ABSTRACT

This chapter provides concepts and data from diverse areas of molar psychology to bear on an analysis of the environment as the determinant of behavior and as the context for it. When the deficient or disturbed behaviors of children are considered in the context of a functional analysis, the engineering of better child-rearing environments to produce more socially desirable behaviors can be facilitated. In order to delineate the operations and concepts involved in behavior development and control from those in other areas, a list is given of some of the mechanisms stemming from and successfully utilized in analyses of fundamental behavioral development and control, both short- and long-term. Conception of the individual in his environment is different from that prevalent in the period immediately following World War II, when the approaches of A. Freud and Hull set much of the tone in analyses of psychological functioning.