regular-discussion-board-3
1. Describe how you would use the principles of stimulus control from this chapter and behavior modification techniques we have covered in the course to help someone quit smoking.
2. Why do you think your approach might work well?
Hint for success: Be sure to apply the principles from your textbook and justify your choice of techniques vs. simply describing a personal experience.
Your response should be between 300 and 400 words
1. The principles of stimulus control include discrimination control, which is when behaviors occur in certain situations but not in every situation. The behavior of someone will occur when the stimuli is present, but not when it is not there. In order to help someone stop smoking while relating this to stimulus control, I would try to associate smoking and zapping. I would zap them every time they touched or lit a cigarette. Therefore, each time they see a cigarette or a cigarette pack, they would associate it with being zapped and be less likely to grab the cigarette. This procedure would be associated with discrimination, because it is identified as behaving differently in the presence of a different stimuli (Chance, 2014). When seeing a cigarette pack, they would behave differently when it is in their presence. They try to avoid touch or letting the temptation defeat them.
2. I believe that using my approach would work well, because I am turning the behavior to become an automatic reactant to the stimuli. While reading chapter eleven, I learned that the individual would be gaining some control, which can be good for some one that is trying to quit smoking. The individual would put less effort into trying to touch a cigarette, because it would come apart of a certain routine. I also learned about that understanding the control will give power and motivation for cigarette smokers to better understand it. Many cigarette smokers know that smoking is essentially bad for you, but if they learned the actual hardcore facts about it then associated the zap with it being bad for you, their behavior would decrease. Using this procedure is also a representation of the individual automatically not wanting to take a cigarette as the new conditioned response, which is the new behavior that is formed due to the stimulus control!
