Behavioural Approach

Slide 3 –
Animals can learn to respond to unconditioned stimuli. The response can be generated
by colour, sound or even light. For instance the theory of Ivan Pavlov, where he
experimented on a dog by giving specific signals before giving the food, and repeated
this procedure several times and eventually the signal alone it self caused the dog to
salivate without even showing the food to the dog. Although the amount of time you
will repeat the experiment to get the response will differ from one individual to another.

Not only animals are like this, humans can also respond to unconditioned stimuli for
example.

Every time someone flushes a toilet in the apartment building, the shower becomes
very hot (an unconditional stimulus, US) and causes the person to jump back (the
unconditional response, UR). Over time, the person begins to jump back automatically
after hearing the flush (conditional stimulus, CS) and (the conditional response, CR),
before the water temperature changes.

Slide 4 – Meaning that you look at someone doing something and you start shadowing
the person.

Slide 5 –
Positive Reinforcement - Awarding something such as money, food or even praising
when a desired action is taken to increase that behaviour in the future. For example
praising your child to clean his or her room will actually increase the chance of your
child doing what has been instructed.

Negative Reinforcement – When target behaviour is performed, something negative

can be taken away in order to increase a response. For example let’s say a teenager is
constantly nagged by his mother to take out the garbage week by week. Finally he does
the task and is amazed that the nagging has stopped so therefore the removal of this
negative stimulus will reinforce the teenager to take out the garbage next week as well.

Punishment – introducing something aversive in order to decrease a behaviour for

example spanking a child for misbehaving. Over time the child begins to not like the
punishment and therefore to avoid it, the child will stop behaving in that manner.
Extinction – The elimination of something in order to decrease a behaviour meaning
that you’re taking something away so that the response is decreased.

Slide 6 – the experiment included learning of aggressive styles of behaviour through

modelling. Children were put into four different groups matched fore things like age,
gender and so forth. Group 1 were shown film of real life attacks, Group 2 were shown
film of people attacking each other with weapons, Group 3 were shown cartoon
characters attacking a Bobo doll with weapons and finally Group 4 were not shown
anything, they were the control group. The purpose of this experiment was to measure
how much the children learnt aggression through the different independent variables.

Slide 7 – you can argue. Some researchers have agreed because it is the physiological
effects of media violence that cause aggressive behaviour. Exposure to violent imagery
is linked to increased heart rate, faster respiration and higher blood pressure which then
lead people to act aggressively in the real world, which then relates to criminal
behaviour. Other thinks that the two are related, but there is no causal connection. That
it maybe the cause of a third factor.