Have you ever wondered why your dog, cat, bird, or 3 year old child are so adept at whining, screeching or complaining until you finally give in? Or why you always fall into that cycle of resisting at first but later bend to their wishes? Now, biopsychologist and behavior analyst, Dr. Susan Schneider, has written a fascinating book titled, “The Science of Consequences: How They Affect Genes, Change the Brain, and Impact Our World,” that reveals it all. Schneider’s area of study focuses on nature-nurture relations, mathematical modeling of behavior, and the principles of learning from consequences, which, along with

Question: I have had my new puppy for a couple of days now, and I have had her at my side nearly all the time, whether tethered directly to me or to a piece of furniture near me, so I can keep an eye on her as Dr. Yin suggested in Perfect Puppy in 7 Days. However, this seems to have resulted in my puppy becoming EXTREMELY attached to me, because we are always together. Unless she takes a nap and I put her in her crate, or it’s nighttime and she is in the crate, we’re not separated at all.

Virtually everyone who trains animals knows the name B.F. Skinner. Burrhus Frederic Skinner (1904–1980) is one of the best-known psychologists in history. His claim to fame is the Skinner Box—a more-refined version of Thorndike’s puzzle box. The box had a lever, a slot for food rewards, and water. The rat could explore and if it happened to press the bar a food pellet would drop into the tray. The cage was wired to automatically record behavior showing the cumulative number of presses per minute. Similar boxes were made for pigeons. Due to this efficient way for testing rats and pigeons

While animal behavior was struggling to become a science, researches, one by one, inched their way closer. One of the first was Ivan Pavlov. Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936) In the early 1900s, the Russian physiologist, Ivan Pavlov, was studying digestion in dogs. Pavlov designed and surgically implanted a fistula, which allowed him to measure and analyze gastric secretions after feeding his canine test subjects. His findings from this research eventually won him a Nobel Prize in medicine, which later attributed to his prestigious standing in Russia and among the Academy of Sciences. However, during the course of his research, Pavlov observed

Question: My husband and I have a 10-week old yellow lab named Avery.  We brought her home 3 weeks ago, at the age of 7 weeks, and have been using the methods we learned from your book, Perfect Puppy in 7 Days, to teach her to say please and to sit for everything. It is going well, and Avery is becoming a good puppy…not perfect!  She likes to bite us A LOT. We try to give her something else and reward her for not biting, or for stopping, but she still likes to do it!  That will just take time, I