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Overt Behavior Paper

Decent Essays

Over the years I’ve noticed my brothers demonstrate several behaviors that I could include in this paper. Behavior is defined as is any activity of an organism that can be observed or somehow measured. (BOOK pg 4) There is a specific behavior I’ve observed my youngest brother, Jeremy do. More specifically an overt behavior, a behavior that is observed by another person. This is when he bites the skin off from around his fingers/fingernails. When asked why he bites his skin off, he states he does this when he is bored. He says he does this to occupy his time, mostly when he feels there is nothing else to do. I then asked when did he notice he did this particular behavior the most, his answer was when he is playing baseball. He commented that …show more content…

This disorder is called Dermatophagia, which is defined as “a neurotic habit or compulsion to self-mutilate their skin or its appendage with one’s teeth” (artivlr). To be diagnosed with Dermatophagia, it requires you to not only bite the skin off, but also ingesting it. Whereas, dermatodaxia consist solely of compulsive biting or gnawing their skin, but not actually ingesting it. There are some medical doctors that link these types of disorders to Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and other types of anxiety disorder …show more content…

This is a bad and unhealthy habit that needs to be broken, I believe that trying several different techniques could help in breaking this habit. I think the best way to see what is the best course of action is to run multiple sets of trials using different techniques to assess if the behavior has changed. There are countless numbers of experiments I would perform to try and break this habit, such as; classical conditioning, both positive and negative operant conditioning, etc. to determine the technique to use I must first decide which theorists I want to be. Either looking at this behavior as a behavioral One of the first methods I would use is Pavlov’s classical conditioning, which is when a stimulus elicits a response because it is paired with another stimulus (pg.

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