Positive Psychology

Praising a child is what adults do en route for reinforcing a behavior the adult wants that child to continue doing. Operant conditioning is when one behaves a certain way and then is reinforced or punished for their actions. Praise is a form of positive reinforcement, when introducing an incentive that will likely increase or maintain a desired result. People are split as to whether or not praise is helpful to a child’s development. Some believe Praise inhibits motive and increases the child’s uncertainty in their own abilities. On the other hand, there are people who believe praise is a useful tool for adults to teach children how to behave in modern society.

The challenging behaviors that affect individual have a reason for their occurrence and do not occur in a vacuum.

Negative reinforcement is removing an unpleasant consequence when a behavior is exhibited in order to encourage said behavior. This was shown when

Operant Conditioning Theory by B.F. Skinner is a psychological manipulation using rewards and punishments to enforce positive behavior. It uses an individual person’s response to events or stimulus. When a particular Stimulus-Response pattern is rewarded, the individual is conditioned to respond. The distinctive characteristic of operant conditioning is related to previous forms of behaviorism. The Operant Conditioning theory comprises of neutral operants, positive/negative reinforcers, and positive/negative punishers. Through these factors, we get the desired behavior of our subject because they do not want to be punished for under performing so they do what they’re told to or do more of what they were assigned to to receive positive stimulus

Skinner’s reinforcement experiments conducted on rats showed the principles of operant conditioning. While working with rats, Skinner would place them in a Skinner box with a lever attached to a feeding tube. After multiple trials, rats learned the connection between the lever and food, and started to spend more time in the box procuring food than performing any other action. He used positive reinforcement, and negative reinforcement to produce or inhibit specific target behaviors. Therefore, if a specific behavior is reinforced then the probability of that behavior occurring again is increased. Based on Skinner’s view, this theory can be applied to learning because learning is nothing more than a change in behavior. Operant conditioning encourages positive reinforcement, which can be applied in the classroom environment to get the good behavior you want and need from students. One of the ways of reinforcing a student’s behavior is through praise. Also teachers can build operant conditioning techniques into their lesson plans to teach children possible skills as well as good behaviors. For example: to give a smiley face, or motivational stamps to encourage children to perform correctly and encourage them to repeat such action again.

perform that particular action (Harrell and Roman, 2001). On the opposite side of this, people are more likely to repeat behavior that earns positive rewards.

Punishment has occurred when a response is followed immediately by a stimulus change to decrease the future frequency of the behavior. Positive punishment aids in the decrease in the problem behavior. Reprimand is one of the most common forms of positive punishments. A firm "No" or "Stop" delivered immediately on the occurrence of an undesirable behavior will significantly reduce the chance of the behavior being repeated in the future.

Raul is very intelligent and needs to get verbal praise throughout his day to stay on task. His triggers are usually when he is asked to sit down within the circle during circle time. The behavior is him pulling away, crying, and hitting, trying to escape the actual activity. The maintaining consequence is that the adults let Raul leave the circle. There is not much fight with Raul because all those involved do not want the other students to become distracted. The first prevention is to give Raul some type of choice to coincide with circle time. A visual activity schedule could give him a more clear idea of what he should be doing and what the daily lessons and activities are. Raul will know exactly where he needs to be and what he needs to be doing at that particular time. Also, manipulatives and intermittent praise are other preventions that the teacher can use. Intermittent praise is praised use throughout the activity but not regularly. This type of praise is given to become persistent. The new skills that can be developed are a part of the plan and may be implemented accordingly. Raul may have increased time of engagement, such as a longer duration of sitting within the circle. Raul will say “all done” when he has completed a task so praise can be given. This will help the adults notice him if he is not given the correct amount of attention. The responses to Raul for sitting longer will also be all positive praise toward

The reason is that the reward is not the main thing that is backing up the action; but something else that could be self-develop, peace, etc. An example is a boy does his homework just because he was told by his parents to do his homework. Based on that the boy believes that his parents know what is best for him to do.

A behavioral contingency is a temporal relationship between behavior and a consequence. A contingency exists when there is a casual relationship between two things and to be contingent implies to be caused by. This relationship is often captured by the “If…, then…,” statement. As an example, if you don’t come on time, then you cannot get the gift. Here there is a temporal relationship between the behavior and the event that follows it. The intended consequence from this situation is considered as a punisher. A contingency that works as a punisher must have a behavioral contingency. For a contingency to be reliable as a punisher there must be a link between a specific behavior and the

An example of negative reinforcement would be You keep on yelling at john to clean his room until he does. The yelling should get him to clean his room so he doesn’t have to listen to it next time.

is a lower level student, who for these assignments need to be consistently address about getting back on task. He seemed to have a hard time concentrating on the task at hand, therefore I frequently walked around him to make sure he was doing what he was suppose to be doing. I did need to give the student extra time to finish, most of the class was able to finish by the end of the class. A.S. needed to take it home and finish it for

Positive reinforcement is the presentation of a stimulus that increases the frequency of a behavior. Positive reinforcement is a tool that has been used for decades with countless affirmative results. However, it is not the perfect solution, as Perone (2003) mentions. This is an article written to question the adverse effects of positive reinforcement through suggested evidence supported by previously written literature articles. The authors use the term aversive in conjunction with behavioral control that studies have previously shown.

Many studies have come out with negative effects that can come about from using many forms of corporal punishment. As parents we need to ask ourselves are we able to control ourselves when we are upset at our kids? Are we able to be fair to our kids? Can the things we do to our children come back and turn out to be used against us and others? “Corporal punishment

From a very early age, children begin to learn about the association between behaviors and consequences. They realize that there is always going to be a consequence whether it’d be positive or negative, that would follow the behavior. Sometimes children behave very well and most of the time, children tend to give parents and others around them a hard time. When it comes to behavior modification, some basic steps include identifying the behavior, setting expectations, monitoring progress, and reinforcing correct behaviors. Positive reinforcement has a lot of effect on children when it comes to modifying a targeted behavior. A reinforcer,