Learning

By Ass.Prof. Dr.
Diyar Hussein
Taher
M.B.Ch.B. /
F.I.C.M.S.Psych. .
Department of
psychiatry,
College of
Medicine,
Hawler Medical
University
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List of Contents:
• Operant or Skinner’s conditioning
• Types of reinforcements
• Superstitious behaviour
• Conditioned Emotions
• Behavioural Therapy

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Objectives:
To know:
• Difference of operant conditioning from classical conditioning
• Human superstitions
• Biofeedback mechanism for conditioning
• Behavioural Therapy

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*Operant or Skinner’s conditioning:
B.F. Skinner, an American psychologist developed the
most important analysis of reinforcement, which
could be:
1-Natural reinforcement: It occurs when a hungry
animal removes leaves to get food, where this
behaviour will be reinforced more & more whenever
food is found.
2-Contrived reinforcement: It occurs by the trainer
when he exploits the animal’s hunger to reinforce a
particular behaviour, by providing a reward of food.
-Where the response (behaviour) will be reinforced
& consequently will occur more frequently in the
future when the animal is hungry.

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E.g. in one Skinner’s box there was a horizontal bar which operates a
food magazine to deliver food when it is pressed.
- As with Thorndike’s cat, the hungry pigeon initially shows a wide
range of behaviour till it operate the bar mechanism by chance.
- This response is reinforced by the delivered food & so the range of
behaviour is reduced until the pigeon’s only activity in the box is to
press the bar.
- At this point the bar pressing behaviour has become conditioned.
- There was no specific characteristic of the bar itself which will
cause the untrained hungry pigeon to press it, i.e. this response has
been emitted (not elicited) so Skinner uses the term operant behaviour
because it ‘operate’ or acts on the environment.

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In operant conditioning the temporal order was 1st
the response & then the reinforcer.
While in the classical conditioning the order was
1st the stimulus & then the response.

Operant behaviour is also capable of being

extinguished when the emitted response is no
longer followed by reinforcement.

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Types of reinforcements:
1- Continuous reinf.: The reward occurs every time the response is emitted.
2- Intermittent reinf.: The reward does not occur every time the response is
emitted but at a variable frequency & level of intensity. It is effective in
maintaining the conditioned operant behaviour in pigeons & humans (e.g.the
behaviour of gambler playing a poker-machine or fruit-machine , where the
lever-pulling behaviour has been shaped, & the reinf. is intermittent).
3- Positive reinf.: There is reward as food, when the required response emitted.
4- Negative reinf.: There is termination of a continuous disturbance as loud
noise, when the required response was emitted.

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*Superstitious behaviour:

Then Skinner arrange that at regular intervals of 15 sec. the electrically

operated food magazine delivered food to the pigeons no matter what
they did.
After some time he found that one pigeon was bowing continuously,
another was turning around & others were engaged in similarly odd
sequences of responses, reinforced because they had been emitted just
before the food was released.
This was termed superstitious behaviour because the pigeons were
behaving as if their behaviour had some effect on the supply of food.

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Human superstitions:
- The gambler who blows on the dice, always sits in the same
chair or wears a lucky tie or hat. He does so because such
actions have been reinforced in the past when they have
coincided with success.
- Many illnesses are self limiting so therapy may coincide with
spontaneous remission, & the consequent belief by the
physician that the drug is effective may be superstitious.
- The placebo effect in the patient is dependent on the
patient’s superstitious belief that any drug will help, which
is derived from positive reinforcement of relief experienced
after taking medication in the past.
So the effectiveness of any new drug can’t be judged on the
basis of its successes with individual patients but only after
a complex & large scale trial has been carried out on a large
no. of patients.
Also the placebo effect in the patient has to be taken into
account by using blind or double blind methods. 9
*Conditioned Emotions:
Emotions could be regarded as responses to specific stimuli.
Watson asserted that fear, rage & love were the basic emotional
endowments in the infant, & would be differentiated as the individual
develops.
- Fear in the infant is an unconditioned response to sudden loss of
support or to a sudden loud noise.
- Watson demonstrated through the “Little Albert experiment” how the
fear response could be by simple conditioning be transferred to a
previously neutral stimuli.

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Little Albert expt.: An 11 m. child, called
Albert was the subject of the expt., & a
white rat was used as a neutral stimulus.
- Albert was interested about the rat &
showed no fear. …. Later the white rat
was shown to Albert but with making a
sudden loud noise, i.e. pairing the
neutral with the unconditioned stimulus
for fear response. ….After several
repetitions of this procedure Albert
started to show a fear of the rat, i.e. he
had learned fear response to a neutral
stimulus.
- The prototype is the simple Pavlovian
conditioning situation.
- Albert’s fear response was then
generalized , so that he showed
fear not only to the rat but to other
white furry objects as rabbit.

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So if emotions could be
conditioned, the emotional
disorders might be
similarly developed & so
could be reduced by
extinction.
But attempts to treat anxiety
disorders by removing them
from the stressful situations
(extinction) showed only
short lived success, where
shortly after that the anxiety
responses could suddenly
reappear, so a more effective
method is required through
Behaviour therapy.

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*Behaviour Therapy: Is treating patients using psychotherapy
based on conditioning techniques.
1-Step by step or gradual desensitization:
Neurotic behaviour in a dog can be produced by repeated noxious
stimuli as minute electric shocks, then like in little Albert the
breakdown in the animal’s behaviour generalized that returning the
dog to the cage or even to the lab would cause neurotic behaviour.
Allowing the response to decay by extinction was found to be an
unreliable method of treatment, but if the neurotic dog was exposed
to the disturbing situation without the noxious stimulus for a very
brief period & then for progressively longer times eventually
produced a reduction in the neurotic reaction.
This could also be achieved by initially placing
the animal at a safe distance from the threat &
then progressively moving it nearer at each trial.
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Little Albert may be relieved by a similar process, where the therapist
introduce the feared animal in a cage into Albert room while he was
playing, for a very brief periods & at a distance.
As the presence of the animal was tolerated, the exposure
progressively lengthened & the cage placed nearer. The fear
eventually was overcome & Albert was able to fondle the animal
affectionately.

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2-Reciprocal inhibition:
- Wolpe, a South African psychiatrist developed this therapy.
- He shows that if a response incompatible with anxiety can be made to
occur in the presence of an anxiety-provoking stimulus then the effect
of the anxiety-provoking stimulus will be reduced.
He repeated the animal expt. producing gradual desensitization of the
neurotic responses but with feeding the animal, 1st of all at a distance
from the threat stimulus then getting progressively nearer day by day.
Feeding the animal increased the rate of desensitization so the animal’s
feeding responses & its neurotic responses were considered to be
reciprocally antagonistic.

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In human, the same thing ,feeding, can be applied in children with
neurotic disorder, while relaxation was chosen as the response
incompatible with anxiety in adults.
The technique advocated by Wolpe involves 1st enquiring from the
patient about all the situations or objects which produce anxiety, then
a hierarchy of responses is constructed ranging from the least
threatening to the most one.
The patient is progressively desensitized by being trained to relax first
to the least disturbing threat, then step by step up the hierarchy until
he no longer feels threatened by any of the listed objects or situations
(as in specific phobic anxiety disorder toward mouse) .

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3-Reinforcement therapy:
Is a behaviour therapy, try to removes a patient’s pathological response
& replace it with a more appropriate behaviour by using Skinner’s
principle of reinforcement.
When the patient emits an appropriate or desired response he is
reinforced, while any abnormal response is not reinforced.
This is applied successfully in training mentally retarded patients for
basic social & occupational skills, & in dealing with chronic ill
patients in mental hospitals.

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At its simplest level, when a patient shows undesirable
behaviour the ward nurses pay no attention but when he
shows appropriate behaviour he is rewarded by praise.

Tokens can act as generalized reinforcers & Therapeutic token

economy have been set up in chronic wards, where the
patient is given a token as a reward for appropriate behaviour
which he can cash-in at the end of the day for an extra
privileges as sweets.

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4-Successive approximation (shaping):
Skinner for building up a pattern of behaviour, he
started from reinforcement of a single emitted
response aiming to shape a complex pattern of
behaviour.
E.g. a chronic schizophrenia patient who had been
mute for many years, on one occasion the therapist
accidentally dropped a stick of gum, he observed
that the patient’s eyes dropped to the floor, then
returned to their usual fixed stare.
It was decided to use this single emitted response as a
base for treatment programme designed to get the
patient to speak?.......
-1st 2 w a stick gum was held in front of the patient & it
was given to him whenever his eyes moved toward
it.
- Next he given gum only when he made some lips
movements.
- Next he given the gum once he has made some sound.
- So he was brought to say ‘gum please ’by end of 6 w.
- Next the patient started to speak to the therapist & to
other people. 19
- Similar methods used with speech problems in autistic children.
- This therapy requires careful planning for each step & for the amount
of reinforcement to each stage, where if the reinforcement is too weak
the behaviour will not be maintained for sufficient length of time, & if
it is too strong the response will became excessive or satiated.

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5-Satiation effect:
E.g. a lady in a chronic ward habitually hoarded towels in her room &
the staff would periodically have to take them all out.
With treatment the regime was changed so that she was given an
increasing no. of towels each day, & after about 3 w. she had over
600 towels in her room.
At this stage she began to take them out by herself, where her behaviour
reached a point of satiation at which towel-hoarding no longer served
as reinforcement.
Similar treatment used in patients with involuntary muscle spasms (tic
disorder) as facial twitching or exaggerated blinking, which can be
treated by Massed practice, where the patient encouraged to twitch
or blink deliberately for a periods of time then improvement will
occur.

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6-Aversive therapy: The patient here presents for treatment because he
achieves pleasure in an inappropriate or pathological manner, as sexual
perversion or addiction on alcohol or drugs.
The approach to treatment is reversed , where the pleasurable response is
reduced by pairing the stimulus with an unpleasant experience to produce an
aversion.
It is drastic & depends on the degree of patient’s motive for improvement
E.g. in one of the original forms of treatment the alcoholic was given
apomorphine (produces violent feelings of nausea & vomiting), where
whenever the effect of apomorphine begins he is given alcohol, & this
procedure is repeated until the unpleasant effects of apomorphine are
conditioned to the ingestion of alcohol, so aversion is produced when the
patient is literally sickened by alcohol.

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• But using drugs can be dangerous, plus it is difficult to time the exact
point at which the unpleasant effect occur & so to give the alcohol.
• Now aversive treatment of alcoholics has used rotation or motion
sickness as means of aversion ( as by disulfiram).
• Success also occur by using painful but harmless electric shocks
which can be timed more exactly in relation to the behaviour which is
intended to avert ( as for sexual perversion ).

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*Conditioning & the biofeedback mechanism:
Pavlov’s concerned with involuntary responses while Skinner with
voluntary responses.
Miller undertook experiments to test whether the principles of operant
reinf. of skinner could be applied to involuntary responses.
He first control the voluntary effects in rats by using curare (a powerful
muscle relaxant), & he used electrical stimulation of pleasure centers
in the brain as a reinforcer, but some rats were reinforced when the
heart rate increased, & others when it was reduced.

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q It is found that this
reinforcing procedure could
affect the heart rate
effectively in the predicted
direction.
q Similar findings were found
in human, but using a more
conventional reinforcers (as
fruit juice ), with feed-back
information to the subject
about the autonomic
processes, so affecting
control on involuntary bodily
processes (as blood pressure).

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Summary & conclusions:
• learning occurred because of the consequences of the response i.e.
the rewarding.
• Skinner used the term operant behavior because it ‘operate’ or acts
on the environment.
• Behavior therapy is treating patients using psychotherapy based on
conditioning techniques.
Questions

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