developmental

• There are different patterns of reward and punishment e.g., positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement used to shape desirable behaviour such as getting a child to complete their homework. The method of successive approximations explains how complex behaviours are learnt by breaking them down into a series of simple behaviours, such as the steps to learning how to write. Schedules of partial reinforcement can explain why someone might become addicted to gambling as gambling games use variable ratio schedule.
• Skinner found that learning does occur through reward and punishment, as the rat learnt to press the lever.
• According to bandura, children develop aggressive behaviour through the mechanisms of social learning particularly in the adult model is important to them e.g., their parents, siblings, and peers. Behaviour, which is learnt, often through multiple repetitions of observation in childhood is likely to be retained in memory and then repeated when the individual is motivated to do so.
• Bandura (1961) showed that children in his experiments would imitate the adults hitting the bobo doll when given the opportunity to – they imitated the precise movements and phrases that the adult models used in their aggression. He also found that this effect was even more evident when the adult model was rewarded for their aggressive behaviour.