Thursday, January 30, 2020
Psychology Learning Essay Example for Free
Psychology Learning Essay Introduction     The following account should probably come under the heading â€Å"Strange but True.†It describes a psychologist’s use of self-administered punishment to change a socially unacceptable behavior.     A person once knew a psychologist who, for reasons which will be discovered shortly, shall remain anonymous. For the sake of the study, this person is named Richard. Richard had a bad habit. He chewed his nails. Well, that’s not actually correct; he chewed his nails off and then spit them out, usually while he was lecturing. Once in a great while, this practice was called to his attention, and it always embarrassed him. He said that he wasn’t aware that he was doing it. It had become such an ingrained habit that he could chew off all ten nails, spit in all directions, and still be totally unconscious of what he was doing.     Richard was a respected learning theorist, and he decided that if anyone could devise a behavior-modification technique to eliminate his habit, he would. The next day he arrived, all smiles, and said he had a request: If any of those around see him biting his nails, this should be brought to his attention. It wasn’t long that before someone said, â€Å"Uh, Richard, you’re doing it.†He stopped and looked at his nails and said, â€Å"So I am.†Then as everyone was watched, pulled up his shirtsleeve, grabbed hold of a heavy-duty rubber band that had wrapped around his wrist, stretched it out a distance of about ten inches, and let is go. There was a vicious snap. He yelled, cursed, and shook his hand. Everyone looked on amazement. Surely learning theorist were all a little insane. â€Å"Punishment,†he said. â€Å"Punishment is the answer!†    What happened to the people around Richard was interesting. Some took relish in pointing out that he was biting his snails, just to see him snap the huge rubber band around his wrist; others preferred to ignore his habit, because they couldn’t stand to see him in that much pain. Happily, after two days, Richard’s habit had been broken.     One person asked him how he thought his program worked. He said, â€Å"Well, if I unconsciously unlearn it. Whenever I was chewing my nails, I administered this punishment. Pretty soon my brain learned that nail chewing resulted in something very unpleasant.†He said that the last time he reached his hand up to his mouth (quite unconsciously), he got a terrible sinking feeling that something awful was about to happen. â€Å"It made me aware.†he said. â€Å"I looked at my hand and saw it was approaching my mouth. Somewhere deep in my brain the little gray cells were screaming, â€Å"Don’t do it!†    It was reported that some days later Richard was wearing rubber bands around his ankles, but nobody wanted want to ask why (Dworetzky, 1994). Discussion     Learning pervades people’s lives. It is involved not only in mastering a new skill or academic subject but also in emotional development, social interaction, and even personality development. People learn what they fear, what to love, how to be polite, hoe to be intimate, and so on. Given the pervasiveness of learning in lives of people, it is not surprising that there have been instances of it – how, for example, children to perceive the world around them, to identify with their own sex, and to control their behavior according to adult standards (Atkinson, 1993). However, there is a more systematic analysis of learning.     Learning may be defined as a relatively permanent change in behavior that results from practice; behavior change that are due to maturation (rather than practice)or temporary conditions of the organism (such as fatigue or drug-induced states) are not included. All cases of learning are not the same though.     Psychology is the study of behavior. Psychologists study learning because among most animals, especially humans, the vast majority of behavior is learned. Learning may also be defined as a relatively permanent change in behavior resulting from experience (Dworetzky, 1988).  Experts, however, tell that when somebody says â€Å"relatively permanent change,†this excludes the effects of such factors as fatigue. Fatigue, which occurs because of experience, may change behavior, but only temporary, whereas learning implies a more lasting change.     Learning is defined by Craig et al., as a process through which one’s capacity or disposition is changed as a result of experience. Whitaker (1972) defines it also as the process by which behavior originates or is altered through experience, while Wittig (in Bernstein et al., 1991) and Hilgard (1975) view it as behavior that occurs as a result of experience.     Apparently while learning can be defined as a process and as a product, more definitions stress learning more as a process. This idea suggests that it is not the product but the process that is important since the products of learning both what one is capable of and what one is predisposed to. Changes resulting from development and experience are emphasized; changes resulting from maturation such as growing older, innate tendencies like reflexes and conditions caused by fatigue, drugs, and diseases are strictly not considered as learned behavior. Adaptive value of Learning (Classical Conditioning) ~Overeating: Taste-Aversion Learning     Taste-aversion learning involves associating particular sensory cues (smells, tastes, sounds or sights), with an unpleasant response, such as nausea or vomiting. Taste-aversion learning can also occur from overindulgence. For example, children report taste aversions to food after overeating and becoming sick. Similarly, the majority of college students’ report taste versions after drinking too much alcohol and getting sick. In these examples, taste aversions to food or drink developed after a single trial and lasted an average of four to five years (Logue et al., 1981). ~Conditioned Emotional Response: Why a certain Christmas song elicits pleasant childhood memories.     In the conditioned emotional response, one feels some positive or negative emotion, such as happiness, fear, or anxiety, when experiencing a stimulus that initially accompanied a painful or pleasant event.     For example, many couples have a special song that becomes emotionally associated with their relationship. When one in the absence of the other hears this song, it can elicit strong emotional and romantic feelings.     In other cases, conditioned emotional responses may develop into irrational fears that are called phobias.     A phobia is an anxiety disorder characterized by an intense and irrational fear that is out of all proportion to the danger elicited by the object or situation. In comparison, a fear is a realistic response to a threatening situation (Bernstein, 1991).     About 73 percent of people with phobias were able to trace the start of their phobias to fearful, painful, or traumatic situations that involved classical conditioning (Atkinson et al., 1993 in Kleinknecht, 1994 and Kuch et al., 1994). For example, about 5 victims involved in moving car accidents had developed fears of sitting or riding in cars, and another third developed the corresponding phobias (Kuch et al., 1994). Just as classical conditioning can result in fears and phobias, however, it can also be used to reduce them. ~Prejudice     In the mid-1940s, psychologist Kenneth Clark held a black doll and a white doll in his hands and asked the following questions of young white children living in the South:     â€Å"Which doll looks like you?†    â€Å"Now tell me which doll is the good doll?†    â€Å"Which doll is the bad doll?†These children knew that the white doll looked like them. most children also indicated that the white doll was the â€Å"good doll†and the black doll was â€Å"dirty†or â€Å"ugly†( Clark and Clark, 1947). How had these southern white children learned to make such association? During the decades of racial prejudices that had come before, darer skins had become associated with poverty and with being â€Å"inferior,†not just in the South, but generally throughout the United States. The white children had learned to attribute these characteristics to black people.     The racist attitude is what the white children had been taught; it is also what the black children had been taught. The black had been raised in the same general environment, the same country. They, too, had seen that the whites had better and they had worse. And, as the Clarks discovered in further research, a majority of black children also chose the white doll as the good one and the black doll as the bad one.     A conditioning experiment conducted by researcher Staats (1958 in Atkinson et al., 1993) helped to show how association process could be responsible for the prejudice, Dr. Clark observed. In their experiment, college students were asked to look at one word while pronouncing another. Without being aware of the purpose of the experiment, the students were manoeuvred into pairing pleasant words or unpleasant words with a particular name (Tom or Bill) or a certain nationality (Swedish or Dutch). In short, subjects revealed obvious differences in attitudes towards these names and nationalities, simply because those words had been paired with positive or negative words. Advertisers, politicians, movie makers, and just about everyone else try to use this kind of conditioning to affect people’s emotions. Then a politician associates himself with a positive symbol such as the flag, or when a movie maker uses dramatic music, or when someone dresses well for a job interview, each is invoking the same process: Each is attempting to render something – the politician, the movie maker, or the job seeker – more appealing through association with positive stimuli.     What appears to be occurring in the instances of association, like those just described, is a kind of higher order conditioning (Dworetzky, 1998). Conclusion     In classical conditioning, the conditioned response often resembles the normal response to the unconditioned stimulus: salivation, for example,  is a dog’s normal response to food. But when you want to teach an organism something novel – such as teaching a dog new trick – you cannot use classical conditioning. What unconditioned stimulus would make a dog sit up or roll over? To train the dog, you must first persuade it to do the trick (Bernstein et al., 1991).     Much of the real-life behavior is like this: responses are learned because they operate on, or effect the environment. Referred to as an operant conditioning, this kind of learning occurs in human individuals, as well as in animals. Alone in a crib, a baby may kick and twist and coo spontaneously. When left by itself, a dog may pad back and forth, sniff, or perhaps pick up a ball, drop it, and play with it.     Neither organism is responding to the onset or offset of a specific external stimulus. Rather, they are operating on their environment. Once the organism performs a certain behavior, however, the likelihood that the action will be repeated depends on its consequences. The baby will coo more often if each such occurrence is followed by parental attention, and the dog will pick up the ball more often if petting or a food reward follows this action. If we think of the baby as having a gaol of parental attention, and the dog as having the goal of food, then operant conditioning amounts to learning that a particular behavior leads to attaining a particular goal (Rescorla, 1987). Reference: Atkinson, R.L., R.C. Atkinson, E.E. Smith, D.J. Bem, and S.    Nolen-Hoeksema, 1993. Introduction to Psychology, 13th ed.  New York: Harcourt College Publishers. Bernstein, D.A., E.J. Roy, T.K. Srull, and C.D. Wickens, 1991.     Psychology. New Jersey: Houghton Mifflin Company. Bootzin, R.R. 1991. Psychology.  New York: Gilford Press. Clark, L., A.D. Watson, and S. Reynolds, 1995. Diagnosis and     classification of psychopathology: Challenges to the current system and future directions. Annual review of    Psychology 46: 121-53. Dworetzky, J.P. 1988. Psychology.3rd Ed. Mew York: West    Publishing Company. Logue, A.W., I.Ophir, and K.E. Strauss. 1981. The Acquisition  of taste aversions in humans. Behavior Research and Therapy,19:3:19-35. Morgan, Clifford T. 1977. A Brief Introduction to Psychology.  2nd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company. Rescorla, R.A. 1987. A Pavlovian analysis of goal-directed     behavior. American Psychologist 42:119-129, 265.
Tuesday, January 21, 2020
Revenue Determination: Pricing and Contracting Essays -- Business Reve
Over the last twenty years health care prices for the general public, because of this continuous rise in prices hospitals and health care facilities have given much attention to improving their communication of prices to the public. Most people of the general public are unaware that hospital costs and hospital prices are two different things. Hospital cost is the dollar amount the hospital pays in order to provide patient care. Hospital price is the dollar amount designated to the specific procedures performed in order to provide said â€Å"patient care†. This dollar amount is what the hospital bills the insurance company and/or the patient for their care (Cleverly & Cameron 2007). It is important for health care facilities and hospitals alike to provide a sense of reasonableness within their bills so that their patrons do not get the feeling that they are being â€Å"ripped off†. Many people feel that the reason their health care bills are so high is because hospital s feel they can charge whatever they want for a product people have to have. In general, sick people will not turn down a life saving treatment because it is too expensive, because the health care industry is aware of this, they charge whatever price they can get away with, like charging the patient’s insurance three times the base price (Cleverly & Cameron 2007). What the general public always seems to overlook is the fact that even hospitals need to turn a profit in order to keep their doors open and keep providing genuinely good health care to their patients. There are three generic factors that influence the way any firm, including health care facilities influence their pricing. These three factors are, the desired net income of the firm, the firm’s competitive positio... ...They are held to â€Å"reasonableness of charges†and it is important that the public knows the facts before speaking out against their local hospital. Health care costs money, therefore like any business hospitals must charge for their services, plain and simple. Works Cited Devers, K, Casalino, L, Rudell, L, Stoddard, J, Brewster, L, & Lake, T. (2003). Hospitals negotiating leverage with health plans: how and why has it changed? Health Services Research, 38(1), 419-446. Cleverley, W. O., & Cameron, A. E. (2007) Essentials of health care finance. Mississauga, Canada: Jones & Bartlett Long, R. (2002). Long: financial turnaround focuses on revenue cycle, managed care contracts - executive insights - ronald r. long, outgoing chairman of healthcare financial management association national board of directors - interview. Healthcare Financial Management
Monday, January 13, 2020
Courage in the Civil War (Referencing for Cause and Comrades by James M. Mcpherson
Kathie Kaidan 4/14/10 HST 202 Paper #2 There is much controversy and uncertainty about the reasons of why the Civil War started, and why it went on for so long. The Civil War is unusual not only in American History, but in world history as well because of the intensity and carnage of it. Men were taking up arms against their neighbors, fathers, sons, brothers, and friends to meet on the field of battle with only one mission: to kill one another. James McPherson wondered this, so he researched over 25,000 uncensored letters to friends and family, and almost 250 private diaries from soldiers fighting for the Confederacy and soldiers fighting for the Union. He then took what he learned and wrote the book For Cause and Comrades, and found certain ideals that, he believes, are key reasons as to why these men fought each other over this conflict. McPherson argues that the initial impulse of the soldiers to fight the war was the simple â€Å"military rage†that follows after the declaration of any war. In most cases â€Å"military rage†is short lived, and mostly just talk, and then people back down when asked to rise up and fight. But in the Civil War, men were tearing down doors in order to enlist, and they continued to do so after the initial excitement had died down. McPherson also follows French Revolution Historian John Lynn in dividing soldiers motivation to fight into three sections throughout the war. â€Å"I have borrowed part of my conceptual framework from John A. Lynn, an historian of the armies of the French Revolution. Lynn posited three categories: initial motivation; sustaining motivation; and combat motivation. The first consists of the reasons why men enlisted; the second concerns the factors that kept them in the army and kept the army in existence over time; and the third focuses on what nerved them to face extreme danger in battle. These categories are separate but interrelated†(McPherson, 12). One important aspect was that men fought because of the desire to have this sense of manliness and doing things to prove it. Two versions of manhood competed in the Victorian era: the hard-drinking, gambling, whoring two-fisted man among men, and the sober, responsible, dutiful son or husband. Some soldiers found that the army transformed them from one kind of man to the other, better kind†(McPherson, 26). Courage played a huge role in determining one’s level of manliness. The more courage you showed, the manlier you were. And with every man trying to prove himself better than the others, it played a key role in why Civil War soldiers continued to fight for as long as they did. The war started out with the soldiers having a sense of false courage. Most of them hadn’t seen battle yet, and they were often unsure if they war would end before they had the chance to make their mark. But this behavior of being â€Å"pumped up†and excited for battle was just pre-battle adrenalin. They were not truly being courageous until after they had experienced the horror of the bloodshed, and decided to continue to endure it all over again. When it had been experienced, the emotional impact of it was overwhelming. Many wrote in their letters to loved ones saying â€Å"I hope I will never be in another†¦no man can tell me anything about war I have got a plenty†(McPherson, 33), and â€Å"I am satisfied with fighting. I wish the War was over†(McPherson, 33). McPherson compared these feelings to those men who fought in World War II, mostly the 101st Airborne Division who took part in the D-Day Invasion. â€Å"Before their drop behind German lines on D-Day, men in the elite 101st Airborne Division were ‘gung-ho’. When the survivors returned to England to prepare for their next mission, ‘the boys aren’t as enthusiastic or anxious to get it over with as they were before Normandy. Nobody wants to fight anymore. ’†(McPherson, 35) This is when the courage began to show. Even after seeing the â€Å"elephant†, a metaphor used by McPherson in place of battle, the men remained determined to fight. They came to realize that courage meant to stand up against and conquer their fear, not just feeling fear itself. It was at its worse before the battle had even begun. Once it began only their courage and adrenaline could keep them going. They also began of noticing ways to relieve their tension. One way was yelling at the top of their lungs, and this it to be thought as the origin of the famous Rebel Yell. The men didn’t understand the changing in their body chemistry, so they were dumbfounded when they could overcome illness, disabilities, and sometimes-even wounds in order to fight. After the battle had ended, most men were overcome with exhaustion. When they finally could rest, thoughts and nightmares of the battle would fill their heads. They experienced breakdowns, little sleep, appetite loss, and hot flashes quickly followed by the chills. But, nonetheless, they pursued on. The last thing they wanted was to give up or be taken over by their dreams. To them, retreating or going home was a loss of courage. â€Å"Civil War soldiers had never heard of the terms ‘shell shock’ or ‘battle fatigue’ or ‘combat stress reaction’ or ‘psychiatric casualties’. But many of them experienced the symptoms these terms attempt to describe. A word that was familiar to them, however, was ‘courage’. And they understood that combat stress reaction was a loss of courage, a loss of the will to go on fighting†(McPherson, 163). It soon was known that courage wasn’t only shown and proven on the field of battle, but to have the determination and desire to endure all else that comes along with warfare: scarcity of food, changes in weather, not having proper shelter, little sleep, having to march for hours every day, and not knowing if you were going to see your friends and family ever again. These were the things that took up most of the soldiers’ lives; fighting in battle was only a small percentage. McPherson quoted a major in the 11th Georgia on his definition of what courage was in 1863; â€Å"†¦not as merely bravery in battle, but also the nerve to endure rain, and snow, and sleet, and the privations of Winter, and the scorching sun of Summer†¦to undergo extreme fatigue, to subdue the pains of hunger†¦ to do battle with sickness and despondency and gloom as with the Country’s enemies. And above all to hold one’s self patiently and cheerfully ready to meet the shocks of battle†(McPherson, 163-164). Although many other factors were involved as to why the men stuck it out, I believe courage is the root to them all. It takes courage to defend your family and land, which is what made your honorable. It takes courage to believe in God, and know that he is watching over you, and guiding you. It takes courage to stand up for your country and fight for what you believe in. It’s amazing how these men continued to fight, and continued to be courageous when they had so many things going against them. It’s better understood as to why they volunteered in the first place, but it is amazing how so many stayed until they died or the war was declared over. Courage is a strong factor for anyone, but the way it is displayed through these men is miraculous.
Sunday, January 5, 2020
Should Gun Control Reduce Violence - 1774 Words
Do-Hyun Weaver Professor Mike Beasley English 201 Final Essay 08/14/14 Would gun control reduce Violence? Perhaps gun control is one of the most controversial topics in America, appealing to the emotions of those who support, as well as those who oppose the regulation of firearms. Although people take various stance on the issue, supporting some aspects for control and rejecting others, the more rigid individuals tend to split into pro gun and anti gun control. The pro gun group express themselves as the supporters of constitutional right to bear arms according to the Second Amendment. Advocates of gun control distinguish themselves as struggling for a more civilized society against gun nuts and profit driven firearms manufacturers. The issue of gun control is a political question that each side has tremendous interest in the outcome. Hence, positions tend to solidify and supporters of one position tend to deny any merit in the place taken by others, each side detracts those who they disagree with. Researchers who are meticulous in presenting research results can become ardent in their a rgumentation as the most supporters of a enthusiastic political position. Nevertheless, data indicate that numerous nations that have more stringent gun controls does not necessarily show the correlations with lower rate of violent crimes, leading to the conclusion that the United States current gun regulation requires comprehensive revisions. Until then, Gun regulation of the UnitedShow MoreRelatedA Stop Action : Reduce Mass Violence1309 Words  | 6 PagesA Call to Action: Reduce mass violence While researching texts written about the gun control and how to reduce mass violence, I found a few authors who published books about the gun control in America. 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