Main description:

We live in a world in which inconsistency is the rule rather than the exception and this is particularly true for rewards and frustrations. In some cases, rewards and frustrative non-rewards appear randomly for what seems to be the same behaviour; in others a sequence of rewards is suddenly followed by non-rewards, or large rewards by small rewards. The important common factor in these and other cases is frustration - how we learn about it and how we respond to it. This book provides a basis in learning theory and particularly in frustration theory, for a comprehension not only of the mechanisms controlling these dispositions, but also of their order of appearance in early development and, to an approximation at least, their neural underpinnings.

Contents:

Preface; List of abbreviations; 1. Introduction: reward-schedule effects and dispositional learning; 2. Motivational and associative mechanisms of behavior; 3. Frustration theory: an overview of its experimental basis; 4. Survival, durability, and transfer of persistence; 5. Discrimination learning and prediscrimination effects; 6. Alternatives and additions to frustration theory; 7. Ontogeny of dispositional learning and the reward-schedule effects; 8. Toward a developmental psychobiology of dispositional learning and memory; 9. Summing up: steps in the psychobiological study of related behavioral effects; 10. Application to humans: a recapitulation and an addendum; Appendix; References; Indexes.