PSYC 305 unit 3 - Lecture notes 10-13 PDF

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Instructor Keith Klein...

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Assumptions of Behaviorism  Assumption 1 o Personality is defined in terms of behavior o No one single thing determines your personality o A person is what they do  Assumption 2 o Behavior is determined by external factors in the environment o No internal determinants o People are their reactions to the world  Assumption 3 o Changing environmental conditions will change people o Its all about contingencies  Assumption 4 o Change occurs throughout the lifespan o No critical periods or developmental stages  Assumption 5 o The focus of behaviorism is the individual o People react to the environment differently o What works to change one person's behavior may not work for another individual

RADICAL BEHAVIORISM: SKINNER  Born in Pennsylvania  Inventor and writer  PhD in Harvard in psychology  Died in 1990 of Leukemia     

Skinner dismissed personality psychology o You can't see personality Radical Behaviorism - distinguishes his approach from learning theories that include internal experiences The evolutionary context of operant behavior The rate of responding - measuring the time it took someone to do something Behavior is selected by the environment

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Selection of behavior is based on the consequences Operant conditioning o Operant conditioning - mode of learning in which the frequency of responding is influenced by the consequences that are contingent upon a response Learning principles o Reinforcement: increasing the Rate of Responding o Punishment or extinction: Decreasing the Rate of Responding Primary reinforcer o Naturally desirable  Food, sex, water Secondary Reinforcer o Learned to be desirable o Money, grades, etc. Punishment and extinction o Punishment - a stimulus contingent upon a response and that has the effect of decreasing the rate of responding o Extinction - reduction in the rate of responding when reinforcement ends Shaping - reinforcement of successive approximations of behavior (slowly getting people to move towards desired outcome) Chaining - one response produces or alters some of the variable that control another response Discriminant Learning - learning to respond differently, depending on environmental stimuli Generalization - responding to stimuli that are similar to, but not identical to, the stimuli present during training Continuous reinforcement Partial reinforcement o Fixed ratio schedule - patterned o Variable ratio schedule - random o Fixed interval schedule - when a reinforcement becomes available only after a specific amount of time o Variable interval schedule - time periods must pass before the reinforcement is given but it will vary at random

APPLICATIONS OF BEHAVIORAL TECHNIQUES  Therapy o Behavior modification o Functional analysis o Token economics  Can be applied to education (teaching machine) STAATS  Born 1924  Youngest of 4 children  Super smart/ genius status 

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Criticizes Skinner's Behaviorism o Because he neglected personality and individual differences o And because he ignored the influences of biology Staats believed that o Personality lies on  Biology, Learning, social interaction, and child development o Time-out - a procedure or environment in which no reinforcements are given in an effort to extinguish unwanted behavior o Based on emotion o Personality consists of BBR's (basic behavioral Repertoires)  Fundamental learning skills used for later learning The emotional-motivational Repertoire o Basics - emotional responses to stimuli  Related to classical conditioning o Result of learning  Approach positive stimuli  Avoid negative stimuli o Foundation for more mature behavior Language cognitive repertoire o Language is essential to human personality o Language is primarily cognitive  Words conjure up images

Learning language for concrete items is the foundation of learning language/understanding abstract concepts later on (religion, politics, justice) The sensory motor repertoire o Using tools, performing work, brushing your hair all require sensory motor skills  We learn these behaviors  Children learn these more so than they are predisposed to them  Much practice lends to mastery (Olympians) Situations o A-R-D Theory - 3 function learning theory  Affects and attitudes influence contingencies at play  Reinforcements  Direct Behavior Psychological Adjustment o Depends on learning (basic behavioral repertoire) o Examples: Emotions (phobias, depression, anxiety)  Social skills  Positive self-concept - thoughts about self  Standards for behavior (perfectionism) Staats viewed life as an intensive learning experience and that learning builds on nature. Biology influences a person before, during, and after learning. He believed in nature+nurture. 

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KELLY: PERSONAL CONSTRUCT THEORY  The dichotomy corollary o Two broad or competing ends of a spectrum  Ex. Good or bad, difficult or easy o One pole will be more desirable than the other o The construct pole might not be what you expect o BELIEFS ARE BIPOLAR o Because dichotomies are personal we can't assume that all people see the same objective o Slot movement - abrupt change from one pole of a construct to its opposite, often precipitated by stress

Ex. A former drug addict who recovers and becomes a councelor The organization corollary o Describes the hierarchal relationships among constructs o Superordinate constructs: apply broadly; generally abstract o Core constructs: central to identity o Peripheral constructs: narrower and more readily changed o Beliefs are arranged in patterns which are based n similarities The fragmentation corollary o Having different sets of construct for different environments or for different people 

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The range corollary o Sometimes beliefs apply to all people sometimes they dont

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Kelly believed that it wasn’t just environment but also internal factors The social embeddedness of construing efforts o The individuality corollary - people see and understand things differently o The commonality corollary - our beliefs are unique: people who are in compatible cultures hold compatible beliefs o The sociality corollary - we use our beliefs to try to understand how other people think: let's us predict how they will behave  Based on this we react accordingly  Cant have a relationship if you're always surprised by the other person Personality change o Emotions related to change o Threat: the awareness of imminent comprehensive change in one's core constructs  Occurs when person anticipates that core structures are about to change

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Hostility: the continued effort to extort validational evidence in favor of a type of social prediction which has already proved itself a failure  Hostility as effort to force reality to confirm one's predictions (even if there is evidence to the contrary) The process of deciding how we want to act: Effective Action Cycle The c-p-c cycle  C: circumspection trying out several constructs for a situation  P: preemption selecting one construct  C: control acting on the construct Loosening and tightening constructs: the creativity cycle  Brainstorming to loosen constructs

Assumptions of cognitive - behavioral theories  People differ in the ways they think about themselves and their environment  Context does play a role in predicting behavior  Differences in thinking are essential to understanding personality differences  Cognitive behavior relationships can be measured in a systematic way

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Walter Mischel o Born in Vienna o Fled Europe from Nazi prosecution Most of his research was done with children (marshmallow experiment) o Delay of gratification Visibility of reward o Delay is difficult when the reward is visible and when thinking about reward o Learning delay means learning to distract Battle of cognition over emotion o Sometimes delay gratification-but not always

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Mischel has been cited as an individual who did not believe in personality because he disagreed with the trait approach o Traits describe but do not explain personality His thoughts o Personality coefficient  Average relationship between self-report personality measures and behavior  Explains only 9% of the variance in behavior (9% by traits)  Also little consistency across situations  Greater temporal consistency o The consistency paradox  The discrepancy between intuition and empirical findings  Common sense(intuition): consistency  Research evidence (empirical): little consistency o The situational context of behavior  Situational hedges: person does x when y  Situations - objective circumstance + internal reactions to them (interpretations) Mischel's framework for describing personality o Describe a person's consistent cognitive and emotional patterns o Cognitive Affective Unit CAU  Cognitive factors within a person that include cognitive and emotional aspects  These aspects enable adaptation to the environment o He previously called CAU the cognitive person variables Cau o Cognitive affective units - trait words  Used to quickly explain a lot of complex detail at once o Personal constructs  Example - self-system o Encoding strategies - situations and events o Categories - prototypes such as dogs and personality prototypes such as a suck-up o Competencies - ability to generate different behaviors relevant to the situation  Cognitive and behavioral  What an individual perceives that they can do  Varies from person to person  May show more stability across time than traits

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Expectancies Behavioral outcome expectancies  Our belief about what will happen if we behave a certain way  Ex. If I speed will I make it to class on time Stimulus outcome expectancies  What is going to happen in the situation  Ex. What will happen next? - assumptions we make from the environment outside of our own behavior Self-efficacy expectancies  Our thoughts about whether our behavior will be good or bad  Ex. Are you going to ace the test or finish the race with a good time subjective stimulus values  Desirability of the outcome (given the individuals particular goals or values) Self regulatory systems and plans  Ways that a person works on complicated behavior  Internal mechanisms that affect behavior (delayed gratification)

Social cognitive learning theory o Individual differences: learning leads to differences in both behavior and cognitions o Adaption/Adjustment: therapies that teach new learning via modeling and increase self-efficacy help o Unlike skinner, Bandura believed that cognitive processes are central to personality o Society: modeling has a major impact on learning o Biology: related but not central theme o Development: children learn through modeling; learning occurs across the lifespan Albert Bandura agrees with the theories of classical and operant conditioning, but adds two important ideas. 1. Mediating processes occur between stimuli and responses. 2. Behavior is learned from the environment through the process of observational learning. Reciprocal determinism

Behaviorism - environment influence on behavior (external) o Traitism - influence on behavior (internal) o Reciprocal determinism - behavior, personality/thoughts, and environment all influence each other. Bandura believe that all of these thing fed off of each other in a never-ending circle. Self regulation of Behavior o Self-system - personal constructs that people use to describe themselves  Cognitive structures - used for perceiving, evaluating, and regulating behavior o People are responsible for their own behavior  Human agency  They vary on how much they take control  Learning how we regulate behavior-->greater control over our behavior o Goals - important step in self-regulation  Higher goals-->higher performance  Possible selves o Self regulate emotions as well as behavior  Choosing to think of something happy when sad, etc.  Pursuing goals, whether in the lab or in life, sometimes requires taking steps to maintain interest in the task and to avoid boredom o Self-efficacy  The idea that one can organize and execute a given course of action required to deal with prospective situations.  The higher self-efficacy we have the better we are able to perform  It also contributes to mental health, physical health, and situational health  Promotes striving toward goals  Persistence  Increases if performance is improved The person in the social environment o

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Collective efficacy helps us achieve difficult goals together  Goals that benefit society Moral disengagement: failure to regulate one's behavior to live up to high moral standards  Cheating because everyone is doing it His ideas: all persons are in the center of a constantly changing world of experience o The person's perception of this field is their reality. An organism has this innate urge to become better versions of ourselves As a result of interaction with the environment, the person develops a sense of self or self concept o The self or self concept is the personality o What I am (self-identity) o What I can do (self-efficacy) o How I feel about myself (self-esteem) Individual differences - did not focus on individual differences He did focus on how we adapt and adjust to our environment progressing through developmental stages Cognitive factors - thoughts and feelings that block acceptance Society - education, marriage, work and group conflict influence functioning Biology - Did not focus on biology Development - growth forces influence development and are often stifled by conditional regard Actualizing tendency - the urge to grow Three major pieces o Organismic valuing process - inner sense within a person, which guides him or her in the directions of growth and health The Fully Functioning Individual o Open to experience - accurate perceptions of events and how they make us feel o Existential living - an increasing tendency to live fully in each moment

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Organismic trust - reliance on inner experience at each moment to guide behavior Experiential freedom - freedom to choose-- how to act, experience, interpret etc.  Determinism exists to an extent Creativity - new ways of living at each moment, instead of being locked in passed rigid patterns

Basic human needs Physiological needs  Breathing, food, water, sex, sleep Safety needs  Security of body, security of employment and resources, security of health and family, security of property Belonging and love needs  Friendships, family, sexual intimacy Esteem needs  Self-esteem, confidence, achievement, respect of others, respect by others Self-actualization  Morality, creativity, spontaneity, problem solving, lack of prejudice, acceptance of facts...