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Essay about Schedules of Reinforcement

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The schedule of reinforcement has many variables, as well as many ways behavior is reinforced. In order to completely create reinforcement schedule the person must understand the behavior that they wish to change. In my case, the behavior that I wish to change is eating habits. In this paper, I will explore the different schedules of reinforcement and how each would work towards changing my behavior, as well as cause weight loss. My eating habits are very easy to explain, I eat when I am hungry which is not very often. This causes my body to store whatever nutrients I do take in, as well as any fat. This way of eating, in addition to medications I have and am taking make it extremely hard to lose any weight. The first reinforcement …show more content…

In order to lose weight, I would need to limit the amount of calories taken in, as well as increase the amount of calories burned in a day. After I figured out at what rate I would lose one pound, I would then be able to develop a plan in which a set number of calories were eaten and burned each day. With variable ratio intervals the amount of calories taken in would hinge upon the amount of activity in a day. By rationing the amount of calories to the amount of activity, the weight loss would be negligible because as with continuous reinforcement, there would be days in which the calories taken in would be zero and my body would then begin to hold whatever calories I did take in. The next category is the fixed interval meaning that the time that I would eat is fixed. There would be a set schedule and the reward for sticking to it would be weight loss. The problem with the fixed interval reinforcement schedule is that real life would soon intrude on the interval in which I ate. Having set times for anything is not a solution because my lifestyle does not support a schedule that is strict and inflexible. Feldman states that a variable interval schedule is “a schedule by which the time between reinforcements varies around some average rather than being fixed (2011).” Going by this definition the average would be the times eaten. While my lifestyle does not support scheduled meals, it does support an average of time between meals. By

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