"Positive punishment" occurs when a stimulus (e.g. shock) is provided and weakens a response. "Negative punishment" occurs when a stimulus (often a pleasant one) is removed and this weakens a response. "Positive reinforcement" is when a stimulus (often a pleasant one) is provided and strengthens a response. Last, "negative reinforcement" occurs when a stimulus (often an unpleasant one) is removed and this strengthens a response.

Although placebos are used in a great deal of experiments, the Skinner box was developed to study the impact of reinforcement and punishment on learning and behavior.

Positive reinforcement rewards actions by presenting a positive stimulus, while negative reinforcements rewards actions by removing a negative stimulus. Positive punishment introduces a negative stimulus, while negative punishment removes a positive stimulus.

B.F. Skinner believed that the best way to understand behavior is to look at the causes of an action and its consequences. This ideal forms the basis of operant conditioning.

Edward Thorndike came up with the law of effect, which states that positive consequences increase the likelihood that an action will be repeated and negative consequences decrease the likelihood that it will.

Ivan Pavlov is one of the earliest psychologists known for classical conditioning and is particularly famous for his experiments in which he got dogs to associate food with sounds, leading them to salivate when there was a bell even when there was not food present.

John Watson was a classical conditioning psychologist who is most famous for his "Little Albert" experiment in which he trained a young boy to be afraid of a rat (or anything like looked like a white rat) because he made an unpleasant noise while presenting the rat. This research indicated that humans too could be classically conditioned.

B.F. Skinner based his research off of Thorndike's law of effect and is considered to be the founder of operant conditioning (the type of learning in which the effects of an action determine whether it will be repeated in the future). He is most famous for Skinner's box-- a box in which he placed animals to conduct operant conditioning experiments.

Sigmund Freud is not a psychologist associated with conditioning at all. Instead, he came up with psychodynamic theories that explained people's actions in terms of conflicts in their unconscious.

Since the reward is given consistently on every Friday—not sometimes on Thursday and sometimes on Monday–the reinforcement schedule is considered fixed. Since the reward is given on the basis of time, not on the basis of number of desirable responses (i.e. number of good, well-behaved actions), it is considered to be an interval schedule. Another way to think about this interval schedule is that no matter how good a student is, he or she cannot “speed up” the reward. In other words, it doesn’t matter if he saves the world from imminent doom on Monday, Ms. Johnson will still not reward him until Friday. Combining the “fixed” and “interval” aspects, we get the correct answer: this is a fixed interval schedule of reinforcement.

A fixed-interval reinforcement schedule reinforces responses after a standardized period of time. In the correct answer, Mike is reinforced with a candy every 15 minutes that he completes the desired behavior of staying on task in class.

Scott decides to pinch Victoria every time she utters a swear word. In other words, Scott is administering an aversive stimulus (the painful pinching) in order to decrease the frequency of Victoria's swearing (an unwanted behavior in Scott's opinion). This is an example of positive punishment.

Behavior can be shaped through operant conditioning through the use of rewards and punishments. "Negative reinforcement "occurs when you remove or relieve a negative feeling. In this case, Sandy's behavior of canceling the show is being negatively reinforced because it removes the feelings of anxiety.

"Positive reinforcement" is when a stimulus (e.g. sugar pellet) is provided that strengthens a response. "Negative reinforcement" occurs when a stimulus (often an unpleasant one) is removed and this strengthens a response. "Positive punishment occurs" when a stimulus (often an unpleasant one) is provided and this weakens a response. Last, "negative punishment" occurs when a stimulus (often a pleasant one) is removed and this weakens a response.

Variable ratio reinforcement is a schedule where a behavior is reinforced after an unpredictable amount of responses. Note that the amount of responses does not have to be a dependent variable truly free of interaction. For example, research shows that a person is far more likely to give change to a beggar if they first witness other people not giving change, so in our example the odds of the beggar getting a reinforcing response may rise over time, but they still don't know exactly when the reinforcement will occur.

Variable ratio is acknowledged as being the schedule of reinforcement which produces the longest-lasting results after extinction of the reinforcer. In some cases, the modified behavior can be permanent.