Applying Psychological Theories to Board Games

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Punishment under the operant conditionings refers to the usage of positive or negative reinforcements in increasing certain behaviour or reducing or eliminates an unwanted behaviour. The two types of punishments are positive punishment and negative punishment according to B.F. Skinner (Skinner, 1974).
Positive punishment is done by applying an aversive stimulus after the occurrence of behaviour. For an example, the player will be given the safety card, where the players are allowed to keep the safety card to void their punishment in the coming turns. By giving a safety card, it is a positive punishment as the player is not really required to perform any punishment act (Gershoff, 2002). On the other hand, negative punishment is known punishment by removal which aims at removing a certain stimuli after a behaviour happening. For instance, if the double punishment card is taken, where players are required to take 2 punishment cards and act accordingly. This happens when the player land on the wrong position on the board game (Gershoff, 2002).
While punishment can be quite useful in few cases, however, some punishments do not exactly increase or reduce behaviour. One example is the prison, which means, after a criminal is send to jail, the prisoner seems to be doing more crimes upon release from the prison (Gershoff, 2002).
The categorization theory can be related into three categories which are prototype theory, classical categorization and conceptual clustering. In categorization process, an individual categorizes the people around them based on common characteristics into different groups (Watson J. , 1913). Most of this processes occur unconsciously and in an automatic manner but at times, is also happens unconsciously. Some ...

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... known (Watson J. , 1913)
Cognitive learning theory can be defined as the process model of how people think. The processes help us to understand the how people learn and think and the information is processes as a short term memory. Once the information goes through practice and rehearsal, then it is shifted to long-term memory. Once in position as long term memory, the information can be derived via other connections (Skinner, 1974). There a number of ways to learn cognitive processes, for example summarizing and asking questions. While playing the game, the player can arrange winning strategies by visually taking notes on how other players are playing without getting punished. All this will be stored in the player’s short term memory. Apart from that, the player can also retrieve their previous game winning strategy from their long term memory (Bandura A. ,1977).

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