The Pros And Cons Of Operant Conditioning

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Stress eating is one of biggest faults when it comes to my health behaviors. As an athlete gaining excessive weight in fat has many disadvantages; my agility, body composition, and reaction time are the ultimate components of my athletic ability first to suffer. As an aspiring Division I athlete, those components, along with skill, are of the utmost importance to gaining play time. My stress eating started as a habit and later developed into classical conditioning. Before said my conditioning unconditioned stimulus was academic work and my unconditioned response was eating. The neutral stimulus during this time was stress. However, now my controlled stimulus is stress and my controlled response is still eating. It is clear this behavior did not develop into operative conditioning due to the shortcoming of positive and negative reinforcement, primary and secondary reinforcers, and punishment. …show more content…

The use of negative reinforcement will have the biggest effect on the completion of this goal. Each time I eat excessively when doing school work I will deposit $15 into my savings account and not take it back out. I will then begin to associate stress eating with losing money, which is something I despise. If I begin to get bold and ignore the negative reinforcement I will have to take a more drastic measure, punishment from my mother. In the past, when I was not able to stop my own bad habits such as: nail biting, knuckle popping, and saying “yeah” instead of “yes” ,with my my mother would ground me for two weeks. This time if I stress eat my punishment from my mother will be being banned from the kitchen for 10 days per each session of stress eating. For every 10 days that I do not stress eat, I will treat myself to a small bowl of frozen yogurt;therefore, making frozen yogurt my positive

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