Notes on Important Psychology Experiments and Theories.

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Pavlov (1927) Learning – What is Classical Conditioning

Method: Children heard stories about the toys that male and female characters enjoyed playing with. Some of the characters were described as liking gender-stereotyped activities, while other characters were describes as non-gender-stereotyped activities. The children were then asked to predict what other toys each character would or would not play with.

Martin (1989) Sex and Gender - Gender schema theory of gender development

Conclusion: Older children have a more flexible view of gender than younger children do.

Results: The younger children used only the sex of the character to decide what other toys he or she would or would not like. For example, they would say that a boy character would like to play with trucks even if they had been told that the boy liked playing with dolls. The older children, however, considered both the sex of the character and the other toys the character liked playing with. For example, they would say that a girl who liked playing with trucks would be less likely to want to play with dolls.

Aim: to show that children’s understanding of gender becomes less stereotyped and therefore more flexible as they get older.

He noticed that when the dog he was studying heard the food buckets being brought, it started to salivate. He knew that salivation is a reflex response; it is an automatic response that should usually occur when food is in the mouth.

Pavlov set up a series of trials over the next few days. Each time the dog was fed, a bell was rung for a few seconds and the amount of saliva produced was measured. Then the bell was rung and no food was given. He discovered that the amount of saliva produced on this trial was the same as when food was given.

So, Pavlov realised that dogs had learned to salivate to a new event – the sound of the food buckets. This encouraged him to investigate whether dogs could learn to salivate to other events.

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He would place a hungry rat in a box. The rat would product a variety of actions such as sniffing, exploring and grooming. By accident it would press the lever and a pellet of food would immediately drop into the food tray. Every time the lever was pressed the behaviour of ‘lever pressing’ was positively reinforced by a food pellet.

Skinner introduced the idea of reinforcement to the Law of effect. He said that all behaviour is learned from the consequences of that behaviour. He called this operant conditioning because the animal or human produces a behaviour that is voluntary, so it ‘operates’ on the environment. The consequence of the particular behaviour produced by the animal will be to either increase or decrease the likelihood of the behaviour being repeated.

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Skinner (1938) Learning – Classical Conditioning

Conclusion: Watson and Rayner showed that fear responses could be learned and even very young children could learn in the way suggested by classical conditioning.

Method: Albert was 11 months old. He seemed to like a white laboratory rat and had no fear of white furry objects. In the conditioning trials the rat was shown to Albert and, as he reached for it, a metal bar was hit very hard with a hammer, behind Albert’s back. This noise was done several times.

Aim: ...

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