The behaviourist approach

A01-operant conditioning conditioning

• Behaviour is shaped by the consequence

• Positive reinforcement: rewarding a behaviour when a behaviour as performed (increasing behaviour)

• Negative reinforcement: occurs when a mammal avoids something unpleasant (increasing behaviour)

• Punishment: is an unpleasant consequence of a behaviour (decreasing behaviour)

A01-classical conditioning

• Learning through association

• Pablo’s research

A01-The Skinner box

• Anytime the rat activated lever within the box it was rewarded a pellet. This would cause the rat to perform their behaviour again .positive reinforcement

• He did this with negative reinforcement by causing the rat to feel unpleasant experience when not pressing the lever

A03-well-controlled research

• Based on a lab experiment

• Removes any extraneous variable and makes the relationship cause and affect cause and effect easier to find a correlation

• Skinners experiment

A03-Real world application

• It has been used in psychiatrist instruction

• Can be used to treat phobias using classical conditioning

A03-Ethical issues

• Skinners experiment was unethical

• Animals were placed in cramped conditions and deliberately kept below their natural weight so they were always hungry