Operant conditioning has been a major part of psychology and behaviorism ever since B.F. Skinner began began testing the way the brain works through motivations. In operant conditioning, psychologist tend to focus on how the outcomes of certain events could potentially affect future behavior of their subjects. For instance, reinforcers or rewards are outcomes that increase a repeated behavior and they can be given to subjects through tangible items or even through praise. There are two main types of reinforcement; positive reinforcement, and negative reinforcement. Positive reinforcement increases repeat behaviors by adding something positive. For instance, if someone were to tell a funny joke, the audience would laugh. In this example, in order to make people laugh, the subject is adding a funny joke to tell in order to get the response of laughter.  On the other hand, negative reinforcement takes something negative away from the equation in order to increase repeat behavior. An example of this would be when a person cleans up his or her room in order to avoid conflict with his or her roommate. Some conflicts come with the use of reinforcers. Reinforcers must be used continuously in order to maintain the desired outcome, if the reinforcer is stopped for long periods of time, the desired outcome will no longer occur. Punishment can also be implemented in operant conditioning on order to decrease a repeat behavior. The use of punishment is most effective when it occurs immediately and consistently. An example of punishment would be when a person scolds a child for jumping on a bed every time that child jumps on the bed. Jumping on the bed will be quickly recognized by the child as something he/she should not be doing, so the child will know in order to avoid a scolding, he/she will not jump on the bed.

Recently my family has adopted a german shepherd puppy named Stella. She is an adorable bundle of energy, but a pain in the butt to train. In order to properly train her, we use reward and punishment much like operant conditioning. Whenever we try and teach her a new trick, if she performs the trick correctly she is rewarded a treat, if she fails to correctly perform the task, no reward is given. Once she naturally begins to perform the trick when asked, we still continue to reward her with treats in order for her to maintain the motivation in order to perform the desired response. Punishment with Stella works the same way. Whenever she jumps onto the furniture, we scold her by saying “No Stella get down”, and she knows that the change in our tone of voice means that jumping on the furniture is something that she should not engage in. Much like operant conditioning, puppy training can be time consuming, but very rewarding in the end whenever the desired outcome is officially achieved.