#behaviorism

[nemfrog]

Pavlov's dog, harnessed beside a food bowl and a rotating drum that records the animal's physiological response to a stimulus. The Field of Psychology. 1909."

[autball]

Yes, the new-and-improved “positive” stuff still sucks.

(Image description: A 4 panel cartoon by Autball.

1: Two figures (one red, one yellow) are in an empty classroom. Yellow is putting something we can’t see on the wall and says, “My kid saw a reference to dunce hats in a Youtube video the other day, and she asked me what they meant.”

2: Same scene. Yellow grabs a blue bin while saying, “I told her what they were about and that they actually used to be a thing in schools, and she couldn’t believe it!” Red is carrying a poster over to the wall and says, “Oh man, yeah, so cruel.”

3: Same scene. Red is putting their poster on the wall and says, “And then there was a time when they’d make kids write lines over and over on the chalkboard about what they did wrong, in front of EVERYONE.” Yellow pulls a clothespin out of the blue bin and replies, “Ugh. So embarrassing, and not even helpful!”

4: Same characters, but we can now see what they’re been working on. They stand in front of a decorated bulletin board which has: a poster of a child sitting “properly” at a desk entitled “I’m Ready to Learn!;” a poster of the classroom rules; a rewards chart with the names of all the children in the class on it; and a rainbow colored clip chart covered in clothespins with the children’s names on them. While attaching a clothespin, Yellow says, “I’m so glad we don’t use public shame and humiliation in the classroom like that anymore.” Red, finishing up with the rewards chart, says, “Totally.”)

[hyperlexichypatia]

While I’m saying things: I got into disability liberation through neurodiversity. I identify with the neurodiversity paradigm. I identify as neurodivergent. I believe that the core concept of the neurodiversity paradigm -- that all brains are different, and all brains should be accepted -- is integral to our liberation. But I’m really getting the sense that “neurodiversity” is becoming to “mad liberation” as “body positivity” is to “fat liberation.” “Neurodiversity” is being used by behaviorists, therapists, and teachers who are still practicing behaviorism and hierarchy. It’s being differentiated from “mental illness” that needs “treatment.” It’s being applied to plucky, cheerful people who can still contribute to capitalism in their own way, but not to people with extreme emotional states, people who experience voices and visions unknown to others, or people who score very poorly on IQ tests. It’s not being used to critically interrogate, let alone dismantle, oppressive concepts like “normalcy,” “sanity/insanity,” “competence,” or “general intelligence.” It’s not being used to challenge eugenics, or question whether “mental health” can have a useful meaning outside the pathology paradigm. It’s not being used to imagine what concepts like “happiness” or “good parenting” or “a fair distribution of resources” would even mean in the absence of pathologization, oppression, and hierarchy. We have to start using “neurodiversity” better if we want it to still have meaning.

[yumedesutrance]

Learning in hypnosis

Hypnosis also teaches the brain.

Positive reinforcement: • deep relaxation • pain relief • parasympathetic activation • sense of well-being • stress reduction

Negative reinforcement: Stress → hypnosis → stress decreases

Hypnosis creates learning: Hypnotic context → pleasant experience → easier cooperation next time

Not like training a dog. Different. Complex. Human.

Takeaway: Hypnosis is learning through experience, meaning, and expectation—not just stimulus → response.

✦ᛉumeᛋᛇ✦

[adastra-sf]

Why do cats hate closed doors?

Part of it is that cats are curious and have a fear of missing out (FOMO), says Dr. Karen Sueda, a board-certified veterinary behaviorist. Cats are naturally curious, and they like to keep an eye on everything happening in their territory, which includes their owner's house. This helps keep them alive in the wild.

"Cats like to control access to spaces and vital basic needs and territory," cat behaviorist Ingrid Johnson says. "It doesn't make them mean. It doesn't make them anything other than a species that is both predator and prey that has to hunt to survive but also has to feel safe and secure in their environment."

A closed door hits on all of what cat behaviorist Jane Ehrlich calls the "three terrible C's" that cats dislike:

They hate not having choice, they hate not being in control, and they hate change. While cats don't necessarily want to be involved in whatever is happening behind the door, they do want to know what's going on.

source story: X

[enthusiastic-consent-training]

One of the reasons that I really value behaviorism both in humans and other animals, is the emphasis placed on the fact that we can’t know the internal life of anyone else. Trying to know how and what someone else is thinking is futile, we can only control how we respond to their overt behavior.

I don’t worry whether my animals love me, I love them and when they’re eager to interact with me, I know I’m a reinforcing presence in some way. Their precise internal emotions aren’t something I can know; I can only know how they respond to me and change my behavior if the reaction is negative. If Midori loves me, great! If he just trusts me and thinks I’m a good resource for snacks and scritches, also great!

Humans have the benefit of being able to better communicate their inner world to others through language, but language is still a behavior. I’ve always been really nervous about how others feel about me and tend to overthink social interactions, and the realization that I can only respond to others behaviors was really freeing. If someone doesn’t want to interact with me, I can only know that when they tell me. If they don’t tell me, worrying about it isn’t really useful; so I may as well work under the assumption that they don’t secretly hate me, until they tell me otherwise.

So it just really pisses me off when my learning professor writes something like:

The first sentence can be a true statement: she doesn’t believe we learn the same way. But then she shifts from sharing her personal beliefs to offering it as a widely accepted fact. But it’s not a fact.

I am not arguing that we think or learn exactly the same way, but there’s no way to empirically prove that another animal is NOT able to think “abstract, complex thought[s].”

Like Frans De Waal, an important primatologist, discusses in his book, Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are?, differences in cognition are probably a gradient like differences in anatomy across taxonomic groups. Grouping it as humans vs. all other animals (not to mention research into plant cognition…) is so odd to me, when it seems obvious that humans and chimps would be far more similar in cognition than chimps and sea slugs.

And De Waal’s other really good point is that when we do an experiment on animal cognition and the species fails: it’s really hard to know if they’re incapable of some cognitive task, or if we’re just bad at designing an experiment to test that particular species (see De Waal’s tool use in primates example). We might be able to prove another animal can do something, but we cannot prove they are incapable of something.

“Humans are capable of more advanced, abstract thought,” is an impossible statement to prove because we’ll probably never know what goes on in a finch or goldfish’s brain. So why even bother worrying about it? It just feels like an inferiority complex where human learning theorists need to know what makes humans special and unique so they make wild unsubstantiated claims to reassure themselves.

Isn’t the fact that we’ve created things no other species has, enough? Why do we need to believe that other species are missing some divine spark? I just think we won the evolutionary lottery and got here first. If crows had figured out pockets and dolphins had hands, we’d be screwed.

[thechaoticfaelostitsshame]

It feels like it’s telling of something that autism’s become more well known but if you look into ABA tags on tumblr the majority are filled with ads for ABA, and if you look for research most of it is shit like measuring caregiver satisfaction after stopping stims, and if you try to talk to someone about how shitty it is or any of its history most people don’t know what ABA even is.

Autism itself may be more well known, but expecting people to act normal and not need accommodations and just stop looking autistic is still just as prevalent as ever