Biomedical subjects

R Eisenberger

Publications and source records attributed to R Eisenberger.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed1992

Learned industriousness.

Extensive research with animals and humans indicates that rewarded effort contributes to durable individual differences in industriousness. It is proposed that reinforcement for increased physical or cognitive performance, or for the toleration of aversive stimulation, conditions rewards value to the sensation of high effort and thereby reduces effort's aversiveness. The conditioning of secondary reward value to the sensation of effort provides a dynamic mechanism by which reinforced high performance generalizes across behaviors. Applications to self-control, moral development, and education are described.

Aptitude↗

PubMed1989

Can response force be shaped by reinforcement?

Frick in 1986, writing in this journal, suggested that experiments purporting to demonstrate the shaping of response force by reinforcement lacked critical controls. He argued instead that such procedures create a mental schema concerning the response topography which influences force indirectly. Although Frick's methodological criticisms are well taken, there is additional evidence suggesting that response force can be strengthened by reinforcement and that such learning generalizes across behaviors.

Animals↗

PubMed1979

Transfer of persistence across behaviors.

Two experiments tested the applicability to human beings of findings with animals that the number of performances required for the reinforcement of one behavior affects the subsequent effort expended in other instrumental behaviors. In the first experiment, adult depressed psychiatric patients worked on a sorting task for the approval of a staff psychologist. The time spent and the work completed were increased by prior approval from a ward attendant for each completion of several custodial tasks, as compared to the ward attendant's approval for each completion of a single task or a no-pretreatment control condition. In the second experiment, preadolescent learning-disabled students who were required to read and spell correctly a greater number of words per reward token later spent more time and completed more work for reward tokens in mathematics, and handwriting. Two alternative interpretations of these results are evaluated: (a) The degree of accustomed effort per reinforcer becomes a learned component of behavior, or (b) high effort increases the habituation of frustration-produced disruptive responses. The results suggest that individual differences in general persistence may arise, in part, from an accumulation of effort training in the natural environment.

Adult↗