(Response Guidelines)

Read the posts of your peers and respond to two. Your response should be substantive and demonstrate your understanding of the material. What aspects of the post do you like or agree with and why? Are there areas that are not clear? Did the post spark questions that you would like to ask your peer? In this, and in all of your courseroom posts, be sure to keep your tone scholarly, respectful, and professional.

 (Peer Post)

I will begin by saying that during this week alone, Operant and Respondent conditioning are finally starting to click. I struggled with this during my undergrad in Educational psyc, and now things are starting to make sense. 

At dinner today, my son who has been working on eating new foods was rewarded for trying and/or eating a new food on his plate. For the foods he didn’t try or eat he wasn’t rewarded with anything. He is insistent on trying at least one new food a day. A behavior that I would consider operant behavior would be going back to sleep after my alarm has rung. I had one bad situation in which I thought I could sleep in until the next time the snooze alarm went off. Turns out I hit the off button. At 7:50 when I need to leave my house to drop off my kids to school, they are waking me up asking if they were going to go to school. They were late, I was late to work and and it was a bad day overall. Never again have I slept past the snooze.

In operant behavior, there are consequences that consist of either a positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, positive punishment or negative punishment. Whereas in respondent conditioning you have stimuli that elicit various responses. In respondent conditioning you have the presence of a neutral stimuli and unconditional stimuli that emit an unconditional response when presented together. After a while that neutral stimuli becomes a conditional stimuli producing a conditional response. They differ in the sense that operant behaviors are controlled or maintained by the environment. How a person engages while in the environment will produce a consequence, positive or negative. Environmental stimuli. Whereas in respondent conditioning the behaviors are reflexive produced by the stimuli. 

I have seen operant behavior almost daily during any given activity, whether they are practicing turn taking while playing a card game, engaging in non preferred tasks, modeling or play. Depending on how my son reacts, desired or undesired behavior, will warrant the RBT or BCBA to react appropriately with either a positive or negative reinforcement.