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