Behaviorism (or behaviourism) is a systematic approach to understanding the behavior of humans and other animals. It assumes that behavior is either a reflex evoked by the pairing of certain antecedent stimuli in the environment, or a consequence of that individual's history, including especially reinforcement and punishment contingencies, together with the individual's current motivational state and controlling stimuli. Although behaviorists generally accept the important role of heredity in determining behavior, they focus primarily on environmental events.

Seicento composers

Antonio Farina (fl. 1675) was an Italian composer active in Venice. He is remembered for his serenatas.

Street of Darkness is a 1958 American adventure drama directed by Robert G. Walker and starring Robert Keys. It had its world premiere on 11 June.

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17th-century classical composers

Street of Darkness

Behaviorism

Antonio Farina

Behaviorism (or behaviourism) is a systematic approach to understanding the behavior of humans and other animals. It assumes that behavior is either a reflex evoked by the pairing of certain antecedent stimuli in the environment, or a consequence of that individual's history, including especially reinforcement and punishment contingencies, together with the individual's current motivational state and controlling stimuli. Although behaviorists generally accept the important role of heredity in determining behavior, they focus primarily on environmental events. It combines elements of philosophy, methodology, and psychological theory. Behaviorism emerged in the early 1900s as a reaction to depth psychology and other traditional forms of psychology, which often had difficulty making predictions that could be tested experimentally, but derived from earlier research in the late nineteenth century, such as when Edward Thorndike pioneered the law of effect, a procedure that involved the use of consequences to strengthen or weaken behavior. During the first half of the twentieth century, John B. Watson devised methodological behaviorism, which rejected introspective methods and sought to understand behavior by only measuring observable behaviors and events. It was not until the 1930s that B. F. Skinner suggested that covert behavior—particularly, thoughts and feelings—are subjected to the same controlling variables as observable behavior, which became the basis for his philosophy called "radical behaviorism." While Watson and Ivan Pavlov investigated how stimulus-response procedures elicit reflexes in respondent conditioning, Skinner assessed the controlling nature of reinforcement and its potential effect on the antecedents (or discriminative stimuli) that emits behavior; the technique became known as operant conditioning. The application of radical behaviorism—known as applied behavior analysis—is used in a variety of contexts, including, for example, organizational behavior management and pediatric feeding therapy, to the treatment of mental disorders, such as autism and substance abuse. In addition, while behaviorism and cognitive schools of psychological thought may not agree theoretically, they have complemented each other in the cognitive-behavior therapies, which have demonstrated utility in treating certain pathologies, such as simple phobias, PTSD, and mood disorders.