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Behavior exhibited by persons in response to certain stimuli.

Instrumental behavior is a concept that grew out of the behavior therapy movement, originating in the 1950s with the work of H.J. Eysenck. Behavior therapy asserts that neuroses are not the symptoms of underlying disorders (as Sigmund Freud theorized), but are in fact disorders in and of themselves. Further, these disorders are learned responses to traumatic experiences in much the same way that animals can be demonstrated to learn a response to instrumental, or operant, conditioning.

In the classic behaviorist experiments of Ivan...