Reinforcement (PDF)

Reinforcement: Behavioral Analyses covers the proceedings of the 1970 Symposium on Schedule-induced and Schedule-Dependent Phenomena, held in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. This symposium highlights theoretically inclined papers on reinforcement processes.

This text contains 10 chapters and begins with a description of how behavior is induced by various environmental events, especially reinforcing events, as well as the relationship between control by inducing stimuli and reinforceability. The subsequent chapters deal with reinforcement phenomena in terms of preference relations and the conditioned emotional responses in terms of opposing motivational processes. These topics are followed by reviews of schedule-dependent effects of preaversive stimuli and the maintenance of behavior by apparent reinforcers that might be expected to punish, as well as the identification of critical variable that underlie the phenomenon. Other chapters examine the interactions between operant and responded conditioning processes. The final chapters outline the experiments on behavior stream whose hallmark is reinforcement if the absence of specified behavior. These chapters emphasize the analogy between the evolution of species and the modification of behavior.

This book will be of value to behaviorists and psychologists.