Adam Granicz
General Psychology (H) - Dr. Babbitt
Application Assignment #4 - 03/09/97

1. 	The goal of the commercial is to cause positive emotional response in those
who attended MSSC. Applying the principles of classical conditioning, the
commercial would be created around the followings.

	- Showing images most students encounter at MSSC, that create a general
positive feeling within the viewers (good old parties, the beautiful landscape
around campus, how students "cheated" the teachers in tests, cheerleaders,
sportscars in the parking lots, and things like this that are connected to MSSC,
and usually make people happier, or cause a positive response)
	- Show something that has the MSSC sign on it, when showing the images,
or right after showing the images listed in the previous point.
	- Play some kind of music that is most liked by the prospective viewers
while showing pictures of good old MSSC. (good old = gold)

It also makes people happy if they can see the important things in life, such as
somebody getting married, because it can bring back nice memories. A good
element in the commercial to illustrate this would be a couple getting married in
Billingsly Student Center.

These elements would create a conditioned response to any image with MSSC in it,
because the commercial connected the things that cause positive response from
viewers with MSSC. Naturally, we would have to play this commercial a bunch of
times on TV, or put excessive amount of these elements into the commercial. A nice
little thing would be to compose a short musical sequence that is liked by most
people, but would sound new, like some cartoon sounds for some kids, and play
this in some part of the commercial. This would get people wondering about it, and
eventually would end up as a conditioned stimulus bringing back good memories
about MSSC, those parts that are showed in the commercial while waiting for this
sound.

2. a, 	In the very first step, I would reinforce the child for not making a "huge"
mess. After a couple times, hopefully the child starts to put things in their place, and
the mess in the room would gradually decrease. Naturally, I would start decreasing
the amount of reinforcement, and only apply it when the child has done more effort
to keep his room "cleaner" as the last time. Once in time, we would probably get to
a point, where I get home, and the child's room is cleaned. I would give much
reinforcement then, so that this activity is going to increase, and would happen once
in two weeks, and then once a week, and so on, until we reach the demanded
degree of willingness to clean the room. After a while, the child may even find
cleaning his room a pleasant activity, for instance digging up some old stuff, or
finding something that was thought to be lost. In this process, again, the
reinforcement is given when the child made more effort to clean his room than the
day before.

b,	Reinforcing the child's effort to clean his room randomly, in other words we
put the child on a variable-interval schedule, would require more time to build up the
child's willingness to clean his room, but on the other hand it would be the most
persistent.
Also showing the child that a clean room has certain benefits, such as if suitably
cleaned it opens the possibility of having a party, or inviting a friend over, etc.

c,	- The more we punish someone, the more that person is going to
dislike us : punishing our child for not cleaning his room would result in him not
liking us very much, or he might even hate us after a longer period of being
subjected to our punishments.

       - By punishing someone, we increase that person's anger : too much
punishment can cause our child to react with anger, and because of that it can
affect external activities, such as decrease the quality of his homework that he is
doing, etc. In very rare cases, the child, especially in adolescent age can even turn
against the parents using physical force, and beat the parent up, or injure him.

       - Punishing decreases the child-parent interaction, and negatively
affects their relationship: in many cases the child talks less with his parents, and
eventually stops interacting with the parents. This usually leads to the child seeking
someone else's help and company, and is in the danger of getting into a peer-group
that affects him negatively.

3. a,	When a parent issues an undesirable command to a child, the child is likely
to respond by protesting against that command. Some parents in this case remove
the command in order to stop protesting, and by doing so, also unintentionally
reinforce the child's very behavior, that by protesting and defiance he can remove
parental commands. Then often parents use tougher measures, even becoming
physically agressive, that stops the child's protesting behavior. This leads to the
reinforcement of this kind of parental methods, and over a longer period of time to a
destructive cycle within the parent-child relationship. An example to illustrate this
would be a family where the mother easily gives in to her child. The child gradually
obtaines enough control over her. But the father does not like this, and tries to stop
this. The mother protests, because she thinks it is good to "serve" the child. The
father and the mother finally get into a huge discussion about this, and eventually
end up divorcing, affecting the child and themselves negatively.

b,	The first component of parent training is giving attends. Parents are taught
to monitor their child's behavior more effectively by paying attention to and
describing the child's appropriate behavior. Parents are required to eliminate all
commands, questions, and criticism, all forms of verbal behavior that is associated
with the child's  deviant behavior. The second treatment component involves
teaching parents reinforcement strategies. They are taught to use verbal preaise
statements upon compliance and other appropriate behavior. The goal here is to
show parents the effect of reinforcement of the child. The third aspect is teaching
the parents principles of ignoring. Ignoring minor inappropriate behaviors, such as
whining, helps eliminating target behavior. Treatment then moves into issuing
commands. The goal here is to help parents give clear, succinct commands, as
some forms of child noncompliance occur because requests are too vague, lengthy,
or confusing for the child to understand. If compliance occurs parents are to praise
their child. On the other hand, if compliance does not occur, parents are to use
affective disciplinary techniques for dealing with that noncompiance. The final skill of
the treatment, time-out teaches an important disciplinary strategy, namely that in
response to noncompliance and other undesired behavior parents are to use time-
out, that is for a short period of time they remove the child from reinforcing
surroundings. When implemented consistently, time-out has been shown to reduce
negative behaviors significantly. Parents through time-out learn not to use painful
punishment.

c,	Surveys on former participants demonstrate that parents find the behavioral
training program both acceptable to use and effective with their children. It has been
demonstrated that behavior change in the treated child generalizes from the clinic to
the home setting and from the treated behavior to other inappropriate behaviors that
were not the target of the treatment.

d,	However, there are some backdraws. Research has been unable to show
that child behavior is modified at school. On the other hand, the treatment is limited
to 1-year of posttreatment, and some children relapse over time.
The program has also been criticized for being standardized and not adjusting for
the developmental level of the child in the treatment. Although the program is
designed for children from ages 2 to 12, sometimes changes must be made to
accommodate developmental differences.
Also some families are not very likely to profit from the treatment, such as those of
low socioeconomic status, or with depressed parents, marital problems, etc.

e, 	Overall, I believe that the concept of training parents is a powerful tool to
avoid parent-child confrontations. It greatly helps both the parents and the children.
On the other hand, I would not support the training program applied on a large
scale. For one thing, there are several limitations to the program that could turn out
to be negative in the long run. Second, if the same parental techniques were
applied to every child, some children would probably cooperatively try to undercut
the joint effort of their parents, learning from being subjected to the same parental
techniques. Besides, this would decrease the diversity of children's behaviors, that
in the long run may cause a lot more problems, for instance in the kindergarden
every child would be given the same treatment, because none of them would act up,
but when there is only one kid who acts up, he can "spoil" the other kids. Naturally,
after several generations the bad habits of children would gradually die out, but
when they reapper (in a form of some bad children) it can more easily damage those
whom are not used to being around bad things.