Behaviourist approach

The behavioural approach is based on the concept of explaining behaviour through observation, and the belief that our environment is what causes us to behave differently. Behaviourists explain behaviour in terms of the stimuli that elicit it and the events that caused the person to learn to respond to the stimulus that way. Behaviourists use two processes to explain how people learn: classical conditioning and operant conditioning. In classical conditioning, people learn to associate two stimuli when they occur together, such that the response originally elicited by one stimulus is transferred to another. The person learns to produce an existing response to a new stimulus.
For example, Watson & Rayner conditioned a young boy called Albert, to respond with anxiety to the stimulus of a white rat. They achieved this by pairing the rat with a loud noise that already made Albert anxious. The anxiety response was transferred to the rat because it was presented together with the noise. The response also generalized to other stimuli that resembled the rat, including a rabbit and a fur coat.
In operant conditioning, people learn to perform new behaviours through the consequences of the things they do. If a behaviour they produce is followed by a reinforcement then the likelihood of that behaviour being repeated increases in future. A consequence can be reinforcing in two ways: either the person gets something good or they avoid something bad. Conversely, if a behaviour is followed by a punishment then the likelihood of that behaviour being repeated in future decreases. Whereas classical conditioning only allows the person to produce existing responses to new stimuli, operant conditioning allows them to learn new responses. For example;
Positive reinforcement: a pleasant stimulus is received after a behaviour is performed for e.g. a mother may give her child some sweets in return for him/her cleaning his room. This reinforces the behaviour and makes it more likely to occur in the future.
Negative reinforcement: a behaviour is performed in order to avoid an unpleasant stimulus. For e.g. a boy receives a detention because he didn’t do his homework. The detention is an unpleasant stimulus; the boy wishes to avoid this unpleasant stimulus, and so is more likely to do his homework next time (this behaviour is reinforced).