Topical Blog Week #8 (Due Wednesday)

The topic I chose to do that we have covered this far is Classical Conditioning. The most commonly used definition of Classical conditioning is as follows; repeated pairings of the conditioned stimulus(CS) and the unconditioned stimulus (UCS) eventually leads to acquisition.
The reason I chose this topic is because the fact that it was one of the first topics in psychology that could be experimented on humans without being too harsh or controversial. It also interested me a lot because I feel as though it can be used to better someone’s everyday life. For example, my brother has a bell (US) hanging from his door to help potty train his new puppy. In the beginning every time he took her outside to use the restroom, he rubbed her nose on the bell. After so many times of this, every time she needs to go outside she rings the bell until someone lets her out. Not only does this make things easier on the owner, but also on the dog because she doesn’t have to suffer if her owner doesn’t realize she needs to go out.
One of the most influential people on classical conditioning is Ivan Pavlov, which is why classical conditioning is also known as Pavlovian conditioning. Based on Pavlov’s initial observations, John Watson furthered the research and was able to explain all aspects of human psychology. One of the most famous experiments, which was also discussed in the text, was conducted on Little Albert. Albert appeared to not be afraid of much, but after a white rat was paired with a loud striking, a phobia had been created after much repetition. From this, I have learned that classical conditioning emphasizes how much of an effect the environment has on human behavior.

http://psychology.about.com/od/glossaryfromatoz/g/Acquisition.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_conditioning
http://www.simplypsychology.org/classical-conditioning.html

For this assignment I have chosen to write about differential reinforcement of other behavior (DRO). DRO is a behavior modification technique that uses reinforcement rather than punishment to reduce the occurrence of a target behavior. The difference between DRO and regular operant conditioning is that DRO gives reinforcement for not emitting the target behavior, which is a behavior that has been designated as undesirable. DRO can be used to increase the occurrence of a new desirable behavior by reinforcing that behavior until it takes the place of the undesirable behavior. I am interested in DRO because it seems like it could be very useful, and also a less emotionally aversive method of changing behavior than punishment.

Support for DRO comes from the idea that reinforcement is a better and more effective behavior modification technique than punishment. Some of the issues with punishment are that it may not stop undesired behavior from occurring, but instead may just cause the behavior to be emitted where or when it will not be detected by the observer who will administer the punishment. Another concern with punishment is that it could be dangerous to the organism being punished, especially if the punishment is physically aversive.

This was the concern of researchers who conducted a study using DRO to reduce horses’ behavior of chewing on their ropes while tied in their stall. It was worried that the aversive punishment usually used to reduce this target behavior might become abusive if used incorrectly. Instead, the horses used in the study were given reinforcement for not emitting a behavior of rope chewing for a fixed interval, such as 30 seconds (FI30sec). The schedule of reinforcement was gradually increased, and by the end of the study the horses had been showing a reduced emission of rope chewing behavior at a schedule of FI120sec.

John B. Watson’s view of behaviorism was that animals and humans are similar enough that the same behavioral principles can be applied to any organism. Using DRO can reduce undesirable behavior in humans in the same way that it reduced the undesirable behavior of the horses. In a situation where aversive physical punishment is not allowed, such as a classroom, DRO is an option that teachers can use. However, the Iris Center website cautions against reinforcing other undesirable behaviors. For example, if a teacher is targeting a student’s walking around behavior, they might give reinforcement when the student is sitting at their desk. But if the student is fidgeting, they may mistakenly associate the reinforcement with the fidgeting behavior as long as they are seated. The reinforcement will then have elicited another undesirable behavior.

DRO is more effective at modifying behavior when the terms of the reinforcement are known and agreed on. While in the case of animals it is not possible to discuss and agree to terms, humans are able to communicate effectively, in general. If the terms of the DRO are specific, such as telling the above student that reinforcement will be given if they sit at their desk calmly and quietly for two minutes, they will know what behavior is leading to the reinforcement. This will increase the likelihood that the desirable behavior of sitting calmly will be emitted. Researchers studied the effectiveness of knowing the rules of the DRO by reinforcing children for not playing with a certain toy during the experiment. The children who were told which toy they were not to touch and for how long did not emit the toy playing behavior as often as children who were not told what the rules of the DRO were.

DRO can be an effective behavior modification technique if used properly. It is not aversive like punishment, and it can lessen the strain of extinction because the organism is still being reinforced.

Article URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037663571200112X
Article URL: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jaba.53/full
Article URL: http://iris.peabody.vanderbilt.edu/module/bi2/cresource/what-techniques-can-ms-rollison-use-to-manage-the-disruptive-and-non-compliant-behaviors-of-students-like-patrick-and-tameka/bi2_06/

Terms: differential reinforcement of other behavior (DRO), reinforcement, punishment, target behavior, operant conditioning, emit, undesirable, desirable, organism, aversive, fixed interval, FI30sec, schedule of reinforcement, FI120sec, John B. Watson, behaviorism, association, elicit, extinction

The topic that I found interesting this week is Mary Cover Jones and her work on systematic desensitization. I have always been interested in the idea of slowly getting someone to overcome a fear that they have. I have also thought about attempting to do that for myself. It reminds me of my fear of heights and how I have managed to control and overcome that pretty well by forcing myself into situations that require me to meet it head on. The text covers this subject pretty well but I wanted a better idea of the history behind Mary Cover Jones’ discovery and how she was able to use it effectively on her patient Peter.

Mary Cover Jones was considered the mother of behavior therapy. She worked with John B. Watson after college and he had been doing the little Albert experiments where he induced fear of rats into Albert. He was not able to continue those experiments long enough to attempt to remove the phobia that he had given little Albert but Watson’s big question was whether he could desensitize not just the particular fear he had invoked but the subsequent fears that had gone along with it. For little Albert, he wasn’t just afraid of rats, he became afraid of rabbits and other things that he associated with rats. Watson wanted to know if you could desensitize the fear of all of those things by working on just the rats. Mary became very interested in the idea of desensitizing and she was soon an expert in it. Her case with Peter became her most well-known study. Little Peter was scared of rats and that spread to other furry objects including rabbits, fur coats, a feather, cotton, etc. Mary did a few experiments and observed which of these Peter feared the most. He actually had more fear of the rabbit than the rat so that is what she used to desensitize him. As Mary slowly introduced a rabbit into Peter’s play time he was able to slowly allow it to get closer and closer to him. He eventually got to the point where he would hold the rabbit and carry it around. During this desensitizing period Peter happened to get scarlet fever and was in the hospital for almost two months. When leaving the hospital he had a scary encounter with a large dog. This brought most of their progress back to square one. They chose to use direct conditioning at that point and introduced the rabbit while Peter was eating. They would only bring the rabbit as close as they could without it disrupting his eating. Another interesting part of this study is that they brought in another child that had no fear of rabbits and had them eat beside Peter. When they brought in the rabbit Peter began to cry but the other kid got down and ran to see the rabbit. Peter then followed and watched the interaction. They continued with this until Peter was comfortable around the rabbit. In one of the last sessions another child was present while Peter interacted with the rabbit. The other child was markedly afraid of the rabbit but that didn’t seem to affect Peter at all. Going back to Watson’s earlier question about the other objects that the fear of the rat or rabbit caused, in Peter’s experiment he was able to greatly improve on those fears as well even though they weren’t the focus of the experiment. He didn’t develop the fondness of them as he did the rabbit but he was able to handle them without fear.

The Peter experiment really seems like it was a breakthrough at that time. It gave therapists the ability to use desensitization in a therapeutic setting to help their clients overcome phobias. I was personally interested in how much we could do as individuals to help ourselves overcome fears. It is recommended that you have a therapist help you simply because a big part of desensitizing yourself is talking through what made you fear the thing in the first place. It is something that will be most effective with professional guidance. However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t apply some of the techniques that Mary used to help yourself get over a fear.

Terminology: systematic desensitization, Mary Cover Jones, behavior therapy, John B. Watson, direct conditioning, little Albert, Peter, fear, therapist, phobia

Beating Phobias and Anxiety – Graded Exposure/Systematic Desensitization
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcojyGx8q9U
This source was helpful in understanding the best way to go about being desensitized. It also talks about you being able to do it yourself but recommends that you have a therapist or professional involved.

Mary Cover Jones
http://desensitization.org/mary-cover-jones/
This source gave me a nice timeline of Mary Cover Jones’ life and included her Peter experiment. It gave me a nice snapshot of her accomplishments.

A Laboratory Study of Fear: The Case of Peter
http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Jones/
This source was very helpful because it gives many of the notes of the study itself and gives a very detailed explanation of how the study was conducted.

For my topical blog, I chose to research taste aversion. This topic interests me because it is a part of psychology and behavior modification that we can all relate to. Have you ever gotten the flu shortly after eating one of your favorite foods and suddenly even the thought of that food makes you feel sick? I'm sure we all have. Everyone who has drank a little too much on the weekends knows exactly what taste aversion is. This fits into what we are studying in class because it is a prime example of classical conditioning.
While researching this topic, I found that one thing that particularly interest researchers about taste aversion is the fact that it violates several laws of classical conditioning. The first rule taste aversion violates is that it emerges full strength after only one CS-UCS pairing. Another rule it goes against is that the association is very selective in that people make the association through taste or odor of something only. Finally, the learned response naturally resists unlearning. It may take weeks, months, years, for the association to leave us. Conditioned taste aversion is a natural survival instinct in animals. It helps them to survive by avoiding certain animals, plants, berries, etc that previously poisoned them or made them sick. Taste aversion is a curious way nature has taught us how to survive more efficiently.
One thing I found interesting in my research is that some people are experimenting with harnessing the fascinating effects of taste aversion in order to eat healthier and associate something unpleasant. The youtube clip I found is of aversion therapy in the 1970's. A woman wanted to eat healthier and avoid junk food, so they associated eating a hamburger with getting shocked, resulting in her saying she no longer wanted to eat it. I thought it was very interesting the ways scientists are trying to harness the power and uniqueness of taste aversion.
Terms: Classical conditioning, behavior modification, taste aversion, conditioned stimulus (CS), and unconditioned stimulus(UCS).
http://www.intropsych.com/ch05_conditioning/taste_aversion.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lc8rtjxG-eI
http://www.conditionedtasteaversion.net/

Taste aversion is when an adverse reaction is paired with a stimulus that makes the individual less likely to repeat the behavior again. For example, an individual may drink a lot of Jagermeister (neutral stimulus) in one night and then become very ill (unconditioned response). Even if the Jagermeister (now the conditioned stimulus) was not the substance that caused the person to become ill (it could have been from eating something earlier in the day (unconditioned stimulus) the person associates the Jagermeister with becoming ill so that the very sight or smell of Jagermeister may cause them to gag or feel sick to their stomach (conditioned response), which is consistent with classical conditioning.

I am interested in this because I am interested in eventually using behavioral techniques to assist with smoking cessation and to see if aversion can be used to do so. A friend of mine told me that he quit smoking by buying a full pack of cigarettes and forced himself to chain smoke the entire pack until he got physically sick. Every time after he had a craving for nicotine, he would get sick to his stomach and successfully quit smoking because of it.

Aversion therapy is a form of therapy used to help individuals stop an unwanted behavior. For example, if an alcoholic wishes to quit drinking he will be given medication that will make him sick and is then asked to drink alcohol before the medicine does so. When the medication makes the individual physically ill, the idea is that it will be associated with consuming alcohol. This form of therapy is usually very controversial and usually only used in emergency situations and when the patient wants to stop his or her problem target behavior.

For smoking, aversion therapy is successful in approximately 52% of individuals who choose to do so. For smoking cessation, puffing (the act of inhaling cigarette smoke), which under normal circumstances would lead to positive reinforcement to the user, is paired with either electric shock or nausea (sometimes both) so that the conditioned response to puffing is associated with being shocked or feeling ill (positive punishment).

Although aversion therapy is effective, due to the fact that it involves exposing individuals to pain and discomfort, it is often not promoted by professionals.

Terminology: taste aversion, neutral stimulus, unconditioned/conditioned stimulus, unconditioned/conditioned response, classical conditioning, aversion therapy, positive reinforcement, positive punishment, target behavior

URLs: http://www.minddisorders.com/A-Br/Aversion-therapy.html
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-human-beast/201002/smoking-most-effective-quitting-technique-little-known
http://psychology.about.com/od/typesofpsychotherapy/f/aversion-therapy.htm

I chose to research John Watson. I am interested in his work and wanted to know about him. His full name is John Broadus Watson. He was born on January 9, 1878 in Greenville, South Carolina. His parents were Emma and Pickens Watson. His mother named him after a local minister. John’s father Pickens left the family in 1891 because of an extra-marital affair. After his father left John rebelled against is mother and teachers.

At the age of 16 John started at Furman University. John was not a very good student at Furman University and it took him 5 years to complete his work. It was here where he tried to upstage one of his professors by getting a PhD in philosophy-psychology. The professor was Gordon Moore and he eventually helped John get into the University of Chicago. It was at the University of Chicago where Watson became interested in psychology and studying animals. At the University of Chicago John wrote a dissertation on the relationship between behavior of rats and the growth of the nervous system. He graduated with a PhD in 1903 becoming the youngest person at the time to receive a PhD from the University of Chicago.

It was at this point in John’s life that he decided to start a family. In 1904 he married Mary Ickes. Together they had two children, Mary and John. The marriage would not last however as John would have an affair with his graduate student Rosalie Rayner. He eventually divorced Mary Ickes and married Rosalie Rayner. He had two children with Rosalie Rayner, James and William.

After his time at the University of Chicago, John took a position at John Hopkins University. It was here where he published his article “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It". This article is considered one of the founding articles for the field of behaviorism. He also became the lead editor for the Psychological Review. He also served as the founding editor for the Journal of Experimental Psychology. In 1915 John Watson became president of the American Psychological Association. It was due to his affair with Rosalie Rayner than he was forced to resign from his job as a professor at John Hopkins University. In 1920 John Watson did his famous Little Albert study.

After resigning from John Hopkins University he went into the advertising industry. He moved to New York and took a job with the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency. There John studied how advertising affects people’s buying patterns. In 1924 John became the vice president of the company. John Watson continued to publish psychological works up until the 1930’s. It was during this time that he decided to focus on his advertising career. After retiring he lived on a farm in Woodbury, Connecticut where he died in 1958.

http://facweb.furman.edu/~einstein/watson/watson1.htm
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/watson.htm
http://www3.niu.edu/acad/psych/Millis/History/2003/Watsonweb.htm

For this assignment, I chose to research more information about systematic desensitization. I really wanted to learn more about this concept because I feel like it is something that we see a lot in everyday life. It seemed like a perfect fit for the section about Watson and the Little Albert study (3.4). I know that I personally used to struggle with a fear of tumbling when I started learning how, and I even used some of these techniques that were mentioned. This topic is very interesting to me and I was very eager to learn more about it.
I thought that the text did a very nice job explaining what systematic desensitization is and how it related to Watson and classical conditioning. I wanted to know more about this concept and how it works with different phobias. While looking it up, I learned that overall, systematic desensitization is a highly effective treatment when the phobia is clear and it is used correctly. While it can be a slow process, it is important that clients with fears continue to engage in the techniques to overcome their fears because research has suggested that the longer the techniques take, the more effective it will be in the end. In regards to effectiveness, I learned that it’s not effective in treating serious mental disorders that may have anxiety due to fear as a symptom. Systematic Desensitization is a very effective way to overcome fears overall.
One of the main techniques that is used to treat different fears is done by creating a hierarchy of fear. This is when a therapist, for example, creates a series of anxiety-producing stimuli and ranks them from least stressful to most stressful. After getting the client relaxed, they are exposed to the stimuli, starting with the least fearful, and use the ‘hierarchy’ system to ease them into their fears. By gradually and systematically exposing people to their fears, they are a lot more apt to overcome them. Just like the text said, different techniques of relaxation and visualization are incorporated into the hierarchy system and ultimately produce very effective results. When I was trying to get over my fear of falling while tumbling during gymnastics and cheer, I was able to overcome it by gradually exposing myself to tumbling alone. I would start on the trampoline, to the tumble track, to a mat, and then I was able to use the spring floor. Visualization was very important, too!

Terms: Systematic desensitization, Watson, Little Albert, classical conditioning, behavior, fear, phobia, behavior, relaxation, visualization, hierarchy of fear, therapy

http://www.simplypsychology.org/Systematic-Desensitisation.html
http://www1.appstate.edu/~beckhp/genthesystematicdesensitization.htm
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3215612/

I choose to learn more about taste aversion. It fits into what we’ve been talking about in the past sections. Taste aversion is when an adverse reaction is paired with a stimulus that makes the individual less likely to repeat the behavior again. An example would be when I was younger I ate a ton of brownie batter (neutral stimulus) in a short amount of time and ended up getting really sick (unconditioned response). The brownie batter, which is now the conditioned stimulus, may not have been the only reason I got sick after that (unconditioned stimulus) but since then I’ve associated eating brownie batter with becoming sick and the smell of brownie batter grosses me out (conditioned response) which would be classical conditioning. Which is why I am so interested in this topic. Because I can relate really well to it and since we’ve been starting to talk about in behavior modification it’s really interested me.
Food poisoning and taste aversion can really go hand in hand. I choose this because that had a lot to do with my first example, and to be honest I’m obsessed with Taco Bell which is referred to in this article. So I had to. The article talks about how the person became sick from Taco Bell, and even though it was mostly likely just because where it was located, the person refuses to eat Taco Bell again, even though the chances are slim of getting food poisoning again. It also talks about how it can be necessary with classical conditioning to have close timing between the conditioned stimulus and unconditioned stimulus, but it doesn’t always have to be this way.
Children receiving chemotherapy tend to develop extreme nausea and develop taste aversions before the treatments. This can cause patients to have a loss of appetite. Since they’re told not to have their favorite foods during this time, they’re given a certain diet that is associated with illness, so they end up not eating at all. And end up developing an aversion to food in general.
There is aversion therapy to help aversive stimulus. Aversive therapy uses basic principles that all behavior is learned and that undesirable behaviors can be unlearned. Aversion behavior uses operant conditioning with punishment or reinforcement to help stop the target behavior. The goal is to help stop the frequency of that behavior. Although it can help, it’s not recommended by professionals.
Terminology: taste aversion, neutral stimulus, unconditioned stimulus, conditioned stimulus, unconditioned response, conditioned response, classical conditioning, aversion therapy, frequency of behavior, punishment, target behavior, operant conditioning, reinforcement.

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/murp0625/myblog/
http://www.minddisorders.com/A-Br/Aversion-therapy.html
http://www.intropsych.com/ch05_conditioning/taste_aversion.html

I chose to discuss Extinction which is involved with chapter 2.4. Extinction occurs when a previously reinforced aversive behavior in no longer being reinforced. For example all of my siblings chew with their mouth open. My mom would like to extinguish their behavior because it is annoying. It is interesting because we all have aversive behaviors we would like to change about ourselves but we would also like to extinguish others' behaviors as well. I also wanted to look more into this topic because I want to know how to best deal with my daughters tantrums!
The articles below all deal with extinction bursts, and the two of them tell you how to overcome them. If you want to extinguish a behavior you cannot reinforce that unwanted behavior and you cannot give in. The youtube video is compiled of clips from the T.V. show Archer. Archer yells Lana's name repeatedly until she answers, not only does he do this to her, but a number of other employees who all give in eventually. The behavior that they want to extinguish is him yelling their name over and over again. When they do not respond he emits an extinction burst, this occurs when he yells their name louder and much longer than the previous times. Variability is also occuring as he yells louder and louder with every yell. Instead of ignoring him they give in and reinforce his behavior by responding (giving him attention)

http://education-portal.com/academy/lesson/extinction-burst-in-psychology-definition-examples-quiz.html#lesson
http://www.comeunity.com/parenting/extinction.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSGU4ND_v_E

VOCAB:
extinction, extinction burst, aversive, extinguish, emit, variability, reinforce

The concept that I wanted to learn more about is systematic desensitization which we read about in section 3.4. This was discovered by Mary Cover Jones and is used to over come phobias and is related to the concept of classical conditioning and Watson. I wanted to learn about this more because everyone has something they are afraid of and it is so interesting to me that one concept could help with such big fears in some cases. I feel like this is something that can be relevant to most peoples lives since everyone has a fear that they would probably like to get rid of.

The reason this works in most cases is due to using a hierarchy of fear so you start with the least fearful thing related to your phobia and slowly work your way up after you feel comfortable with whatever you are currently working on. Depending on how severe the phobia depends on how long you would do this process. There can be a different number of levels in the hierarchy depending on what your fear is that you are working to get rid of or at least become less anxious and afraid of. Things like pictures can be used for the first levels in the hierarchy and then when you work up things like touching the object you are afraid or being in the same room as the object are all examples of what systematic desensitization may look like in terms of the hierarchy of anxiety.

The other major part of systematic desensitization is the learning of relaxation techniques. This is just the learning of deep muscle relaxation so when you even think about your phobia you don't become anxious. This can be done by tightening and loosening certain muscle groups and focusing on the difference in feeling when it is contracted versus relaxed. You work on imagining each step of the hierarchy but using the relaxation and breathing techniques. These relaxation periods should be done without interruption and with complete concentration. A good time to practice these relaxation techniques is maybe before you go to sleep because it is a dark and quiet space where you can fully focus. Once you have practiced the relaxation methods you put them together with the hierarchy that was created to help with your fear. Repeat each level of the hierarchy until you no longer feel fear or anxiety and then work your way up doing the same thing. This relates directly to behavior modification because it is helping modify an unwanted behavior of being afraid of something

Terms: Systematic desensitization, hierarchy, Watson, Mary Cover Jones, phobias, behavior modification
http://www.simplypsychology.org/Systematic-Desensitisation.html

http://www.csulb.edu/~tstevens/Desensit.htm

http://www.minddisorders.com/Py-Z/Systematic-desensitization.html

For this week’s topical blog assignment, I decided to look more into systematic desensitization and the different methods that go along with it. The reason I chose to go over this topic specifically is much like the reason I did the superstitious behavior for last week. I ‘m very interested in the things like superstitions and fears. If I were to ever go into something like clinical psychology, dealing with fears, I think, would probably be one of the areas where I’d like to help people more with. Personally, I don’t have many fears. I think the only fears I have are falling and public speaking. And by falling, I mean falling from a high distance. So here I’m going to go through how systematic desensitization works and the process.

So, as a little bit of background info, systematic desensitization was first developed in the 50’s by Joseph Wolpe. It is a form of classical conditioning. The main aim is to take away the fear by substituting a relaxation response. The first step is basically to go through different relaxation techniques such as breathing and meditation. This is mainly for when the patient goes through the hierarchy of fears (which is the next step). If the patient starts to get afraid or begin to have anxiety he/she can use the methods to calm themselves down.

The next step is for the patient to develop a hierarchy of fears. The patient will develop a list from least fearful to most fearful. For example, a person with a fear of bugs may say that the least fearful thing might be seen a cartoon rendition of bug with a smiley face, then they will continue to list things, each one getting slightly more fearful to the person until they get to the very end, in which they list the scariest possible thing about their fear. For example, sticking with the fear of bugs, the person might say that the worst/scariest thing possible would be to be completely engulfed by a swarm of different types of bugs.

The psychologist will then start to expose the patient to the different items on the list in the order that has been made up. Exposure can be done in two different ways: in vitro (client imagines being exposed to stimulus), and in vivo (the client is actually exposed to stimulus). If the patient shows no signs of anxiety or fear towards the stimulus, the psychologist will move on to the next item. Once a patient does start to feel fear, the psychologist will as them to imagine the previous item on the list and do a relaxation method. This process is repeated for as long as needed for as many sessions as needed until the patient no longer has their fear. This method takes varying lengths of time. 4-12 sessions, usually. However, the longer the process takes, the more effective it is.

Terms: systematic desensitization, stimulus, classical conditioning, in vitro, in vivo
http://www.mdjunction.com/forums/agoraphobia-discussions/general-support/3623082-flooding-vs-systematic-desensitization
http://www.simplypsychology.org/Systematic-Desensitisation.html
http://www.wisegeek.org/how-does-systematic-desensitization-work.htm

My topic is unethical psychological studies.

Conducting studies and doing research is as much a part of psychology today as it was throughout the history of psychology. Many experiments were conducted, and many proved to be beneficial, meaning they added to the understanding of the human mind, and psychology in general, in some way. Some achieved the results they sought while others accidently stumbled upon a new discovery or a new theory all together. This topic directly relates to the section on Watson, and the Little Albert experiment. With today’s standards experiments like this one would not be permitted, and would be considered unethical.

I would like to discuss the unethical experiments conducted, one in particular because there are far too many. Did these experiments benefit us; did the benefits out way the costs? Despite what many of us would like to think, often times references are made to unethical experiments conducted in the past. There are many experiments in today’s world that are considered unethical, and whether or not the benefits out way the cost is being considered. As technology and our understanding of psychology improve, I believe this will always be an issue.

In psychology there are a lot of experiments that break the BPS ethical guidelines; however, a lot of the time they result in new psychological breakthroughs. Take Milgram’s study of obedience for example. It’s reported that most, if not all participants showed signs of stress such as biting their lips and digging their nails into their palms and two were even reported to have had seizures. But the experiment found that people will obey authority figures even when they are uncomfortable with the activity they are taking part in which has multiple applications to everyday life.

The Milgrim Study is a well-known psychology experiment. Stanley Milgram, a social psychologist at Yale University, wanted to test obedience to authority. He set up an experiment with “teachers” who were the actual participants, and a “learner,” who was an actor. Both the teacher and the learner were told that the study was about memory and learning. Both the learner and the teacher received slips that they were told were given to them randomly, when in fact, both had been given slips that read “teacher.” The actor claimed to receive a “learner” slip, so the teacher was deceived. Both were separated into separate rooms and could only hear each other. The teacher read a pair of words, following by four possible answers to the question. If the learner was incorrect with his answer, the teacher was to administer a shock with voltage that increased with every wrong answer. If correct, there would be no shock, and the teacher would advance to the next question. No one was actually being shocked, the experimenters only sought to fool the “teacher”. A tape recorder with pre-recorded screams was hooked up to play each time the teacher administered a shock. When the shocks got to a higher voltage, the actor/learner would bang on the wall and ask the teacher to stop. Eventually all screams and banging would stop and silence would ensue. This was the point when many of the teachers exhibited extreme distress and would ask to stop the experiment. Some questioned the experiment, but many were encouraged to go on and told they would not be responsible for any results.

Milgram summarized the results in an article which basically stated ordinary people, just doing their jobs, and without any hostility on their part, can become agents in a destructive process. Even when the destructive effects of their work becomes clear, and they are asked to go on, going against morality, few people have the ability to resist authority.

This experiment does not have any clear benefits to society; the conclusions drawn from the experiment goes much deeper, showing other aspects of the human mind which would benefit society and the world of psychology greatly. I think that the side effects of seizures are horrible; however, the information gained really may outweigh the the effects. Personally though, I don’t believe the end justify the means if people or even animals are physically or mentally abused/hurt in any way.

Resources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
This link explains Milgrams experiment, goes into detail, and explains the purpose and results.
http://beforeitsnews.com/alternative/2012/12/top-10-immoral-and-unethical-psychological-experiments-2519332.html
This was the website I stumbled upon when searching for right experiment to talk about. It also gives insight on many other unethical experiments conducted.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOYLCy5PVgM
This youtube video gives some details about the experiment, but also contains actual footage of the experiment. The commentaries from the people within the video give a better understanding for the experiment and the results of it.

The topic I was interested in finding out more about is systematic desensitization. It is a type of behavioral therapy that is based on the principle of classical conditioning. The purpose of this therapy is intended to remove the fear response of a phobia through the use of a relaxation technique. This is completed through a hierarchy of fear, which involves a conditioned stimulus that is ranked from least fearful to most fearful. For example, the client works their way up starting with the least aversive condition of a spider and practicing their technique as they go. When they no longer emit the fear response, they move on to the next stage in the hierarchy. It could begin with an image of a spider, a fake spider, and then a small spider that is a distance away. Once seeing the spider no longer elicits the fear response, the therapist can begin to increase the size of the spider or have the spider closer. This is repeated until the client no longer experiences anxiety, and until the hierarchy is at the most anxiety-provoking stage. If this is complete, it indicates that the therapy has been successful. When therapy is successful and the client is more relaxed, it is a desirable result for the client, and it may increase the likelihood of the client seeking treatment in the future, which serves as positive reinforcement.

Relaxation techniques may consist of the target behavior of control over breathing and/or muscle de-tensioning. Research has shown that the relaxation techniques and hierarchies may not be necessary; instead, it is contingent upon the exposure to the feared stimuli. Exposure can be done through two different methods. One is in vitro, and that is where the client imagines exposure to the phobic stimulus. The other is in vivo, and the client will actually be exposed to the phobic stimulus.

The severity of the phobia may determine the amount of time it takes to eliminate the phobia. It usually requires four to six sessions but up to twelve for a severe phobia. The therapy may be terminated when the agreed upon therapeutic goals have been met, which may mean that the individual’s fear may not be completely removed as the consequence.

Systematic desensitization is about challenging your beliefs. It is done until the client feels comfortable at each stage before he or she is able to more on. It provides a sense of control in the person’s life. There are, however, some individuals who suffer with obsessive thoughts that will not benefit from this therapy. Obsessive thoughts from anxiety may provoke persistent thoughts of potential harm, and it is not considered to be a phobia. With obsessive thoughts, systematic desensitization would not be helpful, since there is no clear situation that a person is dreading.

Some of the drawbacks to the systematic desensitization approach include that it can be a slow process, it only treats symptoms of the disorder and not the underlying cause, and it is not effective in treating serious mental disorders like depression and schizophrenia.

http://www.simplypsychology.org/Systematic-Desensitisation.html
http://www.guidetopsychology.com/sysden.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcojyGx8q9U

Terms: systematic desensitization, classical conditioning, response, stimulus, aversive, emit, elicit, desirable, positive reinforcement, target behavior, contingent, in vitro, in vivo, consequence

The topic I would like to learn more about is systematic desensitization and Mary Cover Jones, especially how she used this method of behavior therapy and how people in the modern day use it. Systematic desensitization was first introduced in chapter three, section four along with the “Little Albert” experiment, in which Mary Cover Jones wanted to experiment and see if not only a fear/phobia could be introduced, such as Watson, but Mrs. Jones wanted to experiment if fear could be removed or desensitized. I am interesting in this topic because I plan on becoming a counselor/therapist and to know the different forms of behavioral therapy and maybe one of these days I could use this method on my clients.
To begin the desensitization process one would participate in a series of steps that will all lead to the actual facing of the fear or phobia. Systematic desensitization can be used for OCD (obsessive-compulsion disorder) as well, however, by building relaxation techniques is extremely important for this disorder because just the idea of breaking their obsessive habit is anxiety producing itself. For OCD or even a simple phobia/fear one would start by developing an anxiety hierarchy, in which the individual plans their steps for gradually facing their fear. For example: if someone were to be afraid of snakes (conditioned stimulus) then their hierarchy might including viewing pictures of snake, to holding a stuffed animal snake, to having a snake in the same room with them, to having a snake it besides them, and finally being able to touch the snake. By starting with the least anxiety producing and working your way up as you feel comfortable with the stage then eventually you will be able to face your fear. At the same time the client would be given relaxation techniques so therefore they would pair the aversive stimulus (a snake) to a pleasurable stimulus (massage). In regards the phobia, or especially OCD, relaxation techniques are important to this behavioral therapy relies on the comfortable of moving up the ladder to the next steps to ultimately face their fears. While this process is a slow one because there can be up to twelve steps in the hierarchy, however, it is the most effective when taken longer.
TERMS: systematic desensitization, conditioned stimulus, hierarchy, behavior modification, behavioral therapy, phobia, fear, OCD, relaxation techniques, “little albert”, Mary Cover Jones, Watson, desensitized
http://psychcentral.com/disorders/sx25t.htm
http://www.simplypsychology.org/Systematic-Desensitisation.html
http://panicdisorder.about.com/od/treatments/a/SystemDesent.htm

My topic is the little Albert study. It fits into the section on John Watson and conditioning new behaviors. I was interested in this topic because I wanted to learn more about this classic study and find out what happened to Little Albert. Apparently his real name was Douglas Merritte and he died young at the age of six from hydrocephalus. Watson wrote in his book that Albert was well-adjusted and very emotionally stable.

One thing I didn’t previously know about was the length of the experiment. Watson experimented with Albert for over a year! I also find it interesting that Watson had past experiments dealing with how fear is a conditioned response, only in his past work he covered why children fear fire and animals. What’s also fascinating is how fear responses don’t extinguish as easily as other conditioned responses. In this way, I’m reminded of conditioned taste aversion and how something extremely aversive at times doesn’t need repetition to affect the likelihood of a behavior (which goes against the law of exercise). In a way, people reinforce fears in themselves, because if they never face a fear, then they never have an opportunity to condition a new response to that stimulus.

http://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/01/little-albert.aspx

http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Watson/emotion.htm

http://www.neuroanatomy.wisc.edu/selflearn/Conditioning.htm

Terms: Little Albert Study, John Watson, conditioning, behaviors, conditioned response, fear, extinguish, conditioned taste aversion, law of exercise, stimulus.

I chose to cover the topic of Ivan Pavlov. Last week when we had a similar assignment, I studied the topic of classical conditioning, which mentioned Pavlov several times since he's considered the father of classical conditioning. He's so associated with it that classical conditioning is sometimes referred to as Pavlovian conditioning. I chose him mainly because I covered him briefly in my topic last week and I wanted to learn more about him, and partly because he worked with dogs and dogs are my life.

Ivan Pavlov was born in Russia in 1849. He was not only just a psychologist but also a physiologist and a physician. He was very influenced at a young age by reading Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of the Species" which helped him form the decision to go into the field of science. His primary interests were physiology and nature sciences. While studying the digestive systems of dogs, he began to notice that they would salivate before their food was delivered, which is what led him to conduct his most famous experiments. As discussed in class before, he would present the dog with the food (unconditioned stimulus) which would cause the dog to salivate (unconditioned response) and then ring a bell (neutral stimulus). Eventually it got to the point where the dogs would start to salivate at only the sound of the bell, making it a conditioned stimulus.

In 1904 Pavlov received the Nobel Prize for his studies in physiology and opened up the door for further studies in behaviorism. Surprisingly enough, while Pavlov is discussed in nearly every psychology class around the world, Pavlov did not consider himself to be a psychologist and even had a distaste for the field of study. Which is odd since his contributions to the field have been so great.

Terminology: classical conditioning, Pavlovian conditioning, unconditioned stimulus, unconditioned response, neutral stimulus, conditioned stimulus, behaviorism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Pavlov
http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesofmajorthinkers/p/pavlov.htm
http://www.simplypsychology.org/pavlov.html
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1904/pavlov-bio.html

I decided to do this blog over Conditioned Emotional Response. This topic is of interested because it is a conditioned response. A neutral stimulus is paired with an unconditioned stimuli, only to make the neutral stimuli into the conditioned stimuli and elicit a Conditioned Emotional Response (CER). According for barks from the guild CER occurs simply because the brain changes. The brain makes new pathways that lead to these changes. All the sources say that they are learned responses. They are the consequence of the behavior, but then the consequence become rewarded and reinforced and this become the behavior. An example is when the bell rings and the rats are shocked. The shock causes the rats to freeze, then when the bell rings after it becomes a conditioned stimulus the rats will freeze because that is the CER due to the aversive affect. All CER are formed due to the classical conditioning technique. The same thing occurs in the classic study of little Albert. He was conditioned to fear furry animals due to a loud bang after one ran by, then every time he saw a furry animal he had an CER due to being conditioned to fear for the noise. All of the CER occurred due to fear, but it does not always have to be fear to trigger an CER, but it is usually aversive. CER is an interesting topic because it can occur even without someone trying to condition the response. This can happen during war, or even any trauma. A stimulus that is similar to one in the trauma can create a CER. This happens a lot with trauma disorders. CER is something to study because of the effects it has on the person, as well as how it is formed.
Terms: Conditioned Emotional Response, stimulus, behavior, consequence, neutral stimulus, conditioned stimulus, unconditioned stimulus, reinforced, averse, elicit,

http://barksfromtheguild.wordpress.com/where-do-conditioned-emotional-responses-originate-and-how-can-we-alter-the-resulting-behavior-taking-a-new-look-at-old-methodology/
http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Watson/emotion.htm
http://www.intropsych.com/ch05_conditioning/conditional_emotional_responses.html

I am choosing to write about the general topic of "reinforcement" I am choosing this topic because although it seems simple it is such a huge part of our every day lives. It amazes me how much we are affected by reinforcement. Almost everything if not everything we do is due to the either negative or positive reinforcement we will gain from the action. We often don't think about our actions and receive punishment for them but we pretty much always have some form of reinforcement in mind.

In our minds the benefits of reinforcement overpowers pretty much anything else. For example when someone goes to rob a bank they are thinking the reinforcement of all of the money they will be getting, to them at that time it outweighs the risk of any punishment they could receive, even jail time.

Reinforcement and punishment are so interesting to me because we don't see them as something big but they really control us.

A definition for reinforcement online I found was:

"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. This strengthening effect may be measured as a higher frequency of behavior (e.g., pulling a lever more frequently), longer duration (e.g., pulling a lever for longer periods of time), greater magnitude (e.g., pulling a lever with greater force), or shorter latency (e.g., pulling a lever more quickly following the antecedent stimulus)." (Wikipedia)

Reinforcement is also something that we share with all organisms as it states in the above definition. Whether it is animals, insects, or any other species the things that they do are for a certain reinforcement. We eat.... to no longer feel hungry. We wake up in the morning and go to class.... so that we can get a good grade. We work out.... to feel better about ourselves and get in shape.

I have stated how I think reinforcement controls our lives. We let it control ourselves. However, we are constantly looking for reinforcement from other people. We ask "how do I look" so that we can be positively reinforced with a compliment.

From the time we are born we are reinforced and we are taught to look for positive reinforcement all around us. We are trained or conditioned to want a certain response from certain actions and it amazes me that we will go so far to get it without even realizing how controlled by it we are.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement
http://www2.psychology.uiowa.edu/faculty/wasserman/glossary/reinforcement.html

http://iris.peabody.vanderbilt.edu/module/bi2/cresource/what-techniques-can-ms-rollison-use-to-manage-the-disruptive-and-non-compliant-behaviors-of-students-like-patrick-and-tameka/bi2_06/

Terms: reinforcement, punishment, behaviors, conditioned.

I decided to learn more about systematic desensitization. I wanted to learn more about this because I myself tend to have high anxiety and I would love to learn how to deal with it better.
We fist learned about systematic desensitization in chapter three. We also learned about "Little Albert" and how the doctor used this technique on him. In my research the main thing that I have learned was that it is a process that mainly involves the Anxiety Hierarchy. It can also involve many relaxation techniques such as deep breathing, muscle relaxation,and visualization. Systematic desensitization can be used for OCD, which is obsessive compulsive disorder,phobias, paranoia, and many other diagnosis. For OCD or any other fear, phobia or anxiety we need to start by developing an anxiety hierarchy which we prioritize our fears and make a plan on how to conquer them. Starting with the least anxious thing going to the worst. For example to start by imaging your fear, then listening to it, then seeing it, and then eventually putting yourself in a situation with your fear. It is important to start low and work your way up slowly to actually overcome the fear. This process can be done on your own or with the help of a professional.
Systematic desensitization is now a very common technique used among many psychologists around the world.

http://panicdisorder.about.com/od/treatments/a/SystemDesen.htm
http://www.simplypsychology.org/Systematic-Desensitisation.html
http://www.csulb.edu/~tstevens/Desensit.htm#1. Create The Anxiety Hierarchy
Terms: phobia, anxiety, OCD, systematic desensitization, Anxiety Hierarchy

The topic that I decided to further research is the topic of Systematic desensitization. It is directly related to the section of 3.3 and 3.4 because it is talked about in this section. I am personally interested in this topic because I myself have many phobias and fears which I attribute so some of my OCD, but regardless this is a term that helps people with their fears so I wanted to learn more about how and why this works for some people. Maybe allowing me to find a way to help myself with my own fears by researching further about systematic desensitization.
Systematic desensitization is a behavioral technique or tool used by people who suffer from particular phobias and fears. This is supposed to help suppress and overcome the phobias that one has. This tool is based off of the principle of classical conditioning in people. It was developed in the 1950’s by a psychologist names Wolpe. Systematic desensitization is used to remove the response of fear in particular situations or towards particular things. It is done by removing the fear and replacing it with relaxation by using a system of hierarchy to counter condition the fearful stimulus. People learn how to feel anxious about a thing or situation, so they can also learn how to not be anxious about a situation or thing, which is literally defined as desensitization. By using relaxation techniques, a person is able to work up this hierarchy to overcome fears one at a time from the least fearful to the most fearful. I was never aware of this hierarchy, but it makes total sense. One should work up to it so it is easier to overcome and accept instead of just jumping right into the most fearful thing or situation. I know people who are afraid of heights should just go skydiving, but I feel like if people moved up the hierarchy first, they might not have to jump out of a perfectly good plane to rid this fear. In order for the person to move up on this hierarchy, they must feel completely comfortable when shown the fearful stimulus, which would mean they are no longer fearful about that thing or situation. Once this is done, they can then go onto the next fearful stimulus. I learned that systematic desensitization is usually a slow process because it takes people a lot to move up on the hierarchy chart and overcome their fears, it’s not something that just happens overnight. This desensitization takes time, therapy, relaxation techniques, and many trail runs. One major thing that is important to realize about systematic desensitization is that this does not work with people who are mentally ill. This is a misconception that a lot of people have because it is logical enough to make sense on why it should or could be possible to help people who suffer from mental disabilities, but it doesn’t. Systematic desensitization has been known, almost proven to be an effective technique and tool within the behavioral modification world and it is useful for many people who are struggling. Every person is different with how long or how many sessions it takes to help rid their phobias because everyone’s phobias/fears and the severity differs from person to person.
Terms: Systematic Desensitization, Behavioral Modification, Psychology, Fears, Phobias, Hierarchy of Fear, Stimulus, Wolpe, Behavioral Therapy, Conditioned Stimulus, Relaxation Techniques,
1. http://www.simplypsychology.org/Systematic-Desensitisation.html
I enjoyed this source because it was very informative while being simple at the same time. It defined what systematic desensitization was in a deeper manner than the readings and it gave examples, techniques, and tools to help subside fears and phobias.
2. http://www.csulb.edu/~tstevens/Desensit.htm
This source went into great detail about what systematic desensitization is and research about it. Different steps, techniques, examples, sessions, definitions, how to conduct these particular sessions, and hierarchy’s about systematic desensitization.
3. http://phobialist.com/treat.html
This source was very simple and easy to read. It was straight to the point while being informative at the same time. It defined the terms and gave examples of particular phobias and fears. It talked about how to use this tool in laymen terms.
AS

I have a 2 year old tortoiseshell cat named Pistachio and she is full of personality. She is often referred to as a princess, a brat, or a bitch. Some of her attention-seeking behaviors include knocking over items and pictures, chewing papers, and surprise attacking people from under the coffee table or chairs. Her favorite way to get my attention was by creating as much noise as possible when I’m sleeping, starting at 3am until at least 4am. As soon as I would step out of bed, Pistachio would sprint away from her naughty behavior and run into the other room. Once I was comfortably back in bed, she would continue with the same noisy and aversive behavior creating a vicious cycle. I have removed the item she has selected to make noise, covered cords, stuffed pillows behind my dresser, only to have her find a new object to make noise. I have also tried to ignore Pistachio’s aversive behavior so I wouldn’t reinforce her behavior. However I have little patience that early in the morning, and Pistachio is very persistent.

So attempted to implement some behavior modification techniques. I filled a spray bottle with water and lavender oil. Every time Pistachio wakes me up from sleeping, I grab the spray bottle and squirt spray her causing her to run away. I wanted to establish a positive correlation between the Pistachio’s aversive behavior and the spray bottle. According to Train Your Cat by Christianne Schelling DVM, this is negative reinforcement technique is most popular among cat owns but also the least reliable. She lists many common variables that could affect the success of the intervention.

After this week’s reading assignments about classical conditioning, my actions appear to line closely to those described in our text. I searched youtube for cats and spray bottles finding a video about classical conditioning on a cat. A pair of students follow a trace conditioning schedule by activating a noise prior to spraying the cat with water, who then runs away. After some time, the cat appears to have developed a conditioned emotional response from establishing a positive contingency between the noise and the water. Whenever the cat heard the whistle, it would predict that water would follow and elicit an action to avoid the water before it happens.

Pistachio elicits the same avoidant behavior when I grab and shake the spray bottle, sometimes from me simply reaching for the bottle. Because of the similarities between Pistachio and the youtube cat, I feel as though I have unsuccessfully intervened her behavior. However I feel as though I have successfully conditioned pistachio and established a positive contingency. My use of the spray bottle did not cause extinction of her aversive behavior. Instead it has decreased my elicited response efforts to a shaking of a bottle. This temporarily terminates her behavior longer than previous techniques.

• Classical Conditioning Experiment (Whistle & Spray Bottle- on cat)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgZbX4q5Q8c
• Training Your Cat with Positive Reinforcement
http://www.humanesociety.org/animals/cats/tips/training_your_cat_positive_reinforcement.html
• The Squirt Bottle Controversy
http://www.catbehaviorassociates.com/the-squirt-bottle-controversy/

Concepts: aversive, reinforce, behavior modification, positive correlation, negative reinforcement, intervention, classical conditioning, trace conditioning, conditioned emotional response, positive contingency, elicit, conditioned, extinction.

The topic I chose was positive reinforcement. This was one of the first topics we discussed and one of the most important topics in my opinion. Positive reinforcement has been found to be much more effective at changing behavior than negative reinforcement has been. Positive reinforcement is most effective when used with a schedule of reinforcement. This is the type of reinforcement that especially works best for children or animals. Positive reinforcement is also the type of reinforcement that I would prefer to use on myself if I were trying to change a behavior. Positive reinforcement involves rewarding yourself for doing certain behaviors, as opposed to negative reinforcement which means taking away something bad for doing a behavior. I feel that in general both types of reinforcement will work better than any type of punishment when it comes to trying to change a behavior.
Terms: positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, behavior, schedule of reinforcement, punishment
http://www.wikihow.com/Understand-Positive-Reinforcement
http://bcotb.com/the-difference-between-positivenegative-reinforcement-and-positivenegative-punishment/
http://www.educateautism.com/behavioural-principles/positive-reinforcement.html#.UxjqVPldUg4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JA96Fba-WHk

For this topical blog, I decided to conduct research on John B. Watson, to look more in depth at his contributions to psychology. Watson, speaking from a behaviorist view, believed that psychology’s theoretical goal was to predict and control behavior. Watson’s early work focused on animal behavior, which he then associated with his later work on humans, saying that there was no true boundary between the two species, that we can adapt reactions and processes to humans.

He is most famous for his Little Albert study, in which he took a seemingly healthy, happy 11-month old boy and ultimately conditioned him to fear rats. The example, when walked through, makes conditioning easily understandable. First he presented the child with a rat, noticing virtually no reaction, he then presented the rat, but he paired it with a loud clanging noise in which elicited a crying response from Albert. As in conditioning, they presented this pair several times so Albert would recognize the pairing and eventually make an association. Finally, Watson presented the rat by itself, and by just the site of the rat, Albert showed the same fear initially elicited by the clanging. However, what is intriguing, is that Watson was unable to uncondition Albert, leaving the question, what happened to Little Albert? Unfortunately Albert died at the age of six to a medical condition called congenital hydrocephalus, but research suggests that possible effects from the study could have brought on the fatal disorder for the young child.

Watson went on to work in advertising because of a scandalous affair with his research assistant Rosalie Rayner. This limited his experimentation, and other advancements he could have made in psychology. Although his psychology was somewhat short lived, he is a pioneer in one of the most famous behavior modification techniques used today.

Terminology: Behavior Modification, elicit, conditioning, John Watson

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Watson#.22Little_Albert.22_experiment_.281920.29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Albert

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

Topic: Reinforcement
I chose to talk about reinforcement because it has been covered a lot so far this semester. I have always looked at reinforcement as a reward, but this semester I learned that it is an outcome that follows a behavior that increases the likelihood the behavior will reoccur. There are two types of reinforcement, positive and negative. Positive reinforcement is when you add something desirable to a situation in hopes that it increases the behavior to reoccur in the future. Negative reinforcement is the removal of something aversive after a behavior is done in hopes to increases the chances of the behavior reoccurring. These concepts were tricky for me to understand at first but through practice I have distinguished the difference between reward and reinforcement and punishment and negative reinforcement.
Reinforcement is a part of operant conditioning. It has been said this semester to be more affective in training people to emit a target behavior. It is a term and process that seems to be simple, but there is multiple ways and strategies to use when trying to reinforce a behavior. There are schedule you can use to determine the most effect way to reinforce a behavior. The schedules are fixed ratio schedules, fixed interval schedule, variable ratio schedules, and variable interval schedule. These schedules involve timing on when to emit reinforcement. All schedules are effective depending on the behavior you are trying to increase.
Fixed ratio schedules occur in our lives all the time. An example of this could be every two weeks when a person gets paid. They may increase their performance level before they get paid to ensure they get their paycheck. They could just perform steady or not as well during right after they get paid, but pick their performance up when reinforcement or payday gets closer.
Fixed variable schedule could be shown in a factory line. They could tell their workers that they will get paid every 15 watches. The time period may take shorter than other sometimes depending on the worker and how advanced they are.
Variable ratio schedules could be shown in a slot machine. You may not know if you or when you will win, but people continue to play because of the idea of the reinforcement. If/ when they are reinforced they will pause for a second and continue. This is a steady schedule because people participate in the activity hoping they will eventually get reinforced. They surprise makes it more fun.
Variable interval schedule could be when you are a waitress and you randomly check on your tables. You don’t constantly bug them and see if they are doing okay after every bite of food or drink of soda. You may wait and see if they need something after a while of not checking in on them.
These schedules vary on behavior but are all effective. When you deliver your reinforcement could really change how likely the behavior is on reoccurring.
Reinforcement is used every day by people to increase a target behavior. It has multiple different schedules you can use in order to have success in making a behavior reoccur. The administration of the reinforcement is very important and can effect if it works or not. I think this term is very important in learning how to encourage behavior.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement
http://psychology.about.com/od/operantconditioning/f/reinforcement.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_9ZZaPDtPk
reinforcement, positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, aversive, punishment, reward, fixed ratio schedule, interval ratio schedule, variable ratio schedule, variable interval schedule

Topical Blog Week #8
I decided to look more in-depth at systematic desensitization. We briefly discussed systematic desensitization in section 3.4 (Watson). I am interesting in learning more because, just like every human being, I am also afraid of something. Fear has always been an intriguing emotion to me. Fear is an emotion triggered by a dangerous threat. Whether it be real or imagined. That’s why people can be afraid of the most unlikely things like, stairs or balloons or dogs. To them they might perceive the object at frightening, dangerous, or uncomfortable.
Systematic desensitization has been proven to be effective in helping deal with anxieties and phobias. There are a couple important steps to reach success. Firstly, you need to recognize and identify what is causing the anxiety. Then you need to develop a coping strategy. For example, meditation. Or even imagining an anxiety provoking scenario in your head and then imagine a possible positive outcome. There are countless stories of people getting over their fear of spider or snakes by running through these scenarios in their head. When you become familiar with what you are fearful of, you also may become more comfortable. The use of humor can also shape a fearful object into something less frightening.
Joseph Wolpe is the man behind the process of systematic desensitization. He came up with this process in the 1950’s after he became familiar with Watson and Jones’ separate studies on children’s fear. Wolpe, instead of studying humans, studied cats. It is said that systematic desensitization is not as commonly used today as it was back in its prime by psychotherapists. One fun fact is you can practice systematic desensitization on yourself, by yourself. With sufficient repetition through using your coping strategy, the imagined event will lose its power to provoke your anxiety. So if you are ever faced with the real event, you will discover after all your repetitious imagining, that the real thing has lost its power over your emotions. One downfall is some evidence shows that systematic desensitization may not be effective for all phobias. Especially ones that can be deemed a survival component, like being afraid of heights, the dark, or dangerous animals. Phobias and anxieties that are most effective are those that have been acquired through personal experience of your everyday life.
Terminology: systematic desensitization, Watson, Jones, phobia, anxiety.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_desensitization
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nkd7zcvFQ5w
http://www.guidetopsychology.com/sysden.htm

The topic I have decided to cover is conditioned taste aversion. I picked this one because this topic resonates with me and many of my friends. I think it is so interesting that from one bad experience, it is possible you will never eat a food again. In third grade, I ate orange sherbet and came down with the stomach flu shortly after. To this day, the sight of orange sherbet makes my stomach churn. I always thought it was just my mind messing with me, but this is something many people experience. A common taste aversion for college students is taste aversion to certain types of alcohol. For example, if a student consumes too much fireball whiskey and throws up that night, most likely the taste of fireball will make him throw up or get nauseous the next time he/she comes in contact with it. To relate this to the ABC’s, the antecedent would be being at a party with fireball whiskey. The behavior would be drinking a little. The consequence would be feeling nauseous or throwing up.

In my research, I found that there are ways to overcome taste aversion and many ways that have been tried in the past. The best known reason for food being averse is that at one point the food made us sick. Taste aversion only requires one trial. This shows how powerful it can be! After one bad experience with a food, a person can get taste aversion toward that food. Even if the sickness was unrelated to the food eaten, the brain still associates it together. The person will find this food aversive until extinction occurs, if it ever occurs. A person does not have to consciously recognize a connection between the behavior and the consequence. I find this very interesting. It is on a subconscious level. It is possible a person will not remember getting sick from a certain substance, but the brain will remember on a subconscious level. The brain is trying to protect the person from further poisoning. A person may even hope to enjoy a certain food, but the body handles it reflexively. Taste aversion ties in with classical conditioning. Conditioned taste aversion shows that in classical conditioning, a response is elicited.

I found a few ways to reach extinction with conditioned taste aversion. One way listed is to eat, eat, eat the aversive food and to just force your body to get used to it. Eventually your body will relent. Increased exposure to the food increases your chances of liking it. Having a positive mood about it can also help. For people with extreme aversions, trained professionals can help. By combining hypnotherapy and neuro-linguistic programming, professionals can help end these extreme cases. Sometimes, people experience stimulus generalization and have a dislike to foods that resemble the aversive food. For example, if a person has an aversive response to oranges, they may have the same response to tangerines. These different extinction methods can help with foods that are associated through stimulus generalization.

Normally, taste aversion deals with a food that made a person sick. However, a study in the 1970s was done that flip flops taste aversion. People who were obsessed with junk food wanted a way to stop eating it so much. They wanted the junk food to be aversive. A study was conducted to make tasty food aversive to people through applying shock. Every time a woman tried to take a bite of her hamburger, fries, or shake, a shock was applied to her fingers. The shock made her spit out the food or drop it. After a few shocks, she no longer wanted to eat and started to get emotional. I think they used positive punishment to lead to taste aversion for certain foods. They applied an unpleasant consequence for the behavior of eating unhealthy food. This will lead to the decrease of her emitting the behavior of eating junk foods in the future.

Terms: Conditioned taste aversion, Antecedent, behavior consequence, extinction, response, elicited, classical conditioning, stimulus generalization, positive punishment, emitting, ABC’s

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2013/jun/18/food-aversions-why-occur-how-tackle

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jVz2nemjGI

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taste_aversion

Websites:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Watson

http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/watson.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xt0ucxOrPQE

The topic/person I decided to pick is John B. Watson. Watson is known for being the father of behaviorism. We just started to talk about him. I’m really interested in Watson because he seems to come up in discussion in all of my psychology courses. For Watson, he defined psychology as the study of behavior and that humans and animals learn to adjust to the environment through habit and reflex. His views reflected Charles Darwin’s views. I have taken a lot of biology courses in the past and learned a lot about Darwin. It’s really cool that they had the same views. Who knew my biology course would tie into psychology! We have also been talking a lot about how stimuli trigger behaviors. In the reading for class, it discussed Watson’s Little Albert experiment. This is such a well-known and influential experiment that is discussed to this day. We have talked a lot about classical conditioning and unconditioned/conditioned responses. I want to find out more about Watson and his experiment!
Watson believed that psychology should be the science of observable behavior. Watson did experiments on humans, as well as animals. The most important experiment he conducted is the Little Albert experiment. In this experiment he conditioned a small child to fear a white rat. Watson’s experiment accomplished exactly what he hoped it would. A simple reflex of fear could be conditioned into something much worse. Eventually the baby learned to fear all furry things. By pairing the neutral stimulus, which was the furry animal with an unconditioned stimulus (the noise) elicited the baby’s unconditioned response of fear. Watson’s belief was that most behaviors we have, we are not born with, the behaviors are learned!
Watson believed that controlled laboratory studies were the most effective ways to study learning. Manipulating the environment was exactly what Watson focused on. A famous quote that I found on almost every website(as well as our textbook) while I was researching Watson was written in 1930 and goes as followed: “Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select-doctor, lawyer, artist-regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations and race of his ancestors,” This quote really shows the prominent environmental views of behaviorists.

Terms:
Elicit, conditioned, stimulus, behaviorism, Darwin, unconditioned response, innate, reflex, Watson, reinforce, fear, neutral stimulus, behaviorists, environmental, classical conditioning.

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hBfnXACsOI

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

The topic I chose to discuss is extinction burst from section 2.2. Extinction burst occurs when reinforcement is withheld. The subject will increase the behavior and tries harder for reinforcement to occur. Extinction burst relates to extinction because the target behavior is no longer being reinforced, but occasionally extinction burst will occur in hopes of being reinforced which increases the behavior. This can occur in various situations. I chose extinction burst because I see this happen a lot in the family I nanny for. I nanny a 6 year old boy who has behavior problems we have been working on and extinction is a method the parents and I use to elicit a target behavior. Occasionally, however, I would notice extinction burst and aggression occur if he is not reinforced.
Extinction burst can result as a side effect of extinction treatment. In most cases when extinction was used as a treatment extinction burst or aggression would become a side effect.
Extinction is very important when eliciting target behavior from children. For example, when children do not want to sleep in their own bed. A child needs to feel comfortable sleeping alone in their room. If a child is crying most parents tend to their child’s cry by comforting them or staying in the room with them until they fall asleep. However, by using the extinction technique of getting the child to sleep in their room alone without crying could lead to extinction burst or aggression.
Parents need to be aware of their childrens behavior and set limits to unwanted behavior. I see kids all the time at the grocery store ask for candy and they scream and yell if their mom or dad says no. This is a great example of extinction burst. If a child normally gets candy at the grocery store, but no longer gets reinforced they may portray extinction burst or aggression. It is hard to know how we are supposed to set limits on children’s behavior because of media and popular culture.

Terms: extinction burst, extinction, behavior, reinforcement, elicit, target behavior
http://nspt4kids.com/healthtopics-and-conditions-database/extinction-burst/

http://education-portal.com/academy/lesson/extinction-burst-in-psychology-definition-examples-quiz.html#lesson

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5R63JKIAOY8

I found an aspect of Extinction very interesting when we were learning and discussing the general concept. I wanted to do more research on using extinction to change the behavior of children. I will do this by reiterating what extinction is, when it is appropriate to use extinction, the advantages, and the disadvantages of extinction.
Extinction reduces or eliminates unwanted behavior by withholding reinforcers that had previously been maintaining a behavior. Why extinction is sometimes perfered by people like educators is because it eliminates behaviors without punishment. Extinction is used in conjugation with reinforcing other more appropriate behaviors. This can be a difficult component simply because the attention required to consistently reinforce a behavior may be selectively available. It is also a very common misconception that extinction is synonomous with ignoring. I associated that behavior as a way of implementing extinction when we were first talking about the behavioral technique. Educators or child care providers who are ignoring behaviors that they don't like, are simply doing that, no extinction. Extinction requires more focus and action than simply ignoring a behavior.
Extinction can be used in many different contexts. I will talk about instances where it is appropriate to use extinction with children's behaviors. There are some questions and thought processes that a person needs to think about when confronting whether it would be effective to use extinction for a behavior. A main one that has a direct effect on the effectiveness of extinction is whether the reinforcers can actually be withheld. If control of reinforcers is not present then extinction will not be effective. It is also necessary to know if the behavior that someone is attempting to change can be tolerated temporarily or it is increases in frequency. Extinction is a gradual process and if they behavior needs to be changed immediately for safety of other reasons, then extinction is not the best behavioral method. The person trying to change a behavior needs to objectively analyze the behavior and determine if, with the use of extinction, the behavior will continue to be unresolved or the participant will fail to understand and behavior continues to get worse. If that is the case then extinction is not the best behavioral method of change.
The advantages of using the extinction method are that it is a non-adversive procedure and relatively simple. Using extinction is also a perk because it produces a long-term effect. The disadvantages of extinction is that there is a time commitment and to produce good results, it requires consistency and persistence. Something else that can be annoying is that initially, the undesirable behavior is likely to increase and aggressive behaviors could appear as part of an extinction burst.

URL: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:s-SvvVDL098J:https://www.gvsu.edu/cms3/assets/2CF6CA25-D6C6-F19E-339DC5CD2EB1B543/secondarylevellinkprograms/behavioral_interventions_-_extinction.docx+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=tr

http://education.purduecal.edu/Vockell/EdPsyBook/Edpsy11/edpsy11extinction.htm

http://education-portal.com/academy/lesson/reducing-undesirable-behaviors-in-the-classroom.html#lesson

Terms: Extinction, eliminates, behaviors, reinforcers, punishment, behavioral method, extinction burst

For this week’s assignment I choose to write about reinforcement. Reinforcement plays a huge role in behavior modification, because anytime you are trying to change a behavior positive and negative reinforcement is usually involved. This topic has also been discussed quite a bit in class, specifically in section 2.2 of our online text. I find this topic to be very interesting because I want to work in H-R in my future and that has to deal with a lot of negative behavior in the work place so to help fix it by using positive and negative reinforcement is important to me to learn instead of fixing it with punishment. I decided to learn about the background of reinforcement and how it came about, what exactly reinforcement is, and the different types of reinforcement.
A brief background regarding reinforcement, it began with behavioral psychologist Thorndike, Watson, and Skinner and their use of animal experiments. Wikipedia states that, “B.F. Skinner is famous for his work on reinforcement and believed that positive reinforcement is superior to punishment in shaping behavior.” Skinner also stated that, “positive reinforcement results in lasting behavioral modification whereas punishment changes behavior only temporarily and has many detrimental side-effects. Skinner also defined reinforcement as creating situations that a person likes or removing a situation that they don’t like.
A little bit about what exactly reinforcement is and how it is used is discussed in this article. “Reinforcement is a consequence that will strengthen an organism’s future behavior whenever that behavior is preceded by a specific antecedent stimulus.” An example of this would be money received from a slot machine; in this case the reinforcement is valued. Some stimuli that are rewarding or liked are not always reinforcing, so therefore reinforcement occurs only if there is an observable strengthening in the behavior.
When it comes to reinforcing a behavior it’s important to make sure to use the correct type of reinforcer for the situation. There is positive and negative reinforcement. Positive reinforcement would take place when a stimulus is presented as a consequence of a behavior and the behavior increases. Negative reinforcement occurs when the rate of a behavior increases because an aversive event or stimulus is removed or prevented from happening. There is also positive and negative punishment that is sometimes used. Along with primary reinforcers and secondary reinforcers, primary reinfrocers is also sometimes called unconditioned reinforcer. Secondary reinforcers is also sometimes called a conditioned reinforcer.
Reinforcing, reinforce, behavior, positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, consequence, punishment, unconditioned reinforcer, secondary reinforcer, conditioned reinforcer, observable strengthening, antecedent stimulus, Skinner, Watson, Thorndike.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement
http://psychology.about.com/od/operantconditioning/f/positive-reinforcement.htm
http://www.simplypsychology.org/operant-conditioning.html

The topic I chose for this assignment is the work of BF Skinner. Skinner was a pioneer in many aspects of the world of behavioral psychology. He is one of my favorite topics to learn about. I think his work with social engineering was very interesting. In his controversial literary works, Skinner talks about visiting a Utopian society. The community is able to achieve this by doing what Skinner calls "social planning" and using operant conditioning to raise children. The society also doesn't foster competition or give its support to war. Skinner also believed that it was science and not happiness that lead the way to our true potential and human fulfillment. Because of his texts, Skinner was known for many unpopular political views.
Skinner believed that all human behavior was directly influenced by the environment the person is in. I don't think this is entirely true because there are countless antecedents that could be the cause of any number of behaviors that might not be directly related to the environment.
In one of the other articles it calls Skinner the "father of operant conditioning". This form of conditioning is used with punishments and reinforcement on certain target behaviors. When an organism emits a certain kind of behavior the consequence will either be in the form of reinforcement or punishment.
Reinforcement and punishment can come in four different forms. It could be positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, positive punishment, and negative punishment. Reinforcement is anything that could increase the likelihood of the same behavior being emitted again. Punishment is the opposite, when it is decreasing the likelihood of the behavior occurring again. When the term "positive" is used, it means something is being added to the situation. When negative is used, it means something is being taken away. As an example, with positive reinforcement, something good is being added so the behavior will continue. With negative reinforcement, something aversive is being taken away.
Skinner has done many great things for the world of behavior psychology. His ideas, and invention of the Skinner Box, have revolutionized the way we perform behavioral experiments today.

http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/B._F._Skinner#Social_engineering
http://www.simplypsychology.org/operant-conditioning.html
http://www.biography.com/people/bf-skinner-9485671#later-work

Phobias are something that many people struggle with. Specific phobias are one of the most common disorders being prevalent in nearly 13% of the population. Systematic desensitization is one of the most effective treatments for phobias. While reading about systematic desensitization it sparked my interest. I am currently in an abnormal psychology course and we just discussed phobias and I thought it would be interesting to dig deeper into phobias and systematic desensitization.

Systematic Desensitization, also known as graduated exposure therapy, is a type of behavior therapy used in the field of psychology to help effectively overcome phobias and other anxiety disorders. Systematic desensitization is a form of counter conditioning because it is the condition unwanted behavior into a wanted behavior by association of positive actions (Wikipedia). Systematic desensitization is therapy that is aimed at removing fear responses to phobias and substituting them with relaxation responses (Simply Psychology). Systematic desensitization can also be thought of in terms of operant conditioning as well. People avoid the anxiety producing situation or object and have reduced anxiety. Therefore the taking away of an aversive stimuli then results in increased behavior of avoidance (Wikipedia). Systematic desensitization works to help people stop avoiding their fears and face them. Systematic desensitization consists of three steps (Wikipedia). The first step is identification of anxiety through the creation of a hierarchy of fears. This means that the person makes a list of things about the object or situation that makes them fearful or full of anxiety and then ranks them in a hierarchy (Education Portal). The second step is the learning of relaxation or coping techniques. The last step is using the relaxation techniques to overcome the hierarchy.

Systematic desensitization is focused on learned relaxation and coping techniques. Relaxation techniques are to be used when a person is feeling anxiety and are used to help reduce the anxiety. There are several types of relaxation techniques but they are all aimed at trying to help reduce anxiety. The most common forms of relaxation techniques are controlling breathing and learning to not have tension in muscles (Simply Psychology). These relaxation techniques are commonly compared to meditation (Education Portal). As the client is taught these relaxation techniques they are put to the test. They are then faced with the hierarchy of their fears and then told to use their new relaxation techniques (Education Portal). The combination of the two is supposed to make the client associate the stimuli or event with relaxation rather than anxiety.

Systematic desensitization is successful because it makes people face their fears. Exposure is the key treatment to phobias and anxiety and that is what systematic desensitization does (Simply Psychology). The hierarchy of fear that is created is different steps of exposure that the client will go through (Education Portal). Each stage of the hierarchy are repeated until the client is able to use their relaxation techniques to reduce their anxiety and then they move to the next stage (Simply Psychology). The end goal of systematic desensitization is the client being completely exposed and not having anxiety. There are two types of exposure in systematic desensitization, the first being in vitro (Simply Psychology). In vitro means that client imagines their exposure to the stimuli. This means that the person is not actually exposed but rather uses their imagination (Simply Psychology). In vitro is useful for when the stimuli is too hard to obtain for the therapist or the phobia is too extreme. The second type is in vivo. In vivo exposure is the client actually being exposed to their phobia and this is the most effective form of therapy (Simply Psychology). Exposure is the key to treating phobias and anxiety.

Systematic desensitization is something that can be self-administered. People are able to use systematic desensitization without the help of a therapist and still have good results (Guide to Psychology). People may have fears that they don’t feel are so debilitating that they need a therapist, however they still want to get rid of their anxiety and that is when self-administered systematic desensitization is a good option (Guide to Psychology). The most common example of this is test anxiety. Children and teens that have test anxiety can use systematic desensitization to reduce their anxiety (Wikipedia). They are able to create their own fear hierarchy and learn relaxation tips and then use those techniques to face their anxiety. Just like going to a therapist this is an effective way of reducing anxiety (Wikipedia). Systematic desensitization is an effective way of facing phobias and anxiety whether it be with the help of a therapist or self-administered.

URLS:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_desensitization
http://www.simplypsychology.org/Systematic-Desensitisation.html
http://www.guidetopsychology.com/sysden.htm
http://education-portal.com/academy/lesson/systematic-desensitization-definition-treatment-examples.html#lesson

TERMS: phobia, systematic desensitization, abnormal psychology, graduated exposure therapy counter conditioning, operant conditioning, aversive stimuli, in vitro exposure, in vivo exposure,

The topic I choose is systematic desensitization which was discussed briefly in section 3.4. I was curious about it because I myself have several fears, that you could actually consider phobias. I've seen multiple shows on TV were people go through systematic desensitization and wanted to learn more about the process and its effectiveness.
Systematic desensitization is a technique in behavioral modification, developed by Joseph Wolpe based on classical conditioning. It is a common treatment for phobias; and it's goal is to assist individuals in getting over phobias, typically through relaxation techniques. Specifically, fears and phobias that affect the daily lives of patients. For example, a businessman that flies 2-3 times a week across the world and who has a severe fear of flying. These irrational fears develop from actual dangers. A person associates all nonpoisonous snakes to a dangerous snake, and is then afraid of all snakes.
A frequently used form of relaxation is progressive relaxation. One begins by tightening certain muscle groups and then relaxing them. Attention should be paid to the feeling of relaxation after tightening the muscles. The goal after multiple times practicing is that one will be able to relax themselves in numerous situations.
The clinician and patient seeking treatment for a phobia typically will then create a list of items or situations that increases their anxiety, beginning with the least stress provoking and ending in the most. Using the example of the phobia of clowns. The list might begin with a picture of a clown, seeing a clown from a distance, and then shaking a clowns hand. With a support system, therapist and family, the patient than practices learned relaxation while going through their list. Slowly moving from one item to the next. The feeling of anxiety should be replaced with a relaxed feeling allowing the phobia to become more tolerable. This is the desensitization. Before computers, visualization was used and then virtual became more popular. The latter is found to be the most effective.
The idea is that the patient will condition themselves to no longer have anxiety (unconditioned response) when exposed to their unconditioned stimulus, their phobia. The conditioned stimulus of their phobia should eventually result in the conditioned response of relaxation.
In the video a man has an extreme fear of elevators and in fact hasn't been in one that for 6 to 8 years. He claims he believes he will get stuck and die inside one. Using a support group they suggest he go in an elevator to get over his fear. Because the clip is short, one might assume an antecedent to the behavior of going into an elevator was: discussing his fear, practicing relaxation, and gradually exposing himself to elevators (perhaps pictures). The next day the man has his “survival pack” of lemonade and a paper bag, which is a source of relaxation for him. He enters the elevator by himself, and is met by more supports at the next level. At the end of the clip they suggest he go to New York and go in a larger elevator. This symbolizes the list of hierarchy anxiety discussed.
Most people have positive results and actually have a reduction in their fear or phobia. Exposing and individual to their source of anxiety without any negative consequences or emotions, the fear should lead to extinction of the fear. Additionally, those who go through systematic desensitization are able to go back to their daily routines.
Terms: Systematic Desensitization, Behavioral Modification, Classical Conditioning, Antecedent, Behavior, Negative Consequence, Extinction, Unconditioned Stimulus, Unconditioned Response, Conditioned Stimulus, Conditioned Response.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jpg_y14-tSs

http://www.minddisorders.com/Py-Z/Systematic-desensitization.html

http://phobialist.com/treat.html

My interest lies within the realms of Systematic Desensitization and how it can help to heal people suffering from phobias, as discussed in section 3.4 of the text. As we learned in the text, Mary Cover Jones used desensitization when Watson failed to find a solution to cure Little Albert. It wasn’t even known if results from his conditioning process could even be reversed. I feel like Watson failed the psychological community, and especially Little Albert, in this regard because the extent of the effects of Watson’s study were unclear, because he chose to have sexual relations with his assistant rather than focusing on the task at hand.
Mary Cover Jones studies a child and his conditioned responses to conditioned stimuli paired with unconditioned stimuli, decreasing his initial of fear to the conditioned stimulus. This study was a revelation for people suffering from general and specific phobias. Phobias are defined as an illogical fear that handicaps a person’s quality of life. Some phobias effect people on a daily basis (germs), while others are easily avoided (fear of open bodies of water, if a person lives in a desert area). But, all phobias are encountered at some point within a suffering person’s life, and without techniques to cope with those fears, stress and anxiety remain elevated and debilitating.
There are multiple types of systematic desensitization which includes: breathing techniques, progressive muscle relaxation, visualization, virtual reality desensitization, fear hierarchies, and exposure. All of these techniques are taught with the intent of eliminating or severely reducing fear. Independent counseling as well as group therapies can provide vessels of relief for suffering individuals that can be long term solutions.
Breathing techniques and muscle relaxation can provide on the spot relief for someone who is in the midst of their phobia(s). When a person is confronted by what they fear, the normal response is shortness of breath, which reduces oxygen intake into the body. With this lack of oxygen, a person can be light headed, dizzy, as well as experience an increase in heart rate. Teaching a person to be proactive, instead of reactive can allow them to immediately recognize their breathing as maladaptive, and they can focus on death breathing which calms all of their initial physiological responses.
Muscle tension works to calm the body and the mind. A clinician teaches the art of relaxing each of the muscle groups in order to decrease anxiety. Just like the calming effects of yoga, or pilates, relaxing muscle groups can divert the aversive attention on the phobia to a more tranquil activity. Muscle relaxation also helps to control a person’s breathing, so that like the breathing techniques heart rate, anxiety, dizziness, etc. will be reduced.
I find that systematic desensitization can be useful for all people, because anxiety is a human response. Although not everyone suffers from phobias that can prove to be debilitating, I believe that anxiety reduction can be the path to healthy living emotionally, socially, and mentally.
Terms: systematic desensitization, phobia, Watson, Mary Cover Jones, unconditioned stimuli, conditioned stimuli, conditioned response
http://www.simplypsychology.org/Systematic-Desensitisation.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCDzeou1-2Q
http://www.rethink-anxiety-disorders.com/systematic-desensitization.html

The topic I choose is positive punishment, specifically in the form of spanking. Spanking is positive because it involves the addition of something aversive; before the child emits a behavior they don’t have spanking in their life. It is punishment because spanking decreases the likelihood that the behavior will occur again in the same antecedent. This fits into what we have learned so far because much of what we have learned revolves around reinforcement and punishment. We have looking more deeply at the types of reinforcement and punishment, one specific type being positive punishment, so this research just takes what we have learned into an even deeper level, looking at a specific type of positive punishment. I am interested in spanking because it is a common debate in my mind about whether or not I should spank my children someday. This gave me the opportunity to look at the topic more in-depth to help determine if this is a type of discipline I would use as a parent someday.

In the last few decades the topic of spanking has become a highly contested debate and the subject of much of the recent research. With each study, more is learned about the positive and negative effects of spanking. On the positive side of the table, spanking is associated with immediate stopping of a behavior because of the fear in children of getting hit. Spanking also teaches children what behavior is wrong. Overall, the number of negatives found with spanking greatly outnumbers the number of positives. Children who have been regularly spanked have shown to have less grey matter in the prefrontal cortex region of their brain. This reduction in grey matter has been connected to depression, addiction, and other mental disorders. The grey matter in the brain is what determines a person’s ability to have self-control, therefore this has led to idea that the more you physically punish kids, the less self-control they have. Spanking has also been linked to an increase in aggression in children and a cycle of violence within homes. A decrease in overall cognition in children may also be the result of spanking. Spanking also causes children to be on edge, expecting people to be mean to them. This is especially damaging in their relationship with their parents, a wall of mistrust can develop between parents and their children. Another negative effect found with spanking is it has been found to be the most common way for physical abuse to come into the home. If spanking doesn't work to correct a behavior, the parent often continues to increase the physical harm given to the child which is a very dangerous path to take.

Although there are more negative effects of spanking than positive effects, does spanking work as a form of punishment? Overall, spanking is not shown to help reduce the behavior in the child long-term, only in the immediate short-term. One reason for this might be that spanking doesn’t always directly follow the behavior. A parent may pick a child up from daycare and learn he or she refused to take a nap, the parent may then take the child home and spank them for this behavior, hours after the undesired behavior was emitted. Another reason why spanking may not be effective is that children are only learning what behavior not to emit; they are not learning the behavior they should emit. Children learn best by practicing and if they are not being shown the behavior they should be practicing, it will be more difficult for them to learn the behavior at all. Another reason spanking may be ineffective is because the punishment is only lasting for a minute, they only feel pain for a few seconds after getting spanked and then the punishment is over. During this punishment time the child is also only focusing on the actual act of spanking, not on why they are getting spanked, defeating the entire purpose of the discipline, to correct their behavior.

With the overall findings pointing towards a great number of negative effects of spanking and the ineffectiveness of using spanking as a punishment, the real question now lies in how children are supposed to learn correct behavior. One method is to use positive praise to reinforce good behavior in children. When a child emits the desired behavior, the parent should reinforce this behavior by giving the child verbal praise. Another way to help children behave correctly is to have a consistent discipline plan. If a child is going to receive punishment every time they jump on the bed, each time they jump on the bed they must be punished, not just when the parents feels like punishing the behavior. Another method is for parents to really concentrate on being calm during tantrums of the child, and then talking to the children about the best ways to react to conflict. This open and honest communication between children and their parents about how best to behave helps to build trust between parents. This trust will then help children to see punishment as not something done in anger, but instead as something done to help them. When punishment is needed in these strategies of teaching children correct behavior, a parent can raise their voice to elicit the same fear within the child as spanking would do, but without the physical component. Another type of punishment that could be used instead would be to take away a privilege. Taking away a privilege has longer effects then a spanking; it lasts longer than just a few seconds. It also makes the child think more about the wrong behavior they exhibited. For example every time a child wants to watch TV but can’t because not watching TV for a week was their punishment, they will think about the behavior they emitted to receive the punishment.

Terms: behavior, reinforce, emitted, punishment, positive punishment, aversive, antecedent, reinforcement, desired, elicit, undesired

URL’S:
http://www.cnn.com/2014/07/23/health/effects-spanking-brain/
http://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/04/spanking.aspx
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/moral-landscapes/201309/research-spanking-it-s-bad-all-kids
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUI8tizuChs

This week I found systematic desensitization to be incredibly interesting, so I decided to dig a little further into this. From my research I found a few main themes that I’ll discuss really quick. First off, I found that most research done in this field was subjective and from the little bit of research I did, I only found case studies. So, that is kind of interesting. Usually case studies tend to add the ability to be pretty in depth, but it makes it difficult to generalize these to a larger population. So, from that I’m gathering that this is something that tends to be subjective. There isn’t going to be one way of doing things. And in one case, there might be someone who needs to be reinforced a bunch to decrease their fears and in another case, there might not need to be any reinforcement, there might simply need to be a run through of strategies and boom- they’re a little less fearful. I also found the overarching theme that this needs to be a problem for the patient. There definitely wouldn’t be anyone getting treatment for something if it isn’t disruptive or detrimental to the individual. I also found that there is a system. Kind of seems inevitable based on the name “systematic desensitization”. But really! There’s a system. So, first off, there has to be a ranking of what exactly makes the person tick. So, in the youtube video, there was a ranking at the beginning. The researcher took down information about how far the individual could get to touching the spider. In the research about fear of flying in planes, the researchers found out what exactly it was about flying- the plane, the airport, etc. After this, there was a plan laid out by the researcher to go about handling the fear and overcoming that. Next, the individual will go back through the ranking of fear inducing actions- least problematic to most disturbing. Another theme I deciphered was that of humor. Humor seemed to be a pretty popular attempt at this. Which is very interesting in many regards. I’m not really surprised, but it does seem a little bit elementary.
So, one of the issues I found was just that these are all case studies. Usually (from what I’ve learned in psych of personality) case studies are used to build hypothesis and also just can’t be generalized. So, it’s really difficult to make an assumption that systematic desensitization is really going to cure someone of their phobia. Because, it’s just a case study and although the individual usually reports less anxiety… there’s still anxiety associated with whatever it is they’re fearing. In the youtube video I selected, a woman had a spider phobia. She started not being comfortable touching a skin of a spider. After a couple sessions of humor and some activities to further relieve some tension and anxiety, she was able to touch the spider. But, she still reported having really high anxiety- about a 9 on a 10 point scale- when she did this. And I think I probably would too. Like, honestly that’s so creepy and I don’t have a huge problem with spiders. Another problem that I saw with this was that it’s pretty easily replicated and probably doesn’t have to be administered by a researcher. I think it could definitely be simply self administered. I also think that since it’s so basic, you could even get creative with it and use things a researcher might never think of because you’d be doing this for yourself- and you know yourself well enough, so you might have better systems for yourself.

TERMS: Systematic desensitization, aversive, reinforcement, and anxiety.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nkd7zcvFQ5w

http://eds.a.ebscohost.com.proxy.lib.uni.edu/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=9197ff3f-92f5-42af-a4ce-725d9eb7981c%40sessionmgr4003&vid=3&hid=4102

http://eds.a.ebscohost.com/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=5&sid=9197ff3f-92f5-42af-a4ce-725d9eb7981c%40sessionmgr4003&hid=4113

Superstitious Behaviors

The topic that I am interested in and have chosen to do more research on is superstitious behaviors. This topic relates to behavior modification because we have discussed it in section 2.4 of our reading and I have written notes about it. I am interested in this topic because it is a principle that I have experienced before in my daily life and will most likely come across again in the future.

First off, superstitious behaviors occur when the behaviors are thought to be reinforced, when in actuality the behaviors are not directly related to the reinforcement. Organisms emit superstitious behaviors when they believe that reinforcement occurs at random times.

Through reading on this topic, I’ve learned that superstitious behaviors do not only occur among humans, but they also occur with animals. One great example I noted was about B.F. Skinner studying superstitious behaviors in our class book (citation A). Skinner had placed a pigeon in an operant chamber and had food delivered there at random time intervals. The first time food arrived, the pigeon happened to be circling to the left. The pigeon believed circling to the left was being reinforced with food, when in reality it was being given food at random time intervals. The pigeon was also circling to the left when there was the second food arrival. The pigeon was doing this because it noticed the correlation between circling left and food being presented. When it happened the second time, the pigeon developed a superstitious behavior.

I wanted to get a visual of what some superstitious behaviors looked like so I searched for some videos on YouTube. There was one video that I thought was cute and interesting with a dog performing a superstitious behavior (citation B). A woman wants a dog to sit at the back of the crate before being released. As the woman trained the dog to learn this as a puppy, the puppy would lick the woman's hand when she placed it on the crate. The woman got lazy with the training and didn't require the dog to sit before being released, but she did make it wait in the crate before being released. At the same time the puppy would still lick her hand. The target behavior in this video is the dog sitting down in the crate which occurs at (0:40). I think the superstitious behavior occurred because when the woman became lazy training the dog, the conditioned stimulus became the woman placing her hand on the crate and the conditioned response became the dog licking her hand in hopes of the woman opening the crate.

With additional research on the internet about superstitious behaviors, I have read about how they can become confused with other things, such as rituals or anxiety (citation C). There is a dividing line between rituals/beliefs and superstitious behaviors. Also, researchers do not positively correlate anxiety disorders, such as obsessive compulsive disorder, as superstitious behaviors. However, it can become a tricky thing differentiating anxiety between superstitious behaviors because both involve repetitive ritualized behavior. With superstitious behavior, the key thing to look at is if the organism thinks there is a correlation in a certain behavior they perform and the reinforcement they receive. After researching further on this topic, I feel I have become very well informed about not only spontaneous recovery, but other relative terms and concepts that are also used in our Behavior Modification class.

Website sources:
A) http://www.uni.edu/~maclino/bm/book/sec2.4.pdf
B) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCB_ddthxuU
C) http://www.webmd.com/mental-health/features/psychology-of-superstition

Terminology used: superstitious behaviors, reinforced, emit, reinforcement, B.F. Skinner, operant chamber, target behavior, conditioned stimulus, conditioned response.

For this post, I wanted to talk about classical conditioning and the show American Horror Story: Freak Show. This is for a few reasons. Clearly, there are many people in this world who are considered different from what most would consider normal, and it is pretty obvious that these people are considered outcasts in our society. The thing that I want to focus on is how people that are considered fully functioning and normal are conditioned, at a very young age, to treat these “freaks” as just that. In this show, it is very evident that the main characters feel as though they are secluded and judged by society, but the real conditioning can be found in the actors’ actual lives. In the videos that I found on youtube.com, they interviewed each of the actors that play a “freak” and talked to them about their story growing up and also their story about getting casted. This is where I really became aware of how often people judge someone for the way they look. “People stare at something that they don’t understand,” stated “Legless” Susie, otherwise known as Rose. In this interview it was clear that despite her deformity being something that she couldn't control, Rose had spent her life being ridiculed and stared at. In the description of this show, one of the first words being used is discrimination, but its not only that. Looking at how the audience reacts to the “freaks,” either they are disgusted and put off by them or they are fascinated and so in-tuned with them that they can’t look away. This shows that when people see something that they aren’t used to seeing, they typically will try to figure it out by spending more of their time looking at it or dissecting it, or they will dismiss it all together.
I think that this show is doing an awesome thing by depicting to the public what its like to grow up this way and also what its like on the other side of normalcy. During the interview with Matt Fraser, he mentioned something about how much power the human body has in entertainment, and I couldn't agree with him more. You put people in a theater and show them two films. One film about a family trying to save their dog who eventually dies. They will watch and relate their own lives to it. Then they will leave the theater thinking about how sad the movie was and about how much they love their family and their dog, right? The second film is about someone with cancer, or someone that has a very obvious deformity. Those people in the theater that don't have cancer themselves or a deformity are going to be so captivated that they cant take their eyes off the screen and they will talk about how they couldn't imagine their lives being that way. They cant relate because they have never been in a situation where they are outside of the norm, yet they make jokes and poke fun at the characters because they are conditioned to do so.
On the other hand, in this show, there is a overly terrifying clown character that is depicted as a murderer and a kidnapper. This actually feeds into some people’s fear of clowns or people with coulrophobia. There may be a more common reaction to this clown because there are a large number of Americans who fear clowns, for whatever reason. However, this being in the show and depicted the way that it is, has actually frustrated the clown community and has caused them to disagree with Horror Story’s choice to cast him that way. A big reason for the frustration is because they feel that so many people already have the preconceived notion that clowns are terrifying and hurt people, and they of course do not want that image for themselves. I find it ironic that AHS is trying hard to open people’s mind to “freaks” and to give them a say on how they want to be treated, but then they do the opposite to the Twisty the Clown. I suppose one can only please so many at once, but I just think that the conditioning that we all learn as children and young adults makes peace in society difficult when so many are negatively effected by it. I love this show and I think that it has a good message, (even though it is wrapped in a very disturbing package) and I cant want to see what the rest of the season has in store for the audience.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EF_IsA8NC8k
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DObsODg8y2s
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Horror_Story#Season_4:_Freak_Show_.282014.E2.80.9315.29
http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/10/16/real-life-clowns-arent-happy-with-american-horror-story-freak-show

Terms: classical conditioning, learned behavior, couldrophobia, normalcy, freaks

For my topical blog this week, I have chosen to research taste aversion. This topic interests me because it is a part of psychology and behavior modification that we can all relate to. Have you ever gotten the flu shortly after eating one of your favorite foods and suddenly even the thought of that food makes you feel sick? I'm sure we all have. Everyone who has drank a little too much on the weekends knows exactly what taste aversion is. This fits into what we are studying in class because it is a prime example of classical conditioning.

While researching this topic, I found that one thing that particularly interest researchers about taste aversion is the fact that it goes against several laws of classical conditioning. The first rule taste aversion violates is that it emerges full strength after only one Conditioned Stimulus-Uncontrolled Conditioned Stimulus pairing. Another rule it goes against is that the association is very selective in that people make the association through taste or odor of something only. Finally, the learned response naturally resists unlearning. It may take days, weeks, months, or even years, for the association to leave us. Conditioned taste aversion is a natural survival instinct in animals. It helps them to survive by avoiding certain animals, plants, berries, etc. that previously poisoned them or made them sick. Taste aversion is a curious way nature has taught us how to survive more efficiently.

One thing I found interesting in my research is that some people are experimenting with harnessing the fascinating effects of taste aversion in order to eat healthier and associate something unpleasant. I tried to look for many taste aversion videos. The youtube clip I found is of aversion therapy in the 1970's. A woman wanted to eat healthier and avoid junk food, so they associated eating a hamburger with getting shocked, (negative reinforcement) resulting in her saying she no longer wanted to eat it. I thought it was very interesting the ways scientists are trying to harness the power and uniqueness of taste aversion.

Terms: Classical conditioning, behavior modification, taste aversion, conditioned stimulus (CS), and unconditioned stimulus(UCS).

http://www.intropsych.com/ch05_conditioning/taste_aversion.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lc8rtjxG-eI
http://www.conditionedtasteaversion.net/

Sources:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jpg_y14-tSs

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

http://www.guidetopsychology.com/sysden.htm

I have decided to cover the topic of experimental neurosis, which we covered a bit in section 3.2 when learning about Ian Pavlov and expounded on slightly in section 3.3 when discussing more in depth the subject of classical conditioning.I am interested in this specific topic because I want to master the subject better. I do not think I originally had any type of grasp on the matter and hope to further my understanding. It also, sounds extremely interesting and when looking back through my notes I became interested in learning more.

I found some very useful/valuable information regarding experimental neurosis that should further my knowledge. Experimental neurosis is a somewhat different topic than some of the others we have covered. It deals with both conditions of unresponsiveness and aggressiveness and has been applied to dogs many times. Dogs were classically conditioned to salivate and then discriminate between two things, in this case a circle and a square. Some dogs were said to have learned helplessness, aka unresponsive dogs and they were under the control of inhibitory neurons. On the opposite end exists dogs labeled as aggressive and they are under the control of excitatory neurons.

After training the dogs to discriminate between a square and a circle, the researchers would make it harder and harder for the dog. A circle would start to look more and more like a square, while the square started to look more and more like the circle. until they were indistinguishable.

You could say the experimental neurosis is,a behavior problem that is made by someone testing you or done experimentally and the organism is required to make a very difficult distinction that of extreme difficulty that ends up breaking down in the process. There are three ways this can happen. The first way is the stimuli could be too strong or too complicated. The next problem could be a strain of the stimulus that usually restricts you. Lastly, a collision of the two stimuli. This is why dogs go through the training, to familiarize themselves (for the experimenters) with the very difficult task at hand.

The first method of using experimental neurosis was when Pavlov did a shock test with a dog to see if the dog would eat. Which leads right into the heart of classical conditioning which we also learned about (CS, US, NS, SR, and UR).

This assignment definitely helped with obtaining knowledge about experimental neurosis!

Terms:experimental neurosis, Ian Pavlov, classical conditioning, salivate, discriminate, conditions of unresponsiveness, conditions of helplessness, learned helplessness, inhibitory neurons, CS, US, NS, SR, UR

JER

John Watson is a psychologist that I have always found interesting. Just about every psychology class I have taken has had some discussion about the Little Albert study. Watson is known for being the founder of Behaviorism. Behaviorism is a worldview that operates on a principle of “stimulus-response.” Behaviorism says that all behavior can be explained by and is shaped by the environment. Watson said something about behaviorism that has resonated in the psychology world for decades: “Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and, yes, even beggarman, and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.”
Watson received a doctorate in Psychology from the University of Chicago in 1903. In 1920, Watson and his assistant Rosalie Raynor conducted a study famously known as the Little Albert study. Albert was a 9-month-old infant. Albert was tested on his reactions to various stimuli. He was not afraid of a rat, rabbit, monkey etc., but he did become scared of a loud noise. Watson and Raynor found that classical conditioning could be used to create a phobia. They presented Albert with a white rat and then struck a steel bar with a hammer, causing Albert to be scared and associate that feeling with the white rat.
Watson had an affair with his assistant and divorced his wife. He was asked to leave academia and he went to work in the world of advertising. His experience with behaviorism brought a lot to the advertising world and he was able to bridge the gap between the two fields.

Terms:
John Watson, behaviorism, stimulus, classical conditioning

Websites:
http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesofmajorthinkers/p/watson.htm
http://www.simplypsychology.org/classical-conditioning.html
http://www.learning-theories.com/behaviorism.html

APLK
For this weeks blog assignment I chose to research a term that we just covered this week. I chose to do systematic desensitization because I believe that anxiety and phobias are very common things that millions of people in society suffer from so it's a relevant therapy for many people. I'm interested in furthering my knowledge about systematic desensitization because I suffer from clinical anxiety and I'm interested in seeing how the therapy is used and if it would actually work if I were to try to do a self administered experiment.

Systematic desensitization aims to remove the fear response a person emits of a particular phobia or anxiety situation and substitutes a relaxation response to the conditioning stimulus using counter conditioning. It is a type of behavioral therapy based on the principle of classical conditioning and was developed by Wolpe during the 1950's. It was originally developed to be administered by a psychotherapist, but it has been shown to be effective self administered as well. The number of sessions required for the therapy to be considered successful depends on the severity of the phobia. It usually takes between 4-6 sessions but sever sessions may require up to 12 sessions. Systematic desensitization is highly effective where the problem is learned anxiety of specific situations or objects. Systematic desensitization sessions should never exceed 30 minutes.

This is done by forming a hierarchy of fear that involves the conditioned stimulus to be listed from least unpleasant to most unpleasant. A patient in systematic desensitization works their way up the least unpleasant and practicing their relaxation techniques as they go. When the patient is no longer afraid, they move onto the next stage of hierarchy. During systematic desensitization, the events that cause the anxiety or phobia are recalled through imagination and then a relaxation technique is used to dissipate the anxiety. Relaxation techniques include in vitro, where the client imagines exposure to the phobic stimulus, and in vivo, where the patient is exposed to the phobic stimulus. Repetition of this process is done until the imagined event or phobia loses its anxiety-provoking power.

For example, some people have phobias of spiders. This person sees a still, small spider 10 feet away as a moderate threat but sees a huge, running spider 2 feet away as highly threatening. The patient would be asked to reach a state of deep relaxation and then be asked to imagine the least threatening situation with a spider. They repeatedly imagine this situation until they no longer feel anxiety about it at all. Then they repeat this process until the most threatening situation no longer gives them anxiety. This technique would be in vitro. Another example would be a person with a flying phobia. They could start small with looking at a toy plane, then hearing and watching a plane in the sky, then going to an airport, until they have finally reached the point of flying on an actual plane. This step by step exposure in this systematic desensitization would be in vivo.

Although systematic desensitization is highly effective, some researchers find few flaws in it. An issue with this method is that it relied on the clients ability to be able to imagine the fearful situation. Some people cannot create a vivid image. Systematic desensitization is also a slow process and is not effective in treating serious mental disorders such as depression or schizophrenia. It only treats the symptoms of the disorder, not the underlying cause.

Conditioning stimulus, systematic desensitization, hierarchy of fear, in vitro, in vivo, emits, counter conditioning, classical conditioning,

http://www.simplypsychology.org/Systematic-Desensitisation.html
http://www.guidetopsychology.com/sysden.htm
http://education-portal.com/academy/lesson/systematic-desensitization-definition-treatment-examples.html#lesson

We’re in behavior modification and are learning how to influence people’s behaviors. We also learned how to influence dog’s behavior too. I am going to talk about reinforcement but going to use dog training as an example. Dog training is important but sometimes difficult if you don’t do it right.
The basics of teaching a dog is usually sit, shake, coming when called by name and lay down. By reinforcing their behavior they are more likely to do it because you’re using positive reinforcement and when they don’t do the behavior they don’t get reinforced or anything. Also, if they do something wrong they get punished so they know not to do it anymore.
People have various ways of teaching their dogs things. They can do it themselves or hire someone to do it. However, with a dog people usually use treats as the beginning reinforcers than they use praise like petting them and saying good dog along with the treats and usually work their way into just using praise.
The first thing you need to do is introduce your dog or puppy to training and learn the best practices to train them. This is includes reinforcing them and what you’re going to use as the reinforcer. Also, you want to start on house training as soon as possible. Taking them outside often and petting them or saying good job to them will increase their likelihood to want to go outside when its time to go potty. The next thing is leash training. The best thing is to take your dog or puppy for a walk and learn how they walk now. If it is not to your expectations either shorten the leash and make sure they stay by you and reward them after the walk to increase the likelihood they will continue by your side without the shorted leash.
An important thing to know to train your dog is communication. Communication is Important in any relationship/friendship a person has and that includes with animals. If your dog and you communicate well then they will listen and want to learn new things from you.
No matter what you have to use reinforcement in training your dog just like in anything. With reinforcement you increase the likelihood of something to happen again and its the desired behavior you want. Also, reinforcement helps because your dog or any subject you use (sister, dad, cat, etc.) will get something they want from doing that or changing their behavior, which is what increases the likelihood of it happening more.

Terms Used: behavior modification, behaviors, reinforcing, positive reinforcement, punished, reinforcers, praise,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GS_VcLRmCoI
https://www.aspca.org/pet-care/virtual-pet-behaviorist/dog-behavior/training-your-dog
http://www.nylabone.com/dog-101/training-behaviors/

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).
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. 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.
By integrating/synthesizing I mean to take what your read/experienced from the internet search (and from chapter 1 if you like) organize the information into the main themes, issues, info, examples, etc. about your topic and then write about the topic in your own words using that information. This is hard for some people to do - many students write what we refer to as "serial abstracts." They are tempted to talk about the websites rather than the topic proper. They will talk all about website #1, start a new paragraph and talk all about web site #2, start a new paragraph and talk all about web site #3, and then write some kind of conclusion. Serial means one after the other...This what you DON'T want to do!
At first it is a real challenge to get out of the habit of writing "serial abstracts," but I assure you once you get the hang of it it is much easier to write using the integration method. And besides this is the way researchers and scientists write their technical reports and findings - many of you will have to be able to do this for other classes and for jobs that you may eventually be hired for so now is a good time to learn this skill.
Once you are done with your post make list of the terms and terminology you used in your post.
Let us know if you have any questions.

For this assignment I decided to look further into the idea of systematic desensitization and its effects on our society. Systematic desensitization is a category of behavior therapy based on the idea of classical conditioning. Developed by Wolpe in the 1950s, it aims to remove the fearful response to a phobia and substitute the feeling of relaxation to the conditional stimulus. For example if someone has a fear of bugs, associating bugs with something pleasurable. This will decrease or even eliminate the phobia that person has towards bugs. In the reading you mentioned the example of Little Albert and furry things. With this example the desensitization would have occurred at the end of the study to aid Albert in getting over his fear of furry things. Unfortunately, for Little Albert the desensitization never occurred.

Systematic desensitization can have both positive and aversive affects on our society. In the example mentioned above and in our reading, the use of system desensitization would have had a positive outcome in the life of Little Albert because he would longer have the fear of furry things. Also in terms of its use as a behavior therapy it changes the life of a patient drastically. When a patient comes to a clinician for systematic desensitization their target behavior is rid themselves of their phobia. To achieve this goal, the clinician works with the patient to remove their fear response to their phobia and replace it with a relaxation response. If systematic desensitization is successful, it can help the patient to reach their target behavior of no longer having a phobia.

Systematic desensitization can be positive, but it can also have negative effects. In today’s society, systematic desensitization can be seen in the world of video games. When people of all ages play violent video games, some will become desensitized to real-life violence. This desensitization can lead an increase in aggressive thoughts, behaviors, and attitudes as well as angry feelings, and physiological arousal, and a decrease in helpful behaviors.

Terms: systematic desensitization, Little Albert, conditional stimulus, behavioral therapy, classical conditioning, aversive, target behavior

http://public.psych.iastate.edu/caa/abstracts/2005-2009/07CAB.pdf
http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2008/04/24/violent-video-games-and-desens/
http://www.simplypsychology.org/Systematic-Desensitisation.html

The topic that I wanted to research was taste aversion. This is really interesting to me because it can have such a powerful hold on people. I assume it has evolutionary function based on the need to avoid toxic or poisonous berries or other food and nonfoods but it is incredible how quickly and for how long the taste aversion can affect an individual’s life. I also can’t stand broccoli and cheese soup for this reason. The end of the last reading section is focused on whether the number of pairing between the US and the CS is important or whether effective conditioning has more to do with using a good predictor to elicit an intended response. With the idea of pairing and temporal conditioning can the concept of taste aversion and how some responses can be conditioned within a single trial, and be very effective. Taste aversion in and of itself develops often when a food or smell is paired with the extremely aversive state of nausea or vomiting.

Taste aversion, also known as the Garcia-effect from the psychologist who was the first to coin it has been around for centuries as a means of survival but only studied in-depth for about the last 30 years. The interesting aspect is that, unlike the current self-monitoring behavior we are doing with water drinking and reinforcement, taste aversion is relatively unconscious which is especially cool. Without thinking about it, and only sometimes keying it into memory, the brain reminds an individual that the certain substance that made them sick before is harmful.

Taste aversion can happen with any type of food familiar or not. However, Jim C. Smith an important psychologist in the study of this aversion explains that, “If you get sick after eating something you never tried before, ….then nothing will persuade you that it wasn’t what did you in.” Getting sick from familiar, loved foods is more difficult but is still a potential. That’s why cancer patients undergoing chemo and even individuals with other illnesses like colds should refrain from eating well liked foods because not matter your conscious strength to avoid the association, it will most likely still happen.

Taste aversion is however, also an important learning tool, especially with animals. The Denver Zoo actually undertook a mission in Botswana and used taste aversion on lions in that area. Lions that were kept in a protected area were managing to hop fences and attacking/eating cattle. Farmers were then shooting the lions to protect their cattle. The zoo added medication that makes the lions queasy to cow meat wrapped in cattle hide hoping to associate the smell of the cattle meat with the upset stomach, eliciting an aversive response to the meat turning the lions away from searching out that prey.

While an important tool for animal conditioning it can be rather dishearting as a human. Luckily there is a chance that by consciously emitting a reminding behavior for yourself that what you are eating won’t kill, you can interrupt the poison alert mechanism in your brain and you can progress to eating those foods again.

http://www.rinr.fsu.edu/issue2001/taste.html
http://eatocracy.cnn.com/2011/11/02/the-psychology-of-food-aversions/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6X4QJQg3cY

Terms and terminology: taste aversion, emitting, behavior, reinforcement, aversive, pairing, US, CS, conditioning, response, elicit, temporal conditioning.

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 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

Topical Blog #8
Cassidy Monaco

I researched the topic of systematic desensitization. I choose to do this because it’s something I’m actually very interested it seems very interesting to me and is a common practice to help people overcome phobias. This topic came from section 3.4 about John B. Watson. So many people have phobias, fears, and anxieties so the topic is very prevalent.
I once watched an episode of The Ellen Degeneres show where they found people in her crew or famous people who had strange phobias and made fun of them for the purpose of making people laugh. One girl had an extreme fear of pickles. I thought it was mean for the show producers to use people’s phobias as a laughing matter. However, at the end of the show, they showed clips of the use systematic desensitization to help these people overcome their fears.
Through researching this topic, I learned that the main focus of systematic desensitization is gradually being exposed to your fear. This will make a person gradually more and more used to it, and help their mind to understand that it is not as scary as they originally thought. There are two different ways to go about this; in vitro which is visually exposing your mind to your fear, or in vivo which is exposing yourself physically to your fear. A video I found talked a lot about how this is just like graded exposure, which means it won’t be cured overnight. The point of systematic desensitization isn’t about doing something once and being over it, but gradually being over your fear once and for all.
Systematic desensitization is the most proven and logical way to reduce and overcome fears and anxieties. I learned today that this is something that you can do by yourself. One does not necessarily need to see a doctor or counselor in order to do this. It is interesting to me that a person who has such a huge phobia of something can virtually cure it on their own. That shows just how miraculously the mind works (This is why I love psychology). After research, I also found that you can systematically desensitize yourself to change a specific target behavior. For example, if you have a fear of public speaking, you can ease yourself into it by doing a little step at a time. Behavior modification is a very interesting aspect of psychology. I am very surprised from this research to learn that a person can use systematic desensitization on their own to overcome a fear or cure a phobia. This is so interesting to me that I would love to look further into the techniques of systematic desensitization and use it on my friend Taylor who has a huge fear of spiders. She is so afraid that she cries until she throws up when she sees a spider, which interferes with her life. I would love to be able to help her overcome this by using systematic desensitization and behavior modification techniques.

http://www.simplypsychology.org/Systematic-Desensitisation.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcojyGx8q9U
http://www.csulb.edu/~tstevens/Desensit.htm

TERMS: systematic desensitization, phobias, in vitro, in vivo, target behavior, behavior modification

The topic I chose for this week is operant conditioning. When we hear operant conditioning, the first person we tend to think of is B. F. Skinner. Although we haven't gotten to the reading on Skinner yet (3.5), we have briefly discussed operant conditioning in previous readings.

Operant conditioning is defined as a method of learning that occurs through rewards and punishment for behaviors. An example of this is positive or negative punishment of any kind, as well as positive or negative reinforcement. Since reinforcement has a desirable outcome, this would be the "reward" aspect of operant conditioning. As punishment is the opposite of reinforcement, punishment is aversive or negative. These two aspects of learning are essential for operant conditioning.

B.F. Skinner and John Watson were both faces of operant conditioning, only Skinner's approach was a bit more toned down. He believed that the best way to look understand a behavior was to look at the consequences of the action. He actually took after Thorndike on his approach at experimentation when he used the Law of Effect. His experiment of the rat in the box is the most known experiment by Skinner, and it includes the neutral operants (environmental factors that can neither cause an increase or decrease in the frequency of the behavior), punishers and reinforcers.

Operant conditioning can also be referred to as instrumental conditioning. There are two different kinds of behaviors in operant conditioning- respondent behaviors and operant behaviors. Respondent behaviors are those that occur automatically, and operant behaviors are those that are done on purpose. For example, when it comes to the human body, our respondent behavior is something like our beating heart, and an operant behavior is moving out hand when we wave at somebody.

Overall, operant conditioning has had its hand at solidifying theories around behavior. Skinner, Thorndike and Watson all had their input although Skinner is the most well-known when referring to operant conditioning. Operant conditioning is a method of learning through rewards and punishments, and it is a big part of learning behaviors in psychology.

TERMS: operant conditioning, Skinner, behavior, positive/negative reinforcements, positive/negative punishments, Thorndike, Watson, law of effect, respondent behavior, operant behavior, instrumental conditioning

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning

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

http://psychology.about.com/od/behavioralpsychology/a/introopcond.htm

The topic that I chose to research on is positive and negative reinforcement because we talked about it in class many times. Also, because reinforcement is used in our everyday lives whether knowingly or unknowingly. Reinforcement is always a better choice compared to punishment because punishment does not necessarily reduce a target behavior, according to B.F Skinner and I highly agree with him.

The term reinforce itself means to strengthen. Reinforcement increases the probability of a specific response. For instance, if you want your dog to sit on command, you may give him a treat every time he sits for you. The dog will eventually come to understand that sitting when told to will result in a treat. This treat is reinforcing because he likes it and will result in him sitting when instructed to do so. We all apply reinforcers every day, most of the time without even realizing we are doing it. We may tell our roommate good job when he or she takes the trash out or we may tell our partner how good he or she looks when they dress up. These are examples of positive reinforcements.

On the other hand, negative reinforcement is when a certain stimulus is removed after a target behavior is emitted. The likelihood of the particular behavior occurring again in the future is increased because of removing the negative stimuli. Often times, negative reinforcement is confused with punishment. With negative reinforcement, you are increasing a behavior, whereas with punishment, you are decreasing a behavior. For instance, your behavior of pressing the switch is negatively reinforced by the removal of the light. When something is taken away (the light) as a result of your behavior (pressing the light switch) will lead you to engage in that behavior again (pressing the light switch every time you go to bed) then negative reinforcement has occurred. Another example would be on Monday morning, you leave the house early (target behavior) in order to avoid getting stuck in traffic and being late for class (removal of an aversive stimulus).

In conclusion, when thinking about reinforcement, we must always remember that the end result is to try to increase the behavior, whereas punishment procedures are used to decrease behavior.

http://psychology.about.com/od/operantconditioning/f/negative-reinforcement.htm
http://nspt4kids.com/parenting/the-difference-between-positive-and-negative-reinforcement/
http://www.educateautism.com/behavioural-principles/negative-reinforcement.html

Terms: Reinforcement, positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, target behavior, punishment, reinforce, reinforcer, stimulus.

Section 3.4 focused on Watson’s behaviorist approach to psychology, topics covered include Watson’s behaviorist manifesto, introspection and his most famous experiment “Little Albert”. The area that I felt would be most interesting to research and integrate into our behavior modification class would be the topic of systematic desensitization. The chapter defines systematic desensitization as a behavioral method used today in helping people overcome phobias, or excessive fear and panic attracts associated with a stimulus.
Phobias are an interesting subject on their own, many phobias are irrational and even when an individual is educated on the subject and is aware of the safety they phobia remains. Systematic desensitization occurs when an individual is teaches relaxation techniques such as biofeedback and meditation in an attempt to reduce the physiological reactions of fear and anxiety. Following the relaxation techniques visualization techniques are used to are used, an example of a visual technique would be asking an individual to imagine interacting with the stimulus. After a successful visualization phase individuals will be asked to slowly and systematically move closer to actually interacting or participating in the stimulus associated with the phobia. (1)
One of the sources I found detailed research which compared the effectiveness of exposure to real situations as opposed to imagined situation. The results of the study in involved 24 controlled cases of agoraphobia. The results noted significant improvements in 60-70% of the patients exposed to real stimuli, patients who were exposed to indirect stimuli showed less overall improvement. The research suggest that the relaxation and visualization techniques will only get individuals so far when overcoming phobias. (2)
Systematic desensitization focuses on overcoming phobias using a three stage approach; relaxation techniques, visualization, and exposure. There are many ways that systematic desensitization can be self-administered or by another person. (3) To me the process of desensitization is the most interesting concept from the recent chapters in the readings.

Terms: Watson, behaviorist, introspection, systematic desensitization, behavioral method, phobias, relaxation, visualization, exposure, agoraphobia, indirect stimuli.

1 http://eds.a.ebscohost.com/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=6377b120-f558-497c-9f4a-581d1a9f48f6%40sessionmgr4005&vid=1&hid=4203

2 http://thenadd.org/modal/bulletins/v9n3a2~.htm
3 http://web.csulb.edu/~tstevens/Desensit.htm

The topic that I chose to write about is Systematic Desensitization. This is a type of theory that is based on classical conditioning and this type of therapy is used to help people that are suffering from anxiety. The anxiety that they suffer from is coming from a phobia that they have that causes them to have extreme fear about a certain thing. To treat this anxiety, systematic desensitization is used by psychologists by slowly introducing the thing they are afraid of in a safe place. They teach the person to feel relaxed instead of stressed when they are confronted with their fear.
Systematic Desensitization was first developed in the 1950’s by a South African psychiatrist named Joseph Wolpe. Systematic desensitization fits into the section 3.4. This section is about John B Watson and his experiment on conditioning Little Albert into fearing white animals starting out with a white bunny. One of the other psychologist in the section is Mary Cover Jones how used systematic desensitization in her case study with a boy named Peter. Peter was a little boy that was afraid of animals. Mary found that people were not scared when they were eating so she would slowly start to present Peter with animals when he was eating. When she paired the animal with the food Peter was able to become more relaxed and get over his fears.
What this therapy does is makes a hierarchy of fear and the person starts from the least scary to the scariest. At each stage the person practices relax techniques so that when they overcome their fear eventually. I was interest in this topic because I found it to be unique and I also have some high level fears that I would like to overcome. I liked learning about classical conditioning and what Watson did with Little Albert. I have learned a lot about what classical conditioning means and how it deals with the unconditioned response, conditioned response, unconditioned stimulus, and conditioned stimulus. I wondered what happened to Albert after the experiment. Watson never helped Albert get over his problem, but that is what Mary was doing in her experiment with Peter.

http://www1.appstate.edu/~beckhp/genthesystematicdesensitization.htm
http://www.minddisorders.com/Py-Z/Systematic-desensitization.html
http://www.simplypsychology.org/Systematic-Desensitisation.html

Terms
systematic desensitization, classical conditioning, unconditioned response, conditioned response, unconditioned stimulus, and conditioned stimulus.

For my integrate and synthesize assignment I choice to write about reinforcement. The idea of reinforcement has been talked about in most of the sections we have read, but in detail it was talked about in section 2.2 of our text. I am interested in this concept because most of the information so far states that positive and negative reinforcement is a better option then punishment, when it comes to behavioral modification. This idea was especially talked about Skinner’s novel that depicts a Utopian society in which only reinforcement principles are used to control behavior. This is significant to me because being a future guidance counselor; I want to know the best ways to help my students with various behavioral problems.
In this essay I wanted to explore what were the best ways to reinforce someone. We have talked already in class about how reinforcement is better then punishment, but why? In an article I read it says punishment in many cases leads to a confusion of what the proper behavior is, just avoiding the punisher, and aggression. So this relates back to our class discussion of waiting for someone to emit a target behavior you want to reinforce, unless there is an immediate demand for the behavior to be stopped.
The reinforcer you use is where it gets kind of difficult. There are several types of reinforcements including intrinsic, extrinsic, generalized, limited, broad, primary, and secondary. For a teaching standpoint, I am going to focus on intrinsic and extrinsic. A webpage I went to shows how extrinsic rewards like money, toys, stickers, parties, and candy can lead to things like satiation, doing tasks strictly for a reward, takes away pleasure of the task, and makes the child less intrinsically interested. This leads me to the question what can I do to make things more intrinsically motivating to students, because this motivation is more likely to continue a behavior.
To do this, I feel it is necessary to initially use extrinsic motivation because not all students are intrinsically motivated by getting good grades, behaving right in class, and other various aspects of a good student. Once these students are extrinsically motivated to achieve a target behavior, they might see the benefits of this behavior and create their own intrinsic goals. As a good guidance counselor, I cannot rely on this to be my only reinforcer. The last website I visited explored how I can intrinsically motivate as well. Some of these things are encourage students to work with a purpose, praise effort, set students up for success, create interest about a topic, and setting goals. These ideas help connect how being a good student is individually valuable and applicable to their lives, rather than to others.
http://education.purduecal.edu/Vockell/EdPsyBook/Edpsy11/edpsy11sideeffects.htm
http://www.edutopia.org/blog/reward-fraud-richard-curwin
https://www.learnboost.com/blog/10-super-quick-and-easy-ways-to-intrinsically-motivate-your-students/
Once you are done with your post make list of the terms and terminology you used in your post. -Positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, punishment, reinforce, emit, target behavior, intrinsic reinforcement, extrinsic reinforcement, generalized reinforcement, limited reinforcement, broad reinforcement, primary reinforcement, secondary reinforcement, satiation.

For my post I chose to do more research on systematic desensitization. Systematic desensitization is a type of exposure therapy used to help people overcome anxiety, phobias, and other things of that nature. This relates to what we have been learning because it was in our reading, and it includes other concepts which we have learned about such as extinction, classical conditioning, and reinforcement. I wanted to look in to systematic desensitization because I want to be a clinical psychologist- things relating directly to treatments interest me, as do diagnosis. Specifically, I decided to do research on systematic desensitization as a treatment for PTSD. PTSD is an extreme form of anxiety disorder caused by experiencing an extremely traumatic event like war, brutality, death, or massive destruction.

Studies show that PTSD patients treated with exposure therapy- of which systematic desensitization is one of the oldest- both showed great improvement and a preference for exposure therapy afterward. It is very effective in the treatment of PTSD. However, exposure therapy is only used in roughly 20% of cases of anxiety disorder. My research cited a lack of professionals comfortable with exposure therapy, and lack of professionals with specialized training in exposure therapy as causing this. However, research also shows that the exposure to the feared stimuli is the active ingredient in reducing fear, not the relaxation component. In fact, the relaxation component can actually be counterproductive in cases with patients who have certain disorders like panic disorder. So while systematic desensitization works, it may not be the best exposure therapy.

I wanted to know why systematic desensitization worked as a PTSD/anxiety treatment. It turns out that there are four major theories about the mechanisms of exposure therapy. They are habituation, extinction, emotional processing, and self-efficacy.

Habituation is the natural reduction in fear response to a repeatedly encountered stimuli. Extinction- as we have learned- is from classical conditioning. Extinction says that the unconditioned stimulus is a situation, place, person, etc that initially caused fear (UCR) like a dog bite (USC). Due to stimulus generalization, fear reactions become learned (CR) and are elicited by other stimuli such as dogs that are not dangerous (CS). Due to the aversiveness of the conditioned response, fearful individuals avoid the conditioned stimulus which reinforces the avoidance behavior and the belief that getting away from the fear is only possible via avoidance. Exposure therapy is thought to weaken the conditioned response through repeated exposure to the conditioned stimulus without the unconditioned stimulus. One limitation of extinction theory which I found in my research is that most patients with a phobia do not/can not identify an initial conditioning event. With no unconditioned stimulus to speak of, the classical conditioning puzzle is incomplete.

The third theory, emotional processing, suggests that fear is stored in our memory as a network consisting of a stimuli (the feared stimulus), response (the response to the feared stimuli), and meaning (rationalization/perceived reason for response). It is thought that those with anxiety disorders assign faulty meanings to stimuli in a way that increases fear toward those stimuli. Exposure is thought to result in a new way of processing information and to correct the faulty fear structures. And lastly, the final theory I found is self-efficacy. Self-efficacy theory says that those with anxiety disorders underestimate their ability to cope with fear. It works on building skills to deal with fear and mastery over the stimuli. The person begins to see themselves as better able to deal with fear over repeated exposures to a feared stimuli, and so become more willing to face their fears in different contexts- this generalizes the treatment effects.

These theories are not mutually exclusive- they can actually all be useful depending on the situation or patient. In treating PTSD, exposure to feared stimuli in an order in accordance with a constructed exposure hierarchy would reduce the feelings of fear (habituation), teach the patient a new set of associations (extinction), get them to feel more able to come with the fear (self-efficacy), and generate new interpretations of the meanings of those previously feared stimuli (emotional processing). In cases of PTSD in vivo confrontation with fear-inducing stimuli is not generally possible (experiencing war, gunfire, explosions, and such in real life could prove problematic), and so imaginative (in vitro) confrontation is used. This involves having the patient vividly imagine and describe the stimuli in present tense. You could pair this therapy with cognitive restructuring therapy to challenge some of the patients unrealistic/maladaptive beliefs as well. The goal would be to reduce/eliminate the patients emission of a fear response to the stimuli in question. The construction of an exposure hierarchy is generally done by rating the stimuli in question on a scale of 0 to 100 called the Subjective Units of Discomfort (SUD) scale.

One of the articles I read was about dogs that got PTSD after experiencing tornadoes in Oklahoma. Using the information from out class and from my research here, I want to outline what I think would be effective treatment for those dogs.

First, you would have to somehow construct an exposure hierarchy for the dog. This could perhaps be done by testing responses to stimuli which we could think up that involves bad weather/tornadoes. You would then repeatedly expose them to those stimuli in order of least to most feared, only moving on once the dogs fear level of the current item had gone down significantly. I believe that the extinction theory would be the best to use here- dogs don't have the level of intelligence to make too much use of self-efficacy or emotional processing, but we know that conditioning works on them. To help them generate new associations to the conditioned stimuli (the feared stimuli) you would want to pair the toleration of the stimuli with food/a treat or another reinforcement for tolerating the feared stimuli. This will both weaken the association of the conditioned stimulus with the unconditioned stimulus and create a new association of the conditioned stimulus to the food/treat/reinforcer. To a lesser extent habituation would also work here, as repeated exposure should naturally reduce fear. You would continue this treatment until the dogs level of fear to all stimuli in the hierarchy were at acceptable levels.

I believe my research on systematic desensitization as it is used as an exposure therapy was very informative and interesting. I'm glad that I chose it and it was very useful to learn that extinction isn't the only theory for the extinction of fear/fear responses. It also interested me that systematic desensitization may not be the best exposure therapy due to the inclusion of progressive muscle relaxation due to the issues it can cause with some patients. I believe the knowledge I gained researching for this post vastly increased my knowledge about this subject.

TERMS: systematic desensitization, phobia, extinction, classical conditioning, reinforcement, stimuli, response, unconditioned stimulus, unconditioned response, unconditioned stimulus, aversive, conditioned response, conditioned stimulus, behavior, elicited, emit (emission), exposure hierarchy, in vivo, in vitro/imaginative, association

LINKS: http://www.apa.org/divisions/div12/rev_est/cbt_ptsd.html
http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/anxiety/exposure-therapy-anxiety-disorders
https://caninegoodcitizen.wordpress.com/2013/06/03/dogs-and-post-traumatic-stress-disorder-ptsd/

One thing I was interested in while reading through the ABC’s of Behavior was classical conditioning, more specifically, the temporal scheduling. I wanted to learn more about the different effects that changing the timing of the unconditioned stimuli (US) has on learning. The reason I chose this topic was because, while reading the ABC’s of behavior, I got a laugh out of imagining how backward conditioning would work. I couldn’t imagine any organism learning much from having the CS presented after the unconditioned response (UR).
There are many types of conditioning, each with their own effect on the learning of an organism. We’re all familiar with forward conditioning by this point (It’s when a neutral stimuli (NS) is presented before an US to elicit an UR. When paired enough times the neutral stimuli will elicit the UR). A distinction can be made here between delayed presentation of the US and presenting the US immediately after the NS. Simultaneous conditioning works just how it sounds. The NS is presented at the same time as the US to elicit an UR.
Why is this important/relevant to this class? Associations are stronger and develop more quickly when the NS is presented closer to the US. If you’re trying to teach a behavior, or elicit one with a NS, it’s best to use simultaneous conditioning or immediately present the US after the NS to develop the association.
Another method of conditioning is second order conditioning. This method uses a pre-existing association, let’s say between a bell and food. Another NS is presented with the bell, let’s say a light goes on. After a while an association between the US and the secondary NS will have formed and the primary NS (the first NS, the bell) will not be necessary for the organism to emit the UR. This is useful if you want to build off of an already existing relationship or shift the association to a new NS.
Temporal conditioning is another method. This is when a US is presented at equal intervals of time. It’s something we can see in our own lives, too. Last semester I had a break from class at 1pm every day. This semester I have class at 1pm and find that even if eat before then I still get hungry right around 1pm. The same thing can be seen in most people’s sleep schedule.
Now we come to backward conditioning, and frankly, it’s not going to teach much. Backward conditioning is when the US is presented and then a NS is presented. The only effect found with this method is that it inhibits further response from the organism. This is because the organism learns the NS signals the end of the US being presented.
This leads me to the final method of extinction conditioning (aka de-conditioning). In this, we can take a pre-existing relationship and de-associate the NS and US so that no UR is emitted when the NS is presented. By presenting the NS without the US enough times the relationship becomes weakened over a period of time. However, this will lead to extinction burst and unpleasant feelings experienced by the organism. Also, spontaneous recovery can occur causing the organism to re-associate the two stimuli even when no relationship is substantiated.
With this information we can increase the number of tools we have in our toolbox of behavior modification techniques. We can create associations, change associations, elicit certain behaviors, and even destroy associations. These are tools that we can apply when dealing with many situations throughout our lives.

Terms: Unconditioned stimulus, unconditioned response, emit, elicit, neutral stimuli, behavior, temporal scheduling, forward conditioning, backward conditioning, second order conditioning, extinction burst, spontaneous recovery

Sources: 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ge9Vhvh-Ap0
2. http://web.stanford.edu/class/psych227/RESCORLA%20(1988).pdf
3. http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/faculty/GnG/Gal&Gib_Preprint.pdf

For this blog I chose to write about Classical Conditioning. This is because we have spoken about it in Behavior Modification as well as many other classes and it is something you learn so much as a psychology major. Classical conditioning is reflex or automatic type of learning in which a stimulus acquires the capacity to evoke a response that was originally evoked by another stimulus. Classical Condition was first described by Ian Pavlov. Since Pavlov was so fascinated by his findings of how dogs salivated before even fed in his example about dogs and meat powder he then went on to combine meat powder and ringing a bell stimuli. The reflex of a dog salivating is not learned but is “hard wired” into the dog. Just as humans as we see something we want when we are hunger are mouth will just start to water, this is the same thing with the dogs. He started to measure the presentation of a bowl and food and the salivary secretions of the do and then started to associate the bell as a neutral stimulus with the food. When the meat powder and the bell were combined together multiple times, continuous reinforcement started to apply. But before Pavlov would enter the room and the dogs would start to salivate even though he wasn’t giving them food because the dogs did not learn quite yet. The bell then started to become a neutral stimulus to even though it was not the thing that produced the salivation. The bell just helped the dog elicit the behavior of salivation. Technically the meat powder was the unconditional stimulus and the dog’s salivation was the unconditioned response and after the dog became to associate the bell with food, the bell was now a conditioned stimulus and the dogs salivating was conditioned response because the response was learned. I was glad I chose this topic because after researching it more it really made me understand in detail to what went on in the studies and what actually happened. These websites also helped me understand the terms a lot better.

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

Terms: behavior modification, stimulus, classical conditioning, Pavlov, continuous reinforcement, measure, neutral stimulus, elicit, unconditioned stimulus, unconditioned response, conditioned stimulus, conditioned response.

For this blog, I chose to research more about John B. Watson and behaviorism. We have discussed Watson and his experiments and theories in class/in the class textbook. The reason I chose to research more about him is that behavioral psychology has always been a really interesting topic to me because I work with children and I think all of it is extremely relatable to working with them. I think Watson’s contributions to it are pretty cool as well. He is often called the father of behaviorism in psychology.
Watson had a hard time growing up; he had a strict mother and his alcoholic father abandoned them, which made Watson become sort of a problem child. He grew out of it and went to college, where he ultimately got his doctorate degree in psychology from the University of Chicago in 1903. He taught at John Hopkins University later on. Watson rejected Freud’s theory of the unconscious mind being the reason for how we behave, because he believed that it wasn’t scientific and couldn’t be observed. He developed behaviorism because of this, which he said was the science of actually observing behaviors. Watson strongly believed that it is the environment that shapes our behaviors, rather than genetic makeup and temperaments.
Watson is well known for applying his behavioral theory to child development. Watson’s most famous experiment, the Little Albert experiment, was also his most controversial (because of ethical issues since Albert was never deconditioned). In the study, he classically conditioned a toddler named Albert to develop a fear/phobia of a white rat. He did this by pairing sightings of the rat with loud noises. The loud noises made Albert emit the behavior of crying so he began to cry simply by just seeing the rat because he had associated the white, furry rat with loud, scary noises. He also generalized his fear to other white and furry objects; they resembled the rat and elicited a crying response as well.
Watson had many achievements and contributions in his work in psychology. He served as the president of the APA, published three different works, and received the APA’s award for contributions to psychology. His concepts are still used widely today in the field of psychology; conditioning and behavior modification are used frequently in therapy to help clients change behaviors that are of problem to them and to develop new skills.
Overall, researching and reading more about John Watson was fun and worth the time. He is a big figure in psychology and in behaviorism, and while he may have been a bit unethical in some studies, his experiments, theories, and ideas are very important in the field today and I find that to be really cool.

Terms: John B. Watson, behaviorism, Little Albert experiment, conditioning, classically conditioned, generalized, phobia, emit, elicited, behavior modification, shape

Resources:

https://principlesoflearning.wordpress.com/dissertation/chapter-3-literature-review-2/the-behavioral-perspective/behaviorism-john-b-watson-1913/

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

http://education-portal.com/academy/lesson/john-watson-and-behaviorism-theory-lesson-quiz.html

In the area of classical conditioning, the school of functionalism was briefly discussed. This sparked my interest, so I chose to learn more about the school of functionalism.
I learned that functionalism started in America, in large part thanks to people like William James and Charles Darwin. Darwin's theory of evolution had heavy influences on functionalism, as it took basic theory and turned it into a theory from a psychological point of view.

Essentially, functionalism was formed as a reaction from those who opposed Structuralism, a school mainly brought about from Willhelm Wundt. Those opposed to Wundt developed the school of functionalism, which was designed to explain psychological processes in a more organized fashion. Furthermore, functionalists were much more interested in the purpose of behavior and consciousness, rather than focusing on elements of them which is what structuralism focused heavily on.

An important difference between structuralism and functionalism is that functionalists focused much more on empirical evidence and rational thought rather than the trial and error ways of structuralists. This means that functionalists were much more involved with finding practical uses for psychology, and they were more interested with bringing psychology out from a strictly laboratory-based practice that structuralists usually showed.

Lastly, structuralism was eventually found to be far too subjective, largely because of it's use of introspection. Introspection involved a person being in their own experiment and self-reporting how they did. Herein lays the problem. There is a large amount of potential subjectivity. Furthermore, there could be a potential for numerous confounding variables in a research study like this. This gave rise to structuralism for a short while, until further practices such as behaviorism and psychoanalysis.

Terms: structuralism, functionalism, classical conditioning,

Sources:

http://psychology.about.com/od/historyofpsychology/a/structuralism.htm

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/222123/functionalism

http://psychology.jrank.org/pages/265/Functionalism.html

For topical blog #8, I decided to do more research on Edward Thorndike. Before this behavior modification class, I had never heard of Thorndike or his contributions to psychology. Edward Thorndike was born in 1874 in Williamsburg, Massachusetts. He received his PhD from Columbia University. Thorndike is often considered the Father of Modern educational psychology. Edward Thorndike is best known for his animal research, trial and error theory of learning, and his Law of Effect.

However, Thorndike was mostly interested in animal intelligence. In order to study animal intelligence, Thorndike created puzzle boxes. Thorndike would place a cat inside the puzzle box and would be encouraged to escape it and grab a scrap of fish outside of the box. He believed that once the cat learned how to manipulate the door release mechanism that the cat would be faster at emitting the behavior in order to complete the task. The cat would learn how to manipulate the door release mechanism through the process of trial and error. The cat would emit a variety of behaviors as it flailed around the puzzle box and every now and the behavior would lead to a positive consequence such as the door opening. After awhile the cat would associate its last behavior with the door opening and met that behavior. Through his research on the puzzle box, Thorndike developed the Law of Effect.

The Law of Effect theory regarded the effects on punishment on learning. The Law of Effect states that behaviors that are followed by positive outcomes will be stamped in. With that being said, the behaviors that are followed by an aversive outcome will be stamped out. Originally, Edward believed that reward and punishment were equally effective. However, he eventually determined that reward was more effective than punishment. Thorndike also developed other laws of learning. He developed the Law of Recency, and the Law of Exercise. The Law of Recency requires that reoccurrence is determined by the most recent response. The other law of learning Thorndike developed, the Law of Exercise, states that when a stimulus is administered upon response, each subsequent response is strengthened.

Not only did Thorndike study animal intelligence, he also created military tests during World War I. His tests were used to measure the intelligence of soldiers. These tests were adapted and used amongst schools, impacting the development of standardized testing. As you can see Edward Thorndike was an important figure in psychology.

Terms- Edward Thorndike, behavior modification, Thorndike puzzle boxes, manipulate, trial & error, emit, positive consequence, behavior, Law of Effect, punishment, aversive outcome, reward, Law of Recency, Law of Exercise, response, stimulus

A lot of us have had some experience where we get sick and can’t eat the food we ate right before we were sick. We have a bad association with the food, which is known as taste aversion.
Conditioned taste aversion occurs when an animal associates the taste of a certain food with symptoms caused by a toxic, spoiled, or poisonous substance. Generally, taste aversion is developed after ingestion of food that causes nausea, sickness, or vomiting. The ability to develop a taste aversion is considered an adaptive trait or survival mechanism that trains the body to avoid poisonous substances before they can cause harm. The association reduces the probability of consuming the same substance, or something that tastes similar, in the future, thus avoiding further poisoning. It is an example of classical conditioning or Pavlovian conditioning.
In many cases, people may be completely unaware of the underlying reasons for their dislike of a type of food. Why do these taste aversions occur, especially when we consciously realize that the illness was not tied to a particular food? As you may have already realized, conditioned taste aversions are a great example of some of the fundamental mechanics of classical conditioning. The previously neutral stimulus, the food, is paired with an unconditioned stimulus, an illness, which leads to an unconditioned response, feeling sick. After this one-time pairing, the previously neutral stimulus, the food, is now a conditioned stimulus that elicits a conditioned response, avoiding the food.
Psychologists John Garcia and Robert Koelling studied taste aversion in 1966 while researching the effects of radiation on laboratory rats. Garcia and Koelling noticed the laboratory rats started to avoid drinking the water from plastic bottles in the radiation chambers. Realizing the rats might be associating the plastic-tasting water with the sickness experienced from radiation, the researchers designed an experiment to test their hypothesis.
Garcia and Koelling gave three groups of rats high, medium, or low doses of radiation after the rats drank sweetened water. The higher the dose of radiation, the sicker the rats became. As you might predict, the rats that received the highest doses of radiation strongly associated the sweetened water with the illness following the radiation. The majority of those rats later refused to drink sweetened water.
Overall, I think it is interesting because its something that we have probably experienced on some level and it works into our every day lives.
Terms: Conditioned taste aversion, taste aversion, classical conditioning, Pavlovian conditioning, neutral stimulus, unconditioned stimulus, unconditioned response, conditioned stimulus, conditioned response.

http://psychology.about.com/od/classicalconditioning/f/taste-aversion.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taste_aversion
http://study.com/academy/lesson/taste-aversion-definition-conditioning-learning.html

For my week #8 topical blog, I chose to cover classical conditioning, also known as Pavlovian conditioning. In class we have began to read about classical conditioning, and how it was brought up to what it is today through experiments done on dogs with Ivan Pavlov. Classical conditioning is the idea of repeated pairings of the conditioned stimulus and the unconditioned stimulus that eventually leads to an acquisition between the two.
I am interested in this topic because I love dogs, and my family has gotten two new dogs in the last 2 years. One of the dogs is almost 2 years, and the other is only 6-7 months old. I didn’t know it until after reading these chapters and in the articles about training you’re dog, that my family and I are using some very good techniques with potty training, staying down from jumping, barking, running away, and really just how to listen to us as owners. One thing that I found interesting was the phenomena psychic secretion, or salvia, where dogs seem to know when they were going to be fed and begin to salivate. I used to get a little unhappy with my dogs when they slobber all over the place making my pillows all disgusting, but now I will change my behavior towards their slobbery one. A common use I read about in multiple sites was the use of the clicker, like the one Professor Maclin likes to talk about in class with what he does at home. The use of the clicker could in a way get rid of my dog’s habit to slobber everywhere. With a conditioned stimulus of a click, and the conditioned response as the “yippee” emotion that food is coming could slow down the slobbering aspect of the dogs.

http://www.simplypsychology.org/pavlov.html
http://www.aspca.org/pet-care/virtual-pet-behaviorist/dog-behavior/training-your-dog
http://leemakennels.com/blog/dog-behaviour/dog-training-dog-behaviour/classical-conditioning-in-dogs/

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 blog this week I chose to look further into systematic desensitization and reinforcement and how they can be used to overcome test anxiety. This fits into the section we are talking about because it is using unconditioned stimuli (relaxing) and pairing them with a conditioned stimulus (academic tests) to change what the unconditioned response (fear) is going to be. I am interested in this because I have test anxiety and enjoy finding new ways to overcome panic attacks.

Systematic desensitization is when you slowly introduce the conditioned stimulus that elicits fear to the person while they are using a relaxation technique. Since the person usually avoids the stimulus that makes them uncomfortable, they need systematic exposure while they are relaxed to make them comfortable with the stimulus that elicits fear out of them. This would be considered changing an unconditioned response into a conditioned response.

The main way of desensitization is to first relax. Most of the articles and websites I found concluded that the way of relaxing was very closely related to meditation. You need to get comfortable, close your eyes and imagine a place of total relaxation like a beach. When you do this, you have to make sure you are taking deep breaths and relaxing your muscles. The next step is to visualize what is making you anxious. An article I found about test anxiety said that once you were completely relaxed, visualize that you are taking a test. Over time, this will desensitize you to your fear and you might be able to think about relaxing when you are confronted, instead of tensing up.

Most of the time, when a person with test anxiety is having a panic attack over a test; it is because they see the outcome as being aversive and makes them think they are a failure. At this point, tests seem like punishments and only make the anxiety worse. One way to get over this fear is to reinforce yourself when you stop these thoughts from happening. While taking a test, if you get stuck on a question move to one that you know the answer to then go back to the question you were stuck on. Sometimes answering a question that you know for sure you can get right is reinforcing and will calm you down enough to think rationally about the other questions you were not sure about.

Overcoming test anxiety is about realizing that you do have control over your own behaviors and actions. It is always recommended that you study for a test and be prepared. But sometimes being prepared is not enough to calm anxiety. So if you have anxiety, try systematic desensitization and reinforcement to calm your nerves.

Terms: Systematic desensitization, systematic exposure, unconditioned stimuli, conditioned stimulus, unconditioned response, conditioned response, elicit, reinforcement, punishment, aversive

http://www-ugs.csusb.edu/sail/study_skills/overcomingtestanxiety.pdf

http://www.isu.edu/success/strategies/handouts/docs/stress_management/Systematic%20Desensitization%20of%20Test%20Panic.pdf

http://www.rethink-anxiety-disorders.com/systematic-desensitization.html

The topic that I have chosen to address in my blog this week is that of taste aversion. Taste aversion is defined as the association of the taste of a certain food with symptoms caused by a toxic, spoiled or poisonous substance.

Generally taste aversion takes place when someone has ingested a particular food which caused them to have a negative reaction, perhaps one that made them sick. An example of this can be seen every Sunday morning in bathrooms all across Cedar Falls where students find themselves bent over a toilet and swearing that they will never drink again. In this example, the student emitted a drinking behavior. The excessive alcohol consumption produced a hangover which is very adversive. If the consequence is adversive enough, the student may develop a taste aversion to alcohol. In this case, they will likely not want to drink again, and the very taste or smell of alcohol can make them feel queasy. This is because they relate the smell/taste to the feeling of illness.

However, there are other times when taste aversion occurs between two unrelated things. For example, I can’t stand chicken noodle soup. For as long as I can remember I have hated even the thought of it. This always baffles my husband because I love chicken, noodles AND soup. However, something about putting them all together makes me feel sick to my stomach. This is because chicken noodle soup is always what my mom made me when I was sick growing up. As a result I have formed a mental connection between the soup and my illness, causing a taste aversion. Now, chicken noodle soup has nothing to do with me being sick. It’s not as if the soup is what made me sick when I was little. However, the relationship between the two is enough for a taste aversion to occur. In this case, an unconditioned stimulus is paired with the unconditioned stimulus of feeling sick. After this pairing occurs, the food is now a conditioned stimulus. This new conditioned stimulus now elicits the conditioned response of avoiding the food.

Taste aversion has been shown to be very powerful. A psychologist by the name of John Garcia conducted an experiment in which he fed lab rats flavored water. A short while after giving the water to the rats, he gave them a substance, which made them violently ill. A while afterwards, when he offered the rats the flavored water again, they refused. It only took one pairing of an unconditioned stimulus and an unconditioned response for the rats to develop this taste aversion.

Another interesting thing about taste aversion is that the unconditioned stimulus and the unconditioned response do not have to occur within a short period of time. Often times in classical conditioning, a strong bond is only formed when the pairing occurs within a very short period of time. However, this is not the case with taste aversion. For example, in the example I gave above about the experiment conducted by Garcia with the lab rats, the rats were not given the poisonous substance until hours after they had drunk the flavored water. However, the connection they formed between the stimulus and the reaction was still strong enough for them to develop a taste aversion to the flavored water later on.

TERMS: Taste aversion, unconditioned stimulus, unconditioned response, elicit, emit, conditioned stimulus, experiment, adversive,

http://psychology.about.com/od/classicalconditioning/f/taste-aversion.htm
http://www.intropsych.com/ch05_conditioning/taste_aversion.html
http://study.com/academy/lesson/taste-aversion-definition-conditioning-learning.html

I wanted to do a little extra research on the father of behaviorist psychology John Watson. Watson started to study psychology while he attended the University of Chicago and before that saw himself as a bad student. He was very interested in observable behavior because up until then Sigmund Freud was the father of psychology. Watson referred to the works of Freud as "poppycock" because it is all objective and a matter of opinion that can change from person to person. Watson wanted to show people that behavior was elicited by the environment and how the behavior as been reinforced or punished in the past. John Watson was the psychologist who conducted the "Little Albert" experiment. In this study Watson wanted to see if he could make a little boy who seemed to have no fear at all afraid of something. This was done by what we know as Classical Conditioning which of course makes a conditioned stimulus cause an unconditioned response. This was very controversial because causing a child to fear something for the sake of an experiment is obviously unethical. The good news is that Albert ended up losing his phobia for furry pets when he was desensitized by the introduction of pleasurable stimuli while the furry pets were present. An interesting counter experiment showed us that we do not have fear while we humans are eating something, especially something that we love such as ice cream or chocolate. I believe this is because of the Dopamine that fires in the brain while eating. The Dopamine floods the brain with pleasure and the body becomes more numb to non-threats. I believe this is a good method to cure people who have different kind of phobias. Although Watson claims to be able to raise any child into whatever profession he desires, this seems like arrogance to me considering that he did not have a good relationship with his own children. This is hard for me to understand how somebody in the psychology field could fail to see how beautiful and intense it is to have children. One would think that Watson would learn from his own findings that an environment with no father does not set up children for success. Watson was a brain and contributed much to psychology and although the Behaviorist perspective lost popularity in the 1950's it is still used today in therapy and other professions. John Watson died on his farm in Connecticut after living a reclusive older life.

elicit,punishment,reinforcement,behaviorst, little Albert, dopeamine, pleasurable

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

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Watson

Topic: Systematic Desensitization

This topic fits into our Behavior Modification class, in that, it is regarding conditioning, specifically, counter conditioning, to help individuals’ and animals’ overcome their fear (or anxiety) associated with a phobia. It is a gradual exposure therapy that was developed by Joseph Wolpe (Wiki). Being based on the principle of classical conditioning, the therapy’s objective is to remove the fear response in response to a phobia (McLeod, 2008). Systematic desensitization therapy allows the individuals’ to participate in a relaxation technique and gradually gain exposure to their fear (or anxiety) triggering stimuli (Gilston). Joseph Wolpe identified three main steps to effectively desensitize an individual. The first step is to identify the fear (or anxiety) producing stimuli. The second step is for the individual to learn effective relaxation techniques or effective coping skills. The third step is for the individual to connect the learned relaxation techniques to the stimulus. The individual relaxes completely, and then is presented with the lowest fear (or anxiety) producing stimulus. Once the individual is relaxed completely after the presentation of the lowest fear (on anxiety) producing stimulus, the individual is then presented with a higher fear (or anxiety) producing stimulus. This process is repeated until the highest possible fear (or anxiety) producing stimulus is presented, and after which, the individual has been successfully able to relax completely with the stimuli present (Wiki). The exposure of the fear (or anxiety) producing stimulus can be achieved in two ways. One was the exposure could be achieved would be in vitro, where the individual imagines the exposure to the fear (or anxiety) producing stimulus. The second way being in vivo, where the individual is actually exposed to the fear (or anxiety) producing stimulus (McLeod, 2008). The goal of these steps is to help the individual learn how to overcome their fear (or anxiety) associated with their phobia (Wiki).

URL’s:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_desensitization
http://www.simplypsychology.org/Systematic-Desensitisation.html
http://study.com/academy/lesson/systematic-desensitization-definition-treatment-examples.html

TERMS: Systematic Desensitization, conditioning, counter conditioning, classical conditioning, stimuli, desensitize, stimulus, vitro, vivo, phobia

The topic that I picked was about classical conditioning. I picked this topic to look more in depth about because I wanted to find other examples other than Pavlov’s idea. Classical conditioning theory involves learning a behavior through a process of association. This is saying that two stimuli work together to produce a new learned response within a person or animal. This behavioral learning process is produced by several stages. The first stage is when the unconditioned stimulus produces an unconditioned response. This means that a stimulus in the environment has produced a behavior. The next stage is when a stimulus produces no response with the unconditioned stimulus at which is now called conditioned stimulus. The last stage happens after the conditioning. The conditioned stimulus has been associated with the unconditioned stimulus to create a new conditioned response. The first example I found on this topic is about a high school classroom. Two students were doing a study within the classroom. The one was sitting in the back of the room and would randomly say something. As that happened the other student would run into the back dancing. This made all the students look. They repeated this several times. The last time, most of the students looked but the second student never ran in. This showed that the students learned to always emit a behavior of looking back but at the time the behavior never happened. Another example is the the girl liked her aunt because she always made her feel warm and wanted. She always wore a particular perfume too. So every time she saw her aunt she expected her to smell good and also make her feel wanted.
After looking up this different examples, I found it easier to understand. I find it easier to completely know something if you have other ways to describe it other than just one.

http://changingminds.org/explanations/theories/classical_conditioning.htm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYxUdPj-EEY

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

Terminology: classical conditioning, Pavlov, stimuli, unconditioned stimulus, unconditioned response, conditioned stimulus, emit

Topical Blog Week 8

I have always been really interested in the topic of conditioning. The fact that we can shape and mold people’s (and animal’s) behaviors is a very powerful idea. There are also several types of conditioning that this week’s readings discussed. The main type of conditioning that we learn about in behavior modification is classical conditioning and the work/experiments that Pavlov did with his dogs. Pavlov was able to successfully get the dogs to salivate when introduced to an unrelated stimulus. You would assume that dogs would salivate when introduced to food – that is common knowledge. But you would not assume that they would salivate when they hear a bell. Pavlov paired the food stimulus with a ringing bell sound and eventually was able to change the behaviors of the dogs, so every time they heard the bell ring (even without the food stimulus), they salivated. Classical conditioning is very important to the field of psychology and behaviorism. And in doing my research, I found that operant conditioning is usually discussed when learning about classical conditioning. So I chose to look into these two types of conditioning further. I wanted to know the differences and similarities and which would be best used for certain situations.
I have already discussed classical conditioning and how it relates to the course material, so now I will discuss operant conditioning and how this too can relate the behavior modification.
There are many other types of conditioning discussed in section 3.3, but I wanted to know more about operant conditioning and how it could also be related to the course material. Operant conditioning was an idea that came after classical conditioning and the work of Pavlov. The man who came up with operant conditioning was B.F. Skinner. Skinner had ideas that were less extreme than Watson and his ideas with classical conditioning.
There are two main differences between classical conditioning and operant conditioning. The first reason that classical conditioning and operant conditioning are different from one another is that operant conditioning mainly focuses on reinforcement. Classical conditioning focuses more on the association between stimuli and responses. We can see this with Pavlov’s dogs. Pavlov was able to get his dogs to make an association between food and the ringing of a bell. Operant conditioning would be related to what we have been doing in class. We have been trying to change out water drinking behavior by reinforcing ourselves. When we reinforce ourselves we drink for water the following week (or at least that is what operant conditioning would predict). Both of these examples can also show the second difference between the two. Classical conditioning is more about the reflexive behavior that occurs, whereas operant conditioning is based in voluntary behavior. Pavlov’s dogs don’t consciously know why they salivate when they hear the ringing bell. And even if we did this experiment on humans, they wouldn’t know either. But when it comes to our class changing out water drinking behavior, we are consciously aware that we are trying to modify this behavior.
So after I realized there are a couple reasons that operant conditioning and classical conditioning differed from one another, I wanted to know whether or not one was better than the other in certain situations. For both of these types of conditioning, it really just depends on the situation and the behavior that the person is trying to change. People use both of these types of conditioning every day and they can use them in a variety of settings with a variety of different situations.
The main thing that we need to keep in mind when wondering whether or not we are using classical or operant conditioning is whether or not the behaviors are voluntary or not. This is one of the main ways to tell if we are using classical conditioning or operant conditioning, and it is also the main way to tell which to use if we have not started the behavior modification process.
I have learned thus far that there is not one type of conditioning that is better than the other. They are all used for different situations and in different settings. The main thing to keep in mind when figuring out which type to use, is whether or not the response is voluntary. I know that in later sections we will learn about operant conditioning, but I just wanted to look into it this week because I am so interested in conditioning and the different types.

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

http://mhhe.com/cls/psy/ch06/compare.mhtml

http://psychology.about.com/od/behavioralpsychology/a/classical-vs-operant-conditioning.htm

TERMS: Conditioning, Classical Conditioning, Behavior Modification, Pavlov, Operant Conditioning, B.F. Skinner

I chose to write about reinforcement and punishment. I will focus on why reinforcement is best. In the source containing the youtube video the person who is speaking does a very good job of explaining why reinforcement is best. His first example I appreciated was about two groups of athletes, one group was shown what they did wrong and scolded while the other group was shown what they did well and complimented. The next game they performed in the group that was reinforced played a lot better. Why is this? It turns out the difference in performance was not just psychological, a blood test showed that the players had an increase in testosterone levels. Now in the psychologytoday link these psychologists performed a study on 8/9 year olds and 11/12 year olds. This study was to determine if the participants learned faster with reinforcement or punishment. This study found the same things, that, "performance improved substantially more when the feedback was positive in the case of the younger children, telling them they did well when they did, rather than negative, telling them that they did poorly when they did."

Now that we know reinforcement works best, which form of reinforcement works best? Positive reinforcement or negative reinforcement? Positive reinforcement includes the addition of something positive to increase the likelihood of a behavior in the future. Negative reinforcement involves taking something aversive away to increase the likelihood of a behavior in the future. Both forms of reinforcement are important, but again which is best? Maybe it is easiest to answer the question how to reinforce rather than which way to reinforce. There are four different ways to reinforce some one, that is Variable ratio, fixed ratio, Variable interval and fixed interval. Ratio means after a certain amount of correct responses the subject will get a reward. Interval means that after a certain amount of time, the subject will be rewarded. Fixed means that the correct number of responses or after a certain amount of time the subject will be rewarded, while variable means that the correct number of responses is random every time or that you will be rewarded after a random amount of time. In section 2.5 there is a very nice graph of the schedules of reinforcement and how effective each one is. Turns out that variable ratio is the most effective form of reinforcement. Why is it most effective? because "it may be the next one" the subject never knows exactly when it will get rewarded, it may be after 5 responses or it may be after 10.

Before this class I was always confused about the differences between reinforcement and punishment. I was also confused about the positive and negative part of it all. The sections in the book cleared this all up for me very well, but the additional research cleared it up even more.

Terms.
Reinforcement, punishment, negative reinforcement, positive reinforcement, fixed ratio, fixed interval, variable ratio, variable interval, aversive.

For this week’s blog assignment I will be looking at Premack’s principle and some of its practical applications. The basic premise of this theory is that more probable behaviors will reinforce less probably behaviors. What this means is that the if a person decides to perform an assigned activity, that person will perform a less desirable activity to get at the more desirable activity and this in turn turns the activities into reinforcers. This principle was originally suggested by David Premack, hence the name Premack’s principle. Among all his experiments, in my opinion the most interesting one was his earlier studies that were conducted with children. These experiments started by giving the children two options and that was candy or playing with a pinball machine. After noting down which activity each children preferred he proceeded to the next phase of the experiment where the children was tested with one of two procedures. Either they play pinball in order to eat candy or eat candy in order to paly pinball. In the first one, the kids that liked to eat candy would comply and play pinball which is consistent with the Premack principle and it was similar results when the latter procedure was tested. This showed its effectiveness among humans as a great way to predict reinforcers.

One interesting application of the Premack principle in daily life is using it to stop procrastination. By using a pleasant activity which is the high probability behavior as reinforcement for the low probability behavior which in this case is procrastination, you can reduce the frequency of procrastination. This theory was tested by Aubrey Daniels who is an established author to overcome his writers’ block and finish his PhD dissertation on time. This is a very useful technique that should be applied to many college students as I believe that a lot of students struggle with the problem of procrastination.

Another practical use of Premack’s principle is in dog training and how to use it to get your dog to behave without the need of having pesky leashes. This works by using the distraction and excitement that dogs face outdoors such as squirrels, fire hydrants, and environmental sounds as rewards instead of thinking of these distractions as obstacles to training dogs. Obeying your command would be the low priority behavior and being off the leash will be the high priority behavior and that would be the reinforcer.

Terms: Premack’s principle, reinforcement, reinforcer, low priority behavior, high priority behavior, frequency, desirable behavior

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premack%27s_principle

http://gettingstronger.org/2010/12/stop-procrastinating-use-the-premack-principle/

http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/pets/dog-behavior/how-to-get-your-dog-to-behave-off-leash?page=1

A lot of us have had some experience where we get sick and can’t eat the food we ate right before we were sick. We have a bad association with the food, which is known as taste aversion.
Conditioned taste aversion occurs when an animal associates the taste of a certain food with symptoms caused by a toxic, spoiled, or poisonous substance. Generally, taste aversion is developed after ingestion of food that causes nausea, sickness, or vomiting. The ability to develop a taste aversion is considered an adaptive trait or survival mechanism that trains the body to avoid poisonous substances before they can cause harm. The association reduces the probability of consuming the same substance, or something that tastes similar, in the future, thus avoiding further poisoning. It is an example of classical conditioning or Pavlovian conditioning.
In many cases, people may be completely unaware of the underlying reasons for their dislike of a type of food. Why do these taste aversions occur, especially when we consciously realize that the illness was not tied to a particular food? As you may have already realized, conditioned taste aversions are a great example of some of the fundamental mechanics of classical conditioning. The previously neutral stimulus, the food, is paired with an unconditioned stimulus, an illness, which leads to an unconditioned response, feeling sick. After this one-time pairing, the previously neutral stimulus, the food, is now a conditioned stimulus that elicits a conditioned response, avoiding the food.
Psychologists John Garcia and Robert Koelling studied taste aversion in 1966 while researching the effects of radiation on laboratory rats. Garcia and Koelling noticed the laboratory rats started to avoid drinking the water from plastic bottles in the radiation chambers. Realizing the rats might be associating the plastic-tasting water with the sickness experienced from radiation, the researchers designed an experiment to test their hypothesis.
Garcia and Koelling gave three groups of rats high, medium, or low doses of radiation after the rats drank sweetened water. The higher the dose of radiation, the sicker the rats became. As you might predict, the rats that received the highest doses of radiation strongly associated the sweetened water with the illness following the radiation. The majority of those rats later refused to drink sweetened water.
Overall, I think it is interesting because its something that we have probably experienced on some level and it works into our every day lives.
Terms: Conditioned taste aversion, taste aversion, classical conditioning, Pavlovian conditioning, neutral stimulus, unconditioned stimulus, unconditioned response, conditioned stimulus, conditioned response.
http://psychology.about.com/od/classicalconditioning/f/taste-aversion.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taste_aversion
http://study.com/academy/lesson/taste-aversion-definition-conditioning-learning.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.
The topic I have chose to look into is Mary Cover Jones. This fits into what we learned about this week because she is talked about in section 3.4.

2) What are three aspects of the topic you want to talk about for this assignment?
I plan to discuss Mary’s background, the study she did with Peter, and what concepts were created as a result of her study.

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.
Mary Cover Jones went to Vassar College and took every psychology class offered. She graduated in 1919 and by the summer of 1920 she had completed her Master’s degree. During this year she attended a weekend lecture given by John B. Watson. This is what helped her make the final decision to person her graduate work in psychology. After she completed graduate school she went on to marry one of her classmates Harold Jones. In 1927 she moved with her family to California and took a job at University of California, Berkeley as a Research Associate. While in California she became very involved in the Oakland Growth Studies. She published over 100 articles from the data she gathered with OGS. One of the more popular articles was about the long-term psychological and behavioral effects of early and late maturation in adolescence. In 1952 she was promoted to being an Assistant Professor at Berkeley and in 1959 she became a full-time professor. In 1960 she retired and became the president of the Division of Developmental Psychology for the APA.
After John Watson conducted the Little Albert case, Mary Jones did her own follow up study. The goal of this study was to see if it was to remove the fears of children ages 2-7. Little Peter was scared of white rabbits. At first Jones tried using ‘modeling’ techniques. This worked and little Peter was eventually able to pat the rabbit on it’s back. However, little Peter became ill with scarlet fever and during the 2 months without therapy her was startled by a dog. Because of this the conditioning was reversed and once again he was scared of the rabbit. Jones and Watson came up with a new techniques to reduce Peter’s fear. They would present him with his favorite food (unconditioned stimulus) at the same time he was presented with the rabbit (conditioned stimulus). Over time Peter became more and more accepting and was eventually able to touch/pet the rabbit without any fear at all.
This study lead to the development of systematic desensitization by Joseph Wolpe. Systematic desensitization is the process of helping a person overcome their certain fears. This is usually done by having the person visualizing themselves facing their fear until one day when they are ready to do it in person.

4) At the end, please include working URLs for the three websites.
http://www.northernhighlands.org/cms/lib5/NJ01000179/Centricity/Domain/55/unit6learning.pdf

http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Jones/intro.htm

http://www.feministvoices.com/mary-cover-jones/

Terms: Mary Cover Jones, John B. Watson, Little Albert, Little Peter, modeling, conditioning, unconditioned stimulus, conditioned stimulus, visualizing, systematic desensitization, Joseph Wolpe

1) I chose to search more about the topic of experimental neurosis founded by Ivan Pavlov. These two chapters included a lot of further information about classical conditioning and other ways behavior modification can be done. I am interested in researching more about experimental neurosis because out of almost all of the classical conditioning section this was one of the few things I did not know anything about. It will be interesting to learn about how it fits into behavior modification and what it is.

2) For this assignment the three aspects of experimental neurosis I am going to talk about are what experimental neurosis is, how Pavlov discovered it, and how to induce experimental neurosis on animals or humans.

3) Neurosis is a chronic behavior against high anxious activities that can last anywhere from weeks to years. It is most often made a problem when certain stimuli is made too strong for the animal or person, when there is a strain in the inhibitory process, when there is collision of two opposing nervous processes, and if castration is involved. However, neurosis can also be induced from a laboratory; experimental neurosis. The two are practically the same, however experimental neurosis is when the behavior becomes unpredictable and erratic due to stress from a difficult learning situation. Or in other words, learned helplessness. When Pavlov was finished researching experimental neurosis, he came to the conclusion that the idea of experimental neurosis existed because there was a conflict between the excitatory and inhibitory impulses when a problem was introduced.

Pavlov did not necessarily come up with experimental neurosis on his own, his laboratory came up with the idea. They realized something was going on when they did experiments on dogs by confronting them with different experiments and then they showed big behavior issues. What Pavlov’s laboratory did first was shock a dog and then give it food and make it eat. Eventually it elicited a salivation response when shocked. Once the dog’s behavior was modified they switched areas of the body they shocked and did not keep to one distinct area. Eventually the dog showed signs of aggression and had an explosive reaction when the shock was delivered. Even if they shocked the original spot of modified behavior the dog still went crazy and did not salivate or show any interest in the food anymore. After doing this first study introducing experimental neurosis they did many others to try and match their findings. Pavlov eventually found the amount of vulnerability to neurosis depended on the temperament of the individual or animal being tested.

Experimental neurosis can be introduced in a variety of different ways either in a laboratory or just on pure accident. The more a conditioned stimulus is being presented to the individual or animal being tested, the more the excitatory and inhibitory impulses react. The reason this causes experimental neurosis is because the two emotional impulses are not supposed to be together so it causes emotional tensions. Another way to induce experimental neurosis is to have different, difficult tasks presented. The different tasks have to be alike but also different so that the responses have different emotional responses. An example of this would be having to respond to multiple stimuli at one time with each stimuli having a different outcome. The last way I am going to talk about to induce experimental neurosis is to have long sessions of stimuli present. When the conditioned stimuli is presented for a long period of time before the introduction of the unconditioned stimulus the behavior produced is more of what the researchers are looking for. Once the unconditioned stimulus is introduced in the experiment then reinforcement of the different disturbances keep producing a strain on the other emotional processes. The different disturbances that can put a strain on certain responses and processes are disruptions of normal learning ability (loss of ability for the animal or person to have the same actions they did before the modification), autonomic disturbances and excess emotions like fear and aggression, and unusual behavioral changes that are not just present in the laboratory.

4) https://psychlopedia.wikispaces.com/experimental+neurosis - I chose this URL because it gave examples of experimental neurosis that helped me understand more of what it was and gave a brief definition.
http://www.redhillpark.us/behavior/experimental-neurosis.html - I chose this URL because it was very helpful overall in writing my paper. It helped me understand more about what experimental neurosis is, how it can be induced, and how Pavlov came up with the idea.
http://www.heretical.com/pavlov/chap-46.html - I chose this URL because it gave me good insight on what experimental neurosis was and why Pavlov studied it.

Terms: Experimental neurosis, Ivan Pavlov, classical conditioning, behavior modification, stimuli, elicit, excitatory, inhibitory, conditioned stimulus, unconditioned stimulus, reinforcement

For this week’s blog assignment I will be looking at Premack’s principle and some of its practical applications. The basic premise of this theory is that more probable behaviors will reinforce less probably behaviors. What this means is that the if a person decides to perform an assigned activity, that person will perform a less desirable activity to get at the more desirable activity and this in turn turns the activities into reinforcers. This principle was originally suggested by David Premack, hence the name Premack’s principle. Among all his experiments, in my opinion the most interesting one was his earlier studies that were conducted with children. These experiments started by giving the children two options and that was candy or playing with a pinball machine. After noting down which activity each children preferred he proceeded to the next phase of the experiment where the children was tested with one of two procedures. Either they play pinball in order to eat candy or eat candy in order to paly pinball. In the first one, the kids that liked to eat candy would comply and play pinball which is consistent with the Premack principle and it was similar results when the latter procedure was tested. This showed its effectiveness among humans as a great way to predict reinforcers.
One interesting application of the Premack principle in daily life is using it to stop procrastination. By using a pleasant activity which is the high probability behavior as reinforcement for the low probability behavior which in this case is procrastination, you can reduce the frequency of procrastination. This theory was tested by Aubrey Daniels who is an established author to overcome his writers’ block and finish his PhD dissertation on time. This is a very useful technique that should be applied to many college students as I believe that a lot of students struggle with the problem of procrastination.
Another practical use of Premack’s principle is in dog training and how to use it to get your dog to behave without the need of having pesky leashes. This works by using the distraction and excitement that dogs face outdoors such as squirrels, fire hydrants, and environmental sounds as rewards instead of thinking of these distractions as obstacles to training dogs. Obeying your command would be the low priority behavior and being off the leash will be the high priority behavior and that would be the reinforcer.
Terms: Premack’s principle, reinforcement, reinforcer, low priority behavior, high priority behavior, frequency, desirable behavior
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premack%27s_principle
http://gettingstronger.org/2010/12/stop-procrastinating-use-the-premack-principle/
http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/pets/dog-behavior/how-to-get-your-dog-to-behave-off-leash?page=1

1. For this week’s blog I have decided to do more research on what exactly systematic desensitization is and how it impacts the treatment of phobias. In section 3.4 the example for systematic desensitization was about a boy named Peter. Peter was three years old and became upset and started crying from just about everything. Mary Cover Jones wanted to dig deeper into the idea of could these phobias be removed. She decided to give Peter food and then present him with an animal while he was eating. The animal she present was the conditioned stimulus, Peter’s fear was the unconditioned response, and the food was the unconditioned stimulus. Since the animal was always presented when he had food, Peter was able to be calm when the animal was present and the food was not.
2. I am going to talk more about what systematic desensitization and how it can be applied to your everyday life, along with an example of how I plan on trying to remove my fear of speaking in public. I really feel as though this topic is an important aspect of behavior modification and in psychology in general because everyone has a fear of something, and wouldn’t it be nice to have that phobia or fear disappear and be able to do whatever you wanted without have an intense fear holding you back? I definitely would. I have been afraid of heights since I can remember. For my eighteenth birthday my dad surprised me with a certificate to go skydiving. I knew that he wanted to share the experience of falling twelve thousand feet and only having a parachute keeping me from my death, but I decided to confront my fears and go. Since I am typing this now, I obviously survived the jump, but let me tell you it was hit and miss there for a while. I was shaking the whole car ride to the skydiving place, and was shaking even harder when we were about to jump out of the plane. When my feet touched the ground after the jump I felt exhilarated. I was extremely happy to have gotten over my fear of heights.
3. Systematic desensitization is a category of behavior therapy that originated from the principles of classical conditioning. This type of behavior therapy attempts to remove the fear response of a phobia and add a different stimulus to help relax the individual and gradually help them to become comfortable with the thing they are afraid of. There are three steps that need to be addressed in this behavior therapy: the first phase is for the individual to create a hierarchy of fear, this involves the conditioned stimulus. I will be using the example of my fear of talking in public for this section of my blog. This hierarchy needs to be ranked from least fearful to most fearful. So, I would rank my fear of speaking in a small group setting lower than I would rank talking in front of a couple hundred people. The second step is for the individual to receive techniques to help them relax and feel more comfortable with their surroundings. For me, I would start doing breathing exercises and focus on what’s in front of me. The third step is for the individual to work along with their fear hierarchy and progressing through while also doing their specific relaxation techniques. The individual works their way up from starting at the least unpleasant situation and working on the relaxation techniques and progress gradually getting closer to the highest situation on their fear hierarchy. For me, I would start out by joining the speech and debate team. I wouldn’t necessary have to right away speak in front of hundreds of people, but I could practice with my teammates and eventually be confident enough to speak at tournament. This can be applied to anyone because we all have something that we are afraid of and that is holding us back. If someone is afraid of flying but they have the want to go travel, this is keeping them from experiencing the wonders of the world and new adventures. I can’t even begin to describe how happy I am that I took that jump off the airplane on my eighteenth birthday. I have grown so much as a person since then and I have plans on getting my skydiving license next summer. This wouldn’t have been possible if I never took the leap of faith and tried something that I thought I was so afraid of.
Terms: systematic desensitization, phobia, conditioned stimulus, unconditioned response, unconditioned stimulus, classical conditioning, stimulus, fear hierarchy.
http://www.simplypsychology.org/Systematic-Desensitisation.html
http://www.guidetopsychology.com/sysden.htm
http://www.psychologistanywhereanytime.com/treatment_and_therapy_psychologist/psychologist_desensitization.htm

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.
My topic is going to be deciding whether or not behaviors are innate or if they are all learned. Throughout this section of the ABC's book it states that all behaviors are learned because of Watson's study with Little Albert. They found that Little Albert was not scared of many things when he would see them. However they did see that he was afraid of noise which when they paired it to the things he was seeing, they could train him for being scared of the items shown. They saw that the unconditioned stimulus would create and unconditioned response which would eventually become conditioned. I would like to look into this because I find it very interesting that we as humans may be able to train and get the target behaviors we want in children, especially troubled children. These are the types of children I would like to work with in the future.

2) What are three aspects of the topic you want to talk about for this assignment?
I would like to see what the research says on if behaviors are actually innate or if they can be taught. I also think it's interesting that Little Albert was not scared of any of the things he saw because he wasn't taught they were "scary" yet. I also want to see why the noises that little Albert would hear would scare him even though he really wasn't taught this yet. This may be because noises scare anyone because of the unexpectedness.

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.
In one article I read they were coming from a behavioralist perspective of psychology and they stated that they believed you can only study things you can see and that are observable. They believe you can only make guesses about the mind along with the id and the unconscious. This is good to know because we can see that if there is a learned behavior in humans, say an addiction to drugs or alcohol, we know that we can create the person to "unlearn" the behavior. Like Watson did, you have condition humans into thinking that what they are doing is bad. You have to pair an unpleasant stimulus to the drugs which the person will start to associate with the drug. This will make the person who is using the drugs not want to use it because they will have this unwanted stimulus correlated with the drug. There are said to be three things to think about when you're assessing behavior and how to change it. One would be which behavior requires modification as well as what environmental factors are maintaining those behaviors and what positive reinforcement or punishing events can be used to alter individual behavior? Another article I looked at regarding how drug usage and other things that can be abused commented on the fact that many children are not just taught to pick up an addiction, however they are taught it by the environment they live in. Yes, they may not have a parent yelling at them teaching them to do drugs but they do have their surroundings and trauma that could create the addictions. I also learned that children in these types of homes do not know how to control their emotions because they do not have the ability to express them to their parents. They then resort to alcohol or drugs because it gets their mind off of the real life problems. There could also be the case that children were never taught to play as children in homes that were not good, this teaches them or rather doesn't teach them how to have fun, which makes them resort to alcohol and drugs as parents to escape. And so the cycle continues. To overcome these addictions we have to unlearn the behaviors that were occurring before with cognitive therapy.
I also found that once the drugs or alcohol seems to become "addictive" and when the person thinks they are not capable of stopping because they are "hooked", they really are not. There are just certain regions of the brain that are corrupted which involve decision making. There are immune system responses that the drugs and alcohol are effecting which is the reason we can not just wake up one day and make the decision to quit, whatever the addiction may be.
Overall it is very important to know that we as humans have the ability to stop an addiction because we know that all behaviors are learned. So the addiction will just have to be unlearned, which yes is easier said than done.

3) At the end, please include working URLs for the three websites.
http://web.cortland.edu/andersmd/BEH/BEHAVIOR.HTML
http://waltersmith.hubpages.com/hub/Is-Addiction-a-Learned-Behavior
http://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/arcr343/355-361.htm

Terms:
unconditioned stimulus, unconditioned response, conditioned stimulus, 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.

I want to present some strengths and criticisms of Pavlov, Skinner and John Watson’s chosen school of psychology, behaviorism. I think it fits into the topic at hand because since one of the readings since one of the readings was about these figures and recently we have been covering some behaviorist studies and concepts such as operant conditioning and classical conditioning. I think that it will be fun to go at a theory from a critical and/or contradictory angle while also pointing out why a theory is worth discussing, as it is something that I do not usually do. I feel that often people just read about the strengths or prominent points of an idea or theory and do not think about where they are weak or open to criticism when learning about them and I think only a single sided viewpoint of a theory lessens the overall understanding of it. At one point in time behaviorism was a more popular school of psychology than it currently is and there must be reasons why that has occurred that are worth investigating.

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

The criticisms I want to discuss are it being too limited in scope(1) and being unable to explain complex human concepts(2). I will also start off by explaining some of the strengths of the school(3).

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.

Before I get to criticising the behaviorist school I want to go over some of the strengths and reasons it was popular in the first place. Operant and classical conditioning have both been researched extensively and they both hold up. Operant and classical conditioning are taught in almost every introductory psychology course as a valid and applicable concept which only speaks to its validity. Reinforcement and punishment are both effective ways of modifying behavior and been proven over time. Therapeutic techniques that have been developed from behaviorist techniques and research have been proven to be effective. Some of these techniques included intensive behavioral intervention, behavior analysis, token economies, and discrete trial training. The aspect of researchers studying behavior in observable and scientific ways did make it very easy to do investigate behavior in a consistent manner. Behaviorisms commitment to the scientific method and the law parsimony is admirable. Being able to be studying in a control environment give validity to the behaviors being observed and gave concrete evidence of their discoveries that some of its predecessors did not. Much of early psychology used techniques that were more up to the interpretation to the researcher, such as introspectionism, and made validity of the research more up for questioning or interpretation. Behaviorism was a response to that with a desire to for solid data. Behaviorism has been strongly able to study low-level and instinctive behavior in humans and animals. Behaviorist techniques are used in multiple fields ranging from clinical psychology to animal training.

One major criticism of behaviorism includes that behaviorism has a very single faceted view of what influences behavior. Behaviorism dictates that only observable events of behavior and the environmental influences are to be investigated. When focusing on observable behaviors and observable explanations of behavior I think that it did not do enough to investigate other causes of behavior. Humanistic psychologists, such as Carl Rogers, would say that behaviorism does not take into consideration of free will. Humanists would say that humans have personal agency and do not follow the determinism of sciences. They would also say that studying behavior in a lab environment has little ecological validity as the tests are in an artificial environment. As a proponent of free will over determinism I feel it is a very strong criticism of behaviorist theory. Freud felt that behaviorism did not take account of a person's unconscious thoughts, feelings, and moods as an influences of behavior, focusing too much on the external influences and neglecting internal influences. There are also biological influences of behavior. Similar to the unconscious, biological influences of behavior are internal and not from the environment. Chromosomes and hormones have been shown to have an influences on behavior. For example testosterone levels are have shown to have an influence in mood of males and abnormal levels can lead to adverse behaviors.

Behaviorism does have an explanation on why humans have been able to explain things such as phobias, it has not had answers to some complex aspects of human behavior such as language development and memory. Language and memory are not developed through behaviorist techniques. Noam Chomsky famously criticised Skinner in regards to Skinner's thoughts on language, with main points being that Skinner underestimates how complex language is and his lab experiments of low-level and instinctive behavior does not generalize more complex human behaviors. Behaviorism is generally thought to be good in studying instinctive behaviors but often lacks the ability to leave the lab or make the jump to more complex human functions.

Overall I would say that behaviorism is an important school to know and learn about as it is important influence of behavior modification. Behaviorism lead to proven techniques in modifying behavior. I do think that it is limited in scope and lacks focus in some proven aspect of behavior, such as biological and internal influences of behavior. It also is limited to being effective in explaining lower level and instinctual functions of humans and not as good in terms of explaining more complex human functions.

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

http://www.simplypsychology.org/behaviorism.html

http://www.personalityresearch.org/papers/naik.html

http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~yfreund/consciousness/collins.behaviorism.pdf

Terms used
Classical conditioning, operant conditioning, behaviorism, humanism, language, memory, biological, hormones, chromosomes, phobia, learning, reinforcement, free will, determinism, intervention

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 section I decided to discuss systematic desensitization, this was covered in section 3.4 of Watson. However, it was not Watson who introduced the idea of systematic desensitization but that of Mary Cover Jones when she was doing the study of Peter. I find this subject extremely interesting because it helps people get over their phobias and I would like to learn more about it.
2) What are three aspects of the topic you want to talk about for this assignment?
Three aspects of this topic I would like to discuss is Mary Cover Jones’s study of Peter. This is where the whole subject of systematic desensitization starts from. The next aspect that I would like to focus on is the therapy itself in systematic desensitization. I would like to look into how the therapy works and the specific steps taken in this therapy. The last aspect that I would like to discuss is the specific phobias that this therapy can help with.
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.
Watson had done the Little Albert study where he classically conditioned a baby boy to fear a white rabbit. After Watson had done this experiment he never desensitized Little Albert to not be fearful of the white rabbit. Mary Cover Jones or the “mother of behavior therapy” did an experiment with a boy named Peter. I was surprised to find out from one of my sources that Watson supervised the experiment even after he was kicked out of the college, they brought him on as a consultant. Peter was a fearful 3 year old boy who was conditioned naturally not experimentally. Which personally I think her experiment was much more ethical because she was removing the fear and not inducing it like Watson did with Albert. Jones desensitized Peter to animals by presenting the animals to him while he ate food because food was the US and the animal was the CS. He then could allow the animal to be near him without eliciting fear; they then proceeded to call this systematic desensitization. One of the first steps to systematic desensitization is progressive relaxation. This is when a client would focus on tightening and relaxing their muscles so they know how it feels when their muscles are completely relaxed. This helps them create relaxation skills to apply when they are in a situation where their phobia is present. The therapist and client then make an anxiety hierarchy which is a catalogue of anxiety-provoking situations from least to most distressing. The anxiety hierarchy could include even just pictures of their feared object and lead up to actually being in the presence of that feared stimuli. The client and the therapist go through each stage of the anxiety hierarchy using their relaxation techniques. The progressively go through the list of the anxiety hierarchy getting more in depth with their fears and will eventually become desensitized to those situations. This could start with just looking at a picture of a spider that elicits fear and using their relaxation techniques to actually holding a spider and using their relaxation techniques. In this they hope that the relaxation will replace the alarm. There are many ways that clients can go through this by actually going to a place they fear like an airport or an airplane. However, with new technology people can use virtual reality as means to stimulate their phobias. Some precautions for this therapy would be that with people who have phobias extreme panic attacks can occur and these therapies should be conducted by trained professionals, also it is important that the relaxation response should be thoroughly learned. Desensitization therapy is an effective therapy and the majority of people who undergo this therapy show symptom reduction. I think that this type of therapy would be especially helpful for people struggling with debilitating phobias, those where it is hard to function in daily living environments because their phobias restrict them to. I would not go as far as to say that I have a phobia of spiders but to say that I am strongly fearful of them is more correct. This does affect my work however because I work at a marina where I am inside and outside all day and there is a lot of different types of insects especially spiders. I think if I could go through systematic desensitization therapy this would help me a lot in overcoming my fears and make work easier and more enjoyable. One of my sources explained that systematic desensitization can be used to cure about any phobia with a normal cognitive functioning individual however the only problems that arise are when the individual has a developmental disability. Focusing on the aspect that I wanted to cover on what phobias can be treated it does not matter so much on the phobia but on the individuals cognitive functioning if this therapy can be useful to them.
3) At the end, please include working URLs for the three websites.
http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Jones/intro.htm
http://www.minddisorders.com/Py-Z/Systematic-desensitization.html
http://thenadd.org/modal/bulletins/v9n3a2~.htm
Terminology: Systematic desensitization, Watson, Mary Cover Jones, Peter, Phobias, Little Albert, classically conditioned, US, CS, elicit

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.
a) My topic for week 8 is on systematic desensitization used as a treatment for the fear of heights. This relates to our learning, because we talked about systematic desensitization in Section 3.4. I am interested in this topic because everyone is afraid of something and most people don’t want to be afraid of whatever they are afraid of anymore, but they don’t know how to go about that. I am specifically doing my blog on the fear of heights, because that is a big fear of mine.
2.) what are three aspects of the topic you want to talk about for this assignment?
a) My three aspects I would like to discuss is what systematic desensitization is, the fear of heights as well as its causes and how it affects your every day life, and ways to use systematic desensization to treat someone.
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. Systematic desensitization is a behavior technique where a person is gradually being exposed to what they fear whether it is an event, object, or person. While they are being exposed to what they fear, they use relaxation techniques at the same time in order to reduce levels of anxiety. This is based on classical conditioning. The goal of this method is to remove the fear response of a phobia and replace it with a relaxation response so that those with the phobias aren’t overwhelmed with the phobia that it affects their day-to-day lives.
The fear of heights is known as Acrophobia. Depending on the phobia’s severity, a person can be as afraid of being on a high floor or a building as they are being on a rock climbing wall just a couple of feet up, strapped to a harness. Acrophobia belongs to a category of phobias known as space and motion discomfort. Acrophobia is one of the most common phobias out there. Acrophobia can be dangerous because if they experience a panic attack in a high place, it can cause them to not get down safely. This could have a negative impact on someone’s life such as limiting career opportunities and affect simple day-to-day life activities. It is important to note that acrophobia is an intense, irrational fear of being at a high place. Most people will be afraid of being on top of a cliff and get anxious, and this is normal. Those suffering from acrophobia will get anxious in situations such as climbing up stairs, driving over a bridge, or even walking on a balcony. They will experience panic attacks, rapid breathing, nausea, and dizziness. Some reactions to these situations include crawling on all fours or kneeling down when this situations arise. The cause of acrophobia is most likely attributed to a traumatic experience involving heights. One of the most successful treatments for acrophobia is facing their fear head on with actual exposure, which ties into systematic desensitization because that is their method of removing someone’s fear.
There are three phases to this treatment: relaxation mediation techniques, constructing a hierarchy of fear, and then we combine the two together. . The relaxation techniques used is very similar to meditation. The therapist would begin by having the client close their eyes and relax their muscles while paying attention to their breathing. They would read them a script in order to relax. The next step would be constructing a hierarchy of fears. This would be asking the client of the objects and situations they find fearful in order of least anxiety provoking to most anxiety provoking. The next step would be progressing to talking about their fear hierarchy while using relaxation techniques used to relax their muscles and relax their mind. Then the client would keep imagining their fear until it failed to make them anxious. This process is repeated until the treatment is complete, which is different for every person. An example that took this treatment to the extreme and for the wrong reasons are found in the criminal minds episode entitled: Scared to Death. In this episode, a fake therapist is telling his patients that he is going to treat their fear, but uses their fear against them to kill them. One of the times he did this was with someone who had a phobia of water. He took his client into the lake to swim, even though he couldn’t and held him with a lifeguard rod. In the end, he let go and the man ended up drowning. The clip in the URL section is one of the examples from the show where the fake therapist put his patient who was afraid of closed spaces into a box with no light. He told her he would put her in there so she wouldn’t be scared anymore. He took this to the extreme by using systematic desensitization to lure them into thinking their fear would be gone by the time they faced it.

Terms used: systematic desensitization, behavior, classical conditioning, and meditation, phobia

http://study.com/academy/lesson/systematic-desensitization-definition-treatment-examples.html

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

http://www.fearof.net/fear-of-heights-phobia-acrophobia/

http://www.phobiafears.com/phobia/acrophobia-fear-of-heights/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYHzq84oiXI

Megan Hasley
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.
In this chapter we talked about how people can use systemic desensitization to relieve themselves of their phobias. I have chosen to explore the topic of systemic desensitization further. I am interested in it because I have many phobias that I would like to get over if it is possible, for example, spiders, crowds, and being late. So hopefully through further research I can find more information. Systemic Desensitization is based on classical conditioning.
2) What are three aspects of the topic you want to talk about for this assignment?
The three aspects of systemic desensitization that I am going to talk about is the phobia itself, the process of desensitizing an individual, and finally the implications and how treatment actually is achieved through systemic desensitization.
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.
Phobias can be very difficult for people to deal with. No matter what, everyone is at least slightly scared of something, whether it is heights, spiders, tight spaces, or public speaking.
In order to desensitize an individual of their phobia they are asked to rank the stimuli in order from least threatening to most threatening; after they have done this they are taught relaxation techniques in order to ensure that they will be able to relax (simplypsychology). After they learn the relaxation techniques the individual is then confronted with the least threatening situation in their mind (simplypsychology). After they are no longer feeling anxious during this step they are able to move on to a slightly more threatening stimulus, this is called the hierarchy of fear (simplypsychology). Depending on the individual, exposure to the threatening stimuli can occur in two different ways. In vitro means that the individual would just imagine exposure to the threatening stimuli, whereas in vivo means that the individual is actually exposed to the threatening stimuli (simplypsychology). In vitro would only be beneficial if the individual is able to actually imagine the stimuli, if they cannot imagine the situation occurring that it will not be helpful to them (simplypsychology).
This process on average can take 4-6 sessions depending on the phobia, but for extreme phobias it could take as many as 12 sessions (simplypsychology). This process can also be completed on your own (guidetopsychology). Completion does not necessarily mean that the individual is no longer afraid of the stimuli; it just means that the goals that were set by the professional and the individual were met (simplypsychology). I think that the process of systemic desensitization could be very helpful to a lot of people, especially people who have extreme phobias or anxiety. Through this method they could continue to use calming and relaxing techniques to get through stressful situations.
For one of my sources I used a YouTube video that shows the process of systemic desensitization. The client in this situation is afraid of puppies. He is brought to a park in order to confront his fear; he is in the in vivo stage. After he sees the dog he starts to become very emotional and he starts backing away from the dog. The woman who is helping him has the dog come a little closer, but Marvin tells him when to stop. Then the dog comes closer again until he is right in front of Marvin. Marvin is very emotional at this point and he continues to shake and he starts to cry. The woman tells Marvin that he needs to pet the dog. She will not let him leave until he pets the dog because he needs to get his life back. Marvin is finally able to put his hand on the dog but he is still emotional.
I think that YouTube clip really shows how badly fears can impact lives and how beneficial it is to be able to change your fears. Marvin wanted to get over his fear so that he could go to parks with his kids and no longer be afraid. Hopefully, through this process he was able to move on with his life instead of constantly worrying about dogs. Not only do I think that getting rid of his phobia would be beneficial but I think it would help his self image because he was very distraught that he appeared to be a baby.
3) At the end, please include working URLs for the three websites.
http://www.simplypsychology.org/Systematic-Desensitisation.html
http://www.guidetopsychology.com/sysden.htm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDvDCqLCdEE
TERMS: systemic desensitization, phobias, stimuli, exposure, in vitro, in vivo, classical conditioning, hierarchy of fear

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 want to cover is the idea of innate and leaned behaviors in humans. This connects with our readings in the sense that we covered the idea of the Black slate theory from Watson and his Little Albert experiments. This is interesting to me because I don’t believe that we are all compete blank slates when we are born and that there are innate behaviors that we emit form birth.
2) What are three aspects of the topic you want to talk about for this assignment?
I would like to explain the difference between innate and leaned behaviors in humans. I would like to cover proof of innate behaviors in humans. Lastly I would like to speculate as to why these behaviors developed and became innate.
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 definition of an innate behavior is a behavior performed correctly the first time the subject is presented with the stimulus and is not developed though learning. A genetic behavior that is coded into our DNA to help us survive. Learned behavior on the other hand is most other behavior that we learn by various methods throughout our lives. These can be learned by trial and error or by direct learning from another individual teaching it. Most of the innate behaviors are things like reflexes and the like and are shared by many other animals or could be segregated into a certain section of an animal family.
Some examples of innate behaviors that have been observed are the blinking reflex, yawning, mammalian diving reflex, the swimming reflex, and the tickle response. The blinking reflex is shared by most of the animal world and is the behavior of closing the eye in response to a stimulus like a light shone in the eye. Yawning is seen in many mammalian species and much is unknown about the purpose of this behavior but it still occurs without learning. The mammalian diving reflex occurs when you are placed in water that is less than 70 degrees and only when the face is submerged. This reflex is theorized to help us survive being submerged suddenly in water. It lowers the heart rate and increases the blood oxygen levels to help survive without oxygen longer. The swimming response is seen when a baby is paced in water, they emit a behavior of paddling the arms and legs to keep the head above water. Lastly the tickle response. This has two different forms the first is shared by many animals and is caused by light touch. This is theorized to help bring awareness to insects or small animals on the skin that could be harmful. The second is called gargalesis and is the deep tickle that elicits laughter. This is only seen in humans and great apes and is associated with play and social interaction. All of these behaviors are performed the correct way the first time they are elicited by a stimulus. This means they must be encoded into our genetic structure if a newborn can emit these behaviors immediately.
I believe these behaviors are a function of evolution. These are all behaviors that have a protective or developmental function that help us. I believe these behaviors are things that have been necessary for our survival for so long that they have been encoded into our DNA as a way to help us survive from when we are born. After we are born then learned behaviors take over and some of these are suppressed like the swimming response as we learn a more efficient way to learn but others are too integral to our existence such as blinking and tickle reflex that they are not able to be overcome.
3) At the end, please include working URLs for the three websites.
http://listverse.com/2012/01/28/top-10-human-reflexes-and-natural-instincts/
https://www.khanacademy.org/test-prep/mcat/behavior/learning-slug/v/operant-conditioning-innate-vs-learned-behaviors
http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2014/03/07/is-human-behavior-genetic-or-learned/
Terms/ behavior, innate, learned, emit, elicit

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.
This week I chose to look into experimental neurosis. I chose this because it interests me and it has been mentioned not only in this chapter but in previous ones as well. I was interested to see how Pavlov came across this finding and I wanted to look more into it.

2) What are three aspects of the topic you want to talk about for this assignment?
The three aspects that I would like to discuss are telling the readers what experimental neurosis is, how can it be brought about, and if it is possible to reverse the effects of it.

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.
To start off we need to know what experimental neurosis is. By definition it is a behavior disorder produced experimentally, as when an organism is required to make a discrimination of extreme difficulty and “breaks down” in the process. The second thing we need to know is how experimental neurosis can be caused. Pavlov discovered this when he was working with dogs. During his conditioning experiment he noticed that some of the dogs acted insane and would rip at their collars while others would become docile and emit almost no behaviors at all. He assigned the different dogs into categories of excitatory and inhibitory behavior. So he began a new procedure where he classically conditioned dogs to discriminate between a square and a circle, knowing that one would bring food while the other wouldn’t. Throughout the experiment he made it more difficult for the dogs to discriminate between the two shapes and eventually they didn’t know how to respond, to salivate or not. As a result some dogs became aggressive while others showed learned helplessness and did nothing. The pressure of having to discriminate between two things, and having them become increasingly more difficult causes neurosis or mental disturbance. Me being myself, I was worried for the dogs that became mentally disturbed because they were unable to discriminate between two objects and were not sure on how to react. I wanted to know if there was a way to return the animal back to its normal self. The first way to help solve it would be to give the animal a break from the testing, the problem however is that if the animal endured high amounts of tests in shorter amounts of time the damage would be much worse. Sometimes the animals would need only a months time to recuperate while others would need years before they returned back to their normal selves. The only known way that was discovered to reverse the effects of experimental neurosis was to drastically condition the animal. The researchers had to retrain the dogs how to discriminate between the two by slowly making it easier to discriminate between the two. I don’t agree with experimental neurosis because it causes a mental disturbance on purpose and it can be very difficult to reverse.

Terms: experimental neurosis, emit, excitatory, inhibitory, classical conditioning, learned helplessness

http://www.medilexicon.com/medicaldictionary.php?t=60269
http://www.intropsych.com/ch05_conditioning/release_from_habituation.html
https://books.google.com/books?id=FT4rAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA77&lpg=PA77&dq=experimental+neurosis+solutions&source=bl&ots=F6M2ykA4Lp&sig=FjREbnw7DbAxZkBX6ZCXq5NDhcY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCIQ6AEwAGoVChMIl_nbkJjDyAIVzKUeCh1V9Qsj#v=onepage&q=experimental%20neurosis%20solutions&f=false

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 would like to discuss this week is the idea of getting over a phobia. The reason this fits into the section is because in Mary Cover Jone’s study she looks to see if a phobia can be desensitized and removed. I am interested in this topic because I find working to get over phobias interesting and psychology disorders are a point of interest in my schooling.

2) What are three aspects of the topic you want to talk about for this assignment?
The three aspects of the topic I would like to talk about are Mary Cover Jone’s study, what the difference between a fear and a phobia is, and how someone can develop a phobia.

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.
In 1920, the Little Albert Study conducted by John Watson. Before the study was done, the only known it was believed that you were born with phobias. While there were many ideas and theories that phobias could be learned but it was yet to be proven. John Watson found that partnering a loud noise with the white rabbit would eventually cause Albert to fear the rabbit expecting a loud noise to come with it. Watson determined this a creating a fear and it was learned that phobias could be taught. The study was controversial but informative. It wasn’t until four years later that a study was done to see if someone could unlearn a phobia. Mary Cover Jone’s was the one who decided to test this using behavior modification. Jone’s took a child named Peter, a two year old with a fear of fur. The same phobia that was learned in the experiment on Little Albert. Because Peter seemed to be a lot like Albert he was a great candidate for Jone’s study. Peter was classified with having a phobia rather than a fear because of the criteria he met. Peter’s phobia caused him an impairment by not being able to be by fur, it was of a specific object, he had to endure high stress as seen by him falling over in a paroxysm of fear, it was excessive, he had an intense immediate response, and it lasted for a long period of time. Jone’s worked with Peter by using desensitization. She was the first to use the desensitization method. To do this, she introduced Peter to an area where his attention was occupied by the toys around him. By giving Peter candy while presented with the white animal, he was able to use the unconditioned stimulus to calm himself down and eventually be able to be fine with being near a white animal. He even was able to touch a white rabbit. In the study, it was not known how Peter developed his fear of things with white fur. Different phobias can come from different things and some people are more vulnerable to developing one coming from biological and psychological factors. Genes are said to have a large role in the development of a phobia but there is no one specific gene said to cause it. After Jone’s study, we can now say there are environmental factors that cause phobias like traumatic events. There is a 12% chance a person will have a specific phobia while fears are very common and almost seen in everyone. At the time, Mary Cover Jone’s study was not seen as a very important study. Many people saw little to no psychological information behind it. It wasn’t until the 1970s when some of the research resurfaced that people started using it. After that, she was known as the Mother of Behavioral Therapy.

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

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/roger-covin/phobia-and-fear_b_1596640.html

http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Jones/

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-do-we-develop-certain-irrationa/

terms-
systematic desensitization, phobia, fear, behavioral therapy, behavior modification, Mary Cover Jones, John Watson, Little Albert, Little Peter

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 chose to write on this week is systematic desensitization. The reason I chose this topic is because it is interesting to learn about how a fear or phobia can be removed from someone showing that fears are learned and not from our nature. I also am interested to see various clinical aspects of this topic.

2) What are three aspects of the topic you want to talk about for this assignment?
Three aspects of systematic desensitization I would like to discuss are how it works in relation to reinforcement and punishment, various aspects it can be used for, and lastly unique variations of this technique. These may not have much overlap within the synthesized section, but I wanted a varied view on this to get a better handle on it, and thus what follows is more choppy.

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.

Systematic desensitization is a therapeutic technique that deals with behaviors, namely phobias. It was originally based around the idea of classical conditioning, and expanded into its own unique technique. It is done by first building a hierarchy of fears that are involved around the certain phobia. Next the therapist will teach multiple calming techniques to the person to use in their everyday life. The final step to this process is combining the first two, the client progresses through the pyramid of fear using the calming techniques that they have been taught. So for a real example, let’s say a person has a fear of fire. They would build the hierarchy of fear, the starting point, that is the least fearsome, would probably be a match on fire. The step up may be a lighter, and this would progress up until something like a raging wildfire. The calming techniques could range from breathing, meditation, muscle meditation and others. So the combination of the two first steps would be the person seeing a match, and probably tensing up. With the relaxation he would practice this until he did not tense up and wouldn’t become anxious anymore seeing a lit match. Once this process was done, he would move up the pyramid. There are also two forms of systematic desensitization, in vitro, and in vivo. In vitro is simply imaging exposure to the stimuli that creates the fear, in vivo is the opposite and the person actually is physically engaged with the stimuli.

The next point on systematic desensitization is that it has comparable points to reinforcement and punishment; however they can both be very different from one another. Positive reinforcement involves the use of a reinforcer to create a desired behavior among people. These reinforcers are also usable when they are paired with phobias. In one such study the comparison to the affectability of desensitization and reinforcement was compared. Each did the job and the person was able to remove the anxiety away from a phobia, however the end results were a little more convincing in reinforcers in this case. The reinforcement group was able to “complete” the process in fewer sessions; however the end result was around the same amount of anxiety that was present. Both behavior techniques are well working when it comes to getting rid of a fear, it may come down to preference and that systematic desensitization comes at a slower rate due to building the hierarchical pyramids.

The final point that is interesting to me is systematic desensitization also has had some unique procedures done in the past. The one that stood out to me was an insomniac woman. The woman would not sleep, and unlike most cases of the documented use of systematic desensitization, this did not apparently seem to be from a fear or phobia that caused anxiety, but from thoughts. She stressed about three things, and these thoughts kept her in a cycle of awakenness instead of sleeping. Systematic desensitization was chosen because of the many techniques available for relaxation, and because of these eventually the woman was able to sleep. The relaxation techniques are fairly universal among therapists and do not vary much as opposed to other forms of therapy like psychotherapy. It also was interesting that she stopped the session after 9, not the therapist, whereas most sessions to complete the process and rid yourself of the deep fear anxiety, or insomnia in this instance, takes 12 or even more sessions.

Overall, systematic desensitization is used for many problems, even ones that may not inherently need them. It is an interesting topic and has many uses as aforementioned, even with odd anxiety issues.

3) At the end, please include working URLs for the three websites.
http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=fulltext.journal&jcode=cou&vol=21&issue=6&page=464&format=PDF
http://www.simplypsychology.org/Systematic-Desensitisation.html
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.409.2282&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Terms Used: Systematic desensitization, reinforcement, punishment, positive reinforcement, behaviors, hierarchy of fear, in vitro, in vivo, stimuli, reinforcer, psychotherapy, classical conditioning

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.

- What I want to talk about is systematic desensitization and this relates to the section we just read. It was explained in section 3.4 because it related to Watson’s experiment of Little Albert. He didn’t have the opportunity to desensitize Albert of his fear of anything furry. Everyone eventually develops a fear of something, a phobia, and it can be quite hindering to someone’s life. There are techniques that therapists use to help clients reduce their anxieties. It is a process and that process is called systematic desensitization. I’m interested in this topic because I find phobias really intriguing. I want to know why and how we develop them and how to eliminate the phobia. I believe it would be beneficial to have knowledge on this topic for my own life. In fact, I’ve done a little bit of this process in my own therapy sessions in the past. And I can vouch that it does work and can work relatively quickly.

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

- The three aspects I’d like to cover are 1) why we have phobias, 2) how does systematic desensitization help, and 3) to explain my own phobia, insects, and how this process could potentially help me.

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 have a fight or flight response during situations that put us in distress. This response gives us the change to act quickly against the threats to protect ourselves. But humans can have a maladaptive response to certain situations with irrational fear. Researchers say that genetics and your environment are the main factors for the phobias to develop. A specific gene has not been placed as the “phobia gene” but our genes are the reason for psychological disorders; phobias are a type of disorder. People usually say that something traumatic happened to them and that’s why they fear, in my case, insects. The person can experience the event themselves or watch the traumatic event happen. Both can trigger the fear instinct and become irrational. This is when systematic desensitization can help that person overcome their excessive fear. Wolpe developed this behavioral therapy and explained that there are three phases to the treatment. Step one is to create a list from least to most anxiety provoking in regards to the phobia. Researchers and therapist called this list the anxiety hierarchy. The next step is to teach the client relaxation techniques to use when approaching the anxiety. We want the client to be very calm and relaxed so that the fear isn’t so jarring. After that we want to apply the relaxation techniques to the list the client had made. Once the first situation doesn’t elicit fear, we continue to move up the list to the top where the most anxiety is prevalent. This therapy process typically takes 4-6 sessions but it can be more if the phobia is severe. The more severe and hindering the phobia, the more sessions and work it will take to eliminate it. There are two types of exposure that can be done during the process. In vitro is when the client imagines being exposed to the conditioned stimulus. This would involve the steps I briefly explained except we would apply the techniques to the client’s thoughts. The other is in vivo, which means to actually expose the client to the phobia. This would involve doing the steps I explained but actually presenting the fear face to face. An example of this process would be this: 1) look at pictures of a dog, 2) watch videos of dogs, 3) see a dog through a window, 4) stand 10 feet from the dog, 5) stand next to the dog, 6) pet a small dog that is being held, 7) pet a big dog on a leash, and 8) pet a big dog without the leash. This process has successfully helped me with my fear of confrontation and standing up for myself. But I want to explain my phobia of insects. People tend to be amazing when I tell them I hate every single type of bug even butterflies. I think they’re disgusting and just should not exist. They’re not cute like animals and a majority of them can fly, which adds to the horribleness. At first I always thought bugs were gross and creepy, but they didn’t really bother me. Until I went to an aquarium when we were visiting family in Tennessee. I was busy looking at fish and shells when my dad told me to follow him to this big room (we were following a path through the whole aquarium). When we walked in, my chest tightened and my heart stopped. The room was massive and was completely packed with butterflies and moths. Even typing this and having to remember this is making me feel gross and want to stop. Everywhere I looked there was a huge butterfly or moth. Then I remember looking up at the window and there was a moth with its wings all sprawled out. This thing was seriously the biggest moth I’ve seen and I’ve never forgotten about it. After several years I’ve realized that the room and bugs probably wasn’t the big and the amount of bugs was probably maximized in my head. I can’t stand bugs and I don’t even care if butterflies are “pretty”. The thought of one touching me or being next to me raises anxiety. Systematic desensitization could teach me relaxation techniques to use when I’m near insects. I could make an anxiety hierarchy and gradually go through the list. I would highly prefer to use in vitro exposure for this phobia because I really don’t think I could handle having them next to me right away. Keep in mind, I will leave a room if I see a bug and if I can’t leave, it’s the only thing I’m obsessively thinking about. Over time I could overcome my irrational fear and be able to walk around without having a slight anxiety of an insect landing on me.

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

- http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-do-we-develop-certain-irrationa/
- http://www.simplypsychology.org/Systematic-Desensitisation.html
- http://www.guidetopsychology.com/sysden.htm

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

- Systematic desensitization, Watson, Little Albert, phobia, response, maladaptive, irrational, Wolpe, behavioral therapy, anxiety hierarchy, relaxation techniques, elicit, in vitro, in vivo, conditioned stimulus

This week I decided to do more research on different types of phobias. The first thing I searched was “Strange Phobia’s” so I could find one to go into detail about, and let me say, there are many slightly hilarious ones. Some examples range from fear of bathing, walking, wind, flowers, food, waves, chins, colors, and teenagers. Those are just a handful out of hundreds. I wanted to look into 1) what is a phobia 2) what are some more common phobias and 3) the difference between a fear and phobia
A phobia is explained as something that posses little or no actual danger to a person, yet they have an irrational fear of it. Often there is no evidence to reinforce the fear besides a possible traumatic event earlier in life. They experience automatic and overwhelming terror that can lead to anxiety attacks and other irrational actions. Often the person has difficulty breathing, chest tightness, shaking, sweating, feeling a loss of control, and feeling like you’re about to pass out.
For many people with intense phobias, they will drastically change their lifestyle to avoid their trigger. Most people have regular fears, especially children. Babies are scared of strangers and loud noises. Little kids are scared of monsters or the dark, and some adults are scared of spiders of heights but there is a big difference between fears and phobias.
Fear is a natural response that we have to keep ourselves out of danger. Someone that experiences fear when faced with a snarling bear, or a room full of bees when you’re allergic are rational fears because your body is in the “fight or flight” mode. One may have a fear of heights and choose not to look out the window on the 30th floor of a building because it makes them feel sick, but when that person chooses altogether to not even go up to the 30th floor because they know they’re high up, and have a irrational feeling of panic because of the off chance they could still somehow fall off the building is when it becomes a phobia. Another example would be getting nervous when you see a pit bull because you know they could potentially be dangerous versus avoiding a park altogether because you might see a dog, which will send yourself into a full panic.
The four general types of phobias are animal phobias, natural environment, situational and blood injection or injury phobias. Common ones include fears of snakes, spiders, heights, public speaking, germs, storms and death. Often the best form of therapy is exposure therapy. By slowly interacting with the fear, like starting out by looking at pictures, then a video, and so on until you can become more comfortable with it, people slowly and calmly become less anxious by it. Approximately 4-5% of the US population has one or multiple clinically significant phobias. The average age of onset for social phobia is between 15 and 20 years old.

http://www.helpguide.org/articles/anxiety/phobias-and-fears.htm
http://psychcentral.com/lib/facts-about-phobias/
http://www.statisticbrain.com/fear-phobia-statistics/

Terms: Behavior, Phobia, Reinforce, Trigger, Fear

1.) The topic I chose for this topical blog post is systematic desensitization. The topic of systematic desensitization fits into what we have covered in class so far because section 3.4 talks about systematic desensitization which stems from the idea of classical conditioning. We have talked about classical conditioning in multiple sections previously, and the idea of systematic desensitization deals with trying to overcome previous conditioned stimuli and responses. This topic stuck out to me because I think systematic desensitization is something that many people could use in their lives. I can think in my life alone, not regarding anyone else's, several examples where I could use this to help me get over certain phobias and anxieties. If I learned how to utilize this in my life it would be very advantageous to my future.
For instance, I get very anxious when it comes to talking to people I do not know. If I learned how to use systematic desensitization I could overcome the fear, and it could help me in many different areas of my life. It would help me talk to professors which could lead to certain opportunities, I would be less nervous to apply for jobs which would help me out in obtaining a job, and I know as I get older it will be necessary for me to be able to talk to people if I want to get anything accomplished. On top of this, I have many other anxieties and phobias that systematic desensitization could help me with: fear of worms, anxiety about driving, etc. My future dream job is to become a mental health counselor, so this would be helpful in helping clients' getting over their fears. These are a few reasons why I was interested in learning more about systematic desensitization to help change my behaviors, and the behaviors of others.
2) a) The three aspects of systematic desensitization that I am going to cover for this assignment are: what exactly is systematic desensitization, what different techniques you can perform to ensure that systematic desensitization will work, and when are times a person should use systematic desensitization.
2) b) Systematic desensitization is a method to help people deal with phobias, lesser fears, anxieties, and to help produce overall relaxation. This method is based off of the idea of classical conditioning. The purpose of this method it to try and eradicate these conditioned responses to conditioned fear stimuli, so they will not elicit the fear driven behaviors anymore. There are three steps a person must do for systematic desensitization to take effect. The first step is that the person must identify what their fears are, and once they have done this they need to rank their fears from lowest to highest. (Lowest being what they are the least afraid of, and highest being what they are the most afraid of.) Once they have done this the next steep is that the person learns specific relaxation techniques to help calm them. These relaxation techniques include learning how to take control over their breathing, how to create tension in their muscles, and then relax them. Once a person identifies what their fears are, and they have learned the relaxation techniques they will put the two things together. There are two different ways a person can be exposed to their phobias/anxieties: In vitro and In vivo. In vitro is where the person is told to imagine themselves in a situation where they are expose to the stimulus that causes them fear. In vivo is where the person is literally put into the situation where they encounter the stimulus that causes them fear. The person will start with what they are the least afraid of, and use the relaxation techniques they learned. Once they feel comfortable with that they move on to the next scariest thing. The person will know when systematic desensitization has been effective because when they are met with whatever they were afraid of it will no longer cause any anxiety. The amount of times it takes for a person to deal with their fears is subject to the person, but on average it would take a person five times to get over a fear. However, for a very severe fear is could take up to twelve sessions! Although, it has been shown that systematic desensitization may not be effective in helping fears that have a survival advantage, or if they fear has developed from skill deficits. An example where a person could use systematic desensitization is if they have a big fear of spiders. They would first think of the least scary thing they can think of when it comes to a spider, perhaps seeing a picture of one. The highest fear may be a spider crawling on the person. The person would then learn the relaxation techniques, so they do not emit their usual behaviors. The person would then work through their fear of spiders using the relaxation techniques until spiders no longer caused them any anxiety. (Whether it be from looking at a picture of one, seeing a real one of a wall, or having a spider touch them.)
http://www.simplypsychology.org/Systematic-Desensitisation.html
http://www.guidetopsychology.com/sysden.htm
http://www.minddisorders.com/Py-Z/Systematic-desensitization.html
Terms: systematic desensitization, classical conditioning, conditioned stimulus, conditioned response, elicit, behaviors. In vitro, In vivo, 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.

For this week’s blog i chose to research Ivan Pavlov. Ivan Pavlov fits into this section because he is the father of classical conditioning and that is what we learned about in section 3.3. I learned a lot of interesting information about Pavlov after my research. I was interested in this topic because i would like to learn more about this man.

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

The three aspects of this topic i will be talking about is his personal history, classical conditioning and how his findings helped advance the field of behavioral psychology.

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 topic i chose to write about is the great physiologist Ivan Pavlov. The Russian scientist Pavlov was mostly known for his contribution to the field of clinical psychology but was actually a physiologist, someone who studies the body. Ivan was born into a very religious family, his father was a priest and mother was illiterate who also suffered from a nervous disorder possibly foreshadowing his wonderful career in psychology/physiology. As a child Pavlov was alway interested in learning, however due to a tragic childhood injury he didn’t undergo schooling until he was 11 years old. Before he could graduate from his seminary he left in 1870 to attend the university at St. Petersburg where he enrolled in math and physics courses. After graduating Ivan became a professor at the Imperial Military-Medical Academy in St. Petersburg, where he did research on the digestive process on dogs. This research led to a Nobel Prize in 1904. Ivan Pavlov was an excellent researcher and laid the foundation for clinical psychology and behavioral modification.

Classical conditioning, the learning process of continuously pairing two stimuli, was created by Pavlov and his study on the digestive tract, when his dogs started to salivate before they were presented with food Pavlov became intrigued. Due to his medical experience he was able to direct the salivation secreted by the dogs into tubes for measuring, data collecting and analysis. At first he called this phenomena "psychic secretion". Pavlov would research this and call it the conditioned reflex. The dogs had associated the sound of the scientists footsteps with food. they had learned through association, the basis of all learning. Pretty soon he discovered that behaviors are learned through association, again the dogs had associated the footsteps with food. This was a SR situation, there was a stimulus then a response. The process of classical conditioning is completed through conditioned stimulus/response and unconditioned stimulus/response. In Pavlov’s scenario the dogs associated the sound of the bell with food. The dogs were conditioned to salivate when they heard the bell. The salivation was a conditioned response because it had to be learned, the bell was a conditioned stimulus because it had to learn that the bell was significant in the process of getting food.

Behavioral therapy was also affected by classical conditioning. Classical conditioning can be responsible for creating phobias, an extreme fear or feeling of aversiveness. Behavioral therapies that can help are, systematic desensitization, aversive therapy and flooding. Ivan Pavlov was a self proclaimed physiologist, however he made incredible discoveries when it came to psychology. Aversion was a popular topic in the class, specifically taste aversion. It appears that everyone has some kind of taste aversion, some stranger than others.

3) At the end, please include working URLs for the three websites.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Pavlov
http://www.simplypsychology.org/classical-conditioning.html
http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesofmajorthinkers/p/pavlov.htm

Terms-
Behavior, aversion, emit, taste aversion, classical conditioning, systematic desensitization, flooding, extinct, learning through association, conditioned stimulus, conditioned response, unconditioned response, unconditioned 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.
The topic that I chose to write about it is systematic desensitization. Systematic desensitization is a topic mentioned in section 3.4. It is first mentioned in the part about the Mary Cover Jones’s Study. I chose this topic because I am interested in learning about ways to help people overcome their fears and anxieties. How to do this, I think, is an important thing to know if you ever see yourself interacting with children or in a clinical setting.
2) What are three aspects of the topic you want to talk about for this assignment?
In this assignment, I would like to go over first, what exactly systematic desensitization is, then talk about the Mary Cover Jones Study, and finally, I would like talk about how a person would use systematic desensitization in their real life.
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.
Systematic desensitization refers to a type of behavioral therapy. The principal of this type of therapy is based on classical conditioning. The main goal of systematic desensitization is to help whoever it is being used on to overcome a phobia or anxiety that they have. Typically, the phobia that the person has is so intense that it makes it so the person is not able to do certain necessary things in their life. The fear that the person feels is a response to a stimuli, or the thing that they have a phobia of. The therapy involves substituting a response that is relaxing after encountering the conditioned stimulus. An example of this is the Mary Cover Jones’s Study. Mary Cover Jones was the first person to conduct this type of study. Previously, no one knew if this type of behavior modification could be done. The subject of the study’s name was Peter. In the experiment, Jones presented Peter with a white rabbit, which was frightening for him. When Jones did this, she would try to find ways that would reduce the amount of fear that Peter was feeling when coming in contact with the white rabbit. The procedure that had the most successful results was what is called “direct conditioning”. Jones would present food, which was a pleasant stimulus, when also presenting the white rabbit at the same time as the food. In the procedure, the rabbit was brought closer and closer to Peter, each time with the addition of food. By the end of the experiment, Peter was able to feel the rabbit without being afraid. Jones had used systematic desensitization to eliminate Peter’s fear of the rabbit. Many people have phobias that sometimes make living their everyday life a challenge. A way to help them overcome these fears is with the use of systematic desensitization. There are three steps in completing this type of behavioral therapy. First, it is important to know different types of relaxation techniques. These differ from person to person. Personally, I’m a stress eater so eating makes me feel good, much like Peter. Another common thing that typically relaxes people is listening to music. Anything that makes the person feel good and relaxed. The next step is to create a hierarchy of how anxiety inducing parts of the behavior is. Using the fear of flying on an airplane as an example, some part of the list could be buying the ticket, boarding the plane, taking off, turbulence, and moving throughout the cabin. After making the list and giving a number to the amount of anxiety that they feel, the person with the phobia should then begin introducing themself to both a part on the hierarchy and to the relaxation method. When doing this the person should never overwhelm themself with trying to work on too many parts on the list. Starting from the bottom and working to the top, the person completing this type of therapy should become more relaxed on on each part of the list until the phobia has completely been diminished.
3) At the end, please include working URLs for the three websites.
http://www.simplypsychology.org/Systematic-Desensitisation.html
http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Jones/intro.htm
http://www.guidetopsychology.com/sysden.htm
http://web.csulb.edu/~tstevens/Desensit.htm#The Transfer of Therapeutic Effects to Real-Life Situations

Once you are done with your post make list of the terms and terminology you used in your post.
Mary Cover Jones’s Study, Systematic Desensitization, Classical Conditioning, Behavioral Therapy, Response, Stimuli, Conditioned, Direct Conditioning, Phobia, Hierarchy

BMOD
TB 8
1) Little Albert. This study ties into what we have learned about classical conditioning. In the sections for the Reading Activity we learned about classical conditioning and the connection to Pavlov. Watson was a expansion or advanced study on Pavlov’s classical conditioning on animals. This study differs in that it is an experiment on the human. I like this in that it separates the continuum theory that all mammals can be studied alike. This study however is greatly criticized for its unethical attitude and application of the study. I believe that there is an unethical dilemma about this study, more importantly because it is with a fragile stage of the child that the study was done with.
2) Child Selection. Study illustrations. And Moral Questioning.
3) Child selection.
When we look into child selection we look into what the study objectivities are. The study calls for a child to be classically conditioned into fear of an object that it was not afraid of. Along with this objective was the objective to show that a child’s elicited behavior of an object that was of close subjectivity was connected to the conditioned response of the initial object. This shows the experimental neurosis connection of the study. What the child needs to be then is healthy to show a represented population of the rest or normal children. Next the child needs to be remotely not afraid of many objects so that the study has merit behind it, being that the study showed what it did because of the primary reinforcer and not a secondary one. Basically this is what will give the study validity. And finally the child must be able to show emotion to a given object, if we aren’t clear of the startled nature of the child then we can’t determine that the child was afraid or that the child doesn’t show that it enjoys a stimulus
Study Illustrations
What does this study illustrate? This study shows the classical conditioning that Pavlov coined. This study however is done on a human which takes away from argument that humans and animals are on the same time continuum. What we can see from this study is that classical conditioning follows the same pattern that is does for animals as well as humans, at least the adolescent humans. This study demonstrates a greater understanding of how infants may get scared of objects that may not seem scary at all. This association was presented. What we failed to see however was the dissociation process. We don’t see the full spectrum. This is because of the terminated study, or at least this was the excuse that was used. Whichever the case was we can see that the study shows illustrations that can contribute to other studies but still leaves quite a few questions out there.
Moral Questioning
The biggest concern that was seen was the harm of a child. We are not certain how long the associated fear lasted and we are not sure what phobias could have been created from this study. The other question that might be asked is why choose fear. Fear is an aversive, by nature, stimulus why would Watson chose fear as his stimulus. My concern is that of the harm of the child more than anything. There is also a question about the formed consent for the study. A few observers questioned whether or not the parents were in the room and if they were notified of the intentions that Watson had for his child. What this study shows is that conditioning can happen but is that enough for people to agree that the study should have been done. I ask myself if I was in Watson’s shoes how I would change the study to get the same result. I don’t think there is a way to portray fear in a way that people would consider it an empirical study. I would just simply eliminate the study in hindsight and start anew. More along the lines of systematic desensitization.

4) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hBfnXACsOI
This is the video analysis of the Little Albert study from beginning to the termination of the study/experiment. Here we can clearly see a video of Albert and his reactions with animals both before and after the stimulus is presented.
http://psychology.about.com/od/classicalconditioning/a/sad-tale-of-little-albert.htm
This web source gives information about Little Albert. The experiment and the search to find the Little Albert for the experiment. The source then follows to show the biography of James Watson. After the biography they show the classical conditioning model and how it works. What I like about this web source is that it points out the UR US CR and CS of the study.
http://psychologized.org/the-little-albert-experiment/
I chose this web source because I wanted to get away from the propaganda that other sites presented about Watson choosing a child that was not healthy. I feel that this is a more represented site that discusses what happened and why what Watson conducted would be unethical. The site tells us the basics of unethical studies and exactly why this study should be unethical, without bringing up theories of Watson’s ‘secondary’ objective.
Terminology: John Watson, Classical Conditioning, elicit, Pavlov, UR, CR, US, CS, Ethical, stimulus, experimental Neurosis, systematic desensitization

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 topical post I investigated the topic of discrimination training. I wanted to learn more than the basics that were discussed in Section 3.3: Classical Conditioning. I was curious if there were different types of discrimination training and how popular each of these extended methods are when applied. It fits into the section we have covered so far because it falls under the umbrella topic of classical conditioning. I want to know if the concepts can be applied to human trials or if it is exclusively for animal training.
2) What are three aspects of the topic you want to talk about for this assignment?
One of the first things I would like to talk about for this assignment is the definition and purpose of discrimination training. I would also like to discuss criticisms surrounding discrimination training. Finally, I would like to discuss a prominent researcher (or researchers) in this area. Discrimination training in psychology is the ability to observe distinctions between two or more stimuli. In the third link I found that discrimination is a step up from generalization; it is the next step up. Examples of discrimination training can include a researcher training an animal to differentiate between colors, or shapes, or objects. To discriminate is to tell two objects apart. To incorporate training in to discrimination, one object is reinforced. The organism will be influenced by this reinforcement and will learn the difference between the two objects. In my first link, I discovered that discrimination training is separate from discrimination conditioning because in training, the two objects (or stimuli), are presented at the same moment. This allows for the organism to choose one object over the other. In theory, the organism should pick the object that was reinforced. Discrimination training typically includes a learning set. A learning set occurs when an organism is exposed to such a great number of discrimination trials that the time in which the distinction occurs gets better and better. This concept reminds me of what B.F. Skinner did with his puzzle box experiments with learning and cats (except for the fact that he used operant conditioning and discrimination learning is classical conditioning; I just wanted to make that distinction before I moved on). He created a chart that visually showed that as the number of trials increased, the time it took the cats to escape decreased. This was evidence enough for B.F. Skinner that the cats had experienced learning through repeated experiences. Organisms, using classical or operant conditioning, probably updated their existing schema when experiencing the repetitive trials.
One criticism of the discrimination training method is that a level that is above the organism’s ability level can harm the experiment. For example, if a learner experiences too much difficulty too early in the trials, it can prevent them from learning a category’s specific characteristics (Link 2).
It was difficult to find a specific researcher related to discrimination training (who was NOT Pavlov). When I conducted my research I could not find one specific researcher. I will discuss a trend that I noticed when I changed my search terms for discrimination training. Much of the material was related to education. Specifically, the material referenced beginning education with this type of training before moving on to move advanced learning techniques (Link 4). The article I found mentioned a man named Sidney W. Bijou who was a prominent behavior analyst and child development researcher (who I discovered earned a PhD from the University of Iowa!). He felt that shaping behaviors of children was key before motor skills training were tried.

Terms: discrimination training, conditioning, animal training, education, discrimination training versus generalization, reinforcement, stimuli, learning set, trials, schema, Ivan Pavlov, B.F. Skinner, Sidney W. Bijou

Link 1: http://www.unm.edu/~quadl/Principles/PrZ-Discrimination_Learning
I used this link to offer further explanations on what discrimination training is compared to other types of discrimination. I feel that it is important to make a distinction so that there is not confusion if the two concepts are ever discussed in-depth.
Link 2: http://sites.williams.edu/nk2/files/2011/08/Kornell.InPressC.pdf
I used this link to provide criticisms of discrimination training. I only found one to two methods describing criticisms of this type of training.
Link 3: http://www.britannica.com/topic/discrimination-psychology
I used this link to define discrimination training in psychology. I wanted to have a thorough understanding of the term before I discussed issues, themes, and examples.
Link 4: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2859799/
I used this link to search for researchers who contributed a great deal to discrimination training among other techniques. I discovered Sidney W. Bijou who earned a doctorate in psychology from the University of Iowa.

1). I chose to research Phobias and systematic desensitization. I picked this topic because phobias are very interesting to me. Learning about phobias and systematic desensitization was one of my favorite parts in the sections that we covered in these weeks’ readings. I think it is interesting what people are scared of how they treat it. There are a lot of crazy phobias out there and I think they are very interesting. I also think systematic desensitization is the best treatment option when working with a client with a phobia because it is gradual and shows promising results without actually being near the phobia at the time or gradually being exposed to the stimulus.

2). I want to talk about phobias first. Then I will be talking about specific phobias. Finally I will be talking about systematic desensitization.

3). Phobias are a fear of a situation, object, or thing. The fear is completely irrational and the person with the fear understands that. Phobias are a form of an anxiety disorder and they cause extreme anxiety in the person’s life. The fear actually poses minimal real danger. Phobias can conflict with daily life and restrict a person’s life in many, many ways. There are different types of phobias. Social phobias are the fears of social situations such as public places, eating in public, and populated areas. Specific phobias are the fear of one thing, such as the fear of snakes. Agoraphobia is the fear of open spaces, such as, big crowds, public transportation, big spaces, etc. The most common symptoms of social phobias are avoidance of the situations, shyness, and excesses self-consciousness. Causes of phobias are unknown but they could be caused by genetics and may be caused by a bad experience in a person’s life. Specific phobias are the fear of a specific thing. Some specific phobias are the fear of heights, fear of spiders, fear of clowns, fear of shots. They are commonly focused on animals, insects, germs, etc. Although the causes are unknown there are a few treatment options, flooding, exposure therapy, and in severe cases, medication. The one type of treatment that interests me the most is systematic desensitization. Systematic Desensitization is a form of behavioral therapy. The goal of systematic desensitization is to slowly and gradually remove the fear response when exposed to the phobia. This form of therapy was founded and developed in the 1950’s. This therapy provides the client with relaxation techniques, gradual exposure and slow imaginative exposure. The goal is to show them that the fear is unrealistic and it’s really not dangerous. To get the client past the point of anxiety and show them that if you just relax it will all work out. The client either has therapy sessions in the office with imagined situations or out in the field actually being exposed to stimulus gradually and with many therapy session’s. The main downfall to systematic desensitization is that it relies on the client’s ability to vividly imagine the situation in which the phobia is present. This process is slow and takes a lot of time and effort but it is proven to be very successful and effective when the problem is a phobia.

4). http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/phobias/basics/definition/con-20023478
I used this website and clicked through the symptoms and causes at the bottom and used those as well.

http://www.adaa.org/understanding-anxiety/specific-phobias

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

1) The topic I chose for this week’s topical blog is the experiment on Little Albert study by psychologist John Watson and how his contributions added to psychology. This relates to the sections that we read because one of the chapters mentioned Little Albert and what the experiment provided to psychology. The reason why I chose this topic is because I had learned a little bit about the Little Albert experiments in my high school psychology class, but we didn’t really go that much into detail on him. I think that the experiment is really interesting but there is also much to discuss about it.

2) The three aspects I am going to talk about for this blog are the basics of the Little Albert experiment and what it hoped to achieve, Watson’s addition onto what Pavlov had already observed, and some of the ethical issues that were brought up regarding the experiment. These all relate to each other and shows how we learn from the past and add onto what we already know. All three are relevant to understanding how conditioning works, how psychology has come a long way, and in turn how it adds to why we study history

3) The Little Albert experiment was an addition onto the knowledge that was previously discovered by Ivan Pavlov about conditioning. More specifically, it was called classical conditioning, where an unconditioned stimulus was conditioned to emit a previously unconditioned response. Pavlov experimented on conditioning dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell. However, Watson was interested in taking Pavlov's research further to show that emotional reactions could be classically conditioned in people. Watson exposed the child, who was nine months old, to a series of stimuli including a white rat, a rabbit, a monkey, masks and burning newspapers and observed the boy's reactions. The boy initially showed no fear of any of the objects he was shown.The next time Albert was exposed the rat, Watson made a loud noise by hitting a metal pipe with a hammer. Naturally, the child began to cry after hearing the loud noise. After repeatedly pairing the white rat with the loud noise, Albert began to cry simply after seeing the rat.
Not only did Watson study whether the child was able to be conditioned, but whether stimulus generalization had occurred. What Watson found was that after conditioning, Albert feared not just the white rat, but a wide variety of similar white objects as well. His fear included other furry objects including Raynor's fur coat and Watson wearing a Santa Claus beard.
There are a number of ethical issues that arise when looking back on Watson’s experiment with Little Albert. The American Psychological Association (APA) has developed codes of ethics which any practicing psychologists have to adhere to. They are in short: do no harm, the right to withdraw at any time, informed consent, and confidentiality. For the rule of do no harm, psychologists have to reduce or eliminate the potential that taking part in a study may cause harm to a participant during and afterwards. But during this experiment, Little Albert was emotionally harmed and could have potentially suffered life-long harm as a result. For the participants’ right to withdraw rule, if you are involved as participant in any psychological or medical study you are given the right that you can withdraw at any stage during the study without consequence to you. Albert and his mother were given no-such rights. For the rule of informed consent, subjects have to be given as much information about the study as possible before the study begins so that they can make a decision about participating based on knowledge. If the research is such that giving information before the study may affect the outcome then an alternative is a thorough debrief at its conclusion. Neither of these conditions was satisfied by Watson’s treatment of Albert. For the rule of confidentiality, subjects who participate are able to remain anonymous when the results come out, and no one but the experimenter (and sometimes even not then) knows the names of who is involved. While the child was named Albert by Watson, his identity did not remain anonymous afterwards. It was found out what the boy’s real name was, and a follow up was tried to achieve. However, when looking for Albert and his mother again, it was discovered that Albert had died when he was six because of a buildup of fluid in his brain, which he apparently had the condition since birth. This brought about other ethical issues because it was speculated that Watson had lied about Albert being a healthy baby. His condition may have influenced his emotions and the conditioning. Either way, the experiment was not ethical at all, and there were many flaws. But this didn’t stop Watson and his findings from having an impact on the psychological community.

4) Links: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMnhyGozLyE
This link helped me see actual footage from the experiment and see personally how Little Albert reacted to the stimuluses. It showed me more about the procedures Watson used with Albert.
http://psychology.about.com/od/classicpsychologystudies/a/little-albert-experiment.htm
This link helped me understand more about the thinking behind the Little Albert experiment and why Watson originally wanted to set it up. It also gave me some information on stimulus generalization, and what eventually happened to Albert.
http://psychologized.org/the-little-albert-experiment/
This link helped me understand more about all the different ethical dilemmas and issues that happened with the Little Albert experiment.

Terms: Little Albert, John Watson, Ivan Pavlov, ethics, conditioning, emit, unconditioned stimulus, unconditioned response, stimulus generalization, emotions

The topic that I chose to write about for this week’s assignment is ASMR and Systematic desensitization. Systematic desensitization was mentioned in the second section we read for this week about psychologist John Watson. I believe that to those who experience ASMR techniques relate to systematic desensitization because the relaxing nature of ASMR when triggered could potentially assist with desensitizing those with phobias. ASMR or autonomous sensory meridian response is a phenomenon that is characterized by a tingling sensation in the scalp, neck, or other bodily regions in response to certain trigger stimuli. I personally found out about ASMR a few years ago when I was experiencing a lot of physical and emotional stress which made it difficult for me to fall asleep. Not wanting to take medication and not having time for counseling, I remembered my Personal Health and Wellness class at UNI had talked briefly about guided relaxation videos as a method for reducing stress. Through these videos I learned that what I was experiencing when I watched these videos was called ASMR, and that there is a whole ASMR sub-culture on Youtube that has been going on for years.
The three main points that I cover in the synthesis are what ASMR is and how it happens, possible scientific explanations and theories on ASMR, and prospects for ASMR in therapy and further research.
Synthesis
Autonomous sensory meridian response, auto-sensory meridian response, or ASMR all refer to feelings of tingling or numbing which can be elicited in certain individuals by a number of different sensory stimuli. If you have ever gotten chills hearing someone reading, had goosebumps when someone tapped their nails gently on a desk, or had a deeply calm feeling while hearing whispering; you may have been experiencing ASMR. While it appears that not everyone has the ability to feel ASMR, those that do report that it can be caused by a range of different audio, visual, and even olfactory stimuli. These ASMR inducing triggers are most commonly audial in nature such as often soft-spoken words, ambient or white noise, or tapping and crinkling sounds. ASMR can also be felt differently depending on the individual; some say it feels like tingles, chills, or a sense of deep relaxation even to the extent entering a “zombie-like state”. People use ASMR to help with relaxation, sleep-deprivation, mood state, physical ailments, and a wide variety of other problems.
While seemingly uncontroversial, ASMR has actually been quite a contested subject in terms of its possible causes and debated psychological and physical benefits. There are multiple theories for what causes ASMR, one neurologist even posited that ASMR may be a mild type of seizure, but it is still unclear. While the general consensus among ‘ASMArtists’ is that everyone experiences ASMR to some extent, some research on the subject has shown that there are people who do not respond with ASMR characteristics to any stimuli. However because it is unclear what exactly causes ASMR responses from a psychological or physiological sense, it is difficult to determine exactly if any of these theories are valid. Because there is little to no published research, and not even a clinically correct term for ASMR, it is obvious that this phenomenon needs to be explored in more detail. I believe that for those with ASMR, systemized desensitization could be significantly effective in terms of overcoming phobias. Because those with ASMR have the ability to feel the relaxation associated with systemized desensitization at deeper levels than those without, it is possible that this could strengthen the effect of the extinction procedures. I feel that ASMR techniques are widely applicable and after more research could also be used potentially in music therapy, anxiety management, and PTSD treatment.

Urls
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_sensory_meridian_response
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/a-whisper-then-tingles-then-87-million-youtube-views-meet-the-star-of-asmr/2014/12/12/0c85d54a-7b33-11e4-b821-503cc7efed9e_story.html
http://www.psychologicaltechniques.com/extinction-procedures/
Terms: Systematic desensitization, ASMR, phobia, John Watson, elicit, stimuli, extinction, triggers, response,

What we would like you to do is to find a topic from what we have covered in this week's readings 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 and make sure it adds to the topic).
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 topical blog, I want to talk a little more about the Little Albert experiment performed by Pavlov. I have heard of this experiment long before this class, but I am interested in learning more about it just because of how famous of an experiment it is.
2) What are three aspects of the topic you want to talk about for this assignment?
For my three aspects that I want to look further into, I want to look at more of just the basics of the experiment. I also want to look at the ethical issues of this experiment and lastly, I want to research more into the psychologist, John Watson.
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.
When researching this topic, the first thing that I looked at was the details of the Little Albert experiment. This experiment was a case study focusing on classical conditioning among humans. Prior to the start of this experiment, Watson first observed children before hypothesizing that there would be a fearful response to children hearing loud noises. Watson then wanted to use the unconditioned response to condition a child to fear a distinctive stimulus not normally feared by a child. Basically what this experiment came down to is that they wanted to condition a phobia into a child. After introducing baby Albert to the white rat he had no fear, he played with it and appeared to have no distress so Watson and other researchers started banging loud noises behind Alberts back which resulted in him crying. After several trials of this they then let the white rat out to run around with baby Albert but he immediately became distressed and cried and tried crawling away from the rat, thus eliciting a phobia. Although this research experiment is one of the more highly known experiments, there has also been a variety of ethical considerations discussed. The main reason this experiment was an issue is due to the aftermath of emotional issues little Albert may or may not have faced. Today, it wouldn’t be considered moral to put the participant’s health at risk and we wouldn’t be able to conduct this research. One thing that many of the articles I looked at really emphasized with this is that although today it wouldn’t be moral, that doesn’t take away from the study whatsoever. It still has the same conclusions. It also talked a lot about the little Albert experiment being immoral, but it also has significantly helped to advance the psychology field and proved to have very conclusive data. When looking at this chapter I also decided to look further into John B. Watson, the man that is responsible for the Little Albert experiment. Some of the interesting things that I found out about him were that he is also responsible for behaviorism and he also was the president of the American Psychological Association for a short time. One of Watson’s biggest accreditations is behaviorism. Many say that he set the stage for this as well as some aspects of conditioning. Overall, I have learned a variety of information through the research I have done today. I find it interesting that an experiment that today would be considered unethical was able to give us such a wide variety of information back then. It makes me think about what are the other things that we are not able to discover due to the unethical considerations of today’s society. I am also curious if there are any other experiments that John Watson was involved in that were also considered to be unethical. Overall, I found this to be a very interesting chapter and I learned a variety of things that I wasn’t previously aware of.
4) At the end, please include working URLs for the three websites.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Albert_experiment
http://karishmap55.blog.com/2011/09/30/was-the-little-albert-experiment-ethical/
http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesofmajorthinkers/p/watson.htm
Terms Used: Watson, Little Albert, experiment, unconditioned response, conditioned response, stimulus, phobia, elicit, ethical, and conditioning.

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 want to talk about discrimination training, because I had to use it to train my cat.
2) What are three aspects of the topic you want to talk about for this assignment?
I am going to talk about discrimination training, positive and negative contingencies, and training my cat.
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.
Cats are great pets, but they do have one downfall. They love to jump and climb on things. This can cause many problems. They knock down breakables, spill drinks, or try to eat food from the table or counter they jumped onto. Of course, that last one leads to consequences of its own (cat puke is not fun to clean). Because of these things, I had to train my cat not to do this. However, it is natural for cats to want to jump and climb, so you shouldn’t stop them from doing this all together. So I had to find things that it was okay for my cat to jump on, and things that it was not okay to jump on, and a way to communicate the difference to him. I now realize that I was using discrimination training with him. I had to come up with two different stimuli, to signal two different contingencies. I came up with two different signals to communicate to him what was okay to jump on and what was not. I would pat things that he could jump on. Sometimes these pats were accompanied by kissing noises at first. This is because he knew that kissing noises meant he was doing something that was good or okay to do. After a little bit, the patting (which was a positive contingency) would elicit the conditioned response of jumping onto the object that I was patting. My negative contingency, was snapping my fingers at him. At first I would have to accompany this with a loud, sharp “NO” because he already understood that meant he was in trouble or doing something that he shouldn’t be doing. I would do this if I saw him about to jump on something or to get him off of something that he already jumped on that he shouldn’t have. So now, I can be sitting across the room and see him walking up to something he shouldn’t jump on (sometimes he even gets into jumping position) and all I have to do is snap (from across the room), and the act of jumping is inhibited.
3) At the end, please include working URLs for the three websites.
http://www.alleydog.com/glossary/definition.php?term=Discrimination
http://users.ipfw.edu/abbott/120/RftContingencies.html
http://pets.webmd.com/cats/guide/keeping-cat-countertops-tables