Exam 3: Behaviorist Principles and Theories

In Mr. Marshall's classroom, students who acquire 10 points in one day can have 20 minutes of free time at the end of the day. Mr. Marshall awards points to his students for good behavior and deducts points if they misbehave. The deduction of points for misbehavior is known as:

A child who was once spanked for running into a busy street no longer runs into the street. This can best be explained by which one of the following?

Extinction is one method of eliminating undesirable conditioned responses, but there are several problems associated with its use. Which one is not a problem encountered in using extinction?

At the dentist's office, Teresa has a painful experience that leaves her tense and fearful. The next time her mother brings her to the dentist's office, Teresa begins to get tense and anxious. In this situation, the dentist and dentist's office are _____; Teresa's fear of pain is an) _____.

Julie gets very upset when her mother will not let her help her bake cookies. Julie yells at her mother and throws flour all over the kitchen. Julie's mother makes Julie clean up all of the flour and do all of the dishes Julie's mother created from baking the cookies. Her mother's punishment was a form of:

In the basement of Marcy's college dormitory is a Coke machine that dispenses a can of Coke whenever someone firmly pounds the side of the machine. Marcy is delighted when she discovers this fact, because she can now get Cokes from the machine without having to pay for them. One morning a repairman fixes the machine. The next time Marcy goes to get a soft drink from the machine, she finds that her usual pounding strategy doesn't yield her the Coke she wants. But rather than insert the required coins to purchase a drink, Marcy begins pounding the side of the machine vigorously for several minutes. In behaviorist terminology, Marcy's behavior at this point can best be described as:

Ms. Washington tries to ignore Warren when he tells jokes in class. But sometimes Warren tells a joke so funny that Ms. Washington laughs in spite of herself. Rather than decreasing his joke-telling, Warren begins telling even more outrageous jokes. Inadvertently, Ms. Washington is modifying Warren's joke-telling behavior through:

Avoidance responses are extremely difficult to eliminate. Explain why this is so, and describe two different procedures that can effectively reduce or eliminate avoidance behavior.

When Julie's father comes home from work he opens the front door and picks her up to give her a big hug. Before long, Julie starts smiling whenever she hears her father turn his key to open the door. In this situation, Julie's smiling at the sound of her father's key turning in the door is an) _____; the hugging is an) _____.

Lori has learned that when she wants to say something in class, she must raise her hand before doing so. At home, however, she speaks without ever raising her hand ahead of time. We can say that the classroom has become an) ____ for Lori's hand-raising behavior.

Thorndike's original law of effect described the ways in which the learning of a response:

Imagine that you want to improve a distractible child's ability to sit still and listen in class. Which one of the following procedures illustrates how you might use shaping to do so?

When Judy becomes verbally aggressive toward her peers, she is placed in a quiet and boring room for five minutes. The procedure being used here is most commonly known as:

When Rochelle has an on-the-road lesson as part of her driver education class, she fails to stop at a school crossing zone, as is required by law. Her instructor has her drive around the block several times and stop each time at the crossing zone. He also insists that, once she has stopped, she must wait at least eight seconds before proceeding. The instructor's strategy illustrates the use of _______ as a way of bringing about behavior change.

Good grades are reinforcing to some children but not to others. Someone explaining this fact from an early operant conditioning perspective would say that good grades are most likely to be reinforcers to children who:

If students associate failure with punishment, and then associate playing sports with failure, they may begin to fear playing sports through a process of:

When behaviorists describe an organism as a "black box," they mean that:

Jacob is suffering from a mild case of flu and, as a result, is feeling a bit nauseous. He decides that he needs to eat something to keep up his strength, so he gets out of bed, puts on a heavy sweater to keep himself warm, heats up a bowl of leftover chili, and settles down in an easy chair to watch a television game show while he eats. A few days later, after Jacob has recovered from the flu, one of the stimuli in the situation just described elicits a feeling of nausea. With the phenomenon of associative bias in mind, choose the stimulus that is most likely to elicit nausea.

An avoidance behavior of a previously aversive situation is particularly difficult to extinguish because:

After repeatedly being hugged by her father when he comes through the door, Julie begins to smile when she hears a key turning to open the door opening by any person. Julie's behavior can be explained by: