Behaviorism

Behaviorism is an approach to psychology that explains behavior through observable actions and learning, often excluding private mental states from scientific explanation.

Classical conditioning: A learning process in which a neutral stimulus comes to elicit a response after pairing with a stimulus that already elicits it. Pavlovian conditioning became a central account of how environmental stimuli acquire behavioral control.
John B. Watson: An American psychologist who promoted behaviorism as an objective science of observable behavior. Watson’s 1913 manifesto publicly established behaviorism’s early program.
B. F. Skinner: An American psychologist who developed radical behaviorism and the experimental analysis of behavior. Skinner made operant conditioning the most influential later form of behaviorism.
Applied behavior analysis: A field that applies behavioral principles to improve socially significant behavior through measurement and intervention. It applies behaviorist methods to real-world goals and evaluates change through observable outcomes.
Cognitive psychology: The scientific study of mental processes such as perception, memory, language, and reasoning. The cognitive approach treats internal information processing as a legitimate subject of psychology.
Operant conditioning: Learning in which consequences alter the future frequency of behavior. It explains how behavior changes when actions produce reinforcement or punishment.
Ivan Pavlov: A Russian physiologist whose experiments on dogs established conditioned reflexes as a form of learning. Pavlov’s findings supplied behaviorists with a measurable model of learned responses.
Clark L. Hull: An American psychologist who built a formal theory of learning based on drives, habits, and reinforcement. Hull represents the systematic, theory-building strand of mid-century behaviorism.
Behavior therapy: A family of psychotherapies that uses learning principles to change maladaptive behaviors and emotional responses. Early behavior therapy brought conditioning procedures into treatment.
Cognitive revolution: A mid-twentieth-century shift that made mental processes central to psychological research again. It displaced behaviorism’s dominance in experimental psychology by legitimizing explanations of internal processes.

Linked from 99 pages