Psychology

The Basics

Rolf Reber

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351374675
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This compact introduction is the ideal primer for anyone looking for an accessible overview of the basic principles of psychology, the fascinating science of mind and behavior.

In everyday life we often ask why people act the way that they do, especially when we encounter or hear about puzzling behavior. Psychology: The Basics introduces everyday explanations of behavior, considering them through a psychological lens. Illustrating how behavior can be explained through fundamental psychological principles, the book covers the core areas of cognitive, developmental, and social psychology as well as behaviorism, the human brain, our emotions, personality and individual differences, and psychological disorders.

This book, which includesfurther reading in each chapter for those wishing to study more deeply, is the perfect easy-to-understand introductory text for students, teachers, health personnel, human resource managers, administrators, and anyone interested in the human mind and behavior.

1

LEARNING FROM EXPERIENCE

Behaviorism

In everyday language, we say that Liza avoids dogs because she fears them, or that the young smoker attacked the subway employee because he was angry. However, such parlance is problematic for the scientific study of behavior because we cannot observe internal states like fear or anger; we cannot look into the mind. What we can observe is behavior, such as avoiding dogs or attacking another person.

We might ask Liza whether she fears dogs or the young smoker whether he was angry when he attacked the subway employee. However, verbal reports about why people did something may be unreliable and (even worse from a scientific point of view) these reports cannot be confirmed by independent data; we simply have to believe what people tell us. Couldn’t it be that Liza implies her fear of dogs from running away from them, or that the young aggressor says that he was angry in order to hide that he did it in cold blood?

As a response to the problems with self-reports, psychologists within an approach called behaviorism claimed that it is not possible to investigate mental states because there is no way to observe them. The best a researcher could do, they argued, is observe behavior. A scientist can objectively describe a stimulus, which is the object or event that elicits a behavioral response. Such a stimulus could be a dog, and the behavioral response running away or the facial expression of fear. However, the mental processes that connect the stimulus with the behavioral response – such as perception, categorization, memory, thoughts, intentions, and decisions – remain in the dark. The mind, according to behaviorists, is a black box that scientists are unable to open. Note that behaviorists restrict the scope of psychology. While the common definition of psychology emphasizes the study of both mind and behavior, behaviorists define psychology as the study of behavior.

Behaviorists explored learning. Commonly, we associate learning with school, where pupils learn mathematics or grammar that they have to retrieve at an exam. This is not what the behaviorists had in mind. They started from the assumption that organisms learn everything by experience. At birth, humans start with some basic reflexes, and learning builds on these reflexes. Behaviorists assumed that there are laws of learning that explain behavior, just as there are laws of physics that explain motion. They therefore searched for basic laws of learning.

The legacy of the behaviorists lies in their exploration of two main principles of learning – classical conditioning and operant conditioning – which are discussed in the next two sections. We conclude the chapter with a review of studies that revealed the limitations of behaviorism to explain human behavior. Despite its deficiencies, behaviorism discovered important principles of behavior analysis and behavior modification that have been applied in a variety of domains, most prominently in behavior therapy (see Chapter 8).

PAVLOV'S DOG: CLASSICAL CONDITIONING

Liza, a young woman, is frightened whenever she sees a dog. A common assumption is that prior experiences made Liza feel fear at the sight of dogs. We can try to disentangle the elements of this experience. Let us assume that as a child, Liza became frightened when a dog barked. As dogs often run towards a person and then bark, or wait until the person comes close enough before they bark, Liza had usually seen the dog before it barked. When seeing a dog often enough was followed by barking, Liza begins to show the fear response when she sees a dog, even if it does not bark.

Such learning from experience has been systematically studied since around 1900. The best-known study is commonly referred to as Pavlov’s dog. Pavlov noted that dogs that were new to the experiment salivated when they saw the meat that the experimenter served them. However, after some time, dogs began to salivate when they saw just the experimenter. Pavlov, originally interested in the physiology of digestion, recognized that he might have found a fundamental learning principle. He just added a bell to his apparatus to examine this principle, which became known as classical conditioning or Pavlovian conditioning.

The experiment follows the logic shown in the four panels of Figure 1.1. (1) When a dog sees meat, it salivates. (2) When it hears the bell ringing without meat, it does not salivate. (3) The bell-ringing is paired with the meat; just before the dog gets the meat, the bell rings. Again, the dog salivates when it sees the meat. (4) After the animal goes through repeated trials where the ringing bell is paired with meat, the experimenter rings the bell but does not serve meat. Although the dog does not see meat, it salivates again.

Figure 1.1 The setup of Pavlov’s experiment

There are four elements in this experiment: (1) meat, (2) bell-ringing, (3) salivation after seeing meat, and (4) salivation after bell-ringing alone. Meat is a stimulus that naturally elicits salivation as response. Meat is therefore the unconditioned stimulus (US) and the ensuing salivation is the unconditioned response (UR). Bell-ringing alone only elicits salivation after repeated pairings with the food. The effect of the bell is hence conditioned on being paired with the UR, in this case meat. Therefore, bell-ringing is the conditioned stimulus (CS) and salivation after bell-ringing without meat is the conditioned response (CR). It is worth pausing a moment to memorize these terms that are central to the understanding of the principles discussed next.

In the case of Liza, the sight of the dog is the CS and the barking the US. Fear as a response to barking is the UR, and fear as a response to the sight of the dog alone after repeated exposure to barking is the CR.

The acquisition phase often includes dozens of repeated pairings of CS and US before the CS elicits the CR. Therefore, bell-ringing has to be paired with meat repeatedly before the bell alone elicits salivation. Timing of pairings is crucial. Let us look at four different schedules.

The most efficient timing is to present the CS just before the US. In this case, the CS predicts the occurrence of the US and produces the strongest CR. In Pavlov’s experiment, the bell rang and the dog received food within 2 seconds.

When the CS appears a long time before the US, the connection becomes weaker or disappears completely. When the bell rings 30 seconds before the meat is served, the dog attends to other stimuli in the environment and does not connect the ringing of the bell with the food. In fact, the coming of the experimenter who brings the food predicts the arrival of the meat much better. There is an important exception to this rule: taste aversion. A poison causes nausea (US) and subsequent taste aversion (UR). When food taste (here the CS) is associated with nausea, taste aversion as CR develops even if the delay between CS and US – taste and nausea – is up to 24 hours, as we shall discuss later.

Other timings also lead to weakened conditioning. One example is simultaneous presentation of CS and US; that is, when the bell rings at the same time the meat is delivered. Finally, when the bell rings after the meat is given, the dog presumably enjoys the meat and does not attend to the bell-ringing. The best outcome of classical conditioning has been observed when the CS predicts the US.

To sum up, after repeated CS-US pairings, the CS alone will elicit the CR. The effect of classical conditioning is greatest when the US immediately follows the CS, with the exception of taste aversion.

However, when the dog repeatedly does not get food after it hears the bell, salivation will decrease and finally disappear. This process is called extinction. In general terms, when the CS is repeatedly presented without the US, the association between CS and US will weaken, and the CR will decrease in intensity and finally disappear.

Note that extinction does not mean forgetting. After complete extinction, the dog will no longer salivate after the sound of the bell; that is, there will be no CR after presentation of the CS. Yet when the experiment is interrupted and resumed the next day, the ringing of the bell (CS) elicits salivation (CR), but salivation will be less intense. Although US and CS had never been paired after complete extinction, there was a response again. This mechanism is called spontaneous recovery, and it means that the dog cannot have forgotten the link between bell-ringing (CS) and food (US). Moreover, an animal can more easily learn a once acquired CS-US association after complete extinction. This rapid reacquisition further bolsters the notion that extinction is not forgetting.

Extinction can also be observed in humans. When Liza encounters dogs that do not bark, she may no longer show a fear response at the sight of a dog. However, when she then encounters one dog that barks, she may rapidly reacquire the conditioned fear response at the sight of a dog.

Two other mechanisms within classical conditioning are generalization and discrimination. Let us assume that a dog was presented with a tone of 800 Hz immediately before it received food. What happens if a tone of 600 Hz is played alone? The dog will salivate but less intensely than with the 800 Hz tone. Actually, the salivation response will decrease in proportion to the distance of the tone to the original tone. When food is paired with an 800 Hz tone, the dog will salivate less when a 600 Hz tone is played and even less when a 400 Hz tone is played. This learning mechanism is called generalization. The CR not only appears when the CS is identical to the one presented in the acquisition phase but also when the CS is similar.

When a dog repeatedly receives food after the 800 Hz tone but a weak yet painful electric shock to its paw after the 400 Hz tone, it will salivate after the 800 Hz tone but show a fear response after the 400 Hz tone. This learning mechanism is called discrimination because the dog learns to discriminate between the responses to the two tones.

Again, these principles can be translated to human behavior. Liza may have learned her fear from the encounter with a shepherd dog. However, she presumably generalizes the fear response to other dog breeds as well; the more similar a dog is to the one that originally aroused her fear, the more likely she will respond with fear. If her fear stems from encounters with a barking shepherd dog, but she regularly plays with the neighbor’s nice golden retriever, she may show a fear of shepherd dogs but not of golden retrievers – a case of discrimination.

Pavlov thought that he had found a general learning principle according to which any CS immediately followed by a US will lead to a CR. This is not quite true. We mentioned earlier the exception of taste aversion, which can be conditioned if nausea follows hours after food intake. In addition, food aversion in rats can be conditioned by pairing food with a poison that causes nausea but much less by pairing food with a shock (Garcia & Koelling, 1966). You may object that nausea is just a more potent US than the pain induced by shock. However, this is not the case. The same authors found that avoidance of an audiovisual stimulus (a light and a sound) was more pronounced if paired with shock than with nausea.

Such observations suggest that conditioning is not a general learning principle but depends on biological preparedness. In the study by Garcia and Koelling, organisms pair taste with nausea but not with pain, and they pair audiovisual stimuli with pain but not with nausea. In a demonstration of biological preparedness for humans, Hugdahl and Öhman (1977) conditioned fear by associating pictures with mild but uncomfortable electric shocks. These pictures depicted potentially dangerous objects that are either biologically relevant (snakes, mushrooms) or biologically irrelevant (electric equipment, loose electric cables). Later, the researchers tried to remove these associations by showing the pictures without providing electric shocks, which is the process of extinction. They also instructed participants that from now on, no shock will follow. Supporting the biological preparedness hypothesis, fear from loose electric cables and other human-made artifacts disappeared completely after the instruction, whereas fear from biologically relevant stimuli persisted.

An observation from clinical practice supports biological preparedness for taste aversion in humans. Cancer patients who undergo chemotherapy that produces nausea develop taste aversion to food. So strong is this association that knowledge about the underlying sources does not help; although patients know that their nausea is caused by chemotherapy and not by the food they have eaten, they retain the taste aversion (Bernstein & Webster, 1980).

A classical study – nowadays deemed unethical – showed that the principles of classical conditioning can explain the emergence of fear in humans (Watson & Rayner, 1920). The two authors tested an infant now known as Little Albert. The boy was frightened of loud noises but not of a white rat or any other animals or objects. Watson and Rayner exposed Albert to the rat (CS), immediately followed by the loud noise from striking a hammer on a suspended steel bar (US). After some pairings of rat and noise, Albert became frightened at the sight of the rat. Watson and Rayner could also show that the fear generalized to white rabbits and even to fur coats but not to toy blocks. That is, fear generalized to similar objects only. The researchers planned to remove the fear using extinction, but Albert moved with his mother before the extinction sessions started. His identity is uncertain to this day, so it never became clear whether he went on to fear furred animals.

Box 1.1 Research ethics

Studies like the ones by Watson and Rayner on Little Albert or by Milgram (1963) on obedience (see Chapter 7) have raised questions about the ethics of conducting research in psychology. The principal objective of research ethics is to preserve the rights and integrity of participants. There are guidelines for conducting psychological research with human participants, the most prominent being those of the American Psychological Association (APA). Let us discuss four important ethical issues.

The first is minimizing harm. Participants in psychological experiments should not undergo treatment that is known to be harmful, like the conditioning of fear in a child.

Second, individuals have to give informed consent to participate in a study. When a participant comes to an experiment, the experimenter has to provide the participant with information about the purpose of the study; complete information on what the participant has to do or to undergo, such as filling out questionnaires or getting injections; potential advantages and disadvantages in participating in the study; what the task will be; and how long the study will take. Participation in psychological studies is voluntary; the participant can withdraw from a study at any time without giving a reason and without having to fear disadvantages. If the participant is a child, both the child (if able to do so) and the child’s parents have to provide informed consent.

Third, debriefing after the study provides the participant with all information about the hypotheses of the study. If the study included deception, this information must be disclosed at the end of the experiment. An example of deception is telling a participant that a medication has a sedative effect when its factual effect is arousing. Interestingly, psychologists consider deception to be ethical, whereas behavioral economists do not (see Hertwig & Ortmann, 2001).

The final point pertains to privacy. Data of study participants have to remain anonymous. Data collection is often anonymous, which avoids any problems with this point. However, if a researcher collects data at several time points, the identity of participants must be stored in order to assign the data at different time points to the right person. In this case, the researcher has to use a code for each person. The researcher creates two files: one with the names and codes and one with the codes and data. It is imperative to store the two files in two separate, secure places; only the researcher has access to the identity of the participants. each researcher must follow these rules of ethical conduct.

The analogy of Little Albert’s fear of furred animals to Liza’s fear of dogs is obvious. As already noted, seeing a dog has become a CS for Liza because it was associated with the US (barking) that led to the UR (fear). The irony of fear is that people often do not expose themselves to its source; fear may therefore persist and lead to phobias (see Chapter 8). If Liza avoids dogs, she will not have the opportunity to experience that dogs in general are nice; there is therefore no extinction of the fear response. One popular way to stop fear of dogs is thus to expose people to dogs, as we shall discuss in Chapter 8.

Let us look at a slightly different example, where Liza touched a dog and the dog bites her so that she does not touch dogs again. This kind of learning from consequences of one’s own behavior is based on principles of operant conditioning.

THE SKINNER BOX: OPERANT CONDITIONING

In classical conditioning people learn an association between two stimuli, the CS and the US. However, when Liza does not touch dogs because she once wanted to pet one and got bit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Learning from experience: behaviorism
• 2 Filling the black box: cognitive psychology
• 3 What drives behavior? Motivation and emotion
• 4 Brain and genes
• 5 Human development
• 6 Personality and intelligence: individual differences
• 7 Living with others: social psychology
• 8 Psychological disorders and their treatment
• Epilogue: why we do what we do
• References
• Index