and integrate/synthesize* them into the three aspects of the topic, and then write about the topic.
On January 1st, many people celebrate the new year by pledging to lose weight. “New year, new me,” they will say. After a month or so, the motivation wears off, and by six months, people will be saying how they have made no progress that year. This is the result of a problem with the design of their goals, not people being lazy and lacking motivation. On that day, people will say, “I’m going to lose weight,” and they’ll fill up their refrigerators with vegetables and get gym memberships, but eventually, most people will stop doing this. There are many reasons why. Firstly, they will set goals that are unattainable. A person might start this lifestyle and the first week, they lose five pounds in a week (mostly water weight) so they set the goal to lose five pounds a week. After the first week, it drops down to one or two pounds a week, which is a healthy rate of losing weight, but they get discouraged because they are not making as much progress as they had hoped. Losing five pounds a week is not realistic for losing weight in a healthy way. Another problem that occurs, that I personally think is one of the most important factors in whether or not you fail, is making weight loss the goal. But wait, is weight loss supposed to be the goal? There is a reason why I want to focus on the behavior of eating healthy, not losing weight. There are many unhealthy ways that a person can lose weight. They can get sick. Having an eating disorder can cause someone to lose a lot of weight. Personally, I could probably drop twenty pounds by cutting off one of my legs. But none of these things are healthy. Being skinny does not equal being healthy and being healthy does not equal being skinny. Instead of focusing on a number on a scale or a body type to achieve, you should focus more on how you feel and if you are happy. If a person tries to get healthy, their body will reach a certain weight and shape is reflective of being healthy, but if a person’s goal is to lose weight without the undertone of getting healthy, that means that they would do unhealthy things to lose weight, which may work short term, but in the long run they will not reach their goal. Obviously diet culture is a big deal right now. A person’s appearance is one of the most important things about them, it seems. It’s really unrealistic to not expect most people to look in their mirrors and think, “I really wish I could lose five pounds.” So how do you work with these thoughts without engaging in unhealthy behaviors? Well, like I said before you should not make the goal to lose weight. You should make a specific goal, your target behavior. There are many ways to lose weight. You can change your diet or exercise, but you have to get more specific than just eating healthier or exercising more. These are behavior classes, but you should focus on the target behavior. Go deeper into these classes. Start running more, lifting more weights, do yoga, eat less processed foods, go vegan. The target behaviors need to be specific, attainable, measurable and work with our daily lives. If you live somewhere without a yoga studio, it would be hard to do yoga. I know for a lot of college students it is hard to be vegan or vegetarian because the food is expensive. Make it so the you would be able to reach your goal. If you are rather unfit or have asthma, like myself, it may be hard to run a 5k on your first day. It is important to define a target behavior because you are in control of whether or not you meet it. If your target behavior is to run a mile every day, you are up to running the mile. If your goal is to lose five pounds a week, there are other factor that go into losing weight that are not in our control even if we emit behaviors that typically result in weight loss. Keeping a record is an important step in self-directed behavior modification because it helps you keep track of what you have completed. If we don’t write down whether or not we did something, often times we will forget. Something that helps a lot with eating healthy is keeping a food journal. A food journal where a person writes down everything that they eat, sometimes including drinks, too. If I was asked all I ate today, I probably couldn’t remember all of it. A food journal, if used correctly, is a useful assessment for keeping track of all you eat. It allows you to see on paper where you are in terms of being healthy, if you’re eating too much or not enough, and where you need to make changes in your diet. People eat meals and snack in between, which is good I might add, but most of us don’t know what it all is that we eat in meal and we tend to forget about when we snack. If you keep track of your diet habits, you can see that maybe you always crave something sweet around 2:00 and typically go for chocolate. After seeing this, you can start carrying a sweet fruit or vegetable with you around 2:00. Food journals are important because we are often unaware of what we eat and they bring light to this.
3) At the end, please include working URLs for the three websites.
http://www.mindbodygreen.com/0-14821/7-reasons-people-fail-at-weight-loss.html
http://study.com/academy/lesson/target-behavior-definition-example.html
http://www.webmd.com/diet/obesity/can-food-diary-help-you-lose-weight
Terms:
Self-directed behavior, Modify, Behavior, Reinforcer, Punisher, Other-directed behavior, Target Behavior, Behavior Class, Emit

1) Once you have completed your search and explorations, I would like you to say what your topic is, how exactly it fits into the section we have covered so far, and why you are interested in it.
- The topic I was interested in was the psychology behind our New Year’s resolutions. I want to know why many of us end up quitting them and why we put off our goals until the very beginning of the year. This relates to the second readings we had, 4.2, because it discusses self-directed behaviors.

2a) What are three aspects of the topic you want to talk about for this assignment?
- The three aspects of New Year’s resolutions I want to talk about are 1) why do a majority of our resolutions fail, 2) the stress and anxiety that comes with the change, and 3) tips on how to work towards and achieve your goal.

2b) Next, I would like you to take the information you found from the various sources and integrate/synthesize* them into the three aspects of the topic, and then write about the topic.
- We typically will think of goals that we want to achieve for example a great body or super healthy eating habits. But what we shouldn’t do is solely focus on the end result this doesn’t give us a plan on how to get there and many people struggle picturing the road they must follow to obtain their goal. How we should think of our resolution is as an action because it gives us something that we can actually do. Doing this is will make the behavioral change easier because we are defining what we want to do. By saying, “I want to get fit this year.” I’m being too vague and this can lead to failure. We have to be specific. “I want to jog a mile at the track four days a week at 6:30 am.” Reinforce the new target behavior with something the person enjoys after the behavior occurs. At first start with a continuous reinforcement schedule to trick the brain into liking the new behavior. After a few times, lessen the reinforcer to every other time, and so forth. This will make the target behavior more enjoyable because the person will focus on the reinforcer rather than the behavior they don’t really enjoy. “After every time I run at the track, I’m going to reinforce myself with a nice warm bath to relax.” We also need to understand that obstacles are going to come across our way. By acknowledging those obstacles and preparing for them, we’ll be less likely to quit our goal. Checking the weather the night before is a great way to be prepared. If it’s going to be cold at 6:30 am, set out some gloves, leggings, jacket, and a hat before going to bed so that we are all ready to go when we wake up. Sometimes we fail to overcome an obstacle, but the point is to not beat ourselves up for it. Setbacks are completely normal! It’s important to learn from them and try to figure out when led to the setback, to avoid it in the future. During New Year’s or anytime time of the year, we like to think of 10+ things that we want to change about ourselves and tend to get carried away. This can be very stressful and overwhelming so it is important to focus on one goal at a time. For example, focus on starting an exercise habit then work on eating healthier. After that, focus on stretching more often and doing yoga to relax the mind and body. Typically our goals can be grouped together (ex. Fitness) and this makes focusing on one aspect at a time easy because they’ll follow each other. Too often we think of changing our whole life on New Year’s Day by making drastic changes. The overwhelming thought can easily cause anxiety and make us want to quit because it’s all too much. Making small steps and chopping up our goals into smaller ones eases our anxiety and creates more confidence in ourselves. We definitely don’t have to do this alone either! Having a support system is an amazing motivator and makes our target behavior more pleasurable. Having another people run with you at the track can in a way be a reinforcer itself. Other positive people can offer new strategies and give encouragement when we’re feeling down. Some people have low self-efficacy and this means they believe they have a limit of skills and self-control. They don’t really want to change because they believe they truly can’t. A person with high self-efficacy believes they have unlimited self control and can change anything in their life right then and there. They believe in their own skills and most importantly, they believe in themselves. Overall if you want to make a “new year’s” resolution (psst…it can be done at any time of the year) you have to be fully in it. Commitment is the glue that is keeping you and your goal together. Keep a behavioral diary to track the progress each day even on the days where there’s a setback. From those setbacks, we can learn coping strategies and ways to overcome those obstacles. Resolutions take planning and hard work but the end result is the bitter sweet finish.

3) At the end, please include working URLs for the three websites.
- http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/01/the-psychology-of-making-_n_4475502.html
- http://www.apa.org/helpcenter/resolution.aspx
- http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2008/12/28/the-psychology-of-new-years-resolutions/

Terms:
- Self-directed behaviors, behavioral change, reinforce, target behavior, continuous reinforcement schedule, low/high self-efficacy, behavioral diary, coping strategies

1) Once you have completed your search and explorations, I would like you to say what your topic is, how exactly it fits into the section we have covered so far, and why you are interested in it.
I found several aspects interesting throughout this section. One item that interested me were the ideas or reasons of what should cause a behavior to change, 1) They bother us, 2) They bother other people, 3) They might lead to trouble later on, 4) They are illegal. I also found the section on New Year’s resolutions and goal-making very interesting as well. Overall, the section that I felt most applied to my own life (and can apply to many others’ lives) was the process of goal-making and self-directed behaviors. I found self-directed behaviors interesting because the decision to change comes predominantly from the individual changing the behavior. Others-directed behaviors are changes that are strongly influenced or forced by those other than the individual changing their behavior. Sometimes these behaviors can simply be replaced by alternative behaviors once you have determined a target behavior, however, this can be a tricky process. Hence, goal-making is a very important process and I have decided to focus on that!
2) What are three aspects of the topic you want to talk about for this assignment?
Although goal making is a very broad topic, there are three main sections I will discuss in this post. The first, is how goal-making and self-directed behaviors interact and the difference between a self-directed behaviors change (or goal) and an others-directed behavior change (or goal). Another portion that I will focus on is the important of SMART goals and how they fit into behavior modification. SMART goal making is a concept designed to help create goals that are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time bound. A third and final aspect I will be focusing on is how goal making using self-directed behaviors and SMART goals can positively influence a person’s life, and I will be using specific examples from my own life to demonstrate this. Overall, I will be focusing on how goal making is directly involved with behavior modification, how SMART goals are a nice way of organizing this information, and finally how others can use this information and how I have used it myself.

3) Next, I would like you to take the information you found from the various sources and integrate/synthesize* them into the three aspects of the topic, and then write about the topic.
Again, goal making or setting is a very broad topic. In the reading, the example of New Year’s resolutions was used to beautifully demonstrate how most people create goals – and how they generally are not successful. Goal making can be a tedious process that requires much upkeep and in general, a lot of work! Many people make general statements and assume that is all the goal making they need – so WRONG! For New Year’s resolutions, in general, people will say “I’m going to lose weight” or “I’m going to run more.” These do not fit the standards of making a full behavior change and people who make these statements are generally setting themselves up to fail by eliciting a behavior that will not create the desired results. If they elicited this behavior to a behavior modification professional, the professional would emit a sigh of disapproval.
We have determined that behaviors that are self-directed behaviors are those that have been ultimately decided to change from the person who will be changing the behavior. Others-directed behaviors are those that are solely determined by those around them. In general, the articles stated that goals that come from within us and that are not being pushed on us are more successful. If we desire something, we are (in general) more likely to work hard for it versus being told we need to change our behavior. Goal making and behavior modification go hand in hand. Self-directed behavior changes often involve the goal making process, which is why these articles were so interesting!
One of the articles focuses on the concept of SMART goals, a commonly used acronym that helps people set better and more potentially successful goals. As mentioned above, general statements do not generally work all that well when making goals, you have to have a plan. In the SMART goals concept, the S stands for Specific. You can’t just say “I want to lose weight,” you need to change that to “I want to lose 5 pounds every two weeks until I have lost 50 pounds,” or something along those lines. The M stands for Measurable. When you make a general statement it is impossible to measure it, AKA how do you determined when you are finished with your goal of losing weight? After you lose one pound? Is it okay if you gain it back? Etc. If you are doing 5 pounds every two weeks until you lose 50 pounds, you can easily keep track of your goal and track your progress. The A stands for attainable, you do not want to set an unreasonable goal, such as I want to lose 50 pounds in day (unless you are interested in chopping off an arm and a leg). You need to make sure that you can obtain the goals in a reasonable setting or else you are simply setting yourself up to fail. The R stands for Realistic, along with being attainable, you also want to make sure your goal is actually possible. If you say you want to eventually only way 100 pounds and you are a 6’7 person who weights 300 pounds, that may not be even possible. The T stands for Time, you need to have a certain amount of time in mind for your goal, or else you will lose track of your goal and not be able to complete the other sections of the SMART goals concept.
When one is accomplishing a self-directed goal and follows the SMART goal concept, they are likely to have a better chance of completing their goals successfully. Accomplishing more goals leads to a more positive outlook on changing behaviors and will reinforce people to make positive changes in their lives. While this may involving punishment or the extinguishing of behaviors, this could be a positive consequence for those who have struggled with goal-making in the past. I have used SMART goals before to improve my GPA. For each class I would set mini goals to complete various tasks and to be successful in the course. This eventually led to me improving my GPA and accomplishing many small goals within one larger goal.

4) At the end, please include working URLs for the three websites.
https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newHTE_90.htm
http://www.eiconsortium.org/reprints/self-directed_learning.html
http://ngsd.org/module-1-model/101-definition-self-determination
http://topachievement.com/smart.html

5) Terms:
self-directed behaviors, others-directed behaviors, alternative behaviors, target behaviors, elicit, emit, punish, reinforce, extinguish, consequence

1. I chose to look at self directed behavior modification techniques in weight loss. This is an extension of what we looked at in class this week, but merely finding a specific example.

2. The topics I want to bring out are specific techniques related to weight loss in behavior modification, how they relate back to what we know about behavior mod, and additional tools that can aid in these attempts to lose weight.

3. We know that behavior modification should be used if we want to change something because if bothers ourselves, others, is illegal, or they lead to trouble later on. In the case of weight loss, it is usually driven by it bothering ourselves, or the possibility of health problems later on in life. Interestingly enough, according to some of what I have read, not only is self directed behavior modification a tool used in weight loss, it actually is one of the only ways to have success in weight loss.

The most important part that multiple sources stressed was the concept of self monitoring. This means slowing down and observing what your behaviors that you are currently emitting are. Some of the very things we have done in class for our water study are highly encouraged by weight loss professionals. They recommend you create a journal that details what you're eating, how many calories and such, and that you also create a record of your exercise levels. It is heavily stressed that until you become aware of what you are doing, you won't be able to effectively lose weight. Regular weighing is also another important part of self monitoring. In the realm of technology to assist in these self recording efforts ,they have many suggestions. There are multiple online calorie counting services that are mentioned, so you can keep a detailed account of what foods you are eating and how many calories that translates into. They also have several different ways to measure your exercise for the day. They mention pedometers, which measure steps. Accelerometers are devices that go into more detail, and can measure the intensity, duration, and frequency of activities. The most advance technology mentioned is that of metabolic devices that often sync up with online calorie counters, and use both accelerometer technology and sensors that respond to skin heat. These are all options that help better facilitate self monitoring.

There were a lot of recommendations of small strategies that would help facilitate weight loss in a variety of situations, usually by altering something slightly to be more healthy. Some examples included getting salad dressing on the side, or asking for a salad instead of breadsticks. At a social gathering, offering to bring an appetizer, and then making sure it was something healthy. In general, what I took away from all of these recommendations is something that goes back to some of the very first concepts we had in this class. Change the antecedent, and you'll change the behavior. By changing the antecedent before the situation occurs, you are giving yourself a much better chance to successfully stay true to your goals. Another important recommendation was to make your goals specific. This is just oh so true to our principles of behavior. If we don't have a specific, easily defined target behavior, we are not going to be successful in changing it. They also expanded this out to include having a very specific goal, but the same idea applies. The goal to be healthier is awkward, and hard to achieve, because it is so general. By narrowing it in to say, losing twenty pounds in three months, you have something that is understandable, measurable, and therefore more likely attainable. Another important idea that is mentioned is that of incentives. Having incentives beyond just the desire for better health can be very helpful in achieving these weight loss goals. In behavior mod, we of course call them reinforcers.

So in the end it appears that weight loss that is self directed tends to hold pretty true to the principles of behavior modification, with a heavy emphasis on self monitoring.

http://www.obesityaction.org/educational-resources/resource-articles-2/weight-loss-surgery/self-monitoring-the-way-to-successful-weight-management

http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2013/09/18/5-cognitive-behavioral-strategies-for-losing-weight-that-work/

http://www.ucsfhealth.org/education/behavior_modification_ideas_for_weight_management/

target behavior, self directed behavior modification, emit, self monitoring,reinforcers, antecedent,

1) The topic I chose to write on for this assignment was New Year’s resolutions. The first section of this week’s reading discussed New Year’s resolutions in detail, it talked mainly about why they typically don’t work explained in terms of self-directed behavior and behavior modification. Although the chapter did go into a good deal of depth on this topic I still had questions; are there people who stick to their New Year’s resolutions? If yes, how so? Are there patterns to these successes that the chapter didn’t discuss? Apart from my own curiosity, I was interested in this topic for personal reasons as well. This is a very relatable topic (see the number of hits on Google in the picture from the textbook) to many people but I feel like this is not just because they want to stop drinking soda or go to the gym every once in a while. I think the phenomenon that is New Year’s resolutions is so widespread because everyone can understand the feeling of having some behavior that they are interested in changing, but feel lost as to where to begin the process.
For the three things I want to discuss in this assignment I would like to cover what makes those who stick with their resolutions successful, how behavioral modification strategies might improve these odds, and finally how people’s perceptions of New Year’s resolutions influence their outcomes.

2) Synthesis
The statistic is all over the internet; ‘only 8 percent of those who make New Year’s resolutions are successful’, ‘just 8 percent’, ‘8 percent only-‘. Many articles surrounding the shortcomings of New Year’s resolutions tend to focus on what makes the remaining 92 percent unsuccessful, I am instead interested in what makes the 8 percent effective. After doing my research I found that many of the tactics employed by that 8 percent are ones that we have discussed regarding our behavioral intervention assignment. Having specific target behaviors was one recurring facet of those who were able to keep on track with their resolutions, this falls in line with the second step of the goal-directed behaviors in the textbook. If there is more than just one specific behavior that you want to modify then instead of trying to focus on many behaviors at once it is suggested that starting small and working on one behavior at a time is more beneficial. Obviously having a goal that is actually attainable is another important factor in being successful, but perhaps a not so obvious tactic is using the people around you. This benefits ‘resolutionarys’ in two ways; 1 being that you can use your friends and family for moral support and to cheer you on, and 2 using your support system to hold you accountable to your resolution.
From what I found practically all of the strategies for making New Year’s resolutions stick used almost no reinforcement and punishment. This surprised me considering how well some of the approaches lined up with our self-directed behavior steps. Those that did used mostly intangible reinforcers like praise from family and friends or how you look in the mirror, and no punishers were used in any of the strategies I read about. I suspect that if those who made resolutions went about making a reward system with as specific rewards as their target behaviors, that they would find more ease in accomplishing their goal. Another thing I feel went unmentioned was keeping track of the progress of the resolution. Keeping a regular diary showing clear progress from the baseline of before the resolution started would most likely be very motivating. Another thing we mentioned in this class that I feel would benefit those trying to make a resolution would be to be mindful of the impact of antecedents. If someone in your home always brings cupcakes home and you are trying to lose weight being able to determine that as an antecedent to breaking your diet could help a person to avoid eliciting the behavior they were trying to control.
I was able to find numerous tips and tricks on how to more effectively stick with a New Year’s resolution, why then aren’t more people successful? If there is an abundance of information why isn’t everyone losing weight and eating healthier all year long? I suspected that it had more to do with cognition then action, and from what I can tell I was probably right. One survey mentioned by the Forbe’s article stated that more people than not cited the reason for the demise of their resolution as being a lack of willpower. Besides just not having the will to continue when there are bumps in the road of the resolution, how people perceive their performance regarding their behavior can also help or hinder their efforts. People are more likely to focus on what they do that is in accordance with their resolutions, instead of what they might be doing that is standing in the way of their success. For example someone might be so proud of themselves for working out for 30 minutes that they use this as justification to eat 2 helpings of dessert that night, but still count the day as a good one in terms of keeping the resolution. This leads to a stalemate in progress which seems to be unexplainable, and by not being able to tie their behavior to any specific consequences the resolution holder becomes frustrated and abandons their efforts.

3) Terms: self-directed behavior, target behavior, reinforcement, punishment, reinforcer, punisher, baseline, antecedents, elicit, behavioral intervention

4) URLS
http://www.apa.org/helpcenter/resolution.aspx

http://www.forbes.com/sites/dandiamond/2013/01/01/just-8-of-people-achieve-their-new-years-resolutions-heres-how-they-did-it/

http://scopeblog.stanford.edu/2014/12/17/perceptions-about-progress-and-setbacks-may-compromise-success-of-new-years-resolutions/

1. The topic I chose to research about is a combination of self-directed behavior and New Year’s resolutions. Both self-directed behavior and New Year’s resolutions were talked about in section 4.1. The section mainly talked about self-directed behavior and I wanted to expand more on that and how it can be used to create a successful New Year’s resolution.

2. When reading this section and thinking about self-directed behavior I wanted to find out more about the success of self-directed behavior compared to other-directed behavior. I also wanted to discuss why New Year’s resolutions tend to fail. I then would like to talk about how someone can use self-directed behavior to come up with and successfully complete a New Year’s resolution.

3. There are many times that we want to change one of our own behaviors. To do this we set up goals for ourselves to obtain and we usually end up failing to reach those goals. This happens to millions of people who create New Year’s resolutions and fail to follow through with them. One of the large reasons they tend to fail is because of the broad behavior they are attempting to modify. Most people usually chose to change a behavioral class rather than picking a precise specific target behavior. Immediately from the start they fail to understand what exactly they want to change and how to make it happen. It is important to find a specific target behavior that is manageable, realistic, and that can be reinforced in order to be successful. One of the ways to change an individual’s behavior is to use a self-directed behavior approach. Self-directed behavior simply means that you are in charge of maintaining and reinforcing the behavior you want to change. A major problem when choosing any behavior modification procedure is the need to use punishment instead of reinforcement. Nobody likes to be punished we would much rather be reinforced but it just seems to be easier to punish. It is necessary to reinforce a target behavior using the self-directed approach because we will more likely continue staying on course with a successful reinforcer than we would being punished. Being in command of the behavior approach with self-direction means being in control of the environment around ourselves by manipulating the antecedents. By setting up antecedents that elicit the target behavior we are more likely to continue emitting that target behavior because the context to do so it much more accessible. When attempting to change a behavior there is no need to do an all or nothing approach, sometimes it is better to take things slow and to do the adjustments in increments instead of going all out. One of my most common New Year’s resolutions was to work out and eat healthier. Looking back I can understand why I failed every year. The target behavior was very broad and I treated it like an all or nothing approach. Knowing what I know now I would define my target behavior a lot better. I would say something like I will do 3 sets of 10 reps for 5 different leg workouts on MWF and 5 sets of 8 reps with 7 different arm and chest workouts on T/Th and rest on the weekends. It is very specific and precise and manageable because I have two off days to rest and I am alternating the muscles I am working out each day. I think the next time I fully commit to implementing a new goal to workout I can be successful at it with the tools of self-directed behavior modification.

http://www.wikihow.com/Accomplish-Your-New-Year's-Resolutions

http://www.uni.edu/~maclino/bm/book/sec4.2.pdf

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wired-success/201412/why-people-cant-keep-their-new-years-resolutions

Terminology: Self-Directed Behavior, Reinforcement, Punishment, Elicit, Emit, Target Behavior, Behavioral Class, Antecedent