anti-Causality


Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Pure lie: Behavioral learning perspective on personality

I wrote this for a grade knowing that the professor, who claims she is humanistic, is fully behavioral.  Watson was a felon; professors attempt to rationalize his activity in the context of his times, or zeitgeist.  Equating the effects emotional communication with terrifying and, admittedly, permanently damaging a child--effectively equating fear and affection--shows that psychology has a pathologically limited emotional range.  Fortunately, because of the rise of imaging technology, most of this material can to out with trash.



1) Pre-condition: Conditioned stimulus (CS-bell) causes no response.

2) Unconditioned stimulus (UCS-food) causes Unconditioned Response (UCR-salivation).

2) Combine CS-bell (conditioned stimulus) with UCS-food (unconditioned stimulus) while triggering UCR-salivation (unconditioned response) to create CR-salivation (conditioned response).

3) CS-bell (conditioned stimulus) causes CR-salivation (conditioned response)


As all of life is continual stimuli and responses paired with symbolic counter parts for these stimuli with often symbolic responses, behavioral responses comprise much of the learning process, which includes the learned responses to experiences that influence the development of the personality.  Pavlov laid the ground with animal experiments and that the same rules apply to humans in simple ways that can show emotional responses, such as fear, to otherwise neutral stimuli based on experiences.  Someone who has been robbed at night, for instance, may be afraid to go out at night; his behavior, and hence a component of his personality has been behaviorally learned by experience.


Pavlov was able to create neurotic behaviors in animals appeared to be similar to those in humans with experiments that altered and confused the presented stimulai, such as with his changing of the shapes of circles, further showing the effects of classical conditioning on personality.  Friedman and Schustack give an example of children who become anxious and confused when they cannot guess praise or punishment responses of their unstable and, hence, unpredictable parents.  Pavlov was primarily interested in behavioral responses; the thinking and feeling components of the effect classical conditioning on the personality was expanded by Watson, a contemporary to Pavlov, who developed conditioned emotional responses (Rilling, 2000).  Rilling writes that Watson actually absorbed ideas from psychoanalysts such as Freud whose entire work was the basis of personality, and proved certain aspects of their theories with classical conditioning experiments, even though he strongly disapproved of psychoanalytic theory. 


With his "Little Albert" experiment, Watson conditioned a small child to fear a rat that the child was previously unafraid of with a loud noise that produced fear when the child was playing with the rat.  Very significantly, Watson proved the transference component of Freud's theory of affect that shows emotional response, or learning, is redirected from one object to another.  The child's fear response to a rat was transferred to another similar but neutral object, a rabbit.  Watson explained the "transfer of emotion behavioristically" without the unconcious as a mediator as it had been in Freud's version of transference.


To show the importance of transference, in therapy it is used to describe the transfer of feelings.  In the broader sense, the transfer of feelings is describes emotional bonding.


transference: communication



References


Rilling, M. (2000). John Watson's paradoxical struggle to explain Freud. American Psychologist, 55(3), 301-312. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.55.3.301.




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