Behavioral Psychology

Behavioral Psychology

Introduction

Behavior psychology is the term which refers to all mental and physical activities and actions of human, animals and all the living objects in response to the external situation or event. Behavioral psychology deals with the responses of the living objects to the situation they face and how the animals and Humans learn a particular behavior. This theory explains some major points regarding the behavior. The theory states that behavior is determined by its own rewards and punishments and is conditioned. This means that the behavior is based on the rewards and punishments that subject gains by performing that behavior. Moreover, the human behavior can be studied by studying the animal behavior and the only measureable factors of behavior are worth observing. This means that there are similarities in the behavior of humans and animals. There are some factors of behavior which are not measureable; working on those factors to measure behavior is useless. There are three theories in behavioral psychology; Classical Conditioning, Operant Conditioning and Neobehaviorism.

Classical Conditioning

Classical conditioning refers to the theory of learning. This is a process of learning which uses the relationship between the naturally occurring stimulus and the environmental situation. The theory uses the process of association to develop the learning. The behavior or response is learned by a human or an animal due to the link between the two stimuli (Alonso, 2012).

Principles of Classical Conditioning

The major principles that are associated with the classical conditioning are:

Unconditioned Stimulus

Unconditioned stimulus is the stimulus which becomes the cause of generating a response which is unconditional, involuntary and natural. In unconditional stimulus, the subject does not have to have previous learning nor does it not go through a proper former learning. The smell of the cooking food is an example of the unconditioned stimulus. In daily life there, some other examples also such as, the smell of lemon may cause a sour taste in the mouth of a person and that person may salivate. It is natural because it happens from childhood and without even tasting the lemon before. Other than this smelling black pepper and pollen cause a person to sneeze which is also an example of an unconditioned stimulus because no learning is required to respond (Alonso, 2012).

Unconditioned Response

Unconditioned response is the unlearned response which occurs in reaction to the unconditioned stimulus. The occurrence of unconditioned response is natural and unconditional which only takes places in reaction to the unconditioned stimulus. The example of unconditioned response in real life is the arousing of hunger in response to the smell of cooking food (Carison, 2010).

Conditioned Stimulus

The third principle conditioned stimulus is formerly a neutral stimulus which itself does not produce a response. The functioning of the conditioned stimulus is dependent on the unconditional stimulus. It gets associated with the unconditioned stimulus in order to produce a response which is conditioned. In the food example, when a person smells cooking food, and at the same any other event occurs such as that person listens to a ...