A Very Brief History of the Pioneers of Behavioural Psychology

 

This very brief work introduces the reader to some of the great names of of behavioural psychology.

Socrates was executed in 399 BC for corrupting young people into believing that being a person of good behaviour is more important than being a wealthy person (sound familiar)?  He is famous for his Socratic questions; these question enquire of one’s self and are used today in cognitive behavioural therapy.

 

Aristotle is considered by many to be one of the first behaviourists.

 

He contemplated and wrote about memory - and drew attention to what is now the obvious, that memory, space and time are connected and that quantity is an essential ingredient of memory.

 

It seems he considered that time conditioned your perception of an event: “Memory is, therefore, neither perception nor conception, but a state or affection of one of these, conditioned by lapse of time”.  (350 BC Aristotle).  I consider that affection means affected in a way that is not necessarily emotional.  It appears to mean a person is conditioned by what has happened to them in the past and this will affect their thoughts and therefore behaviour in the present and the future.  However 2000 years of interpretations and possible Chinese whispers could well take a toll on the accuracy of what he really did say.

 

Ivan Pavlov did his famous experiment with dogs in 1927.  He had special containers attached to the mouths of the dogs so saliva could be collected and thus show whether a notable increase of salivation had occurred.  Every time the dogs were fed, shortly beforehand a bell was rung.  This was done whenever they were fed.  The bell was then rung without food being present and the dogs salivated.  This showed that the dogs had been conditioned to associate the bell with food.  Pavlov referred to this as a temporary conditioned reflex as apposed to innate or normal reflex.

 

When the dogs first hear the bell tone they have an orienting response (OR).  That is they prick their ears up and take note that something unusual is happening.

 

The unconditioned stimulus is the food (US).  This will cause the dogs to salivate naturally without prior conditioning.  The unconditioned stimulus must be a biologically important stimulus such as food, sex, water, electric shock or something equally powerful.

 

The salivating due to the (US) is known as the unconditioned response (UR).

 

When the bell is rung and no food is given, but the dog still salivates it is called conditioned response (CR).

 

If the bell was rung on many occasions close together without food being served to the dogs soon afterwards the affect was that they would stop salivating when they heard the bell.  This is called extinction.

 

This research was taken further by Garcia & Koelling in 1966 when they subjected rats to water with a strong taste that also contained a chemical that would make them sick.  Other rats suffered electric shocks on their feet, noise and flashing lights when they drank the water.  It was only the rats that were sick that refused to drink the flavoured water.

 

I have read of children seeing a black cloudy sky before a storm learning to go inside to shelter being considered classical conditioning the same as Pavlov’s dogs from Psychology an Integrated Approach.  I disagree with this and believe it draws attention to the difference of conscious cognitive learning and the unconscious effect of the autonomic nervous system.  I learned to be careful when dealing with the high tension electrics of a van when the engine was running after I suffered an electric shock from it.  I also had to make myself work on it afterwards because I had a conditioned response to expect a shock even when I knew it was safe.  The children I read about could predict the storm was coming by using the experience of their conscious mind linked to the long term memory in their unconscious mind, although a cold feeling from the memory of the rain could be a conditioned response and a reminder to get inside.

 

 

John Watson studied learned behaviour in children to try to find out if behaviour was nature or nurture.  The changingestates.co.uk website claims he came to the conclusion that a lot of behaviour is due to reflex responses, much more is fully conditioned or influenced by conditioning.  However Introductory Psychology by Tony Malim and Ann Birch claim he considered all behaviour to be moulded by experience. To my mind reflex response is conditioning as apposed to conscious learning.  Watson attacked the Eugenics contention that all behaviour is inherited and this contributed to the downfall of the Eugenics movement.  The most infamous experiment of these was done with Rayner and conducted upon little Albert (an 11- month-old boy) who was of a phlegmatic nature and the white rat.  Albert was quite happy to be in the company of the rat and did not show any fear of it, he even stroked it.  Albert was then exposed to a loud noise made by striking an iron bar behind him, loud enough to make him cry; this was done every time he touched the rat.  The next time Albert met the rat, some months later, he cried.  In fact any fury object had this affect on him and he was never reconditioned out of this behaviour.

 

If an animal or person has learned to react in a particular way because it resulted in pleasure, and this response is unlearned by it starting to produce pain instead.  The pain is causing a reciprocal inhibition.  The animal or person is inhibited from doing what it had learned to do before.  At a synaptic level stimuli are travelling down synapses that go in the opposite direction to the previous ones.  When more stimuli are going in the opposite direction aversion to the previous behaviour will be set up.   

 

Little Albert derived pleasure from stroking the white fluffy rat.  When the frightening noise was heard the fear was unpleasant and a reciprocal inhibition was set up and therefore an aversion to the rat and all white fluffy things.

 

Edward Thorndike experimented mostly on cats to find out if they used insight or trial and error to solve problems.  He used what he called a puzzle box.  This was a box that could be opened from inside by pulling a string that had a loop at the end of it or by pressing a button.  A hungry cat would be placed in the box and the time it took for the cat to escape from the box so it could find food was recorded.  If the cat used insight the learning curve would have a sharp drop, but if it used trial and error the radius of the curve would be even.  The cats would first just play with the string and find it opened the box.  This would occur a number of times before the cat would realise that pulling the string opened the door of the box and pull the string as soon as it was put into the box.  From this he concluded that the cats used trial and error to make their escape.  This is an example of instrumental conditioning.  When an animal makes a response and it is rewarded, the response is learned; if the response is not rewarded it slowly disappears.  Thorndike described the response being successful and therefore followed by pleasure as being stamped in.  Responses followed by pain tend to be stamped out.

 

Thorndike suggested that stimuli and responses become connected or dissociated from each other according to the Law of Effect.

The version of the Law of Effect as described by Edward Thorndike in 1898 stated that “Responses to stimuli that produce a satisfying or pleasant state of affairs in a particular situation are more likely to occur again in the situation. Conversely, responses that produce a discomforting, annoying, or unpleasant effect are less likely to occur again in the situation”.  Around 1930, Thorndike shortened the law of effect to simply say that responses to stimuli that produce a satisfying or pleasant state of affairs in a particular situation are more likely to occur again in the situation.

This law helps understand learning, in particular how it relates to operant conditioning.  Because it is not easy to define what is a satisfying state of affairs or an annoying state of affairs, the law of effect has been criticised.  Most psychologists have followed B. Skinner’s suggestion to define a reinforcer as any stimulus which when present after a response, leads to an increase in the future rate of that response.  On that basis, the law of effect follows tautologically from the definition of a reinforcer.

 

Burrus Skinner would place a rat into a Skinner box as he called it and tested its ability to learn a response.  As it was moving about in the box it would push down a lever, this would send food or water down a shoot into a trough this is called positive-reinforcement and the rat pushing the lever to get the positive reinforcement is called the operant.  Over time the rat would learn to push the lever to get food.  This is called behaviour shaping.  The number of times needed to push it could be varied and false stimulus could also be added.  Electric shocks and loud noises were used to produce negative reinforcement if a rat switched the electric shock off with a lever.

 

Skinner later used pigeons for his experiments.  According to Introduction to Psychology by Tony Malim and Ann Birch he taught them to play table tennis and pilot rockets using operant conditioning.

 

Kohler demonstrated that chimpanzees have the ability of insightful learning.  The chimpanzee will look at a problem, stop and think until a solution comes and then act upon it.  This was demonstrated when in an experiment in 1925 a chimpanzee called Sultan belonging to Kohler was able to join interlocking rods to reach a piece of fruit that had been put out of his reach.

 

Joseph Wolpe is known for his work on desensitisation using a scale of the causes of the anxiety known as The Subjective Anxiety Scale, now known as a Subjective Units of Disturbance Scale.

 

The definition of anxiety: Neuroses is persistent maladaptive learned habits in which the foremost feature is anxiety.  The word anxiety (for which fear is a synonym) must now be defined.  I continue to define it operationally as the individual organism’s characteristic pattern of autonomic responses to noxious stimulation (Wolpe 2002)

A noxious stimulus is painful and tends to make the sufferer try to escape or avoid what they associate with it.

 

Various therapies including psychoanalysis try to influence the mind so that the unwanted behaviour will fade.  Behaviour therapy attempts to do the opposite to this by changing the behaviour directly and thereby easing mental anguish.

 

Mental activity and behaviour are interdependent and neither can be said to be controlling the other so both forms of therapy are valid.

 

Although most people think you can only do something from a choice of your mind this is not so.  An example of this would be if you wish to do something but do not have enough confidence to do it.

 

Being dissatisfied with psychoanalysis, Wolpe formulated Systematic Desensitisation as a form of behavioural therapy.  Desensitisation was criticised as only being suitable where one symptom was present and not capable of dealing properly with a complex, deep cause neurosis scenario.  Joseph Wolpe replied to this by saying: “Because the psychoanalysts have misapprehended the requirements of scientific evidence they have adduced no acceptable support for their theory, beguiling themselves with surmises, analogies and extrapolations”.  (www.balloons.com/Phobia/Josephwolpe.htm 2008).