The Psychology class where Danielle is having a rough go part 2 😬

● CC Principles
● Acquisition is the phase during which a CR is established
○ (* Ring the bell and give the food)
● Extinction is the reduction and elimination of the CR after the CS is presented
repeatedly without the UCS
○ (* Keep ringing the bell but don’t give the food)

● Applications of CC
● Advertisers pair their products with stimuli that elicit positive emotions (higher -
order conditioning) - “if you buy this, your life will be like this”
● Can show latent inhibition:
○ Resistance to conditioning because it’s been experienced alone too often.
If i already have an impression of something, it will be harder to change
that through pairing it w/ something else
● Helps to explain how and why we acquire some fears and phobias (not Freud’s
way)
○ Little Albert - Watson and Rayner (1920)
■ Stimulus generalization - rabbit, dog, coat, santa mask
■ Stimulus discrimination - cotton, balls, hair
● Can also help to treat phobias - Mary Cover Jones
○ Little Peter
● Fetishism - sexual attraction to non living things - seems to be partly due to
classical conditioning
● Japanese quails and terrycloth cylinders
○ UCS - female, UCR - mating, CS - terrycloth object, CR - mating with cloth
object
● Disgust reactions to safe food and drink - Rozin study, pg. 207-208

● Operant Conditioning
● Learning controlled by the consequences of the organism’s behaviour
● The organism gets something because of its response
● Also known as instrumental conditioning

● The Law of Effect

● E. L. Thorndike
● If we’re rewarded for a response to a stimulus, we’re more likely to repeat that
response to the stimulus in the future
● Learning involves an association between a stimulus and response (S-R), with
the reward stamping in this connection
● B. F. Skinner
● Followed up on Watson and Thorndike’s work on behaviour
● Designed the Skinner box to more effectively record activity

● Shaping
● Shaping by successive approximations
● We train a new target behaviour by reinforcing behaviours that are not exactly
the target behaviour but that are progressively closer versions of it
● Like the hot, hotter, burning hot game (trying to get them to find the thing)
● Do you shape other people’s behaviour?

● Operant Conditioning Terminology

● Reinforcements are outcomes that strengthen the probability of a response
● Positive reinforcement involves giving a stimulus
● Negative reinforcement involves taking away a stimulus
○ **(not good/bad - is add/subtract; both still strengthening the probability of
a response)
● Punishment is any outcome that weakens the probability of a response
● Like reinforcement, can be positive or negative (yelling or taking away your
phone)
● Disciplinary actions are punishments only if they decrease the chance of the
behaviour happening again (are you accidentally reinforcing the behaviour you
are intending to stop?)