Corporal Punishment of Children

My comments on this interesting article.......To Spank or Not to Spank:

Spanking is definitely based on Classical Conditioning, or Pavlovian Conditioning. In it's simplest form, the idea is that the child will associate the spanking with the bad behavior...they don't like the spanking...they don't wish to experience it in the future...so they remove the bad behavior.

However, it is not as simple as that. There are so many factors that go into punishment. If a parent does not catch the child in the act of the bad behavior but finds out, let's say, hours later and, at that point, punishes the child by spanking...well, the child will no longer be able to associate that punishment with his/her behavior. Therefore, conditioning is not taking place.

In my opinion (that's for you, Jon), I don't think spanking a child teaches them anything worth learning. Sure, it may teach them that they don't like getting spanked...that it hurts...but, is it truly teaching them why they're getting spanked in the first place?

Spanking will not change a particular behavior any more than another form of punishment. All the child learns is that they need to be more savvy about doing that behavior in the future...like, striving to do it outside the watchful eye of Mom or Dad (from whom the spanking would come). But, I think this creates a deviant behavior....thus contributing to avoidance and an overall devious personality. Is that really what we want to teach our children? How will that help them in life?

Thanks to the work of behaviorists like Pavlov and B.F. Skinner, enter Operant Conditioning...that is, the use of positive & negative reinforcement, as well as positive & negative punishments. And, yes, there are differences. In a nutshell, these are ways to teach the child consequences for a bad behavior or to reinforce a good behavior. With Operant Conditioning, children are much more likely to continue to apply what they've learned to future situations.

Due to my Developmental Psychology class in college, I find this extremely interesting and could go on and on about this topic...but, where do you weigh in? Feel free to comment.

Can You Say Random??

Let's start with the Philly Cheesesteak Thickburger from Hardee's...

It's a new sandwich just launched this week by Hardee's. I like to call it "Heart attack on a bun." This thing is layered with meat upon layers of meat. It has a whopping 930 calories, 63 grams of fat, and 24 grams of saturated fat...according to the above-linked article, this is "a full day's worth of the recommended amount of fat, and almost half the recommended 2,000 calories." YIKES.

Okay, it's time for some "Mentalrobics"....

I'm pretty much a geek when it comes to things like this...I find the brain very interesting, along with much of what I learned in the 3 Psychology courses I took in college.

I found a site called Braingle, where you can test your short-term memory (and also find many different types of brain teasers and puzzles). Go here to take the test...Basically, it tests your ability to hold pieces of information for short periods of time--testing you using either numbers or letters (you can choose). I was able to remember an average of 8-9 numbers at a time. You can read more about the hippocampus and its relation to short-term memory here. For more general info about memory, see this page.

Now it's time to fight for the end of women's suffrage!...

Well, so some girls think. It's such a shame...obviously these girls were set up, but still...suffrage doesn't mean what they think it means. It's actually a good thing!...the right to vote!! Yes, the word is very deceiving. So, in the following video, you will see a jokester who goes around a school campus getting female students to sign a petition to end women's suffrage. It's very much like what Leno does to get people to answer history questions on camera and then it ends up making them look stupid because they don't know the correct answer.

http://www.ebaumsworld.com/videos/suffrage.html

I wonder how many of these girls, afterwards, realized what they had done and then felt the need to smack themselves upside the head? Here's a question though...what exactly did the video-makers mean at the end of the video where they said "We rest our case." What exactly were they resting their case about? About suffrage being a misleading word?...uh, probably not. Hopefully they weren't trying to portray girls as having a lack of intelligence. Honestly, I'd be curious to see how many male students would make the same mistake. Obviously, what made it funny was the fact that females, themselves, were signing a petition to end their own right to vote...however, I just don't get the "We rest our case" part...any thoughts?

Thus ends the randomness of this post...Have a great weekend!