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When a dog pulls, handlers often have the tendency to tug or correct them back on leash. Positive punishment is often used on daily walks. You’re adding verbage to stop an unwanted behavior. There are many ways to go about this and most dog owners use this more than they realize! A great example is telling your dog “No” or “Stop” when he/she is barking. Positive Punishment involves adding a stimuli to a stop an unwanted behavior. Positive Punishment is often confused with Negative Reinforcement. At the end of the day, Negative Reinforcement is one of the hardest to quantify in dog training and is the rarest quadrant used. Once the task is completed the nagging is removed. When wanting something to get done around the house the spouse will constantly bring up that they want it done. The best example that comes to mind involves a common household dynamic, the nagging spouse. This is the most difficult quadrant to understand and to put into practical terms. If we circle back to our terminologies, Negative means taking away or removing something, it does not mean that you correct the dog using a negative or aversive stimuli. Many people consider correcting a dog to be negative reinforcement, but that is not the case. The first three websites that appear when Googling the term are teeming with misinformation. The next quadrant is one of the most misunderstood forms of Operant Conditioning, Negative Reinforcement. Some trainers may not use treats, but this doesn’t mean they don’t utilize something positive to reinforce a behavior. Positive Reinforcement in dog training does not necessarily have to be with a food item, but can be given through praise or playing with a favorite toy. Examples include giving your dog a treat for sitting when asked, rewarding an employee with a bonus for a job well done, giving your child $5 for every A they receive on their report card. Positive Reinforcement is essentially adding something to the equation to encourage the subject to repeat a desired behavior. We’ll start with the best known example: Positive Reinforcement. So let’s break it down even further by mixing and matching our newly learned terminology. Lastly, “Punishment” is a consequence that is aimed at decreasing the likelihood of a behavior happening again in the future. “Reinforcement” is pretty straight forward and means trying to increase the frequency of a desired behavior. In Operant Conditioning, “Positive” is considered adding and “Negative” is subtracting or taking away. In this context however that would be incorrect. What do you think of when you read “Positive” and “Negative”? Good and bad, is the first thing that comes to mind. In Operant Conditioning Theory, there are essentially four quadrants: Positive Reinforcement, Positive Punishment, Negative Reinforcement, and Negative Punishment. In order to take an in depth look, we have to understand the terminology. He believed that the best way to understand a behavior is to look at the causes of an action and its consequences. Operant conditioning deals with intentional actions that have an effect on the surrounding environment. While Pavlov gets mentioned many times for his classical conditioning experiments, B.F. Opinions on the use of these methods can be debated intensely, so we’ll save that conversation for a different day. Skinner’s Operant Conditioning Theory and how it shapes all dog trainers and the philosophies they use to help train you and your dog. I’d spend hours researching and reading theory. We are two different species yet we need to communicate on a daily basis! How do we get there if we don’t speak the same language? By touch? By food? There were so many questions and an overwhelming amount of information to be found. When I was an up and coming dog trainer, the psychology of training animals absolutely fascinated me.
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