Complete 4 page APA formatted essay: Psychological Growth and Development.Download file to see previous pages... One type of learning, classical conditioning, is a procedure in which a previously neut

Complete 4 page APA formatted essay: Psychological Growth and Development.

One type of learning, classical conditioning, is a procedure in which a previously neutral stimulus is paired with one that elicits a response. Most of the research conducted using classical conditioning techniques describe the experimenter presenting a stimulus to a passive animal. Operant conditioning took the central themes of classical conditioning and expanded on them by studying behaviors of animals who were acting on their environments (performing operant behaviors). Edward Thorndike's law of effect for operant conditioning states: Behaviors that are followed by satisfying effects are much more likely to occur again, but behaviors that are followed by unsatisfying effects are much less likely to reoccur.

Thus were born the concepts of positive and negative reinforcers. Positive reinforcers increase the likelihood of the desired response recurring. Negative reinforcers tend to elicit an increased response when they are removed. It is important to remember that both positive and negative reinforcers act to increase a particular behavior. The aspect of control is important here. Some studies have found that if an experimental subject does not have any control over its environment, and is unable to remove itself from the negative stimulus, a condition called learned helplessness will occur. In this state, a subject will have learned to be helpless so that in a new situation, even if it has the ability to control the situation, it will not even attempt to do so. The subject has attended to the stimulus and learned that nothing it can do will ever remove it. In this way, attention and memory are inextricably linked. One cannot remember something if one does not first attend to it.

The two main types of conscious memory encoding are termed short-term and long-term memory. Short-term memory allows us to temporarily store the very small amount of information that we are currently using. It helps us to selectively attend to the information that is most important to us at the moment, so that our brains will not be overloaded with a lot of extraneous information. Long-term memory is our link to the past. It is a permanent storehouse of all the information we have accumulated about our world. The organization of the data determines how easily this information will be recalled at a later date, and this could be the reason behind the phenomenon of eidetic memory (or photographic memory). People with this ability can recall images, sounds, or objects in memory with great accuracy and in seemingly unlimited volume. It has been shown that anyone's memory can improve either with time or practice, and this is important because these are the details that help make us who we are. Sometimes the memories are good, but sometimes they are bad, and this is where the psychoanalytic concept of repression comes in.

Repression is one of the defense mechanisms (strategies that protect the conscious mind from threatening thoughts and feelings) identified by Sigmund Freud. Repression occurs when a dangerous memory is forced from consciousness. The memory just will not be remembered because it is too painful. A related idea is the concept of denial, where an individual is consciously aware of the painful memory, but they choose to ignore its existence.