PRINT

INSTANCEBEGINEDITABLE NAME=”DOCTITLE” ASSESSMENT 2 CONTEXT INSTANCEENDEDITABLE

InstanceBeginEditable name=”Body”

Classical Conditioning

In his dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess sets up a macabre classical conditioning scene to which he subjects his main character, Alex, who has an insatiable hunger for violence. As the story begins, Alex, along with his droogs (friends), commits brutal acts of random violence including theft, rape, and eventually murder, for which he is arrested and sentenced to fourteen years in prison. After two years behind bars, Alex hears about and agrees to participate in a research experiment called Ludovico’s Technique, which is, in all respects, Pavlov’s classical conditioning.

I have almost forgot the taste of fears:

The time has been my senses would have cool’d

To hear a night-shriek; and my fell of hair

Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir

As life were in’t. I have supp’d full of horrors;

Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts,

Cannot once start me.

–Macbeth, Act V, Scene 5, by William Shakespeare

As the experiment begins, prison doctors inject Alex with a nausea-inducing serum, then strap him into a chair, prop open his eyelids so that he cannot close them nor blink, and force him to watch violent and sexually explicit films. While he watches the films and as the serum takes effect, Alex becomes violently ill. And, after numerous conditioning episodes (the pairing of the serum and the violent films), Alex becomes ill when he is exposed to violence, even when he is not injected with the serum.

Alex describes his ordeal (words in parentheses are translations of the previous word and are not included in the actual text):

Where I was wheeled to, brothers, was like no sinny (cinema) I had ever viddied (seen) before. True enough, one wall was all covered with silver screen, and direct opposite was a wall with square holes in for the projector to project through, and there were stereo speakers stuck all over the mesto (place). But against the right-hand one of the other walls was a bank of all like little meters, and in the middle of the floor facing the screen was like a dentist’s chair with all lengths of wire running from it…

What happened now was that one white-coated veck (man, guy) strapped my gulliver (head) to a like head-rest[.]… ‘What is this for?’ I said. And this veck replied…that it was to keep my gulliver still and make me look at the screen.… And then I found they were strapping my rookers (hands) to the chair arms and my nogas (feet) were like stuck to a foot-rest.… One veshch (thing) I did not like, though, was when they put like clips of the skin of my forehead, so that my top glaz-lids (eyelids) were pulled up and up and up and I could not shut my glazzies (eyes) no matter how I tried.

And then, O my brothers, the film-show started off with some very gromky (loud) atmosphere music coming from the speakers, very fierce and full of discord. And then on the screen the picture came on, but there was no title and no credits. What came on was a street, as it might have been any street in any town, and it was a real dark nochy (night) and the lamps were lit.… And then you could viddy (see) an old man coming down the street, very starry (old), and then there leaped out on this starry veck (old man; old guy) two malchicks (boys) dressed in the height of fashion,…and then they started to filly (play) with him. You could slooshy (hear, listen) his screams and moans, very realistic.… They made a real pudding out of this out of this starry veck, going crack crack crack at him with their fisty rookers (hands), tearing his platties (clothes) off and finishing up by booting his nagoy plott (naked flesh)…and then running off very skorry (quickly).

Now all the time I was watching this I was beginning to get very aware of a like not feeling all that well, and this I put down to the under-nourishment and my stomach not quite ready for the rich pishcha (food) and vitamins I was getting here. But I tried to forget this, concentrating on the next film which came on at once, my brothers, without any break at all.… I was sweating a malenky (little) bit with the pain in my guts and a horrible thirst and my gulliver (head) going throb throb throb, and it seemed to me that if I could not viddy this bit of film I would perhaps be not so sick. (pp. 12–16)

Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936), a Russian physiologist who won a Nobel Prize in medicine for his work on digestive processes, is credited with discovering the “conditioned reflex” to which Burgess’s Alex was subjected. Pavlov, along with two other pioneers, Edward Thorndike and John Watson, influenced the fields of psychology and educational psychology in major ways. Because of their early efforts, behaviorism came to dominate psychology, especially in the United States, for the better part of the twentieth century.

Reference

Burgess, A. (1995). A clockwork orange. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company.

In an American school if you ask for the salt in good French, you get an A. In France you get the salt. The difference reveals the nature of educational control.

–B. F. Skinner (1953)

Instrumental Conditioning

B. F. Skinner (B. F. stands for Burrhus Frederick; his friends called him Fred) is one of the best-known psychologists of all time. His work continues to influence millions of people from around the world and all walks of life, especially those involved in psychology and education. In his 1984 American Psychologist article titled “The Shame of American Education,” Skinner writes:

On a morning in October 1957, Americans were awakened by the beeping of a satellite. It was a Russian satellite, Sputnik. Why was it not American? Was something wrong with American education? Evidently so, and money was quickly voted to improve American schools. Now we are being awakened by the beepings of Japanese cars, Japanese radios, phonographs, and television sets, and Japanese wristwatch alarms, and again questions are being asked about American education, especially in science and mathematics. Something does seem to be wrong. According to a recent report of the National Commission on Excellence in Education (1983), for example, the average achievement of our high-school students on standardized tests is now lower than it was a quarter of a century ago, and students in American schools compare poorly with those in other nations in many fields.¹ As the commission put it, America is threatened by “a rising tide of mediocrity.” (p. 947)

So, what does Skinner think will improve American education? Here’s an excerpt from his novel, Walden Two, which is the story of a utopian community—named for Henry David Thoreau’s Walden—where members are living out the principles of instrumental conditioning. In this excerpt, the story’s narrator is describing the community’s educational system to two visitors.

“We discussed the economics of community life,” he said, “I should have mentioned education. Teachers are, of course, workers, and I’m willing to defend all that I said about our economic advantage as specifically applied to education. God knows, the outside world is not exactly profligate in the education of its children. It doesn’t spend much on equipment or teachers. Yet in spite of this penny-wise policy, there’s still enormous waste. A much better education would cost less if society were better organized.

“We can arrange things more expeditiously here because we don’t need to be constantly re-educating. The ordinary teacher spends a good share of her time changing the cultural and intellectual habits which the child acquires from its family and surrounding culture. Or else the teacher duplicates home training, in a complete waste of time. Here we can almost say that the school is the family, and vice versa.

“We can adopt the best educational methods and still avoid the administrative machinery which schools need in order to adjust to an unfavorable social structure. We don’t have to worry about standardization in order to permit pupils to transfer from one school to another, or to appraise or control the work of particular schools. We don’t need ‘grades.’ Everyone knows that talents and abilities don’t develop at the same rate in different children. A fourth-grade reader may be a sixth-grade mathematician. The grade is an administrative device which does violence to the nature of the development process. Here the child advances as rapidly as he likes in any field. No time is wasted in forcing him to participate in, or be bored by, activities he has outgrown. And the backward child can be handled more efficiently too.

“We also don’t require all our children to develop the same abilities or skills. We don’t insist upon a certain set of courses. I don’t suppose we have a single child who has had a ‘secondary school education,’ whatever that means. But they’ve all developed as rapidly as advisable, and they’re well educated in many useful respects. By the same token we don’t waste time in teaching the unteachable. The fixed education represented by a diploma is a bit of conspicuous waste which has no place in Walden Two. We don’t attach an economic or honorific value to education. It has its own value or none at all” (pp. 118–119).

In this assessment, you are introduced to the history, research, and theories of B. F. Skinner and his colleagues who study instrumental conditioning and its effects on behavior.

¹ There are many who would dispute Skinner’s and the commission’s claim that American schools are failing. For example, see Berliner, D. C., & Biddle, B. J. (1995). The manufactured crisis: Myths, fraud, and the attack on America’s public schools. New York, NY: HarperCollins.

References

National Commission on Excellence in Education. (1983). A nation at risk. Retrieved from http://www.ed.gov/pubs/NatAtRisk/risk.html

Skinner, B. F. (1948, 1962, 1970). Walden two. New York, NY: Macmillan.

Skinner, B. F. (1953). Science and human behavior. New York, NY: Macmillan.

Skinner, B. F. (1984). The shame of American education. American Psychologist, 39(9), 947–954.

18 Chapter 2 • The Meaning and Measure of Happiness
chief goal of life is the pursuit of happiness and
pleasure. Within psychology, this view of well-being
is expressed in the study of SWB (Diener, 1984;
Diener et al., 1999). Subjective well-being takes a
broad view of happiness, beyond the pursuit of
short-term or physical pleasures defining a narrow
hedonism. Subjective well-being is defined as life
satisfaction, the presence of positive affect, and a relative
absence of negative affect. Together, the three
components are often referred to as happiness.
Research based on the SWB model has burgeoned in
the last 5 years (Ryan & Deci, 2001). Studies have
delineated a variety of personality characteristics and
life experiences that help answer questions about
who is happy and what makes people happy. A
major portion of this book is devoted to reviewing
the research and theory on SWB.
Eudaimonic Happiness
Is happiness enough for a good life? Would you be
content and satisfied if you were happy and nothing
else? Consider a hypothetical example suggested by
Seligman (2002a). What if you could be hooked to
an “experience machine” that would keep you in a
constant state of cheerful happiness, or whatever
positive emotion you desired, no matter what happened
in your life. Fitting the hedonic view, you
would experience an abundance of happiness all
the time. Would you choose to be hooked up? We
might like it for awhile, but to experience only one
of our many emotions, and to have the same cheerful
reaction to the diversity of life events and challenges
might actually impoverish the experience of
life. And some of what we would lose might be
extremely valuable. For example, negative emotions
like fear help us make choices that avoid threats to
our well-being. Without fear and other negative
emotions we might make very bad choices. We’d be
happy, but we might not live very long. Seligman
(2002a) argues that we would likely also reject the
experience machine because we want to feel we are
entitled to our positive emotions, and to believe
they reflect our “real” positive qualities and behaviors.
Pleasure, disconnected from reality, does not
affirm or express our identity as individuals.
Above all, most of us would probably reject
the experience machine because we believe that
there is more to life than happiness and subjective
pleasure. Or as Seligman (2002a) describes it, there
is a deeper and more “authentic happiness.” Much
of classical Greek philosophy was concerned with
these deeper meanings of happiness and the good
life. Waterman (1990, 1993) describes two psychological
views of happiness distilled from classical
philosophy. Hedonic conceptions of happiness, discussed
above, define happiness as the enjoyment of
life and its pleasures. The hedonic view captures a
major element of what we mean by happiness in
everyday terms: We enjoy life; we are satisfied with
how our lives are going; and good events outnumber
bad events.
In contrast, eudaimonic conceptions of happiness,
given fullest expression in the writings of
Aristotle, define happiness as self-realization, meaning
the expression and fulfillment of inner potentials.
From this perspective, the good life results from living
in accordance with your daimon (in other words,
your true self). That is, happiness results from striving
toward self-actualization—a process in which our talents,
needs, and deeply held values direct the way we
conduct our lives. “Eudaimonia” (or happiness) results
from realization of our potentials. We are happiest
when we follow and achieve our goals and develop
our unique potentials. Eudaimonic happiness has
much in common with humanistic psychology’s
emphases on the concepts of self-actualization
(Maslow, 1968) and the fully functioning person
(Rogers, 1961) as criteria for healthy development and
optimal functioning.
What kinds of experiences lead to eudaimonic
happiness? Waterman (1993) argued that eudaimonic
happiness results from experiences of personal
expressiveness. Such experiences occur when
we are fully engaged in life activities that fit and
express our deeply held values and our sense of
who we are. Under these circumstances we experience
a feeling of fulfillment, of meaningfulness, of
being intensely alive—a feeling that this is who we
really are and who we were meant to be.
At this point, you might ask whether hedonic
and eudaimonic views of happiness are very different.
Aren’t activities that bring us pleasure also generally
the ones that are meaningful because they express our
talents and values? Waterman believes that there are
many more activities that produce hedonic enjoyment
than activities that provide eudaimonic happiness
based on personal expression. Everything from alcohol
consumption and eating chocolate, to a warm
bath can bring us pleasure, but there are fewer activities
that engage significant aspects of our identity and
give a deeper meaning to our lives.

You have probably noticed in your educational career that some people are very good at remembering facts and therefore do well at tests that require memorization. Other students, on the other hand, struggle with tests that require memorization.  To understand how memory works, this exercise will ask you to trace the memory system – from the stimuli to long-term memory. 

Use your text book and research from the Internet to learn the process of memory – from beginning to end. Your description should include the following:

• Identification and description of each step in the human memory model. As you describe these steps, use an example to illustrate the process
• Discussion of factors that enhance or impede information flow in each step of the process
• Explanation of proactive and retroactive interference and how you might counteract their effects while studying in order to facilitate maximum retention via long-term memory
• Explanation of other kinds of forgetting and a discussion of strategies that can improve memory consolidation and retrieval

Submit this in the form of a 2 -3 page paper. You can use illustrations to demonstrate the process.    Be sure to document your references using the APA format.

• Margins – set to one inch
• Font – 12pt. Times New Roman, no bold, or underline
• Title – center above the paper, 12 pt. font (Level A Heading), no bold, underline, or italics
• Pagination – every page; consists of a header containing a short title for the paper and page number placed in the upper right corner of the page
• Line Spacing – double space all work including the References Page
• Point-of-View – third person, objective; limit perspective to research; no personal opinion or narrative
• In-text citations – must conform to APA requirements
• References list – must conform to APA requirements   

Assignment 1: Discussion—Expression of Emotions

The psychology of gender can be significantly influenced by interpersonal interactions and environment. You often learn to communicate emotionally from the people around you and the expected social norms in your community.

In this assignment, you will explore your own emotional development and how it has supported your gender expression. You will also learn how expression of emotions has an impact on relationships.

Using the module readings, the Argosy University online library resources, and the Internet, research emotional development and gender expression.

Respond to the following:

• Explain how the expression of emotion has affected your ability to have successful personal and professional relationships.
• Describe what or who has influenced your ability to express emotions successfully.
• Describe in which areas of your life you have struggled to communicate emotion. Describe what or who has contributed to the development of these challenges.

Be sure to provide personal examples and experiences along with research in support of your responses.

Write your initial response in 300–400 words. Apply APA standards to citation of sources.

By Saturday, November 22, 2014, post your response to the appropriate Discussion Area. Through Wednesday, November 26, 2014, review and comment on at least two peers’ responses.

Assignment 1: Discussion—Expression of Emotions

The psychology of gender can be significantly influenced by interpersonal interactions and environment. You often learn to communicate emotionally from the people around you and the expected social norms in your community.

In this assignment, you will explore your own emotional development and how it has supported your gender expression. You will also learn how expression of emotions has an impact on relationships.

Using the module readings, the Argosy University online library resources, and the Internet, research emotional development and gender expression.

Respond to the following:

• Explain how the expression of emotion has affected your ability to have successful personal and professional relationships.
• Describe what or who has influenced your ability to express emotions successfully.
• Describe in which areas of your life you have struggled to communicate emotion. Describe what or who has contributed to the development of these challenges.

Be sure to provide personal examples and experiences along with research in support of your responses.

Write your initial response in 300–400 words. Apply APA standards to citation of sources.

By Saturday, November 22, 2014, post your response to the appropriate Discussion Area. Through Wednesday, November 26, 2014, review and comment on at least two peers’ responses.

1. Topic: Introduction to Hypothesis Testing

   In an article entitled “Science and ethics in conducting, analyzing, and reporting psychological research” in the journal Psychological Science (1994), psychologist Robert Rosenthal examines the relationship between a researcher’s methods and the ethical implications of these methods. In particular, he examines what he terms “causism,” defined as “the tendency to imply a causal relationship where none has been established (i.e., where the data do not support it)” (p.128). He goes on to state that causism can arise from the language chosen to describe the results of hypothesis tests, especially when authors use words such as “consequence” or “cause” instead of “related to” or “inferred from.” He argues that the stronger language can be misleading, causing the result to “appear more important or fundamental than it really is” (p. 128). This, in turn, misleads the public into drawing conclusions or implementing policies that could be based on faulty assumptions. With this in mind, read the following excerpt from the Discussion section of a hypothetical research study by Dewey, Cheatum, and Howe linking prenatal vitamins with a certain birth defect called Birth Defect X, and answer the questions that follow.

   “As shown in the previous section, our results were significant at the .05 level (p = .047, n = 23). These highly significant results prove the research hypothesis that there is a higher incidence of Birth Defect X in babies of mothers who consume prenatal vitamins daily versus babies whose mothers do not consume such vitamins. Thus, we can state with some certainty that taking daily doses of prenatal vitamins during pregnancy can cause the birth defect in question in many cases. This is a landmark study, the first of its kind that examines the link between prenatal vitamins and the consequent appearance of Birth Defect X” (Dewey, Cheatum, & Howe 2000).

   1. discuss the errors in the conclusions the authors have drawn from their statistical tests.
   2. Imagine that these results are disseminated to the general public through publication and media coverage. Write about 1 possible harmful consequence these conclusions could have in the everyday world.

   Read Psalm 15; this passage describes how God wants his followers to live. How do these verses apply to the obligation of Christian psychologists (and psychologists in general) to care for the public interest when wording and reporting their findings