Personality

Dollard and Miller

• FOUR FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS ABOUT LEARNING
• ~ Drive: Wanting Something
• - motivating force
• - can be learned
• ~ Cue: Noticing Something
• - What a person notices, which provides a discrimative stimulus for learning
• - can be thoughts, not just sensory
• ~ Response: Doing Something
• - What a person does, which can be learned
• - any behavior that can be changed by learning can be considered a response
• - Dominant response can be learned to be desirable
• ~ Reward: Getting Something
• - what a person gets as a result of a response in the learning sequence, which strengthens responses because of its drive-
• reducing effect

The learning Process

• IMITATION, ANGER-ANXIETY CONFLICTS
• IMITATION
• - learning by observing the actions of others
• ~ same behavior
• ~ copying
• ~ matched dependent behavior
• ANGER-ANXIETY CONFLICTS
• ~ Dollard and Miller believed anger-anxiety conflict was sufficiently important and added it as a fourth critical training period

SUPPRESSION, CONFLICT, LANGUAGE

• Suppression
• - willfully putting thoughts out of consciousness
• ~ often fails
• ~ expressing feelings through writing helps to relieve from those feelings
• Conflict
• - a situation in which cues for two incompatible responses are provided
• ~ approach-approach
• - which favorite meal should we order at the restaurant
• ~ avoidance-avoidance
• - die by firing squad or lethal injection?
• ~approach- avoidance
• - wants to ask a girl out but the thought of rejection stops you
• Language
• - provides discriminative cues for learning how to deal with various situations and can be conceptualized as an important part of Freud’s ego.