Behavior, or behaviour (see American and British spelling differences In the early 18th century, English spelling was not standardized. Differences became noticeable after the publishing of influential dictionaries. Current British English spellings follow, for the most part, those of Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language , whereas many American English spellings follow Noah Webster's An American), refers to the actions of an organism or system, usually in relation to its environment, which includes the other organisms or systems around as well as the physical environment. It is the response of the organism or system to various stimuli or inputs, whether internal or external, conscious or subconscious, overt or covert, and voluntary or involuntary.

Contents

Biology

In humans, behavior is believed to be controlled primarily by the endocrine system and the nervous system. Thus, it is most often believed that the complexity of the behavior of an organism is related to the complexity of its nervous system. Generally, organisms with complex nervous systems have a greater capacity to learn Learning is acquiring new knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, preferences or understanding, and may involve synthesizing different types of information. The ability to learn is possessed by humans, animals and some machines. Progress over time tends to follow learning curves new responses and thus adjust their behavior. Behaviors can be either innate or learned. However, current research in the Human Microbiome Project The Human microbiome project is a National Institutes of Health initiative with the goal of identifying and characterizing the microorganisms which are found in association with both healthy and diseased humans. It is a five-year project, best characterized as a feasibility study, and has a total budget of 115 million dollars. The ultimate goal of points towards a possibility that human behavior may be controlled by the composition of the microbe population within a human body.[1]

More generally, behavior can be regarded as any action of an organism that changes its relationship to its environment. Behavior provides outputs from the organism to the environment.[2]

Psychology

Human behavior Human behavior is the population of behaviors exhibited by humans and influenced by culture, attitudes, emotions, values, ethics, authority, rapport, hypnosis, persuasion, coercion and/or genetics (and that of other organisms In biology, an organism is any contiguous living system . In at least some form, all organisms are capable of response to stimuli, reproduction, growth and development, and maintenance of homoeostasis as a stable whole. An organism may either be unicellular (single-celled) or be composed of, as in humans, many trillions of cells grouped into and mechanisms) can be common, unusual, acceptable, or unacceptable. Humans evaluate the acceptability A taboo is a strong social prohibition relating to any area of human activity or social custom that is sacred and forbidden based on moral judgment and sometimes even religious beliefs. Breaking the taboo is usually considered objectionable or abhorrent by society. The term comes from the Tongan word tabu, meaning set apart or forbidden, and of behavior using social norms Social norms are the behavioral expectations and cues within a society or group. This sociological term has been defined as "the rules that a group uses for appropriate and inappropriate values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviors. These rules may be explicit or implicit. Failure to follow the rules can result in severe punishments, including and regulate behavior by means of social control Social control refers generally to societal and political mechanisms or processes that regulate individual and group behavior, leading to conformity and compliance to the rules of a given society, state, or social group. Many mechanisms of social control are cross-cultural, if only in the control mechanisms used to prevent the establishment of. In sociology Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—that uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop and refine a body of knowledge about human social activity, often with the goal of applying such knowledge to the pursuit of social welfare. Subject matter, behavior is considered as having no meaning, being not directed at other people and thus is the most basic human action Action theory is an area in philosophy concerned with theories about the processes causing intentional human bodily movements of more or less complex kind. This area of thought has attracted the strong interest of philosophers ever since Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (Third Book). With the advent of psychology and later neuroscience, many, although can play a part in diagnosis of disorders such as autism Autism is a disorder of neural development characterized by impaired social interaction and communication, and by restricted and repetitive behavior. These signs all begin before a child is three years old. Autism affects information processing in the brain by altering how nerve cells and their synapses connect and organize; how this occurs is not. Animal behavior is studied in comparative psychology Comparative psychology usually refers to the study of the behavior and mental life of animals other than human beings. However, psychologists and scientists do not always agree on this definition. Comparative psychology has also been described as branch of psychology in which emphasis is placed on cross-species comparisons—including human-to-, ethology Ethology is the scientific study of animal behavior, and a sub-topic of zoology, behavioral ecology Behavioral ecology, or etoecology, is the study of the ecological and evolutionary basis for animal behavior, and the roles of behavior in enabling an animal to adapt to its environment . Behavioral ecology emerged from ethology after Niko Tinbergen (a seminal figure in the study of animal behavior) outlined the four causes of behavior and sociobiology Sociobiology is a synthesis of scientific disciplines which attempts to explain social behavior in animal species by considering the Darwinian advantages specific behaviors may have. It is often considered a branch of biology and sociology, but also draws from ethology, anthropology, evolution, zoology, archaeology, population genetics and other.

Behavior became an important construct in early 20th century Psychology with the advent of the paradigm known subsequently as "behaviorism Behaviorism , also called the learning perspective (where any physical action is a behavior), is a philosophy of psychology based on the proposition that all things that organisms do—including acting, thinking and feeling—can and should be regarded as behaviors. The behaviorist school of thought maintains that behaviors as such can be". Behaviorism was a reaction against "faculty" psychology which purported to see into or understand the mind without the benefit of scientific testing. Behaviorism insisted on working only with what can be seen or manipulated and in the early views of John B. Watson John Broadus Watson was an American psychologist who established the psychological school of behaviorism, after doing research on animal behavior. He also conducted the controversial "Little Albert" experiment. Later he went on from psychology to become a popular author on child-rearing, and an acclaimed contributor to the advertising, a founder of the field, nothing was inferred as to the nature of the entity that produced the behavior. Subsequent modifications of Watson's perspective and that of "classical conditioning Classical conditioning is a form of associative learning that was first demonstrated by Ivan Pavlov. The typical procedure for inducing classical conditioning involves presentations of a neutral stimulus along with a stimulus of some significance. The neutral stimulus could be any event that does not result in an overt behavioral response from the" (see under Ivan Pavlov Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was a Russian physiologist, psychologist, and physician. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1904 for research pertaining to the digestive system. Pavlov is widely known for first describing the phenomenon of classical conditioning) led to the rise of operant conditioning Operant conditioning is the use of consequences to modify the occurrence and form of behavior. Operant conditioning is distinguished from classical conditioning in that operant conditioning deals with the modification of "voluntary behavior" or operant behavior. Operant behavior "operates" on the environment and is maintained or "radical behaviorism," a theory advocated by B.F. Skinner Burrhus Frederic Skinner was an American psychologist, author, inventor, social philosopher, and poet. He was the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard University from 1958 until his retirement in 1974, which took over the academic establishment up through the 1950s and was synonymous with "behaviorism" for many.

For studies on behavior, ethograms In ethology, an ethogram is a catalogue of the discrete behaviors typically employed by a species. These behaviors are sufficiently stereotyped that an observer may record the number of such acts, or the amount of time engaged in the behaviours in a time budget are used.

Other fields

Behavior outside of psychology includes physical property A physical property is any measurable property the value of which describes a physical system's state at any given moment in time. For that reason the changes in the physical properties of a system can be used to describe its transformations and chemical reactions A chemical reaction is a process that leads to the transformation of one set of chemical substances to another. Chemical reactions can be either spontaneous, requiring no input of energy, or non-spontaneous, often coming about only after the input of some type of energy, viz. heat, light or electricity. Classically, chemical reactions encompass.

Computer science

Behavior as used in computer science Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation, and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems. It is frequently described as the systematic study of algorithmic processes that create, describe, and transform information. Computer science is an anthropomorphic construct that assigns "life" to the activities carried out by a computer, computer application, or computer code in response to stimuli, such as user input. Also, "a behavior" is a reusable block of computer code or script that, when applied to an object In computer science, an object is any entity that can be manipulated by the commands of a programming language, such as a value, variable, function, or data structure, especially a graphical one, causes it to respond to user input in meaningful patterns or to operate independently. Also, behavior is a value that changes over time[3] (one of the key concepts in functional reactive programming). The term can also be applied to some degree to functions The mathematical concept of a function expresses the intuitive idea that one quantity completely determines another quantity (the value, or the output). A function assigns a unique value to each input of a specified type. The argument and the value may be real numbers, but they can also be elements from any given sets: the domain and the codomain in mathematics, referring to the anatomy of curves In mathematics, a curve is, generally speaking, an object similar to a straight line but which is not required to be straight. Often curves in two-dimensional or three-dimensional (space curves) Euclidean space are of interest.

Earth sciences

In environmental modeling Environmental science is an interdisciplinary academic field that integrates physical and biological sciences to the study of the environment, and the solution of environmental problems. Environmental science provides an integrated, quantitative, and interdisciplinary approach to the study of environmental systems and especially in hydrology Hydrology is the study of the movement, distribution, and quality of water throughout the Earth, including the hydrologic cycle and water resources. A practitioner of hydrology is a hydrologist, working within the fields of either earth or environmental science, physical geography, geology or civil and environmental engineering, a behavioral model means a model that is acceptably consistent In logic, a consistent theory is one that does not contain a contradiction. The lack of contradiction can be defined in either semantic or syntactic terms. The semantic definition states that a theory is consistent if it has a model; this is the sense used in traditional Aristotelian logic, although in contemporary mathematical logic the term with observed natural processes, i.e., that simulates Simulation is used in many contexts, including the modeling of natural systems or human systems in order to gain insight into their functioning. Other contexts include simulation of technology for performance optimization, safety engineering, testing, training and education. Simulation can be used to show the eventual real effects of alternative well, for example, observed river discharge In hydrology, discharge is the volume rate of water flow, including any suspended solids , dissolved chemical species (i.e. CaCO3(aq)) and/or biologic material (i.e. diatoms), which is transported through a given cross-sectional area. Frequently, other terms synonymous with discharge are used to describe the volumetric flow rate of water and are. It is a key concept of the so-called Generalized Likelihood Uncertainty Estimation (GLUE In hydrology, GLUE or Generalized Likelihood Uncertainty Estimation is a method to quantify the uncertainty of model predictions. The method has been introduced by Beven and Binley . The basic idea of GLUE is that given our inability to represent exactly in a mathematical model how nature works , there will always be several different models that) methodology to quantify how uncertain environmental predictions A prediction or forecast is a statement about the way things will happen in the future, often but not always based on experience or knowledge. While there is much overlap between prediction and forecast, a prediction may be a statement that some outcome is expected, while a forecast may cover a range of possible outcomes are.

See also

Look up behavior in Wiktionary Wiktionary is a multilingual, web-based project to create a free content dictionary, available in over 151 languages. Unlike standard dictionaries, it is written collaboratively by volunteers, dubbed "Wiktionarians", using wiki software, allowing articles to be changed by almost anyone with access to the website, the free dictionary.

References

  1. ^ Mood and gut feelings at ScienceDirect
  2. ^ Dusenbery, David B. (2009). Living at Micro Scale, p. 124. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. ISBN 978-0-674-03116-6.
  3. ^ Flapjax tutorial

External links

Categories: Education-related terms | Human behavior | Behavior

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