Responsiveness Concept in Psychology

Responsiveness

Commencing with a very popular and commonly used definition of learning, ‘Learning is a relatively permanent behavioral change that occurs as the result of experience’, it is important to mention that there exists several types of learning that differ from one another, both in procedures and elements required to produce a response called learning.
In order for us to understand the phenomena of learning, it is important to establish what factors are required for it to occur, not to occur, or to disappear- be extinguished.
Our environment and everything that is a part of it is going under a constant change, in this regard changes in responsiveness to stimulus variations can occur in even the simplest organisms on a temporary basis, but these changes cannot be considered as learning. Changes in responsiveness include sensitization and habituation.

• Sensitization is a process according to which the magnitude of responses to stimuli increases after repeated stimulus exposures. For example, after frequent system crash downs, a student becomes and alert and for the next time he recognizes any warnings or virus attacks in the system and immediately works something out to avoid another system crash, rather than ignoring it like all previous times.

• On the other hand, one may be accustomed to a repeated stimulus or a change. For instance, an employee that once got really distracted and annoyed with the sounds of an electricity generator outside his office, and then develops a habit to that noise and soon becomes indifferent to it. This phenomena is called habituation.

All such changes are recognized and noticed changes in a behavior, regardless of the fact that these changes are temporary. Hence many theorist didn’t claim anything regarding the phenomena because a little change could also be anticipated if a person is tired, or the level of motivated has changed, be it increased or decreased. In this regard, these changes in behavioral responsiveness are not learning, because they are not relatively permanent changes in behavior as a result of experience. Classical conditioning, operant conditioning, contingency learning, and cognitive learning are a few basic types or learning.

Responsiveness in Daily Life

[large]Responsiveness, in communication, covers important things like what you say, responds clearly and directly, to what the other person just said. If you are being responsive, the other person knows you are paying attention.

The opposite, or non-responsiveness, is exceedingly common in regular speech. The result to which is that conversation is disjointed and disconnected, with both parties walking away feeling the whole thing was rather pointless, or feeling unhappy with the other person.

Responsiveness is an approach in your control and you want to use it to interact with others, by paying attention to what the other person says, and responding directly to it some control and let the other person play. There is so little responsiveness going on in most communication that when you are responsive, you separate yourself as being somewhat special and valuable.