Operant Conditioning Case Studies

Introduction A middle-aged female client has came in with the need of help with reducing the amount of profanity she uses while upset. She has made this intervention because she feels she is lacking professionalism and intelligence when she speaks. She has maintained this behavior for over fifteen years and swears in about ⅖ sentences she speaks. To change this, one could punish her for swearing and reward her for refraining. Plan One Classical conditioning could have helped give this undesired behavior to this woman. Classical conditioning is where one is trained to react in a specific way to an object, sound, etc. For this woman specifically, her parents and friends swore while mad, causing her to assume it is socially acceptable to use

Operant conditioning is a behavior that occurs when affiliated with a certain event (Biswas-Diener, 2017). The specific event that affected this woman happened when she was around seventeen years old and her mother told her that it didn’t concern her if she swore, and since then she does it all the time. In this case, there was no effective punishment from her mother while her daughter was growing up, causing the daughter to have to make this intervention several years later in her life. In operant conditioning, a reinforcer increases a certain behavior and punishments decrease a certain behavior. The particular reinforcer in this case was her mother increasing the amount of profanity her daughter uses. In most cases a reinforcer is positive, although in this case it is negative. If the mother would have used a punishment, it would have been her telling the daughter it is not socially acceptable to swear, giving her an intervention. However, that was not the case in this particular

Cognitive learning is something that can not be directly observed but it rather inferred. Cognitive learning also depends on mental processes. In this particular instance, the cognitive learning is how the woman showed that she is capable of retaining information from the people she is around the most, specifically, the profanity they use. Connected to that, latent learning is when someone only displays knowledge of something if there is an incentive. For this woman, the knowledge would be the profanity that is used around her and her recognizing it, and the incentive would be her anger, releasing the foul language. Social learning hinges on the presence of authority or a higher status (Biswas-Diener, 2017). In this case, the woman’s parents are the higher status, and she is hinging on them to teach her the correct things, but not to teach her profanity. Some characteristics of social learning are learned helplessness, vicarious reinforcement, and vicarious punishment. This woman has not had to go through learned helplessness because she does not have a sense of powerlessness. Although, she has a lack of vicarious reinforcement, which is our tendency to repeat behaviors that are rewarded. No one has rewarded her for her use of profanity, as nobody should. She also has a lack of vicarious punishment because there isn’t anybody getting in trouble for swearing in her