Avoidance learning is the process by which an individual learns a behavior or response to avoid a stressful or unpleasant situation. The behavior is to avoid, or to remove oneself from, the situation. Researchers have found avoidance behavior challenging to explain, since the reinforcement for the behavior is to not experience the negative reinforcer, or punishment. In other words, the reinforceme…
The cause of avoidant personality disorder is not clearly defined, and may be influenced by a combination of social, genetic, and biological factors. Avoidant personality traits typically appear in childhood, with the appearance of excessive shyness and fear of new people and situations. However, these characteristics are also developmentally appropriate emotions for children, and do not necessari…
Albert Bandura was born in the province of Alberta, Canada, and received his B.A. from the University of British Columbia. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in clinical psychology at the University of Iowa, focusing on social learning theories in his studies with Kenneth Spence and Robert Sears. Graduating in 1952, Bandura completed a one-year internship at the Wichita Guidance Center before accepting …
Battered child syndrome occurs as the result of long-term physical violence against a child or adolescent. An estimated 2,000 children die each year in the United States from confirmed cases of physical abuse and 14,000 more are seriously injured. The battering takes many forms, including lacerations, bruises, burns, and internal injuries. In addition to the physical harm inflicted, battered child…
Nancy Bayley was a pioneer in the field of human development. She devoted her life to documenting and measuring intellectual and motor development in infants, children, and adults. Her studies of the rates of physical and mental maturation have greatly influenced our understanding of developmental processes. Her "Bayley Scales of Mental and Motor Development" are used throughout the …
The Bayley Scales of Infant Development measure mental and physical, as well as emotional and social, development. The test, which takes approximately 45 minutes, is administered individually by having the child respond to a series of stimuli. The Mental Scales, which measure intellectual development, assess functions such as memory, learning, problem-solving ability, and verbal communication skil…
Aaron T. Beck was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on July 18, 1921, the third son of Russian Jewish immigrants. His father was a printer by trade who seriously abided by his socialist ideals. His rather overbearing mother was known for her extreme mood swings. Beck had two siblings who died before he was born. Beck's childhood typified middle-class America, complete with his involvement i…
Clifford Whittingham Beers was born in New Haven, Connecticut, studied at Yale University, and began a professional career in the insurance industry. In 1900 he was institutionalized for a mental breakdown after a suicide attempt and diagnosed as manic-depressive. Confined to both public and private institutions over a three-year period, Beers found the treatment of mental patients inhumane and in…
Behavior modification is based on the principles of operant conditioning, which were developed by American behaviorist B.F. Skinner (1904-1990). In his research, he put a rat in a cage later known as the Skinner Box, in which the rat could receive a food pellet by pressing on a bar. The food reward acted as a reinforcement by strengthening the rat's bar-pressing behavior. Skinner studied ho…
In contrast to the psychoanalytic method of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), which focuses on unconscious mental processes and their roots in the past, behavior therapy focuses on observable behavior and its modification in the present. Behavior therapy was developed during the 1950s by researchers and therapists critical of the psychodynamic treatment methods that prevailed at the time. It drew on a va…
Behaviorism is a psychological theory of human development that posits that humans can be trained, or conditioned, to respond in specific ways to specific stimuli and that given the correct stimuli, personalities and behaviors of individuals, and even entire civilizations, can be codified and controlled. Edward Thorndike (1874-1949) initially proposed that humans and animals acquire behaviors thro…
The complete name of this test is Bender Visual Motor Gestalt Test. It is a test used with all age groups to help identify possible learning disabilities, neurological disorders, mental retardation, or developmental delay. Test results also provide information about specific abilities, including motor coordination, memory, and organization. The test-taker is given a series of nine designs, each on…
Bruno Bettelheim was born in Vienna in 1903. He was trained as a psychoanalyst, receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Vienna in 1938. In the same year, the Nazis conquered Austria, and Bettelheim was interned in the Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps. He was released in 1939 and emigrated to the United States, where he first became a research associate of the Progressive Bruno Bett…
The language rights of ethnic minorities in the United States have been a source of public controversy for close to two decades. The 1970s saw record levels of immigration, bringing an estimated 4 million legal and 8 million illegal immigrants into the country. To accommodate this dramatic surge in the nation's population of foreign language speakers, language assistance has been mandated o…
Alfred Binet was born in Nice, France, in 1857. After studying both law and medicine in Paris, he earned a doctorate in natural science. Binet's psychological training—mostly at Jean-Martin Charcot's neurological clinic at the Salpetriere Hospital—was in the area of abnormal psychology, particularly hysteria, and he published books on hypnosis (Le magnetisme animal, wit…
Binocular depth cues are based on the simple fact that a person's eyes are located in different places. One cue, binocular disparity, refers to the fact that different optical images are produced on the retinas of both eyes when viewing an object. By processing information about the degree of disparity between the images it receives, the brain produces the impression of a single object that…
Biofeedback originated with the field of psychophysiology, which measures physiological responses as a way of studying human behavior. Types of behavior that may be studied in this way range from basic emotional responses to higher cognitive functions. Today, biofeedback is also associated with behavioral medicine, which combines behavioral and biomedical science in both clinical and research sett…
Bipolar disorder is classified among affective disorders in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders . The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) estimates that about one in one hundred people will develop the disorder, which affects some two million Americans. While this condition occurs equally in both males and females and in every …
Research has correlated birth order with such aspects of life as temperament and behavior. For example, first-born children, when compared to their siblings, tend to score slightly higher on intelligence tests and to attain a slightly higher socioeconomic status. Some psychologists believe that birth order is a significant factor in the development of personality. The psychologist Alfred Adler pio…
In psychoanalytical theory, birth trauma is the first major occasion of great anxiety in the life of an individual experienced at birth as the infant moves from the gentle comfort of the womb into a new environment full of harsh and unfamiliar stimuli. While most psychoanalytical psychologists assign a moderate degree of importance to the birth trauma in terms of its effects, some believe that the…
Childbearing is often viewed as the transition to adult female sexuality. Birth labor is divided into several stages. During the latent phase (Stage 0), which lasts from several hours to as long as three days, uterine contractions (either regular or irregular) are present, but the cervix has not dilated more than three or four centimeters. The mucus plug may be passed at this stage. The first stag…
There is no single accepted definition of bisexuality. Some define it narrowly as sexual involvement with members of both sexes concurrently (within a twelve-month period or less). Others define bisexuality more broadly as any sexual attraction to or involvement with members of both sexes at any time in one's life. However, few people qualify as bisexual in its narrow definition. A comprehe…
Humans have the unique ability to form abstract conceptions about themselves and to gaze at themselves as both the seer and the object seen. Conflict occurs when the seer places unrealistic demands on him or herself and the body. Body image considers physical appearance and may include body functions or other features. Body image is linked to internal sensations, emotional experiences, fantasies, …
Bonding is the process by which parents form a close personal relationship with their newborn child. The term "bonding" is often used interchangeably with " attachment," a related phenomenon. For the purposes of this essay, bonding is confined to the newborn period. Attachment develops over the larger period of infancy and is treated in a separate entry. The way parents…
Borderline individuals have a history of unstable interpersonal relationships. They have difficulty seeing the "shades of gray" in the world, and view significant people in their lives as either completely flawless or extremely unfair and uncaring (a phenomena known as splitting). These alternating feelings of idealization and devaluation are the hallmark feature of borderline person…
Everyone, at one time or another, feels bored. Children, however, may report boredom more frequently because they have not yet learned to alleviate it for themselves. Infants and toddlers rarely experience boredom. Infants spend large blocks of time asleep and much of their waking time feeding. Toddlers have a nearly unlimited curiosity to explore a world that is still new to them. Preschool and s…
The idea of combining psychology and philosophy may seem to run counter to the idea of psychology as a science. But psychology is a science of the mind, and the releationship between the mind and ideas is critically important to psychological study. Medard Boss, trained as a physician, used his knowledge of philosophy to help humanize psychology. He spent his career developing the concept he calle…
Murray Bowen grew up in a small town that he believed gave him the foundation for his theories on family therapy. To Bowen, the family was an emotional unit; although it was made up of individuals who had their own thoughts and needs, much of how they behaved was the result of how they functioned as part of the family. Bowen, the oldest of five children, was born in Waverly, Tennessee, on January …
John Bowlby's pioneering work on the relationship between mothers and children was instrumental in shaping child psychology in the twentieth century. His research focusing on the mother-child bond—what it meant, and what happened when it did not or could not exist—formed the basis for groundbreaking work that culminated in his "attachment theory" about maternal b…
It has recently been reported that neurology, the study of the brain, is the fastest growing specialty in the life sciences. With this growth has come a wealth of new information about the origins of and treatments for some of the more prevalent brain disorders. There are many varieties of brain disorders that affect humans, including Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, epileps…