010 - Behaviorism and Classical Conditioning

01/05/25 • 22 min

PsyDactic - Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Board Study Edition

I have so far discussed some of the early psychosexual, psychosocial and cognitive approaches to child development, but I would be remiss if I did not also mention a group of theorists who attempted to study humanity by completely ignoring the fact that they have thoughts and emotions. The behavioralists tried to simplify the study of humans by massively simplifying their assumptions about humans. In fact, they are primarily criticized for vastly oversimplifying humans. For instance, they assumed that behaviors were basically just reactions to the environment without any deeper meaning. These responses are learned based on environmental inputs. Whatever else is happening on the inside is either irrelevant or extraneous. All we can really see are behaviors, so we should only study behavior. This episode focuses on Classical Conditioning.

Referenced resources can be found within the show transcripts at https://psydactic_caps.buzzsprout.com

Feedback can be emailed to [email protected] OR submitted via a form at https://psydactic.com.
This is not medical advice. Please see a licensed physician for any personal questions regarding your own or your child's health.

Let me know what you think! -

Referenced resources can be found within the show transcripts at https://psydactic_caps.buzzsprout.com

Previous Episode

009 - Temperament - Part 2 - Gray, Rothbart, Kagan, Eisenberg, Schermerhorn and Bates

Let me know what you think! -

In episode 8, I started discussing temperament theory with an introduction to Alexander Thomas and Stella Chess. They first developed a temperamental formulation by following 141 children longitudinally and proposed 9 dimensions of temperament that can be reduced to three basic categories: Easy, Difficult, or Slow-to-warm-up temperament. There were many researchers to follow and today I am going to compare and contrast a number of them, including Jerome Kagan, Jeffery Allan Gray, Mary Rothbart, and then highlight researchers who focussed extra attention on parenting and social development’s interactions with temperament - Nancy Eisenberg, Alice Schermerhorn and John Bates.

Referenced resources can be found within the show transcripts at https://psydactic_caps.buzzsprout.com

Next Episode

011 - Behaviorism, Operant Conditioning and Positive Psychology

Let me know what you think! -

In the last episode, I introduced behaviorism, which took a strikingly different approach to human learning and development by basically assuming that everything we are on the inside is somehow learned from the environment, except for some of the most basic things we need for survival. Our inner life and the reasons we give for our decisions are more or less illusions. What we are is what we are conditioned by our environment to be. I started with classical conditioning, Pavlov, dogs, and scaring babies. Today I am going to move on to operant conditioning with Skinner, Thorndike and Seligman who liked to put animals into boxes and at times even shock them into complacency.

Referenced resources can be found within the show transcripts at https://psydactic_caps.buzzsprout.com

PsyDactic - Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Board Study Edition - 010 - Behaviorism and Classical Conditioning

Transcript

The following is an outline of the content of this episode.

Classical Conditioning

Kerplunk and “muscle memory”

The "Kerplunk" experiment, conducted by John B. Watson and Harvey A. Carr in 1907, was a pivotal study in the development of behaviorism. It focused on understanding how rats learn to navigate mazes and how their behavior is influenced by sensory feedback and learned associations.

Here's a breakdown of the experiment: