Mark and Kathy take their 2-year-old son to the supermarket every Saturday. Each week, the same sequence of events unfolds: Their son screams, demanding that they buy him treats. Although they refuse to give in to his demands, he continues to scream. Finally, either Mark or Kathy give into him and give the boy a treat. What operant conditioning concepts are illustrated in this story?

The parents are using punishment to suppress the screaming; their use of punishment is negatively reinforced by the cessation of screaming.

Explanation:

Punishment: In psychology, the term "punishment" is determined as one of the concepts of operant conditioning which was proposed by B. F. Skinner. Punishment referred to any specific changes in an organism's (human beings & animals) environmental surrounding that tends to occur only when a particular response or behavior is being provided and generally reduces the response or behavior to occur again in the future.

Punishment is of two types i.e, negative and positive punishment.

In the question above, the given statement represents the negative punishment (decreases an unwanted behavior by removing a desired thing).

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