make personal, social, and economic life peaceful and pleasurable are learned. Their learning should be psychologically guided. Contemporary psychologists have developed techniques and procedures based on the principles of classical and operant conditioning, social learning, verbal learning, concept learning, and skill learning for improving many aspects of life. We can have a glimpse of the applications of learning principles in four areas, i.e.
organisations, in treatment of maladjustive behaviours, in rearing children, and school learning. In organisations, a number of problems such as absenteeism, frequent medical leave, indiscipline, and lack of proper skills pose serious problems. Applying the principles of learning may solve these problems. To increase attendance and reduce absenteeism, an interesting device is used in some organisations.
At the end of every third month, name slips of employees, not being absent on a single working day are placed in a drum. Four to five per cent of the names are randomly drawn and they are given attractive rewards for not being absent on a single working day. Such rewards have been found to reduce absenteeism. To increase the number of employees, who have not gone on medical leave for full one year, various benefits are given.
Such partial rewards reduce the incidence of medical leave. With a view to improving discipline, managers start functioning as models for employees, or employees are placed under such model managers. Based on the principles of learning, a number of therapeutic procedures have been developed to modify maladaptive and socially incapacitating habits and behaviours. In these procedures, the principle of extinction is employed.
In the case of those children and Associative learning, Biofeedback, Cognitive map, Concept, Conditioned response, Conditioned stimulus, Conditioning, Discrimination, Dyslexia, Extinction, Free recall, Generalisation, Insight, Learning disabilities, Mental set, Modeling, Negative reinforcement, Operant or instrumental conditioning, Positive reinforcement, Punishment, Reinforcement, Serial learning, Spontaneous recovery, Transfer of learning, Unconditioned response, Unconditioned stimulus, Verbal learning