Your Dog Is Misbehaving? A Dog Behaviorist Scottsdale May Be The Solution.
In the beginning, behaviorism was proposed by the American psychologist John Broadus Watson at the beginning of the 20th century. Watson proposed behaviorism as a rejection of psychology and introspection methods that were based on the idea that learning was an internal process.
On the other hand, Watson was based on the study of observable human behavior and identified that it modifies the behavior of individuals after a process of stimulus, response, and reinforcement that ends with learning.
Hence, behaviorism emphasizes that the object of study is not consciousness but the relationships formed between stimuli and responses that give rise to new observable behaviors and behaviors.
However, the Russian philosopher Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was the first to study reflexes or conditioned stimuli and determine what is known as classical conditioning, which expresses how human and animal behaviors are modified with the use of various techniques.
Pavlov’s best-known experiment is that of dogs’ anticipated salivation after certain stimuli that indicated that they were going to eat.
Likewise, the American psychologist Burrhus Frederic Skinner was an outstanding specialist who developed behaviorism and described the processes that accompany voluntary behaviors after several experiments, among the most famous the “Skinner’s Box.”
Skinner determined that behaviors result from operant conditioning through attention, information encoding, motor reproduction, and motivation.
For behaviorists, behaviors are part of the adaptations that human beings or animals must make in various circumstances to copy reality, so they must also be related to the natural sciences.
What does this have to do with your dog? Well, the coexistence between domestic dogs and humans can be affected by the presence of behavioral problems. These are mainly related to aggression, dominance, fear and separation anxiety, and to a lesser extent, compulsive disorders. The alterations related to aggression are the most worrying at the social level, given the risk, they entail for the human.
Sometimes, these behaviors are the species’ usual behaviors, but they are presented in an exaggerated, repetitive, or ritualized form, such as extreme fear or aggression. The most extreme consequences of these disorders include abandonment of the dogs, permanent housing in dog shelters, or, in the worst cases, euthanasia.
A dog behaviorist scottsdale will conduct behavior modification based on experimental psychology insights, believing that an essential factor in the occurrence of both normal and abnormal behaviors is the result of experience. Consequently, in this approach, maladjusted behaviors are analyzed in terms of the primary learning principles and applied to explain and predict specific behaviors.
Likewise, the dog behaviorist scottsdale uses procedures and techniques that he submits to objective evaluation and empirical verification to reduce or eliminate maladaptive behaviors and establish or increase adapted behaviors in terms of the interventions carried out to solve behavioral problems dogs; behavioral treatments showed particular effectiveness.
The most commonly used procedures are successive approaches, systematic desensitization, and counterconditioning. In some cases, they are associated with the use of other methods, such as spaying and neutering, appeasement pheromones, and psychotropic drugs.
Although many papers provide information on these treatments, most of them have few objective evaluations and lack untreated control groups or alternative therapies to make more valid comparisons. Unlike the use of these treatments in humans, there is abundant evidence of their effectiveness; their use in dogs has been confined to a more artisanal application. Behavior modification techniques based on learning principles are one of the most effective tools.
