Operant Conditioning

1. After reading this article, see if you can find an instance similar to this where operant conditioning was happening to you and you didn't know it. Was it positive/negative or reinforcement/punishment? Explain what you actually learned from the experience.
         

          Similar to the wife in this article changing her method of nagging the husband to positively reinforcing the husband, I was positively reinforced with homework completion. Early on in my junior year, my teacher was unhappy that his students were not doing the homework that he assigned, mainly because he never checked them and they were not worth any points. Until one day, when he came up with the solution to start grading them for accuracy, instead of not giving any value to whether his students completed them. Once we realized that he was grading us on our homework, we began completing the assignments. Our math teacher operantly conditioned us to complete all of our homework assignments by positively reinforcing us. The reinforcement was receiving a higher grade in the class. In addition to learning the material from the homework, we also received higher grades on the test. In this case, positive reinforcement was a very effective way for the teacher to make his students complete the homework assignments

Classic Conditioning

1. Have you known someone who experienced classical conditioning via trauma in a way similar or dissimilar to the victim in the article? Explain the situation and how it connects to classical conditioning. Please keep the event anonymous.

            There once was a little boy who believed he had no fears.  He thought that nothing could hurt him or ever would.  However, one day, when he saw a spider in his garage.  Being the fearless boy that he was, he walked over to the spider and decided to pick it up.  Shortly after he had picked it up, it was crawling around his hand and tickling him with his hairy legs.  The little boy wanted to show the spider to his parents, but as soon as he began to walk from the garage into the house, the spider bit him.  He immediately shook his hand, causing the spider to fall off of his hand, screamed in pain, and began to cry.  Ever since that tragic event, this little boy has had a fear of spiders that hopefully one day will cease to exist.

            This story connects to classical conditioning because the young boy modified his behavior because of a stimulus.  The boy, originally not afraid of spiders, was bitten by a spider and became arachnophobic.  Similar to the females in Trauma As Classical Conditioning, the little boy gained the fear after just one exposure to the stimulus, because of how traumatizing the one spider bite was to him.