Unit 4 Project
Jacqueline Smith
PS124 Intro to Psychology
01/07/2014

I have always heard the term positive reinforcement but I have never had it explained to me as it did in the reading assignment. I use to work for Kids for the Future; a school setting for early childhood development. Most of the children who attended there were behavioral and needed therapy. While being trained in the classroom, my supervisor would always say use positive reinforcement. Which I thought meant taking bad behavior and turning it into good behavior. And the way to do that is by observing the children and if I saw a child who was angry or becoming agitated, I were to go to that child and access the situation and do all I can to make it better. The reading material shed a lot of light on the definition. I like the way Skinner came up with his experiment using the animals and studying their behavior.
Operant Conditioning is learning that occurs based on the consequences of behavior.(Kaplan). Which to means a child would get grades if they were threatened with being punished if they didn’t. And parents do that a lot without realizing the pressure that they are putting on the child. Positive punishment according to Skinner is the strengthening of a response by presenting a typically pleasurable stimulus after the response.(Kaplan) which to me means that if one of my children I was mentoring while working at Kids for the Future would misbehave, I would give them more work to do while they were at the learning center doing an assignment. But in my situation it did not work. The children enjoyed doing the work at the learning center, so they saw it as a pleasure instead of a punishment. Negative reinforcement is the strengthening of a response by removing a typically unpleasant stimulus after the response.(Kaplan). I can relate to that. I have had a dry cough since early December and it is irritating. I have been taking halls cough drops and