Operant Conditioning

Positive reinforcement is an increase in the future frequency of a behavior due to the addition of a stimulus immediately following a response. Giving or adding food to a dog contingent on its sitting is an example of positive reinforcement if this results in an increase in the future behavior of the dog sitting.

Negative reinforcement is an increase in the future frequency of a behavior when the consequence is the removal of an aversive stimulus. Turning off an annoying song when a child asks their parent is an example of negative reinforcement (if this results in an increase in asking behavior of the child in the future). Another example is if a mouse presses a button to avoid shock. Do not confuse this concept with punishment. There are two variations of negative reinforcement.

Positive reinforcement:In an attempt to decrease the likelihood of a behavior occurring in the future, an operant response is followed by the presentation of an aversive stimulus. This is positive punishment.


Negative Punishment:In an attempt to decrease the likelihood of a behavior occurring in the future, an operant response is followed by the removal of an appetitive stimulus. This is negative punishment.




behttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcementhavior of the dog sitting).

B.F Skinner

Skinner was born in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania to Grace and William Skinner. His father was a lawyer. His brother Edward, two and a half years his junior, died at age sixteen of a cerebral hemorrhage.
He attended Hamilton College in New York with the intention of becoming a writer. While attending, he joined Lambda Chi Alpha Fraternity. He wrote for the school paper, but as an atheist, he was critical of the religious school he attended. He received his B.A. in English literature in 1926. After graduation, he spent a year at his parents' home in Scranton attempting to become a writer of fiction. He soon became disillusioned with his literary skills and concluded that he had little world experience and no strong personal perspective from which to write.
Skinner received a PhD from Harvard in 1931, and remained there as a researcher until 1936. He then taught at the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis and later at Indiana University, where he was chair of the psychology department from 1946–1947, before returning to Harvard as a tenured professor in 1948. He remained at Harvard for the rest of his career.
In 1936 Skinner married Yvonne Blue. The couple had two daughters, Julie and Deborah m. Buzan). He died of leukemia on August 18th 1990 and is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

He discovered and advanced the rate of response as a dependent variable in psychological research. He invented the cumulative recorder to measure rate of responding as part of his highly influential work on schedules of reinforcement. In a recent survey, Skinner was listed as the most influential psychologist of the 20th century. He was a prolific author who published 21 books and 180 articles.

Behaviorism

Behaviorism, also called the learning perspective (where any physical action is a behavior), is a philosophy of psychology based on the proposition that all things that organisms do including acting, thinking and feeling can and should be regarded as behaviors. The school of psychology maintains that behaviors as such can be described scientifically without recourse either to internal physiological events or to hypothetical constructs such as the mind. Behaviorism comprises the position that all theories should have observational correlates but that there are no philosophical differences between publicly observable processes (such as actions) and privately observable processes (such as thinking and feeling).
From early psychology in the 19th century, the behaviorist school of thought ran concurrently and shared commonalities with the psychoanalytic and Gestalt movements in psychology into the 20th century; but also differed from the mental philosophy of the Gestalt psychologists in critical ways. Its main influences were Ivan Pavlov, who investigated classical conditioning, Edward Lee Thorndike, John B. Watson who rejected introspective methods and sought to restrict psychology to experimental methods, and B.F. Skinner who conducted research on operant conditioning.

John Watson

John Watson was born in south Carolina in 1878 and grew up on a farm. Watson claimed to have been unruly and a poor student as a youngest. And by all acounts he seemed destined to father his father model of violence and recklessness. Watson Research on animals and children was interupted by World War 1.

Ivan Pavlov

Ivan Pavlov was born in Ryazan, Russia.[1] He began his higher education as a student at the Ryazan Ecclesiastical Seminary, but then dropped out and enrolled in the University of Saint Petersburg to study the natural sciences and become a physiologist. He received his doctorate in 1879.
In the 1890s, Pavlov was investigating the gastric function of dogs by externalizing a salivary gland so he could collect, measure, and analyze the saliva and what response it had to food under different conditions. He noticed that the dogs tended to salivate before food was actually delivered to their mouths, and set out to investigate this "psychic secretion", as he called it.
He decided that this was more interesting than the chemistry of saliva, and changed the focus of his research, carrying out a long series of experiments in which he manipulated the stimuli occurring before the presentation of food. He thereby established the basic laws for the establishment and extinction of what he called "conditional reflexes" — i.e., reflex responses, like salivation, that only occurred conditionally upon specific previous experiences of the animal. These experiments were carried out in the 1900s, and were known to western scientists through translations of individual accounts, but first became fully available in English in a book published in 1927.