Reflection Paper For Psych

Reflection Paper For Psych

I have decided to write my reflection paper on learning. It applies to everyone in the world and there are many different ways to learn new things. You learn something new everyday. Until reading Understanding Psychology by Robert S. Feldman, I had no idea there were different ways to learn. It opened my eyes to a new understanding of the way my brain works.
The most obvious and most common way of learning has to be observational learning. Observational learning is “learning by observing the behavior of another person, or model (201).” Most people learn to do things by watching someone else do it first. For example, when children are learning to play a sport, the coach with demonstrate how to do a specific move or play so the children can actually see what they're wanted to do. Some learning by observation is done with the intent of learning. Sometimes you just watch someone do something enough times that you subconsciously learn how to do it yourself. For example, when I was growing up, I would always watch my mom pump gas at the gas station. I'd watch her put the gas card into the machine, open the gas tank, grab the hose, put it into the car, and pump gas. When I turned 16 and got my first car, I already knew how to pump gas into it. I never had someone intentionally teach me how to do it, but from watching my mom do it for so long, I already knew how to do it. A negative side to observational learning is that a child can learn behaviors that aren't wanted just from watching someone else. A child growing up in an abusive home can get the idea that it's okay to hit someone or call them a name when they're angry. The parents don't ever explain to the child that it's wrong because they would be contradicting themselves.
Another form of learning is Classical conditioning. Classical conditioning “is a type of learning in which a neutral stimulus comes to elicit a response after being paired with a stimulus (178).” A good example of classical conditioning...