PPE 3003 Lecture Notes - Lecture 14: Intellectual Disability, Caffeine, Psychopathology
11 May 2016
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Document Summary
All our behaviors take place in different situations and produce results or outcomes. Skinner believes we operate on the environment to generate consequences. Thus, operant behavior includes talking to people, reading, walking, writing, fighting and many other actions we do every day. For some of our behaviors we are rewarded (reinforced) and for some others, we are punished. The establishment of an association between behavior and its consequences is called operant conditioning. A contingency is a rule stating that some event (b) will occur if and only if another event (a) occurs. An operant conditioning contingency has three important components: the environment or situational event in which a response or behavior occurs. This is the behavior that precedes (comes before) the behavior we expect: the behavior self, the consequence of the behavior this is referred to as the abc of operant conditioning. We learn that some stimuli bring us reward and some bring us punishment.
