We live in a world in which inconsistency is the rule rather than the exception, and this is particularly true for rewards and frustrations. In some cases, rewards and frustrative nonrewards appear randomly for what seems to be the same behavior; in others a sequence of rewards is suddenly followed by nonrewards, or large rewards by small rewards. Sometimes we are rewarded for responding quickly, other times for responding slowly. The important common factor in these and other cases is frustration, how we learn about it and how we respond to it. Without our awareness, our long-term dispositions are shaped from infancy and early childhood by such inconsistency of reward and by our reactions to discrepancy, and they are marked by changes in arousal, suppression, persistence, and regression. This book provides a basis in learning theory, and particularly in frustration theory, for a comprehension not only of the mechanisms controlling these dispositions, but also of their order of appearance in early development and, to a approximation at least, their neural underpinnings. The explanatory domain of frustration theory covers a area of experimental research that has evolved over some 40 years. Written by the originator of the theory, the book provides a integrated survey of the theory's history and the experimental particulars on which it is based, tracing its development and the experimental research it has stimulated and organized.

Preface; List of abbreviations; 1. Introduction: reward-schedule effects and dispositional learning; 2. Motivational and associative mechanisms of behavior; 3. Frustration theory: an overview of its experimental basis; 4. Survival, durability, and transfer of persistence; 5. Discrimination learning and prediscrimination effects; 6. Alternatives and additions to frustration theory; 7. Ontogeny of dispositional learning and the reward-schedule effects; 8. Toward a developmental psychobiology of dispositional learning and memory; 9. Summing up: steps in the psychobiological study of related behavioral effects; 10. Application to humans: a recapitulation and an addendum; Appendix; References; Indexes.