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Personal Life Experience Essay

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The fallowing essay will introduce a personal life experience describing the feelings and emotions experienced when playing piano to an audience in comparison to the piano practice in loneliness. It will then apply the seminal Classical Conditioning Theory and the contemporary Theory of Flow in order to explain the occurrence of these feelings and emotions from a theoretical prospective (Pavlov & Gantt, 1928; Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). The essay will critically analyse the extent to which these theories are accurate in describing the experience and provide supporting evidence. The essay will end will a conclusion summarising the most important arguments provided in the content and consider the implications of these arguments. When I was very …show more content…

Preserving a behaviourist position one might argue that instrumental conditioning plays a significant role. Although slightly less extreme than classical conditioning, operant conditioning supports and challenges at the same time my experience. Skinner, 1948 was the first who put the operant conditioning theory forward, he argued that behaviours tend to stop if a punishment is received in response; on the other hand behaviours are repeated if they are reinforced. According to this view I should have stopped playing piano a while ago because of the punitive nature of the experience. However according to the same view I didn’t stop my actions because I was experiencing a rewarding positive feeling when practicing in loneliness. A behaviourist would call this phenomenon a self-reinforcement and would argue that due to the fact that I had a relatively small number of exams in comparison to the independent practice I was exposed to a larger amount of reinforcing feelings than punishing feelings. Although the behaviouristic position is well contended and supported by relevant research the main issue with this approach is the intentional disregard of the internal, emotional events. One might suggest that because of the nature of my experience it will be more relevant to adopt an approach based on the belief that human beings control their lives. The behaviourists however deny this affirmation and argue that the environment is controlling human

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In chapter 7, I found the concept of punishment to be most intriguing. Punishment is a part of operant conditioning which was theorized by B.F. Skinner. Punishment is often confused with negative reinforcement. However, the main difference between the two is: while the goal of reinforcement is to increase the likelihood of a behavior, the primary goal of punishment is to reduce the chances of the behavior it follows. In 1938, Skinner concluded that punishment produces only temporary suppression of behavior but later research found that effects may be permanent.

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Despite the ache in her heart that her mother’s death left her with, Billie Jo conquered her pain and continued to play the piano. Despite the physical hurt it caused her hands and the emotional pain it causes her as it remind her of her mother Billie Jo persisted and didn’t give up on her dreams of piano playing. Such as when Billie Jo thinks, “I play songs that have only the pattern of myself in them and you hum along supporting me. You are the companion to myself. The mirror with my mother’s eyes,”(194.).

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Meet my Jazz band. This is a picture of us in New Orleans my junior year during spring break to play Jazz. I decided upon this picture because this band has had such a profound impact on how I frame my future. My connection with music through the piano has been fostered ever since I could reach those shiny black and white collection of keys. Starting at the age of four, playing the classical music of Mozart and Bach was what my musical background was founded upon, with tangible medals and accomplishments as achievements.

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My Byrne’s scolding does not make the children settle down because his scolding is not followed by punishment or reinforcement. “In a positive reinforcement-based system, animals are rewarded with something they like for responding appropriately to the caregiver’s cues or commands,” (Laule 2). Mr. Byrne could use positive reinforcement instead of just scolding the students. “Reinforcement training, where the animal performs the correct behavior in order to escape or avoid something it does not like,” (Laule 2). Mr. Byrne could give the students practice quizzes containing information on the tests as a positive punishment.

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Beautiful music plays in their head and inspires them. The first patient introduced in the book, Tony Cicoria, described his case of musicophilia as a life-changing event. He had never found music a significant part of his life, but after he was suddenly struck by lightning, he experienced a strong desire to listen to classical music. Soon, he found a way to teach himself to play the piano at the age of forty-two, and a new stage of his life began. He began to compose and perform his pieces, stating that “whenever he sat down at the piano to work on his Chopin, his own music ‘would come and take him over’”.

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Introduction Erik Erikson’s psychosocial stage of initiative versus guilt as well as B.F. Skinner’s operant conditioning within behaviorism would be the theories that best describe the given scenario. Initiative vs. Guilt At this stage, it is known that children assert themselves more frequently and according to Bee (as cited in Thatcher, 2011) it is a “time of vigor of action and consists of behaviors that the parents may see as aggressive". This stage also sees the child wanting to initiate and complete his/ her own actions for a purpose.

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Emotions can influence one’s behaviour for instance when a person is angry they are likely to display aggressive behaviour and so forth. The main evidence that shows how emotions can influence an individual to exert disobedient behaviour is the Stanley Milgram experiment. In one of the variations of the experiment, most of Milgram’s participants refused to continue with administering electric shocks when the learner was present in the same room as the teacher, the obedience rate dropped to around 40%. When the teacher was asked to hold the learner’s hand on the shock plate, obedience level significantly dropped to 30%, due to the fact that the teacher thought the learner was in pain or distressed and this resulted in the feeling of empathy and responsibility for the well-being of the learner (“Obedience”). However, it is vital to take into consideration the fact that it is difficult to measure the feelings of an individual.

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Learning is something people do on a daily bases, some do not even know that learning is occurring. The gaining of new knowledge and or skills from experience leads to change in behavior is the logical definition of the term learning (Schacter, Gilbert, Wegner, Nock, 2015). There are three different ways to come about learning these are, Classical conditioning, Operant conditioning and Observational Conditioning. Each conditioning is unique in their own way in describes a different way of learning. Right now we’ll focus more o n Classical conditioning and Operant conditioning.

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Nevertheless, Skinner points out that children learn nothing from the punishment. Instead, they may start to work out how to avoid it (Nolan & Raban, 2015). Another concept is classical conditioning (classical behaviorism) that emphasizes on the relation between stimuli and response. This concept embodies in a famous experiment, in which the food is presented to the dog when the bell rings, and the bell becomes a conditioned stimulus for the dog (Nolan & Raban, 2015). Likewise, if children receive toys in the condition that they behave well, then they will probably repeat this behavior to get the toys.

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The prompt for this essay is quite simple: write about how your involvement in sports, community service, leadership, academics, and other extracurricular activities have affected your overall character. However, I feel as though this essay would be better if focused on my career in lacrosse and how it’s changed my life over the past five years, helping me throughout the good and bad, the simple and the challenging. Lacrosse has been a part of my life for about five years now. I started playing when I was in fourth grade, simply because I wanted to branch out and try something new, exciting, and a little bit out of my comfort zone.

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Introduction Learning enables you as an individual, to gain more knowledge about something which you have never learned about. Learning also has to do with past experiences which are influenced by behavioural changes (Weiten, 2016). There are different types of ways to learn; through, classical conditioning, operant conditioning and observational learning which will be discussed and analysed in the essay.   Behaviourism Behaviourism is considered one of the main subjects in psychology and the two main people who founded behaviourism were, Burrhus Frederic Skinner, also known as B.F Skinner and Ivan Pavlov who were famous for the work they did on classical and operant conditioning (Moderato & Presti, 2006). According to Moderato and Presti

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The Positive and Negative of Operant Conditioning and The Most Effective Method There are many ways we can come about in behavior. An American psychologist, B.F. Skinner, introduced the theory of operant conditioning. Operant conditioning is known as associative learning and a learning process. The theory is made up of two factors in which behavior is modified through either reinforcement and or punishment.

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1404 Words | 6 Pages

INTRODUCTION Have you ever thought on how people explain about behaviour? How do we know when learning process has occurred? Learning is permanent change that happened in the way of your behaviour acts, arises from experience one’s had gone through. This kind of learning and experience are beneficial for us to adapt with new environment or surrounding (Surbhi, 2018). The most simple form of learning is conditioning which is divided into two categories which are operant conditioning and classical conditioning.

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Life for me growing up was super difficult. A lot of my childhood was pure traumatic. Also, it was a struggle for me and my family, money wise and food wise. Also, our house was very small. We even lost our father and I also became a teen mom.

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The past four years of my life hold both my highest of highs and my lowest of lows. High school can be a very awkward time period in a person’s life. Four years ago, I made the intimidating switch from St. Mary’s School to Algoma High School. There were certain aspects of high school which made me nervous, but academics was not one of them. I learned how to be a responsible student in my earlier years, and school had always come relatively easy to me.

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