Behavioral Research (biting nails)

Purpose: Improving your understanding of how behavioral principles work can help you change your behaviors and the behaviors of employees, friends, or family. Think about unwanted habits you have or irritating habits that those around you might have. This assignment will also teach you how to make more objective and clear observations, which improves your ability to think critically, as well as guide you in writing up a beginning Case Study, a task you'll undertake in multiple fields. These skills will help you in college and in your career: being able to determine discriminative stimuli will help you to identify patterns in people's behaviors, and that will help you to be able to understand them better. Task: This assignment will take at least 25 days to complete: an initial 10 days of observations and record keeping, an additional 14 days of trying to change the behavior while still making observations and recording them, a final day to write up your observations and what you learned in your Case Study. However, your observations will only take a few minutes each day to record. Please read through the entire process at least twice before starting. Use the sample log here that you can either download and type inside or simply use as a model for your own behavioral journal and record keeping. Day 1: Choose a behavior of yours that you would like to try to modify using the principles of behaviorism. Keep it simple and clearly measurable (for example, not "I should exercise more," but "I want to jog one mile a day" – not, "I want to be more outgoing," but "I want to talk to at least two people each day" – not, "I want better grades," but "I want to study X amount each day"). Use the assignment below to send me your idea, and I'll let you know if it'll work for this assignment. Days 1-5: For five days, merely record the frequency that your target behavior is occurring naturally (this is called establishing a baseline). How often, at what times, and under what circumstances, do you engage in the behavior? What are the good consequences of the behavior (such as short-term anxiety relief for smoking) and what are the bad consequences (such as long-term health problems)? If the behavior is a currently non-existent one that you want to establish, keep track of when you have opportunities to engage in the target behavior, but do not do so. Also note the times, contexts, cues, and consequences that are reinforcing this LACK of your target behavior. Day 6-10: Beginning on the sixth day, start noting the discriminative stimuli (i.e., recurring patterns of circumstances surrounding or triggering the behavior) you have recorded. Continue to observe behavioral frequency and note the stimuli and consequences through day 10 of your journal. For example, some people only smoke when visiting with certain acquaintances, or only snack while watching television. Limiting or eliminating those cues may help in changing the target behavior. Look for at least three discriminative stimuli.