Classical Conditioning
Russian born Ivan Pavlov was one of the early psychologists to study classical conditioning. Pavlov first published his findings in 1906. He introduced the idea of studying reflex responses through animals. One of Pavlov’s more famous experiments was on a dog. Pavlov taught the dog to associate the sound of a bell or music to his food resulting in the dog salivating when the bell rang rather than when his food was in front of him. He did this by first introducing the sound of the bell to the dog, he then gave the dog food and sounded the bell, with the food being in front of him the dog began to salivate. After a while Pavlov took the food away but just began sounding the bell again, the dog had learnt that with the sound of the bell food must be on its way so he began salivating at just the sound of the bell. This is what Pavlov called learning through association. Another classical conditioning experiment was carried out by Watson called the little Albert experiment. Little Albert was 11 months old and before Watson began his experiment it was know that little Albert had no fear of rabbits, rats, monkeys or masks. As Watson first presenting little Albert with these items on their own and the small boy was not fazed by them. But then Watson presented him with a rat and a loud banging noise to which little Albert began to cry. Watson did this with all the objects. After a while Watson took away the loud noise on introduced little Albert to the rat again. He then began to cry as he associated the rat with the loud banging noise. Little Albert by the end of the experiment was afraid of all the objects that originally didn’t faze him. This is because he now associates them with the loud banging noise.
Operant conditioning
B.F Skinner used rats in his experiments to prove to others that operant conditioning worked through reward and punishment. A rat was placed in a box with a tube attached to the outside of the box full of food but the only way for the rat to get the food was to press a lever inside the box. The rat accidently pressed the lever at first to which a pellet of food fell into the box. The rat soon learnt that pressing the lever is what he must do to receive food, and because the food was seen as positive reinforcement the rat began pressing the lever whenever he wanted food. Another one of skinners experiments also involved rats. He placed a rat into a cage with an electric floor and every time the rat pressed the lever the electric would stop. The rat soon linked the two together and pressed the lever as much as it could; this is what skinner called positive punishment as the bad behaviour stopped when the rat did something positive. Negative punishment was another great idea of skinners this is where you remove something pleasant from the situation decreases the likely hood of the bad behaviour being repeated. E.g. for grounding a teenager for being late. Removing the privilege to go out decreases the chances of the teenager being late again.
Strengths and weaknesses
Behaviourism teaches us that behaviour is something we learn from the environment we are brought up in or the things we are taught. These 2 theories prove that idea to us whether it be a dog or a child even though many of the experiments were on animals and it’s hard to generalise. A lot of research went into the experiments and lot of good evidence came from them. The behaviourist theories are all good ways of reinforcing good behaviour and they can be very affective when treating someone with phobias or bad dreams. But they also seem to treat human behaviour like a machine and ignore the facts humans have free will.
Behavioural Therapies
There are many ways of treating different types of addictions or phobias, that’s were behavioural therapies comes in. it is split up into classical and operant therapies. These therapies include implosion, flooding, aversion and systematic desensitisation.
Flooding
If somebody decides never to face there fear it may grown to extreme strengths over time and there for will be harder to overcome if possible at all. The client with the fear e.g. is asked to explain their most feared state. E.g. in a room full of spiders. Flooding is like throwing someone into the deep end of a pool when they can’t swim. With the client who has a fear of spiders the therapy used in flooding to get rid of this fear would be to put them in a room full of spiders and leave them there until the fear is gone. This is done because its proven as a human we can only keep a state of fear up for so long before we calm our selves down. obviously the time someone is in fear for varies between person to person. But by the end the client would have calmed themselves down enough to realise spiders aren’t as scary as they first thought.
Aversion
Aversion therapy comes from classical conditioning it’s mainly used for addiction or wrong behaviour. It is a type of therapy in which by the end of it the client will associate smoking with something horrible and not want to do it anymore. They do this buy simply putting something negative with the behaviour. With smoking its very well known that if the cigarette is dipped in horrible tasting and smelling solution when you pick it up to smoke it makes you feel sick. Done often enough, when you leave the clinic or therapy the next time you pick a cigarette up it will make you think of the horrible solution and how it tasted which then results in you not wanting to smoke. This therapy is very similar to the experiment on little Albert.
Strengths and weaknesses
Flooding and aversion are 2 very good therapies and very affective. Flooding usually has a very good success rate but on some occasions it could make the phobia worse or even put the patient in danger e.g. losing the fear of spiders and picking up a deadly spider without knowing. But it’s known to be a very fast way to deal with phobias. Aversion is the best therapy used for addictions or crimes such a paedophilia and again has a very fast success rate. Both of these therapies need structure and constant but many people are learning how to do self therapy at home which is resulting in them being worse off than before.