Question 1

A child is wetting his or her bed. According to our text, punishing the child would be the best way to permanently stop this behavior. You would recommend that the child be given no food on the day after a bedwetting incident. This is because punishment is guaranteed to stop bad behaviors.

Accepted Answer

Punishment is not always the best way to permanently stop a behavior, especially when it comes to bedwetting, which is often caused by underlying physical or psychological issues. Punishing the child by withholding food could actually make the behavior worse and cause psychological harm. It is important to seek the guidance of a healthcare professional in addressing bedwetting.

Question 2

Bandura's seminal study of observational learning involved watching children and their interactions with Bobo dolls.

Accepted Answer

Bandura's seminal study did, in fact, involve watching children and their interactions with Bobo dolls.

Question 3

A conditioned stimulus is presented repeatedly without the paired presentation of the UCS. After time, the subject no longer makes the conditioned response. This fading of the CR is known as habituation.

Accepted Answer

This fading of the CR is known as extinction, not habituation. Habituation refers to a decrease in response to a stimulus after repeated presentations, without the involvement of a conditioned stimulus and unconditioned stimulus pairing.

Question 4

Using continuous reinforcement is the BEST way to prevent a response from becoming extinguished.

Accepted Answer

Using continuous reinforcement can actually lead to quick extinction, as the individual learns that the response only gets rewarded every time. Intermittent reinforcement, where the response is only rewarded sometimes, is actually more effective in preventing extinction as the individual continues to engage in the behavior in hopes of receiving a reward.

Question 5

The Brelands tried to condition pigs to drop wooden coins into a bank. This turned out not to be easy, as the pigs tended to make instinctual responses as compared to the learned responses.

Accepted Answer

The statement accurately describes the Brelands' experiment's findings.

Question 6

Albert was a little boy who was shown to be remarkably resistant to having his emotional responses conditioned by Watson. Watson presented Albert with a cute little furry rat and then rang a loud bell. Later, Albert should have become scared of the bell, but this never happened.

Accepted Answer

This statement is misleading and incorrect. The experiment conducted by Watson and his assistant Rosalie Rayner involved conditioning a fear response to a white rat in Little Albert, and not conditioning an emotional response to the loud bell. The experiment was deemed unethical by modern standards and has been widely criticized.

Question 7

According to B. F. Skinner, negative reinforcement of a response makes you more likely to continue to make that response.

Accepted Answer

Negative reinforcement involves removing a negative stimulus after a specific behavior, which increases the likelihood that the behavior will be repeated in the future. This is a fundamental concept in Skinner's theory of operant conditioning.

Question 8

If one presented the conditioned stimulus (such as a metronome) after the presentation of the unconditioned stimulus (the food) in Pavlov's learning experiment, little or no classical conditioning would occur.

Accepted Answer

In classical conditioning, the conditioned stimulus needs to come before the unconditioned stimulus in order for learning to occur. Presenting the conditioned stimulus after the unconditioned stimulus would not create an association between the two stimuli.

Question 9

Conditioned emotional responses are some of the easiest forms of classical conditioning to accomplish, as demonstrated by the fact that our lives are so full of them.

Accepted Answer

Conditioned emotional responses are formed through pairing an emotional response with a previously neutral stimulus, such as associating the sound of a bell with salivating for food. As humans, we have many conditioned emotional responses that have been formed throughout our lives, such as feeling anxious when seeing a spider or feeling happy when hearing our favorite song.

Question 10

Give an example of an unconditioned stimulus.

Accepted Answer

The answer of Give an example of an unconditioned stimulus....

Question 11

Observational learning has been used to explain why children who watch violent television tend to behave more aggressively. Research has demonstrated that watching such television shows causes an increase in violent tendencies.

Accepted Answer

The answer of Observational learning has been used to explain...

Question 12

Seligman's concept of learned helplessness has been extended into the field of psychopathology to explain the emergence of schizophrenia in late adolescence.

Accepted Answer

Learned helplessness has been primarily extended into the field of psychopathology to explain depression, rather than schizophrenia. It describes a condition in which a person suffers from a sense of powerlessness, arising from a traumatic event or persistent failure to succeed, leading to depression and other negative outcomes. Schizophrenia's emergence is more often associated with a combination of genetic, brain chemistry, and environmental factors.

Question 13

In Pavlov's original experiment of classical conditioning, dogs learned to salivate at the sound of a metronome when the metronome was repeatedly paired with the presentation of food. The food is referred to as the unconditioned response.

Accepted Answer

The food is actually referred to as the unconditioned stimulus, and the salivation that naturally occurs in response to the food is the unconditioned response. Through repeated pairing with the metronome, the metronome became a conditioned stimulus that elicited a conditioned response of salivation.

Question 14

Why is learning described as a "relatively permanent" change?

Accepted Answer

The answer of Why is learning described as a "relatively...

Question 15

The "aha!" moment that indicates insight learning was first hypothesized by Tolman.

Accepted Answer

The "aha!" moment that indicates insight learning was first hypothesized by Wolfgang Köhler, not Edward C. Tolman. Köhler observed this phenomenon in his experiments with chimpanzees.

Question 16

After graduating from college, you are hired to work in a factory as an industrial psychologist. The workers assemble iPads. They can either be paid by the hour or by the number of iPads they assemble in a day. You decide that you will do the latter (pay by the number of iPads put together). According to Skinner, you have put the workers on a fixed ratio schedule.

Accepted Answer

A fixed ratio schedule refers to a reinforcement schedule where a reward is given after a certain number of responses. In this scenario, the workers are being paid for the number of iPads they assemble, which fits the definition of a fixed ratio schedule.

Question 17

Biofeedback training is an application that uses the principles of operant conditioning.

Accepted Answer

Biofeedback training uses operant conditioning principles by providing real-time feedback to help an individual learn how to control and regulate bodily processes such as heart rate, blood pressure, and muscle tension. The feedback is given based on the individual's actions, encouraging them to repeat behaviors that lead to positive changes in their bodily processes.

Question 18

Current views of conditioning by psychologists, such as Rescorla, indicate that learning is completely automatic and has nothing to do with cognitive processes.

Accepted Answer

Psychologists such as Rescorla take a more cognitive view of conditioning, suggesting that cognitive processes, such as attention and expectation, play an important role in learning.

Question 19

The law of effect emphasized that responses were more likely to be made if they were followed by some pleasing consequence.

Accepted Answer

The law of effect, proposed by psychologist Edward Thorndike, stated that responses that are followed by satisfying consequences are more likely to be repeated, while those that are followed by unpleasant consequences are less likely to be repeated.

Question 20

Give an example of an unconditioned response.

Accepted Answer

The answer of Give an example of an unconditioned response....

Quiz 5: Learning