Punishment

Hye, everyone... Im back again!!! hope u are doing good...

well, as i promised u in my previous post on reinforcement, im going to write about punishments in this new post. hope u'll enjoy reading it.

first of all, let's see what is punishment. punishment is defined as the consequence that occurs immediately after an operant behavior, that reduces the occurrence of the same behavior in the future. basically, punishment attempts to decrease the likelihood of an unpleasant behavior from occurring again in the future.

there are two types of punishment which are positive punishment and negative punishment. both positive and negative punishment are defined as follow:

positive punishment - the occurrence of an unpleasant behavior is followed by an immediate consequence of adding or increasing the intensity of an aversive stimulus, to reduce the occurrence of the behavior in the future.

negative punishment - the occurrence of an unpleasant behavior is followed by an immediate consequence of removing or decreasing the intensity of an pleasant stimulus, to reduce the occurrence of the behavior in the future,

therefore, both positive and negative punishments attempts to reduce the occurrence of the behavior in the future but works in a different way. the examples provided below will help u to differentiate both of the stimulus.

examples :

positive punishment :

John fights with his brother and hits him. therefore, the mother punishes him for hitting his brother by grounding him in his room. hence the unpleasant target behavior (John hitting his brother), is immediately followed by introducing an aversive stimulus as its consequence (the mother grounded him). since, John would hate to be grounded, he would not repeat his behavior in the future because he learned that if he hit his brother, he will be grounded by his mother. this, results in the decrease of the behavior in the future.

negative punishment - 

John fights with his brother and hits him. therefore, the mother punishes him for hitting his brother by not allowing him to watch television. hence, the unpleasant target behavior (John hitting his brother) is followed by removing the pleasant stimulus as its consequence (the mother doesn't allow him to watch television). since, John love to watch television, and he would hate it if someone doesn't allow him to do so, he would not repeat his behavior in the future. this is because, he learned that if he hit his brother, his mother won't let him to watch television. this, results in the decrease of the behavior in the future.

based on the examples provided, i would like to conclude that positive punishment involves presenting an unpleasant stimulus as the consequence of a behavior whereas negative punishment involves the removal of a pleasant stimulus as the consequence of a behavior. 

for further information regarding punishment and the differences between punishment and reinforcement, u can refer to the links below:

http://psychology.about.com/od/operantconditioning/f/punishment.htm

http://allpsych.com/psychology101/reinforcement.html

here's a video that can help u to know more on punishment..enjoy watching..

so, thats all from me for now..till we meet again in my next post..see yah..take care.. :D

REINFORCEMENT

hye everyone...how are you all doing?? hope you are still in a good shape..

well, today i intend to write about reinforcements...u might be wondering what is that all about and how does it be helpful..actually,reinforcement are one of the ways used to modify a target behavior. wait, what is target behavior now?? target behavior is the a undesirable or desirable behavior that you intend to increase or decrease in terms of its frequency, intensity, duration or latency. basically, a target behavior is the behavior that you intend to change or acquire. for instance, you might have nail biting behavior and you plan to get rid of it. so, that nail biting behavior is now referred to as the target behavior.

so how does these reinforcement work in  modifying the target behavior?? before that,  let's have a look at what is reinforcement.

 reinforcement is defined as, the occurrence of a particular behavior is followed by an immediate consequence that results in the strengthening of the behavior.  the consequence that strengthens the behavior is called a reinforcer. there are two types of reinforcement which are:

1) positive reinforcement - the occurrence of a behavior is followed by the addition of a stimulus (reinforcer) or an increase in the intensity of the stimulus which results in the strengthening of the behavior.

2) negative reinforcement - the occurrence of a behavior is followed by the removal of an aversive stimulus or a decrease in the intensity of a stimulus which results in the strengthening of the behavior.

both positive and negative reinforcement strengthens the target behavior and results in increased occurrence of the behavior in future. the difference between positive and negative reinforcement is in the term of whether the stimulus is added or removed. in positive reinforcement, everytime a desirable behavior occured, the person is rewarded with something pleasant immediately thus increasing the likelihood of the behavior reoccuring in the future. however, in negative reinforcement, every time a desirable behavior oocured, the person is rewarded by removing an aversive or unpleasant stimulus, thus increasing the likelihood of the reoccurrence of the behavior.

example:

1) positive reinforcement

- A child managed to clean his room on his own. following that, the mother allows him to play his favourite computer game. in this case, the target behavior is cleaning the room on his own and the positive reinforcer is being able to play computer game. hence, here a pleasant stimulus (computer game) is introduced immediately following the behavior (cleaning the room). therefore this increases the likelihood of the child cleaning his room on his own in the future, because he knows that if he do that, he will be allowed to play computer games.

2) negative reinforcement

- a child managed to clean his room. following that, his mom stops nagging him. in this case, it is almost similar to the above situation but there is slight difference in the way the reinforcer is administered. in this situation, the target behavior is cleaning the room on own and the negative reinforcer is mom stops nagging. hence, here an adversive stimulus also known as unpleasant stimulus  (mom nagging) is removed immediately following the behavior ( cleaning the room). therefore this increases the likelihood of the child cleaning his room in the future, because he knows that by doing so he can make sure his mom stops nagging.

basically both these positive and negative reinforcement works to increase the occurrence of a desirable target behavior in the future. u might be wondering how to decrease the occurrence of an undesirable target behavior in the future.. that one i'll explain in my next post. so, till then see yah

Conformity.... :D

Hye everyone...what's up..hope everything is going good.. Well, I'm glad to be writing again..Today i'm going to write about an interesting topic that I had read in my Social Psychology book last semester. It's about conformity. Actually, last semester my lecturer had assigned us with a group project where we need to come out with a video that shows an experiment on any of the topic that we have read in our Social Psychology experiment. I and my group members had several topics on mind but we finally decided to choose conformity because it is a quite interesting topic and we were sure the experiment could turn out well. so, here we go..allow me to share what is conformity is all about and what kind of experiment that we did to test out this conformity thing.



First of all, let us see what does conformity means. Conformity refers to any change in behavior caused by another person or group; the individual acted in some way because of influence from others. It also refers to the act of matching attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors to group norms. hence, it is a type of social influence that results in the change of behavior or belief in order to fit in a group. conformity often occurs due to real or imagined group pressures. (McLeod, S. A. (2007). What is Conformity? Retrieved from http://www.simplypsychology.org/conformity.html). 

There are several popular experiments that have been conducted back at those times to test conformity. one of the most popular experiment conducted was the Asch Conformity Experiment. 

during the 1950's, a psychologist Solomon Asch conducted a series of lab experiment to test out conformity. in the experiment, participants were told that they would be participating in a 'vision test' and brought into a room with several other people, however, the participant didn't know that the rest of participants except for him are confederates. during the experiment the participants are presented with a set of lines and they have to match those lines with another set of lines that have the same length. each of them have to say out loud their answers. initially the participant and the confederates would be telling the correct answers. after some time the confederates would purposely give wrong answers to see whether the participants agrees with them or not. even though initially, the participant stays firm with his or her own answer, but eventually they tend to conform and follow what the others say and continues to answer wrongly too.this shows conformity had occured due to group pressure.  the video presented above shows the experiment that was conducted. to get further information on this topic you can try this links below: 

1) http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/psychology/social/asch_conformity.html 
2) http://psychminds.com/solomon-aschs-experiment-conformity/



so based on these ideas, our group decided to test it out on our university students. but we wanted to try it out differently and in a hilarious way. so what we did, we came with this 'invisible rope' experiment. in these experiment, two of our group members would be pretending to hold a rope across a narrow walkway (the rope doesn't exist..just a imaginary one). some of us would be acting as the confederates. whenever, we see people approaching the walkway, our confederates would walk through the way first and pretend to cross over the rope as if it exists. we would see if the people do the same or just ignores since they know the rope doesn't exist. the results was quite astounding. what we found out is that, when there is no confederates walking in front of them and when they don't see anyone crossing the rope, they tend to ignore and walk through it. but when people see others crossing the rope, they tend to do the same, even though they know there is no such rope that exist.

here is the video of our experiment. hope u enjoy. so that's all from me for now..see yah in my next post..stay happy always.. :D