January 2019
Recent Issues. Chapter 7: The Operant Side of Behavior Therapy. Quote 7
“The word control raises a familiar issue. What right has a therapist to manipulate the conditions of which a person’s behavior is a function? The question is more often asked about the use of punitive consequences by governments or positive reinforcers by business and industry. If it is not so often asked of psychotherapists, it […]
Recent Issues. Chapter 7: The Operant Side of Behavior Therapy. Quote 6
” The argument for operant behavior therapy is essentially this: What are felt as feelings or introspectively observed as states of mind are states of the body, and they are the products of certain contingencies of reinforcement. The contingencies can be much more easily identified and analyzed than feelings or states of mind, and by […]
Recent Issues. Chapter 7: The Operant Side of Behavior Therapy. Quote 5
” Therapists have been as much concerned with what people do as with what they feel. Behavior therapists trace what is done to two kinds of selective consequences, innate behavior to natural selection and learned behavior to operant reinforcement.” (p. 75)
Recent Issues. Chapter 7: The Operant Side of Behavior Therapy. Quote 1
” … cognitive psychologists no longer observe the mental processes they talk about. The processes are hypotheses, to be confirmed either by inferences from the behavior they are said to explain or by a different kind of observation, of the Nervous system.” (p. 73)
Recent Issues. Chapter 6: Whatever Happened to Psychology as the Science of Behavior? Quote 9
“By their very nature, the anti-science stance of humanistic psychology, the practical exigencies of the helping professions, and the cognitive restoration of the Royal House of Mind have worked against the definition of psychology as the science of behavior.” (p. 68)
Recent Issues. Chapter 6: Whatever Happened to Psychology as the Science of Behavior? Quote 8
“Cognitive psychologists like to say that “the mind is what the brain does,” but surely the rest of the body plays a part. The mind is what the body does. It is what the person does. In other words, it is the behavior, and that is what behaviorists have been saying for more than half […]
Recent Issues. Chapter 6: Whatever Happened to Psychology as the Science of Behavior? Quote 7
” … psychology may find it dangerous to turn to neurology for help. Once you tell the world that another science will explain what your key terms really mean, you must forgive the world if it decides that the other science is doing the important work.” (p. 67)
Recent Issues. Chapter 6: Whatever Happened to Psychology as the Science of Behavior? Quote 5
” Gaps are inevitable in a behavioral account. Stimulus and response are separated in time and space, for example, and so are a reinforcement on one day and stronger behavior on the next. The gaps can be filled only with the instruments and methods of physiology. They cannot be filled by introspection, because there are […]
Recent Issues. Chapter 6: Whatever Happened to Psychology as the Science of Behavior? Quote 4
“Astronomers interpret the waves and particles reaching Earth from outer space by using what has been learned under controllable conditions in the laboratory—for example, in high energy physics. In a similar way we use what has been learned from an experimental analysis to explain behavior which cannot, at the moment at least, be brought under […]
Recent Issues. Chapter 6: Professional Issues. Quote 3
“The analysis [of verbal contingencies] does not “ignore consciousness” or bring it back into a behavioral science; it simply analyzes the way in which verbal contingencies of reinforcement bring private events into control of the behavior called introspecting.” (p. 62) Subscribe to RSS feed here
Recent Issues. Chapter 6: Professional Issues. Quote 2
“Prompted by Pavlov’s emphasis on the control of conditions, I made sure that all Thorndike’s “errors” were eliminated before a successful response could be made. A single “reinforcing” consequence was then enough; the response was immediately and rapidly repeated.” (p. 62) Subscribe to RSS feed here
Recent Issues. Chapter 5: Genes and Behavior. Quote 6
“Behavioral scientists observe three things: the action of the environment on an organism, the action of the organism on the environment, and changes which then follow. There are gaps in that account which only neurologists will eventually fill with their different instruments and techniques.” (p. 56) Subscribe to RSS feed here