PSYC 2130 Lecture 10: Lecture 10 – Personality.docx

• School: York University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 2130
• Professor: Krista Phillips

Document Summary

Personality theorists began to reconsider the usefulness of studying laboratory animals. Attention is important to us as children & grownups humans do not like to be dismissed, we like to be attended to by other humans: sheer acknowledgement has a very strong rewarding property. Social reinforcers do not act on terms of physical means. One type of v. e: 1-vicarious emotional arousal. Empathy as a personality trait looks like a normal distribution, if emotion cannot be experienced personally v. e. a creates for classical conditioning --- big possibilities for learning. Vicarious reinforcement simple idea very powerful implications if you observe someone being reinforced for a behaviour you become more likely to behave that way. Vicarious punishment same idea important process in human memory: a lot of trial & error learning that takes place vicariously through watching other people being punished or reinforced. Claimed that the choices that we make can be analyzed mathematically.