Changing Behavior

Paper Summary:

The paper states that behavior modification is simply learning. The author discusses and compares Pavlovian and Operant conditioning and Positive and Negative Reinforcement. The paper refers to various reinforcement strategies: Systematic desensitization, aversion therapy (reciprocal inhibition) and biofeedback. The author details her experiment using positive reinforcement (buying a CD) to learn new behaviors in regards to caffeine consumption. She noticed problems of physical addiction.

From the Paper:

"Pavlovian conditioning is in fact a type of learning. Indeed, it is perhaps the most famously documented type of learning that there is. It is difficult indeed to imagine that there exists a college student anywhere in the Western Hemisphere who has not heard the story of how Ivan Pavlov came up with the idea of teaching his dog to associate the sound of a ringing bell with the introduction of food. (We all know the ending of this story: Pavlov was able to make his dog salivate in anticipation of being fed whenever he heard the meal-time bell and even after Pavlov no longer followed up the bell with food the dog continued to salivate for a number of repetitions of the experiment.)
This is the way in which Pavlovian learning always works: An individual (a dog, a human, a chimp and even some non-mammalian species) is given a certain stimulus to which it responds consistently."

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