Adding a pleasant stimulus, such as praising a child for picking up toys, illustrates which concept?

Enhance your skills for the Combined MAPH, Learning, Intelligence, and Testing Test with interactive questions, flashcards, and thorough explanations. Prepare effectively for your examination to ensure success.

Multiple Choice

Adding a pleasant stimulus, such as praising a child for picking up toys, illustrates which concept?

Explanation:
This is about reinforcing a behavior by adding a pleasant stimulus. In operant conditioning, reinforcing a behavior makes it more likely to occur again. Praising a child for picking up toys adds a positive consequence right after the behavior, so the child is more likely to repeat that action in the future. The term “positive” means something is added, not that it’s good in value. The other patterns would work differently: removing an unpleasant thing to encourage a behavior is negative reinforcement; giving something unpleasant to decrease a behavior is positive punishment; taking away something pleasant to decrease a behavior is negative punishment.

This is about reinforcing a behavior by adding a pleasant stimulus. In operant conditioning, reinforcing a behavior makes it more likely to occur again. Praising a child for picking up toys adds a positive consequence right after the behavior, so the child is more likely to repeat that action in the future. The term “positive” means something is added, not that it’s good in value.

The other patterns would work differently: removing an unpleasant thing to encourage a behavior is negative reinforcement; giving something unpleasant to decrease a behavior is positive punishment; taking away something pleasant to decrease a behavior is negative punishment.

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