Précis ofFrustration Theory: An Analysis of Dispositional Learning and Memory

Abstract

This is a précis of a book on frustration theory, whose explanatory domain includes a family of phenomena that have been summarized by the terms dispositional learning and memory-systems that ordinarily have a long-term historical etiology, and in which the learning is relatively reflexive and the memory implicit and not strongly episodic. The book is an attempt, in the context of stimulus-response learning theory, to present in some detail an animal-based model of frustration as it is applied to a limited-but still large-number of these experimentally established phenomena (perhaps the largest number organized by any one such theory). These bear some resemblance to equivalent phenomena in humans, to which the descriptive terms arousal, suppression, persistence, and regression have been applied. An explicit caveat is that this is a book on one particular theory of frustration and not a book on frustrationtheories. Whereas it does address other theories of frustration, its main purpose is to review a line of theorizing and experimental research that has evolved over some 40 years: an analysis of the status of the concept of frustration in learning theory.