SUMMARY OF BEHAVIORIST APPROACH

• The behaviourist approach emphasizes the study of observable responses, and rejects attempts to study internal processes like thinking.
• In doing so, behaviourist focus on learning as the primary factor in explaining changes in behaviour. Depending on the type of response, this involves either classical conditioning or operant conditioning.
• Classical conditioning is concerned with how conditioned stimuli come to elicit conditioned responses- reflex responses which are normally elicited by unconditioned stimuli.
• Classical conditioning can be applied to a number of aspects of human behaviour, including emotional responses like fears, and even activity of the immune system.
• Operant conditioning is concerned with how the probability of the voluntary 'operant' response changesas a function of the environmental consequences (reinforce) which follow the response.
• This process of reinforcement can be analyzed in terms of the type of reinforcer, the contingency of reinforcement and the schedule of reinforcement.
• The application of the operant conditioning to everyday behaviour is commonly called behaviour modification; related research includes the effects of aversive control and methods of altering behaviour by biofeedback, among others uses.
• Recent research has indicated that while conceptually distinct, classical and operant conditioning are interrelated in actual behaviour. In addition, research on biological constraints on learning has suggested that there are limits to the generality of conditioning principles, as illustrated by the concept of preparedness.