Case Study

BEHAVIORAL

-Classical Conditioning: William did not like male authority figures, because from when he was a young baby all the way up to around the age of ten he was being abused by a number of different male authority figures. These people ranged from people in his family like his father, to people he didn’t really know like drug dealers and clients of his prostitute mother. The unconditioned stimulus was the abuse he endured through the years from people, mainly his father and other male adults. The unconditioned reaction was William feeling hurt, sad, and resentful, confused, and having low self esteem. The neutral stimulus would be adult male authority figures. Through conditioning, any male authority figure became the conditioned stimulus. The conditioned response was William disliking male authority figures.

-Operant conditioning: William was exposed to operant conditioning around the age of nine when he began to hang out with older kids. He would do bad things like shoplift, taking drugs, and participating in other minor criminal activities to get positive reinforcement from his friends, praising him for his bad deeds.

-Observational learning: William grew up seeing people being abused and seeing his family abused by his father. Through seeing how his father didn’t hesitate to use violence in the house hold against him, his mother and his brother, William learned to use violence whenever he saw suitable, such as the time he burned the kid with the match book.

-Positive Punishment: There was a lot of positive punishment in Williams’s life which in turn had a negative outcome on him. Through abuse and constantly being neglected as a child, it caused him to grow up to be very angry and defiant.

PSYCHODYNAMIC

-Regression: William shows signs of regression. His mother stated that he is very immature and sucks his thumb while he is asleep. He became mentally fixated to certain characteristics of his infancy years. This regression is due to the fact that when he was an infant his mother didn’t feed or clean him as much as she should have. He was very underweight at the age of 2 and was rarely cleaned. Another factor that played a part