Behavior and aversive stimulation

An aversive stimulus It is a stimulus that has the property of being unpleasant for those who receive it. For example, receiving a physical stimulus as an electric shock could be considered an aversive stimulus. However, stimuli can have a physical or social nature. By explaining operating or instrumental conditioning, the aversive stimulus is used both in negative reinforcement and positive punishment.

Behavior and aversive stimulation

Some important parameters in escape conditioning are the following:

Bower, Fowler and Tramp (1959) They obtained that, as, which occurs in studies with positive reinforcement, the observable behavior of experimental subjects ran a couple with the intensity of the stimulation presented: the greater the intensity of stimulation greater rapidity of the career in the escape behaviors and, case of case Changing this intensity, if they increased it, the speed in the escape behavior was promptly increased; And if it decreased, so did it.

In the learning of avoidance a large block of parameters refer to the intensity and duration of the discriminative stimulus that precedes the presentation of the aversive stimulation. Here the results indicate that how much more intense Be the signal that precedes the presentation of aversive stimulation, higher performance In the avoidance response.

One of the main bipro -process theories in the learning of avoidance is the "Fear mediation bipro -rock theory" (Mowrer, 1947; Solomon and Brush, 1954; Rescorla and Solomon, 1967).

It is based on the fact that the application of aversive stimulation to a subject is caused by a fear reaction. In avoidance designs, the aversive stimulus (which would work as a classic EI) is paired by contiguity with a signal that precedes it (normally a light or a sound from a buzzer that acts as EC), causing a response of fear before The presentation of the EC. This fear is the responsibility of the avoidance response: when the answer ends, the EC ends, fear is reduced and this reduction in fear is reinforcement for having made the avoidance response.

Another bipro -process theory in avoidance of avoidance is "Bipro -rock theory of aversion". The existence of two processes is also postulated (class "harmful" either "aversive"; and instrumental based on which, the response made immediately before the disappearance of the aversive stimulus) is reinforced.

Unlike the bipro -rock theory of fear, in this, the definition of "aversion" It is totally operationalizable (without the theoretical surplus that the hypothetical fear construct possesses) and, in more precise terms, it refers to an increase in the probability of aprarication of the responses made immediately before the disappearance of a stimulus. Another bipro -process theory in avoidance learning has been formulated by Heirnstein (1969) and has been described as "Discriminative Theory". Avoidance learning is explained by appealing to discriminatory learning processes.

The existence of two processes (classic and instrumental) is not supposed to. The exterior stimuli that precede the presentation of the aversive stimulus act as environmental indications or keys that function as "background" of the appearance of aversive stimulation. Another bipro -process theory in the learning of avoidance, the most recent, is represented by the "Cognitive Theory" from Seligman and Johnston (1973). There are for this theory, two components, one cognitive and one emotional. The cognitive cuponer is represented by the expectation.

The emotional component, for the classically conditioned fear, understood as a response elicitator (in this theory does not play the reinforcement that is achieved with the reduction of fear). All this assumes that there is a conditioned response of fear and whose mission is to serve as an elicitator of observable responses, but the reduction of this fear is not relevant.

Ucubiertalism

Bandura came to the following conclusion: "General evidence seems to indicate that learning can take place without conscience, although with a slow rate, but that the symbolic representation of response contingencies and reinforcement can significantly accelerate the decuated responsibility".

Ucubiertalism is a medical theoretical position that uses the vocabulary of classical and operant conditioning (although insisting more on this last) and postulates that the imaginative and conceptual dynamics follow the same laws as direct, muscular responses, which are studied in the Laboratory experiments. The maximum representative is Caution.

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