Escape and Avoidance Learning

• escape: when behavior terminates aversive stimulus
• avoidance: when behavior prevents aversive stimulus
• avoidance conditioning maintains phobias
  • phobias are resurgent and come back a lot
  • we avoid our fears completely and that avoidance makes the fear stick bc we don’t have the chance to extinguish it
  • phobias are irrational (like escalators) not rational (like guns)
  • animals condition less readily than humans
  • human phobias require one brief conditioning trial (doesn’t take much)
• stampfl procedure: avoidance response occurs early in sequence of events. early responding greatly reduces extent to which avoidance response can be extinguished
• ocd
  • persistent thoughts, impulses, or images
  • repetitive actions in response to obsessions
  • persistent thoughts are reduced by the compulsion
  • compulsion reinforces the obsession by reducing anxiety
  • people w ocd believe that they should be in complete control of their thoughts and feel personally responsible for the highly improbable
  • Exposure and Response Prevention
  • method of treating ocd
  • systematic desensitization with flooding therapy
• escape and avoidance conditioning strengthen the behavior through removal of an aversive stimulus
• punishment weakens the behavior through the application of an aversive stimulus or the removal of an appetitive stimulus
  • positive punishment: adding something that they don’t like.
  • negative punishment: removing something that they like
  • response cost: removal of specific reinforcer following the occurrence of problem behavior
  • time-out: loss of access to positive reinforcers for a brief period of time following problem behavior

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