 Emotions. You know, a lot of people argue that behavior analysis this course is anti-emotional. We don't deal with emotions and in fact it's quite the opposite. We've actually studied emotions very thoroughly and well aware of how they interact with overt behavior and covert behavior. Interestingly enough, this is one of those areas that really bridges emotions and are one of those areas that really bridge the gap between the biology and the physiological stuff and the overt behavioral stuff. So there is a respondent component in emotion and that's the emotion itself. The physiological properties that feeling in the pittier stomach, the increased heart rate, the sweaty palms, those types of things. Those are the result of a particular stimulus. So something happens and those things change. When we then experience as we describe them, and we'll talk about describing emotions here in a minute, but the idea is that those physiological responses, in fact pretty much all of them, I'm trying to think of one that isn't, but the research that I'm aware of literally says that anything that's controlled from the autonomic nervous system can be classically conditioned, in other words that conditioned respondentally. So because of that, we know that there are these things called conditioned emotional responses, like for example the fear conditioning with Little Albert. So quick summary and it wasn't a bunny but it's just a cute picture. So anyway, so you've got Little Albert and the bunny. You take the bunny which doesn't originally elicit fear in Little Albert and you pair that with a loud noise. So the hammer being banged in the presence of the baby. The hammer produces fear and the baby starts crying. So part of fear that orienting response or that startle response, the orienting response and all those things, we end up describing that as fear. But if you pair those two things, the bunny and that sound, it will eventually cause the bunny to produce fear. So there is your classical conditioning of emotions. And as we just talked about with the previous slide, you're more than likely to avoid bunnies in the future, which is going to keep your fear reduced. So then you're negatively reinforced for avoiding the bunnies. So it's an interesting cycle that happens. But that emotional stuff, the physiological parts are definitely classically conditioned. Now what's the operant component of the emotion? So let's look at how we react to those physiological changes. In other words, the emotion. So how you react to an emotion, that is operant conditioning. In other words, when some people get mad, some people yell. They scream and they get loud. They get really pissed off. They bang stuff. So I'm so frustrated. You know, you hit the desk or you do something like that. That is the operant response to the physiological experience. So the physiological experience, which was classically conditioned. Some people get mad. Some are sorry. Some people yell when they get upset. Some people get quiet when they get upset. Those things are then reinforced and punished. And people can change their reactions to emotions. Maybe when you're younger, you do one thing, and then as you grow up or as you change and as you experience different situations, you change how you react to a particular stimuli. So again, that's the result of punishment and reinforcement. If I react one way to getting angry and my wife doesn't like that, guess what? She's punishing my particular reaction. She's not punishing my emotion. She's punishing my reaction to that emotion. It's okay to have the emotion, but it's not okay to react in one particular way. So then the way of reacting reduces. So there you've punishing that one reaction. Of course you can reinforce it just as well. Another operant component is being able to describe it. Some people just suck at being able to describe their emotions. It's all there is to it. You know, I think your book talks about some research that says by the time you're nine or something like that, you can describe most of your emotions. Well, some people just aren't that good, right? They haven't had that much practice. They haven't been reinforced for describing their emotions. Maybe they say, I don't know what I'm feeling. And some people get frustrated when they have a discussion with someone and the person says, I have no idea what I'm feeling or I just don't know. I don't get it. Maybe they're telling you the truth. Maybe they do not know how to describe that physiological experience. In other words, their emotion. And if they haven't learned how to describe it, then guess what? You might have to teach them how to describe it. And with kids, it's the same type of thing. You have to expose them, or you have to expose them to the words that allow them to describe these things and then reinforce appropriate description. And it's very context specific, right? You know, you get a kid that, you know, one behavior can look, one overt behavior can look one way and be a reaction to one emotion. And then, you know, let's say anger. You could be yelling and chasing or something like that. Then that's your reaction to anger. But in another situation, that's actually happiness. So this gets to be really challenging for people to actually describe stuff. But that is an operant sort of thing, right? And so let's look at some of these causes about how emotion develops, right? So reinforcers and punishers, right? Cause certain emotions. Happiness, sadness, and so forth, right? In other words, there's simply unconditional stimuli or conditional stimuli. So a reinforcer can be an unconditional stimulus. So think about that for a second. Behavior happens, it's reinforced. The reinforcer itself is also a U.S. for say happiness or whatever it may be, okay? So those things are directly tied to each other. So when you reinforce someone, you may produce happiness. When you punish someone, you may produce anger or frustration or something like that. So then again, the reactions to that happiness and that frustration can then be reinforced or punished. And you see how this cycle really starts to build, right? So somebody that does something, gets punished for it, then they get angry about it, and then they get punished for that, and then that produces anger, and then it just cycles up, and it just starts to get out of hand, right? And that's a normal sort of thing, but you have to intervene and you have to try to change some of those stimuli that are happening if you want to change the behavior. So sometimes when we talk about how we feel, we often feel ways because of the operant conditionings, the operant contingencies that we're experiencing at the moment. So if you're generally happy with your life, you might be getting quite a few reinforcers. If you're generally frustrated with your life, you might be getting a few punishers or too many punishers. And this starts to play a role with anxiety. This starts to play a role with depression and all those types of things. So it's not as simple as what a lot of our textbooks just make it out to be. It's really this complex dance between all of these different stimuli and the responses to those stimuli and what happens to those responses, right? Are those responses punished or extinguished and so on and so forth, right?