Which of the following psychological orientation perspectives emphasizes observable events?

As conceived by J. B. Watson, behaviorism was a psychology that limited its inquiry to stimuli and responses and insisted on empiricism, determinism, and analysis as the scientific hallmarks of the discipline. It excluded both physiological conditions and mental states as nonobservable fictions and rejected holistic psychology because it was nonanalytic. It discarded explanations of behavior that employed such nonmaterial causes as instinct. Later developments in psychology modulated this classical position. Today, a family of behaviorisms accept Watson's insistence that scientific psychology is stimulus–response psychology but differ on several other such points.

The term ‘behaviorism’ refers to a family of doctrines that emphasize the importance of behavior over mind, or cognitive processing, in psychology and linguistics, notably as its proper subject matter or its ultimate evidential basis. In psychology and linguistics, behaviorism is both a set of methodological prescriptions and an explanatory conceptual framework. While many of the methodological prescriptions have been included into cognitive science, the conceptual framework of behaviorism, emphasizing observable behavior and learning, has been mostly discarded. Philosophical behaviorism is a semantic thesis concerning the meaning of statements used to ascribe mental states such as beliefs and desires. Three types of philosophical behaviorism are distinguished: the reductive philosophical behaviorism of logical positivists, the non-reductive philosophical behaviorism of ordinary language philosophers and the eliminative philosophical behaviorism advocated by Quine.

II.D. Operant Conditioning to Psychological Behaviorism

Behaviorism was just reviewed as a single theoretical system. Staats identified three generations of behaviorism. He ascribed the first generation of behaviorism to John B. Watson and his studies on conditioned emotional reactions. Staats associates Skinner, Hull MacCorquodale and Meehl, Spence, and Tolman with behaviorism's second generation. Staats identifies himself with behaviorism's third generation.

Staats has offered a perspective on behavioral assessment and treatment that is based on a unification of basic behavioral principles and general psychology. Unlike his predecessors, his emphasis has been on linking behaviorism with the rest of the field rather than establishing behaviorism as a separate discipline. He has called for “complementarity—not opposition.” Staats outlines 11 “levels” of psychological behaviorism, essentially capturing the major experimental and applied areas of psychology. These are biological mechanisms of learning, basic learning theory, human learning principles, personality, child development, social personality, measurement, abnormal psychology, clinical psychology, educational psychology, and organizational psychology. Although not explicitly cited, efforts aimed at incorporating basic psychological science findings into behavior therapy have been undertaken in the same spirit espoused by Staats by Onken and Blaine and by Onken and Bootzin.

In determining how to best analyze human behavior and develop empirically sound interventions, Staats and associates present a diagrammatic approach to developing a functional analysis. A key component of this arrangement is the set of basic behavioral repertoires (BBR) that one develops during a lifetime and brings to treatment. The verbal-motor repertoire entails the ability to understand language and use it to regulate behavior. The verbal-image repertoire entails the ability of language to elicit a conditioned sensory response. The verbal-emotional repertoire entails the ability of language to elicit emotions. The verbal-labeling repertoire entails the person to respond verbally to external stimuli. The verbal-association repertoire entails communication, problem solving, and mathematics. The verbal-imitation repertoire entails language to govern behavior. The verbal-writing repertoire entails language and written expression. The sensory-motor repertoire entails stimuli with action. The emotional-motivational repertoire entails affect and those factors that drive behavior. Standard psychological tests, such as IQ tests, are viewed as standardized behavioral samples. Performance on these tests quantifies specific BBRs. Hence, Staats has addressed what are usually characterized as cognitive phenomena by extending behavioral theory (see Figure 2).

According to Staats, treatment proceeds best when this illustration of initial learning situation, basic behavioral repertoires (or personality), and current contingencies operate in a continuous feedback loop. That is, intervention alters current contingencies, resulting in environmental changes, which in turn influence the BBR. In this way, assessment and treatment are inexorably linked. This approach is consistent with the original vision of behavior therapists but offers a perspective that embraces the full breadth of psychology.

Although Staats initially termed his approach paradigmatic behaviorism, Tryon maintained that his efforts were more accurately termed psychological behaviorism, and that became the title of subsequent article and the subtitle of his most recent book. Staats uses the term unified positivism to describe this approach. He endorses the general values of science including observation, measurement, and experimentation and endorses general theory construction values of empirical definition, consistency, generalizability and parsimony but is open to and actively encourages the use of psychological constructs.

6.02.2.4.1 Different types of behaviorism

The term behaviorism was from its early beginnings part of the struggle of paradigms in psychology. Coined by Watson in order to push his view of scientific psychology, the term was later used primarily by the opponents of Watson, Skinner, and their followers. The intense debate frequently overlooked that there is not a single type of behaviorism; instead there are several competing positions. The most common classification differentiates three types of behaviorism.

Methaphysical behaviorism denies the existence of consciousness or mental events. The object of psychological science is exclusively seen in observable (overt) behavior (prominent advocate: Watson).

Radical behaviorism (also called analytical behaviorism) is a version of radical materialism which asserts that the world consists only of one matter. Mental phenomena are regarded as mere linguistic illusions that can therefore not be the object of scientific psychology (prominent advocate: Skinner).

Opposed to these two types is methodological behaviorism that defines itself not through statements about the existence of mental phenomena but through methodological guidelines that distinguish scientific from nonscientific procedures. Even though many representatives do not use the term, methodological behaviorism represents the majority in today's empirical psychology, including, for instance, cognitive psychology.

The basic guidelines of methodological behaviorism as it is applied today in clinical psychology and psychotherapy can be summarized as follows (Margraf, 1996; Reinecker, 1994; Westmeyer, 1984).

See also:

Behaviorism; Brain Stimulation Reward; Cognitive Neuropsychology, Methodology of; Cognitive Psychology: History; Cognitive Psychology: Overview; Learning and Memory, Neural Basis of; Lesion and Behavior Approaches in Neuroscience; Linear Algebra for Neural Networks; Long-term Depression (Cerebellum); Long-term Depression (Hippocampus); Long-term Potentiation and Depression (Cortex); Long-term Potentiation (Hippocampus); Memory: Synaptic Mechanisms; Neural Development: Mechanisms and Models; Neural Networks, Statistical Physics of; Neuropsychological Functioning, Assessment of; Synaptic Efficacy, Regulation of

Behaviorist orientation.

Behaviorism focuses on observable behavior shaped by environmental forces. Learning occurs when there is a change in the form or frequency of observable performance.113 The key elements in learning under behaviorist principles are the stimulus, the response, and the association between the two. The environment plays the most important role in the behaviorist theoretical approach. Behavioral theorists believe that the teacher’s role is to design an environment that elicits desired behavior and to extinguish behavior that is not desirable. An example in physical therapy patient education would be the therapist verbally reinforcing a correct transfer technique as it is being performed while ignoring the behavior when the transfer technique is done incorrectly. Another example might be when the therapist instructs a patient in stair climbing and consistently reinforces the “correct technique,” such as a particular foot advancing first. The patient eventually performs according to the therapist’s instructions but may not know why, so when encountering unfamiliar situations, may have difficulty adapting his or her behavior to the new situation. The systematic design of instruction, behavioral objectives, notions of the instructor’s accountability, programmed instruction, computer-assisted instruction, and competency-based education are strongly grounded in behavioral learning theory. The behaviorist orientation is thought to be ideal for learning that requires rote responses and recall of facts. Behaviorist principles are less appropriate for higher order thinking skills, such as problem solving.113

Learning

Behaviorism was dominated by an emphasis on learning, but cognitive psychology has not abandoned the question of how knowledge is acquired. After all, while knowledge of such basic categories as time and space may be innate, most knowledge is derived from experience. Learning, then, is the process of knowledge acquisition. In fact, some of the earliest cognitive challenges to behaviorism came through alternative accounts of learning. Even such basic processes as classical and instrumental conditioning are now interpreted in terms of the organism's developing ability to predict and control environmental events. Pavlov's dogs did not salivate to the bell because it occurred in close spatiotemporal contiguity with meat powder, and Skinner's pigeons did not peck at the key because it was reinforced by the delivery of food in the presence of a certain light. Rather, and not to anthropomorphize, they did so because they expected food to follow the bell and the keypeck. Learning occurs in the absence of reinforcement; reinforcement controls only performance, the organism's display of what it has learned.

The importance of expectancies, and the limited role played by contingencies of reinforcement, is underscored by the development of theories of social learning by Julian Rotter, Albert Bandura, Walter Mischel, and others, who argued that human learning rarely involved the direct experience of rewards and punishments. Rather, most human learning is vicarious in nature: it occurs by precept, in the sense of sponsored teaching, or by example, as in observational modeling. In either case, we learn by watching and listening to other people. Bandura argued that behavior was controlled not by environmental stimuli, but by expectancies concerning the outcomes of events and behaviors, and also by self-efficacy expectations – that is, people's belief that they can engage in the behaviors that produce desired outcomes. Some clinical states of anxiety may be attributed to a (perceived) lack of predictability in the environment, while some instances of depression may be attributed to a perceived lack of controllability. Interestingly, a capacity for observational learning has been uncovered in nonhuman animals such as rhesus monkeys, and has been implicated in the genesis of animal “cultures”.

Learning processes are obviously implicated in analyses of the encoding stage of memory processing, in the acquisition of procedural knowledge, and in concept-formation. At the same time, cognitive psychologists have generally avoided the topic of learning itself. Partly, this may reflect an overreaction to the excessive interest in learning on the part of behaviorists; partly, it may reflect the influence of Chomsky, who discounted the role of learning in the development of language. Recently, this situation has changed due to the rise of parallel distributed processing, interactive activation, neural network, or connectionist models as alternatives to traditional symbolic processing models of human information processing. In symbolic models, each individual piece of knowledge is represented by a node, and discrete nodes are connected to each other to form a network of associative links. Thus, a node representing the concept doctor is linked to semantically related nodes representing concepts such as nurse and hospital. Such models are very powerful, but they leave open the question of how the knowledge represented by nodes is acquired in the first place. Connectionist models assume that individual concepts are represented by a pattern of activation existing across a large network of interconnected nodes roughly analogous to the synaptic connections among individual neurons (hence the alternative label). No individual node corresponds to any concept; every concept is represented by a pattern of widely distributed nodes. Instead of one node activating another one in turn, all nodes are activated in parallel, and each passes activation to each of the others. In connectionist systems, learning occurs as the pattern of connections among nodes is adjusted (sometimes through a learning algorithm called back propagation) so that stimulus inputs to the system result in the appropriate response outputs. Although the link between connectionism and stimulus-response behaviorism is obvious, connectionist theories are cognitive theories because they are concerned with the internal mental structures and processes that mediate between stimulus and response. Compared to traditional symbolic models, they are extremely powerful and efficient learning devices. Unfortunately, they also display a disconcerting tendency to forget what they have learned, as soon as they are asked to learn something new – a phenomenon known as catastrophic interference. Moreover, although connectionist models seem to reflect the neural substrates of learning, it has proved difficult to demonstrate the biological plausibility of specific features such as back-propagation. Accordingly, the future of connectionist models of information processing remains uncertain.

2.09.4.2 Behavioral Analysis and Change

Behaviorism advanced along two paths: behavioral analysis (related to experimental aspects) and behavioral modification (linked to therapeutic aspects). Its greatest influence was felt in Mexico and in the countries of Central America and the Caribbean. But it also carried powerful weight in Venezuela, Colombia, and the countries along the Pacific. Likewise, it had numerous followers in Brazil, headquarters of a solid organization of professionals: the Sociedad Brasilera de Terapia Comportamental. In 1996 the society organized a meeting at the Universidad de Campinas which was attended by over 1000 therapists.

The importance of its development in Mexico has been seen at various levels: in the education of significant contingents of clinical psychologists, in eminent publications, and in numerous transcendental scientific events. The dominating model was the application of different therapeutic strategies derived from Skinnerian thought. One of the distinguished centers for work has been the Departamento de Psicología y Medicina de Rehabilitación de la Universidad Veracruzana, the venue of the First Annual Symposium on Behavioral Change held in 1971. Later development of this movement in Mexico shows many similarities with the movement which took place in the same theory in the US, where there was a significant movement toward the development of new procedures based on a behavioral–cognitive approach.

Important developments in behavioral change have taken place in other countries of the continent. In the Caribbean, Puerto Rico is one of the countries where most work has been carried out; another is the Dominican Republic. Guatemala and Costa Rica stand out among the nations of Central America. There have also been vigorous developments in Venezuela and Peru, grouped around organizations like the Asociación Venezolana para el Avance de las Ciencias del Comportamiento and the Sociedad de Análisis y Modificación del Comportamien-to de Perú. Its evolution in Colombia was doubly significant. Not only was it a center for important activity but it was also where the Asociación Latinoamericana de Análisis y Modificación de Conducta (ALAMOC) was created. ALAMOC's periodical congresses bring together most of the specialists in the region. Its last congress was held in La Paz, Bolivia. This group has also been responsible for publications in this field.

Behaviorism and psychopathology

Behaviorism, by contrast, gives no special status to psychopathology. Behaviorism explains unusual—even the most unusual—behavior in the same terms and with the same variables as any other behavior. Psychopathology, like other behavior, is to be operationalized, its sources of variation are to be tracked down, and its functional relationships must be discovered. If one wishes to change the psychopathological behavior, then it must be treated through the same methods used in the modification of other behavior. In explaining psychopathology, the explanations of behavior and behavior change are the same as those used to explain any behavior change.

The EAB often studies arbitrary, conveniently measured responses in nonhuman animals that are cheap and convenient to measure, whose learning history and environment can readily be controlled, and where the magnitude and generality of the behavior change may not be important. When intervening to modify behavior in applied settings, ABA has a much more difficult task. Baer et al. (1968) identified seven dimensions of ABA: It must be applied, behavioral, analytic, technological, conceptually systematic, effective, and have generality. Wolf (1978) added that ABA must also be socially valid. Applied means that society has defined the behavior, organism, and stimuli as important. Behavioral refers to a pragmatic emphasis on what organisms do, rather than their reports of their behavior. Behavior is a physical phenomenon that actually exists in time and space. Its physical parameters, such as frequency, duration, latency, intensity and variability, and its products can be measured reliably. Any change in the data must clearly be ascribed to the behavior of the organisms observed, rather than changes in the behavior of the observers. Analytic refers to the believable and reliable demonstration of a functional relationship between independent and dependent variables.

ABA rejects statistical methods and group designs. These methods erroneously emphasize the averaged data of the nonexistent average subject at one or two points in time, rather than the variations in behavior over time of the actual person of concern. Statistics and group designs also erroneously give importance to an often minimal standard of change that is merely greater than chance, instead of socially or personally important changes. Finally, they also make the serious error of inferring that an independent variable caused a change despite the fact that in many group experiments, some subjects' behavior may not have changed at all, while still other subjects' behavior changed significantly in the opposite direction because of the treatment! Researchers using group designs, however, still infer that the independent variable caused the change, even when that change may not have happened (Chiesa, 1994)! In contrast, ABA analyzes variations in the behavior of individual organisms and its relationship to explicitly manipulated independent variables using single-subject experimental designs, such as reversal and multiple baseline designs. By reliably demonstrating that the presentation and withdrawal of an independent variable reliably controls a dependent variable, we can conclude that a functional relationship exists (Sidman, 1960).

ABA interventions are also technological, meaning that they are operationalized and reliably implemented to such a degree that another person could implement them accurately. ABA interventions are conceptually systematic, meaning that their methods are described with reference to behavior analytic concepts. Thus, describing a procedure as “attention extinction” is preferred to “planned ignoring,” since the former states the learning that appears to occur and the latter merely describes an intervention technique. An ABA intervention is said to be effective when it produces behavior change that is of practical value. Clients and members of society, rather than behavior analysts, generally define this standard of change. Finally, generality refers to behavior change that occurs over time, settings, and a set of responses judged to be important. Generalization of behavior change must be planned and systematically implemented, rather than merely hoped for. Wolf (1978) added that ABA must also “find its heart” by demonstrating that its goals, procedures, and effects are judged to be socially valid. Thus, merely eliminating stuttering but leaving the person talking in an unusual monotone might be judged to be socially invalid by the person or others. The outcome goals must be those that society recognizes as important. Additionally, the methods used must also be acceptable and valued. For example, society and clients usually view restrictive intervention methods as unacceptable in some circumstances.

6.2 Learning Frameworks

Behaviourism is a theory of stimulus and response. The emphasis here is on modifying behaviours; and internal mental states or states of consciousness are considered to be of little importance. They are not considered relevant to the idea or practice of learning. The learner is passive, and behaviours are understood as being caused by external stimuli as operant conditions. B.F. Skinner, a leading proponent, argued the following. Pleasant experiences are positive reinforcers. If experienced by a learner, they establish connections between stimuli and response. On the other hand, unpleasant experiences are negative reinforcers. They have the effect of causing learners to avoid undesirable responses to stimuli. If learning is continuously reinforced, this increases the rate and depth of that learning. Both positive and negative reinforcement can shape behaviours immediately and in the long-term. If the learner does not receive any reinforcement, then this can also shape behaviour. If learners do not receive any response to their behaviour, they may change their behaviour to induce or encourage some kind of external reinforcement.

An example of a programme of learning underpinned by a behaviourist meta-theory is the Keller method. This method, or, more accurately, teaching and learning approach, has been influential, if not decisively successful, in the education of the professions in Brazil (Mota, 2013). The Keller Plan (Keller, 1968) was launched in the early 1960s and it is an early attempt to use new technologies in teaching and learning environments. The Plan, also called the Personalized System of Instruction (PSI), was developed by Fred S. Keller with J. Gilmour Sherman, Carolina Bori and Rodolpho Azzi, among others, in the middle 1960s as an innovative method of instruction for the then new University of Brasilia. When the Keller Plan was launched, the new digital technologies were in their infancy and this meant that content delivery, the development of learning environments, and their capacity to deliver a deep learning experience, was limited. In addition, its reliance on a behaviourist approach meant that it was operating with a severely restricted pedagogy, and consequently its impact on learning was less than originally hoped for. However, it is worth examining because it constituted an early attempt to use the new technologies to create productive learning environments.

The Keller Plan is a type of personalized instruction in which learning materials are presented in small units. When a student feels ready, they take a test prior to completing the unit and, if they pass at an appropriate level, are allowed to continue on the unit. This test is also diagnostic in that it provides a description of the capabilities of the student, which allows the subsequent programme to be adjusted to the needs of the student. It is in this sense that the programme can be described as personalized. The student completes each of the subsequent units at his or her own pace. This indicates one of the benefits of this form of learning: the capacity of the system to accommodate students who wish to progress through the programme rapidly, as well as those who wish to take their time. This is one element of the inherent flexibility in these types of teaching and learning approaches. Under the Keller Plan, instructors (or teachers as we would know them) serve only as facilitators, administer no punishment at any stage of the learning, and award only pass or fail grades.

The Keller Plan is underpinned by a behaviourist philosophy (Zimmerman, 2002). The primary presentation of new content was through written texts. Given the forms of media available at the time when the Keller Plan was developed (e.g., lectures, movies, audio records, television, radio, paper-based text, etc.), paper-based texts gave students the greatest freedom; books and texts are portable, can be read at one’s own pace, can be started and stopped at any time, can be easily reviewed, and can be written upon by the reader. As an application of behaviourism, the Keller Plan was designed to maximize the number of operant behaviours that could be reinforced; this could best be done with written materials rather than learners being passive observers of other media.

Subject matter material was broken down into separable, meaningful units. These units could have various kinds of relationships; for example, one unit could provide learning which forms a prerequisite for understanding another, or a later unit could be an elaboration of an earlier one. Indeed, these forms of learning, because they allow flexibility, are able to accommodate different progression modes. A number of these progression modes have been identified. The first is prior condition. In the acquisition of particular knowledge, skill and dispositional elements, there are pre-requisites in the learning process. An example might be mathematical where knowledge of addition is a pre-requisite of multiplication. A second form is maturational. A maturational form of progression refers to the development of the mind of the learner. There are some mental operations that cannot be performed by the learner because the brain is too immature to process them. A third form is extensional. An extensional form of progression is understood as an increase in the amount, or range, of an operation. Greater coverage of the material is a form of progression, so a learner now understands more examples of the construct, or more applications of the construct, and can operate with a greater range of ideas.

A fourth form is intensification. Related to the idea of extension is a deepening or intensifying of the construct or skill. Whereas extension refers to the amount or range of progression, intensification refers to the extent to which a sophisticated understanding has replaced a superficial understanding of the concept. Then there is a notion of complexity. In relation to the knowledge constructs, skills and dispositions implicit within a learning environment, there are four forms of complexity that allow differentiation between units. These are: behavioural complexity, symbolic complexity, affective complexity and perceptual complexity. There is also a type of progression, abstracting, which involves moving from the concrete understanding of a concept to a more abstract version. A further measure of progression is an increased capacity to articulate, explain or amplify an idea or construct (i.e., learners retain the ability to deploy the skill and in addition, they can now articulate, explain or amplify what they are able to do and what they have done). A final form of progression is pedagogical, and this refers to the way that learning is also influenced by its means of delivery. An example could be moving from an assisted performance to an independent one. Students are allowed to advance through the course material at their own pace and in an order which suits the type of progression that is most appropriate for them. Learners then move through a programme as quickly or slowly as they choose, as long as they finish the whole programme within a determined period of time.

Students are required to satisfy a mastery requirement in one unit before proceeding to the next. Typically, a unit in the programme would have more than one equivalent form of assessment; for example, three quizzes of equal difficulty or three primary sources or data sets to be analysed. Students are required to demonstrate mastery of a unit’s objectives at a certain level. If the student does not reach the threshold, he or she is redirected to unit materials (or supplements if provided) and can then take an equivalent form of the unit assessment. From a behaviourist perspective, demonstrating mastery, and being allowed to continue to a subsequent unit, was presumed to be reinforcing.

Teaching assistants or proctors were an important element of the Keller Plan. They could have been external to the programme (adults or peers recruited from external sources) or internal (advanced students on the programme who were doing well, had completed all the units to date, and had good interpersonal skills). They acted as the arbiters of unit mastery; they certified mastery, identified areas of weakness, and directed students to the next units. The Keller Plan was used extensively in the Brazilian higher education system, particularly as a more personalized form of instruction, but there is nothing inherent in the Keller formulation to restrict its application to particular grade levels, contents or types of programmes. There has been some research on the effectiveness of the Keller method which suggests that it has had robust, significantly positive effects on learning when compared to more traditional lecture-based formats (Pear and Crone-Todd, 1999).

The Keller Plan, as we have suggested, is underpinned by a behaviourist meta-theory and this may have contributed to its relative lack of success. Behaviourism can be contrasted with the two alternative meta-theories that we have already made reference to: cognitivism or symbol-processing and constructivism. The main focus of cognitivism is the role played by inner mental activities. The learner is viewed as an information processor, passively receiving information from an external source. Cognitivist perspectives on learning are a paradigm example of a symbol-processing learning philosophy.

On the other hand, constructivism entails an active process of learning and is generally associated with the work of the Russian psychologist, Lev Vygotsky. Moore (2012:18–19) summarizes Vygotsky’s views on development, instruction and consciousness. Cognitive development is achieved most effectively by elaborating ideas and understandings in discussion with teachers or pedagogical experts and peers. Learners perform and develop better with help than without help, and are given tasks that will test what is developing in them rather than what has already developed (the notion of stretching not just “able” students, but those who may be perceived as under-achieving in comparison with any accepted developmental or positional norm). Learners aim to develop “conscious mastery” over what they have learned rather than merely being able to recite facts which may have little meaning for them. The development of such expertise is not subject-specific, and once acquired becomes a tool through which all learning is facilitated and enhanced. Student–teacher relations therefore are dialogic rather than monologic, involve collaborative learning, both with peers and the teacher, recognize learning as an active and interactive process concerned with the provisional nature of the student’s knowledge, and emphasize articulation and meta-processes of learning.