Negative Reinforcement
Negative reinforcement plays a large
role in addiction. Negative reinforcement is the reduction
or termination of an averse stimulus in response to a certain behavior.
A person may feel pain or depressing emotions due to many things in every
day life, from stress to actual physical pain. If a person begins
taking drugs to escape this pain or to positively change their mental state,
they are avoiding the painful stimuli of every day life. This aversion
is a negatively reinforced response. Their behavior of taking a drug
is repeated in order to avoid what they feel is a painful stimulus.
Withdrawl is
a result of the body's compensatory physical changes in response to a drug.
They are essentially the opposite effects of the drug itself. These
changes involve mechanisms which are enhanced over time to essentially
fight the effects of the drug. These changes include a desensitization
to the drug, and and effect involving classical conditioning.
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