Operant Conditioning

In behaviour psychology, in order to change the behaviour of a subject, you can use one of 4 different methods. These are categorized into reinforcements (rewards) and punishments and further into positive and negative. It is important to note that positive and negative have nothing to do with how they are perceived, only with whether something is added or removed to the subject.

Method	Description	Example
Positive reinforcement	This is when a pleasurable experience is given to the subject in exchange for increasing the desired behaviour	Getting a good mark for studying or giving a dog a treat for doing a trick.
Negative reinforcement	This is when an unpleasant experience is removed from the subject in exchange for increasing the desired behaviour	Removing some of a class's homework for being quiet or removing a dog's chain for not pulling it.
Positive punishment	This is when an unpleasant experience is given to the subject in exchange for decreasing the undesired behaviour	Getting a report for bad behaviour or giving a dog a scolding for not obeying.
Negative punishment	This is when a pleasurable experience is removed from the subject in exchange for decreasing the undesired behaviour	Removing a class's break time for being disruptive or removing a dog's toy for making noise.

Notice that these need not be manually applied by someone. It could be something like eating too many sweets giving you a stomach ache, which would be positive punishment.