This page on Depression is part of the Auxiliary section of the Beginner's Course
of the D.S. Dog Training Workshop, and an element of the Dog Science Network
Comprehensive Behavioral Conditioning for Dogs
Understanding Depression in Dogs and Humans
Page One of a two-page article
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An Introduction to an Exact Process
There is an exact process and a precise mechanism that causes both dogs and people to become depressed. That process is extremely well understood. Indeed, there is no mystery about it whatsoever.
It is, actually, a great scandal that with so many people suffering from depression, the psychological establishment has done such a poor job of getting the word out and explaining that mechanism to the general public.
The purpose of this page, then, is to explain the mechanism that results in both dogs and humans becoming depressed.
If you want to grasp the mechanism that drives depression, the first thing you need to understand is that someone's activity level, their level of depression, if any, and the amount of reinforcement they receive in the course of their daily life are all inextricably intertwined.
Reinforcement Generates Energy and Drives Activity Level
Essentially, reinforcement is anything you encounter in your environment that drives your level of activity. That is the nature of reinforcement. It is the energy source that fuels the behavior of dogs and humans alike.
Indeed, reinforcement is to behavior as fuel is to an automobile. It is that which produces the energy that makes behavior happen.
Most people think of reinforcement as being some type of reward that serves to increase the frequency of a response, and it is certainly true that reinforcement will increase the frequency of any given activity with which it is closely associated in time. So if you do some particular thing and it quickly produces a rewarding consequence, then, you are likely to begin doing more of that particular thing in the future.
However, in addition to increasing the frequency of those particular responses with which it is directly associated and closely associated temporally, reinforcement in general just tends to make people and dogs more active in general. The more reinforcement someone gets in the course of their day, the more active they are likely to be. That is why, as a rule, those who live extremely rewarding lives are very busy people.
A Dense Schedule = A Happy, Active Organism
A reinforcer, then, is really just some sort of reward that someone gets for doing something. It just makes sense, then, that someone who gets a lot of rewards for the things they do is going to do more things. Hence, someone who receives a lot of reinforcement during the course of their day can just naturally be expected to be more active, since they are getting more payoffs for doing more things.
When someone gets an enormous number of payoffs for the things they do, we say they are on a dense schedule of reinforcement. When someone is rewarded every time they make some particular response, we say that that particular response is being reinforced on a continuous schedule.
Sports stars are reinforced on a continuous schedule for many of the responses they make. Every time a basketball star shoots a basket the crowd cheers - every time. Therefore, we say that the basketball star's basket-shooting behavior is reinforced on a continuous schedule.
Some celebrities receive continuous reinforcement across the board, by which I mean that they are in a position in which they can draw continuous reinforcement for absolutely everything they do. They can find people who want to listen to everything they have to say and people who will pay them just for the chance to spend time with them. For some celebrities, there is not anything they do for which they cannot find someone who will reward them in some way for doing it.
People who live their lives on a dense schedule of reinforcement tend not only to be busy, they also tend to be extremely happy.