There’s this girl at my school and she’s really nice and I remember sometime last year at one point she would carry a clicker around and click it everytime she had a happy thought/something good happened/she laughed etc. It was always kind of cute how you’d just hear the little click every once in a while throughout class it always made me smile knowing that it was bc something made her feel happy idk
she was training herself to be happy oh my god
This is a sweet thought, but usually a click is associated with a reward (reinforcer) and with shaping behaviors. Unless the clicking sound is inherently rewarding, this isn’t “training”. It’s just her letting everyone know she’s happy.
Clicking occurring every time that she’s happy means that her brain will associate the click with being happy. This is the same reason we combine the click with treats when training dogs. Later, when she clicks, it’ll remind her of feeling happy. So.
Humans aren’t dogs though, and if it were that simple then the depression rates would be a lot lower and clicker sales a lot higher than they are.
Clickers are good tools for training a dog, but with a person it is more complex. Wouldn’t this interfere with social anxiety as well? Sweet idea, but practically not so sure. Seems more like a clickbaity story to me.
I… I don’t know how to explain to you that classical conditioning is one of the first examples of behaviorism and ABSOLUTELY works with humans. It uses a feature of the brain that’s basically required for survival.
Human complexity makes them easier to train, not harder. It’s very practical, actually. Why do you think that certain people make you happy? Do you know psychology? I’m sorry if that’s rude, it’s just that this story is actually pretty basic.
The clicking sound isn’t an unconditioned reinforcer, it’s a conditioned one. There are varying reasons that it could be reinforcing for her, but emotion isn’t an unconditioned reinforcer. Much like fear of rats or spiders is not unconditioned, it’s conditioned.
An unconditioned reinforcer is anything that is inherently rewarding, dependent on survival, such as food or water. All else is malleable, including this. What if she can’t use a clicker in all scenarios? What if she loses the clicker? And like you’ve said, many things are inherently reinforcing and a clicker may just be overkill. Unless she was seriously depressed, then a clicker probably isn’t worth the trouble. Each bevahior has a consequence, and in the case of using the clicker than means social unease.
In a certain environment, sure it’s fine. Such as at home. Out in public, it may cause more trouble than it’s worth.
Thanks for answering your own question on why everyone doesn’t do it. I was wondering when you’d pick up on that.
Every form of conditioning has issues. Those aren’t questions that matter a ton.
Food and water are the quickest trainers, but joy is one of the five basic emotions and can absolutely be associated with other phenomena.
It sounds like it wasn’t too much trouble for her, and it seems like you understand that this isn’t necessarily a clickbait story and is plausible.
The only reason I felt the need to explain the shortcomings and questionable nature of this story is because you were defending its 100% infallibility. If you ask any behaviorist professor on what qualifies as an unconditioned reinforcer, emotions aren’t included as unconditioned reinforcers. The antecedents of emotions can vary from person to person and are not overtly quantifiable. Emotion is a covert, unmeasurable aspect of a behavior, unlike measuring the salivary secretions from a dog in bringing them food. Quantifying emotion is down the line a ways but for now we just have imperfect ways of gauging emotion.
My main point if this: Don’t believe everything you read online. Discussing stories like this actually yields better results for the user than just passing by it and haphazardly liking it. So thanks for the discussion, in that regard.
hi, OP here, this post is very very old but it is a real thing that happened. I used to sit in front of her and I remember some other kids teasing her about it and saying it was stupid. she was a soft-spoken, kind, and smart girl who I made this post about because I found it very nice to hear the click and see her smiling. It made me smile. after making this post, I had a friend (who knew her much better than me), inform me that it was actually a project from her church. I think she was Mormon but I can’t remember exactly.
but yeah. not made up story. don’t know why her church did it but yeah.
Newsflash: text notification sounds ARE click training! That little sound releases a shot of dopamine similar to a snort of cocaine. (So does a perfect drive off the tee and swishing a 3 pointer)
