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Essay about Behavior Psychology

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Behavior Psychology Psychology is defined as a science that focuses on the study of and to explain the way human’s think, behave, and feel. The behaviourist school of psychology is concerned with the explanation of behaviour through observable outcomes without making reference to mental events. Behaviourism is very narrow and can be strongly objected in its approach to psychology as it does not consider the mental thought process involvement in behaviour. This school of psychology is very much about nurture rather than …show more content…

The belief is that human behaviour can be trained because human emotions are so malleable therefore personality is forever changeable (Cohen, 1979). Behaviour is simply a reaction to a stimulus which once learned becomes part of learned habit. It was also believed learning occurs through the reinforcement of certain aspects of the situation. Reinforcement is when something is added to the situation which makes the same reaction in that situation more likely in future (McInerney, 1998). The belief was that most of behaviour is a result of what has been learnt, which is to say that it is the result of the environment rather than biological influences.

Therefore the study of learning and the conditions under which it occurs is the core project of behaviourism (Tennant, 1997)

Behaviouristic therapy is aimed at the modification of behaviour especially undesirable ones by mainly reinforcing the desirable behaviour and suppressing or punishing the undesirable and unwanted behaviour. Once the therapist has identified the behaviour and triggering factors they may employ several techniques to condition or recondition the person’s behaviour. These methods of therapy have been derived and adapted by experiments done by earlier behaviourists such as Pavlov, Watson and Skinner. Methods used today

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