Table of Contents

Conditioning 3

Memory 14

Thought 21

Perception 25

Sensation 33

Personality Theory 39

Abnormal Behavior 49

Psychotherapy 56

Emotion 59

Motivation 62

Social Psychology 70

Intelligence 75

Physiology 78

States of Consciousness 84

Statistics 88

Human Development 91

Conditioning

What are the laws of learning? What are the things that glue in our knowledge of the world? We are talking about the role of experience in shaping our lives. The rules of learning give us great adaptability. There are three basic types of learning. They are habituation, classical conditioning, and instrumental conditioning.

Imagine a worm. When the tide is in, it comes out. It has extensions from its head, getting particles from the outside. So it comes out of its hole to snatch these particles. It has one fear though: seagulls. The worm is delicious to them. They see him and they eat him. The worm has a detection system wired in though. When there is a shadow, he ducks. It is a hard-wired reflex. Sometimes, however, shadows don’t mean a darn, like on a cloudy day. If it doesn’t come out because of the shadows, it will get nothing done and starve to death. Therefore, if the shadows are too frequent, it will ignore them. There is some risk, but there is the greater risk of starvation. There is a phenomenon of learning not to duck in. Habituation is not a good learning. It extinguishes rapidly from one day to the next.

In 1907 was the first major experiment by Ivan Petrovich Pavlov. During the Cold War, he was the Russian’s hero. We had our own hero, Edward Thorndike. However, we are over that period now.