100 PSYC Introduction to Psychology Paper #2 Reaching a Behavioral Goal through Conditioning This paper will be a report of a study you will conduct over the next 4 weeks. The participant in the study will be you. Your objective is to identify a behavior you would like to increase or decrease in frequency, and apply conditioning principles to move closer to your desired goal. It is extremely important that you follow these guidelines in selecting the behavior and implementing a conditioning approach. If you violate these guidelines, you do so at your own risk and the report will not be accepted for credit. As indicated in the syllabus and at the start of this course, one of the goals of taking psychology courses is to develop skills to improve quality of life. In this project, you will attempt to improve the quality of your own life by focusing on a desirable behavior change. It is entirely unacceptable to attempt to increase behavior that is psychologically or physically unhealthy to yourself, others, or any aspect of the environment. Examples of positive behaviors would be to increase studying, appropriate exercise, healthy eating, kind or polite actions toward others, keeping in touch with people, offering praise and encouragement to others, and being more productive at work. Select something your parent or other caretaker would support you in doing, and if you have any doubts, ask them, your TA or your instructor. If you aim to increase a behavior, you will need to apply principles of learning (classical or operant conditioning, most likely operant) that result in a behavior increasing in frequency. If you aim to decrease an undesired behavior (such as socializing when you should be studying, cursing, driving aggressively or criticizing others), you will apply principles that decrease the frequency of behaviors. Again, you are not to introduce any stimulus that can cause you, anyone or anything pain, injury, illness or serious hardship. Due to our limited timeframe, select a behavior that tends to occur frequently, at least multiple times per week, and ideally, everyday. The assignment is to write a brief report (2-3 pages) of your conditioning experience using the format of the American Psychological Association (APA). The sections of a research report are described at the end of chapter 2 (see pages 69-70). The questions below will guide you through preparing your report. You will write your Introduction and Method sections first, before you begin your program. You will write the Results and Discussion sections after you have conducted your program. Your program is to span 14 days. It is expected you will conduct it the two weeks after Spring Break, but you may start it Spring Break week if that works well for you.
Writing your Introduction will lead you through developing your program. Type your paper title, centered, above this section. Do not type the word Introduction. Address the following, in this order: -What is the purpose of this study? (Phrase in terms of decreasing or increasing a behavior.) -Describe the behavior that is targeted. -Discuss the context in which in tends to occur. -Explain how this undesirable behavior (or lack thereof) came to be. You will need to do this in terms of a psychological theory. Was this undesired behavior conditioned? Modeled? Can you apply a cognitive or psychodynamic perspective here instead of a behavioral perspective? Remember you may use behavioral techniques to change behavior regardless of its cause. Use the information in your textbook. Other sources are not required or expected. You may skip using internal citations (of your text) for this assignment. For example, you might say "according to B.F. Skinner's theory of operant conditioning...." -Describe in general what stimulus you will use to reinforce or punish (negative punishment encouraged over positive) yourself to change the behavior in the desired direction, and if indicate you are using negative/positive reinforcement/punishment techniques. State clearly how your plan is derived from the theories and other information in your text. Do this by describing an experiment or example discussed in your text that implemented the approach successfully. -Conclude by stating what your hypothesis is. This will be along the lines of "My hypothesis is that the frequency of (XXXXX) will (increase or decrease) over a two week period." Next prepare your Method Section. Type Method, centered, above this section. It should have three subsections, labeled with headers as you see below. Participants Describe yourself as a XX year old male or female student in this class at this university (1 sentence). Materials Describe exactly what the reinforcing or punishing stimulus is here. Describe how you will record your data (paper, computer). What you will need to do is create a table for 14 days, and indicate each time the target behavior occurred as well as noting the stimulus applied to it. If you are unable to reinforce/punish yourself, record this honestly. It could be relevant to your results. This sheet will be included with your report. Procedure
This section gives a play-by-play of how your program was implemented. The detail should be sufficient enough that someone could read this and replicate exactly what you had done. Be specific about how you identified when the target behavior did (or did not) occur, and when and how you applied the stimulus. Indicate what schedule of reinforcement or punishment you are using (continuous or partial), describe any shaping that will be done, After your 14 days, you will have a daily chart showing how many times you did or did not do the target behavior, matched up with the stimulus you applied to yourself. To analyze your results, calculate the total number of times the target behavior occurred each of the 14 days. Results Section. For your results section, you will prepare a graph with days 1-14 labeled on the X-axis and "Frequency of XXXXX" labeled on the Y-axis. Plot the daily frequency. Give your graph a good descriptive title, such as "Frequency of XXXXXX following Negative Reinforcement." Type Results, centered, above this graph, and type the title above the graph. Discussion Section. Type Discussion, centered, above this section. Begin by stating whether you found support for your hypothesis or not--did your behavior change at all, and in the predicted direction? Then, state whether this is consistent or inconsistent with the theory you were implementing, such as the effect that positive or negative reinforcement or punishment is supposed to have. Next, discuss and limitations to your study. If you did not get the expected result, it is particularly important to discuss why this may have occurred. Relate this to the consistency and appropriateness of the stimulus used, and any situational complications that arose. You will not be downgraded for not obtaining a substantial change so long as you show reasonable effort in this project and in this discussion. Conclude by discussion implications from your study--what other specific behaviors could be altered using a similar approach? In the bigger picture, what applications, in our outside of psychology, would this approach have? Your entire report should be typed, double-spaced, with 1" margins all around. Do not put extra spaces or lines between section headers and paragraphs. This link shows an APA style research paper just so you can see how it should appear. http://thewritesource.com/APA/APA.pdf It is much more elaborate than this assignment, so use these guidelines to determine what sections and elements you must include. Include a title page as shown in this example, and use a page header (2-3 words describing your study plus page number) on each page. This completed assignment is due in discussion section the week of 4/2-4/5.