Dogs make the most amazing companions in life. They tend to be much loving and loyal to their masters. They are not like human beings since their brains work a little bit different. The way they interact with and perceive the social environment around them is also quite different. This is where effective communication and interaction is vital. In order to effectively communicate with them, we need to train them.

However, training your dog may be one of the most challenging aspects of receiving a new canine into your home. But wait! Have you ever given a thought of the psychology behind dog training? Trust me it will make the whole process of dog training into a walk in a dog park!

Now hold on your hat as I take you through some of the most amazing ways of training your dog. Teaching your canine friend how to behave is just one of the benefits from knowing how the minds of others work. You never know, if you’re good at it, dog training could be the start of career in psychology or maybe you could create a new superstar dog.

Negative Reinforcement

You might be thinking this reinforcement to be an undesirable consequence for instance pain. Trust me you are definitely wrong on this! Simply, this entails removal of a nasty stimulus. This psychology principle works by encouraging good behaviors in your puppy.

To start, house-train your new puppy using pee pads. Place the dog in unoccupied but warm and safe room. Do it when at home to avoid any mishaps. The dog may start complaining or barking due to loneliness. Nevertheless, avoid tending the dog the moment they start whining. Begin with slight increases for instance 10-20 minutes of loneliness.

Next, you can take away the unpleasant stimulus and socialize with the puppy. Over time, increase the boosts of interaction. As time goes by, your dog will know the routine of loneliness varies. They will thus adapt the idea of being alone at home without barking.

Classical Conditioning

The science behind this associates a stimulus with a definite response. This means that the response takes place involuntary provided the stimulus exists. The next time you are taking your dog for a nature walk, try this approach. It will cheer up your companion to relieve themselves while on a walk. You need to ring a bell each time they do acceptably relieve themselves outdoors. Within a short time, the bell becomes a conditioned stimulus. This means your dog will relieve itself involuntary upon ringing the bell. Try to condition the bell once you are done with your walk.

Justify Maslow’s Basic Needs

According to this psychological principle, needs are presented in the hierarchical form. Fulfillment of appetite, pleasure, and thirst are some of the basic needs both in animals and human beings. Basic needs can, therefore, be harnessed as rewards for training your dog. Pet your dog the moment they perform simple habits, for instance, sitting down voluntarily.

Next, you can start to pet them only upon command. This method works magic since you strengthen your canine acceptable behavior by fulfilling their basic needs. In addition, you will be conditioning your pet to relish both the reward and approach.

Complement Primary Reinforcement

It may become challenging to carry on with a single enforcement approach. Undesirable effects such as begging are evident when you only use primary reinforcers without supplementation. Your dog may even start to think it’s the boss due to unceasing attention and petting. Instead, you can start to complement the reinforcement with praise. After a number of efforts with the secondary reinforcement, the pet will associate both the praise and food for accomplishing the ideal trick. The technique works on kids as well.

In conclusion, this is just but some of the best ways to train your dog using the principle of psychology. Use them to cultivate good and desirable behaviors in a dog. The good thing is that they all work!

Perhaps the most popular child support model is income shares. It’s used by the majority of US states and has been adopted in other countries. Under the income shares model, separated parents have their income pooled for the purpose of calculating child support.

To understand how it works, we’ll look at how support increases as the income of the payer parent goes up. We’ll also use examples from the Australian income shares system. Right now, there’s a big push in that country for extensive child support reform.

Under income sharing, a rise in payer income generally increases the amount of child support payable (as you’d expect). The manner of increase is what’s interesting. Payers have limited child support obligations at low income levels. However, child support rises steadily at medium to high income levels.

Mathematically, the child support response to an income rise is the cumulative impact of an income share effect, a cost of children effect, and a complex set of cost tables.

A. Income share effect

According to the child support formula, the amount of child support rises in proportion with a payer’s share of combined income. Combined income is the sum of each parent’s child support income (which is taxable income minus a self-support amount).

Because of factors such as the self-support amount, fixed minimum child support rates, credit for any care time, and the other parent’s high income, the income share effect may not be felt until the payer’s income reaches $40k, $50, $60k or more. It also doesn’t apply if the other parent has an income below the self-support amount (since the payer contributes 100%).

B. Cost of children effect

For payers with <50% care, child support obligations go up when their income rises due to a cost-of-children effect. Higher combined income is assumed to increase the cost of children broadly. This works against the parent with <50% care because each parent gets financial credit for direct care.

The cost-of-children effect generally adds to the income share effect. It helps keep child support down for low-income payers. And, when a payer’s income rises, it further adds to the child support increase.

C. Cost tables

The amount of child support is finally decided by cost-of-children tables. To illustrate, by using the tables, we can work out that the cost of a child under 13 who has 2 parents earning $50k each (taxable income) is $8,587 annually.

The tables are constructed so that the cost of a child increases with income but at a declining rate. It starts at 17 cents per extra dollar and drops progressively to 15 cents, 12 cents, 10 cents, 7 cents and zero (at a combined child support income just over $180k).

The relationship between a payer’s income and the amount of child support is complicated not out of sophistication but by poor design. The system routinely produces unfair and inefficient outcomes.

Problem A: Demoralizing effective tax rates

The child support system must balance the need to collect support against the cost of discouraging payers from earning a good income. For many payers, but especially those with little contact time, the system imposes demoralizingly high effective marginal tax rates. Consider this example where, at almost any income level, a payer must give up over half of any extra income.

Children: 2 (mixed age groups)
Care: 100% of time with recipient
Recipient taxable income: $60k p.a.
Payer effective marginal tax rate: 55% – 60% over $30k to $150k income range

Here the payer foregoes 57% of extra income in tax and child support when income rises from $30k to $150k.

• At $30k, the payer pays $2,780 in support and $2,397 in tax.
• At $150k, the payer pays $27,776 in support and $46,132 in tax.
• Over each $30k interval in between, the marginal effective tax rate doesn’t drop below 55%.

Calculation tools: Child Support Calculator (2017), Pay Calculator (2017)

Problem B: Excessively high or low payment rates

A useful child support measure is the nightly cost of extra care above 50:50 care. It asks the question: how much does the recipient receive for each night of care they provide above their fair share? Applying the measure, it is easy to see where child support amounts are too high or low. Here’s an example where the amount is too high.

Children: 2 (mixed age groups)
Care: 8 nights with recipient per fortnight, 6 with payer
Incomes: $60k for recipient, $150k for payer
Dollar rate per night: $505.38 per night ($13,176 per year)

The care arrangement is quite even, with the recipient providing 1 extra night of care per fortnight above an even split. For having a lower income and doing essentially 26 additional nights of care per year, the recipient receives $13,176.

There are many sayings that people use on a daily basis to communicate with their audiences. These sayings have become so common that speakers rarely stop to consider their source. Most of them are derived from historical events and legends. Read on to find out more about the unusual stories behind the origin of top 5 common sayings. The article is brought to you by Activate Press.

1. Caught Red-Handed

To be caught red-handed means to be found doing or initiating something wrong. This phrase was derived from the practice of ancient laws. If a person slaughtered a neighbor’s animal, he was only convicted when there was an evidence of the animal’s blood on his or her hand. Fresh meat alone didn’t make someone guilty.

2. Eat Humble Pie

Eat Humble Pie means giving an apology and being ready to suffer the humiliation that comes along with it. This saying dates back to the Middle Ages. During this time, the king would hold a large feast after a successful hunt. His family would be served with the finest meat while those of the lower status would receive a pie comprising of the innards and entrails, referred to as “umbles.” So being served “umble pie” was a sign of humiliation.

3. Give the Cold Shoulder

This is a rude way of telling a person that he isn’t welcome. Today, giving someone a cold shoulder is considered rude and disrespectful (see cold shoulder jokes). However, in the medieval England, it was actually considered a polite gesture. After a feast, the guests were given a cold piece of meat from the shoulder of pork, mutton or beef. This was a sign that hosts used to communicate to their guests that it was time to leave.

4. Blood is Thicker than Water

This saying simply means family comes before everything else. It was derived from the ancient Middle Eastern culture. During this period, a blood ritual between men was a symbol of stronger bonds than those of family. For instance, warriors who shed blood in the battlefield symbolically shared that blood. They were said to be “blood brothers,” with stronger bonds than that of biological brothers.

5. Break the Ice

This saying means to initiate a friendship or settle a room by telling a joke. Before the invention of cars and trains, port cities and towns that thrived on trade suffered a lot during the winter season. Frozen lakes, seas, and oceans prevented commercial ships from entering the city. To rescue the icebound ships, city authorities used small ships to break the ice. Those small ships were referred to as “icebreakers.”

Jokes and humor are personality psychology. They entertain people or convey a certain message in a literal and hidden manner. In humor and jokes, words are used in a well structured and highly designed narrative structure to entertain people and make them laugh. Humor always starts with a story and ends with a punch line which is the part that will make people laugh and enjoy. There are various types of humor and jokes.

Satirical Humor

This type of humor is tactically used to mock somebody or an event. Irony is used to bring out the story part that somebody might have been engaged in or caused it happen. It also uses sarcasm to bring out the real life vices about the satire story in question. The punch line comes in by making a comment about the story and how it should be.

Self-Disparaging Humor

This is the type of jokes and humor you want to make about yourself. People will love to laugh at how you describe yourself or definitely how you perceive yourself. Although this might make people be uneasy when they are around you, it plays a greater role in bonding with the audience. Self-disparaging humor and jokes is effective in most cases but it should be moderated as people might be bored talking about yourself always.

Witty Humor and Jokes

This type of jokes and humor needs intellectual structuring and is always for the smart and quick minded. One can take any known situation that happened and use it to tease the audience and describe about it. In most cases it is a situation or story that nearly everybody is aware of (e.g. common sayings). They use the story and tactically twist it to march their intentions. When engaging in witty humor be careful not to cross the line and tease or joke about a story that offended many people. This will make the audience dull.

Slapstick Humor and Jokes

Slapstick humor uses physical variations to bring about an awkward moment to the other party that is perceived to be perfect. It gives variations of body movements or structures that create a mock or simulated body harm to bring out a comic effect.

Topical Humor and Jokes

This type of humor focuses entirely on topics making headlines in news, social media or in any communication platform. It Includes topics about politics, sports events, war, economy or any other popular headlines. This humor makes fun of current events, its effects or importance and fun is made on how the events were handled, how it happened and its aftermath.

Tab, also known as tablature, is an important tool that allows guitar players to easily learn how to play melodies, chords, and songs. Instead of using symbols like it is in standard musical notation, it uses ordinary numbers and characters. Learning how read guitar tabs can be a mystery for some newer guitar players.

Here is a step by step guide on how to read guitar tabs.

1. Guitar tab staff – Strings fret numbers

For this one, the top is the bottom. Your thinnest string is pictured on the top, so when you hold your guitar by the guitar neck and place your hand, your fingers will wrap around the guitar neck at the first string. By doing this, your fingers will be right in place to follow along with the tab.

2. Repeat Signs

Repeat signs are there to enable you to know that you are supposed to repeat that section of notes. The number of times you repeat depends on the song.

3. Hammer On

Hammer on is done by picking up a note and then hammering is done with the fretting hand on the second note (see video here). Actually, the second note is not picked but kind of echo the first one. Hammer-ons are one of the standards in guitar techniques.

4. Slides

If done the right way, this sounds really cool. For a slide, begin by plucking the first note then slide on the string up or down to the second.

5. Pull Offs

Pull off is the exact opposite of hammer-on. The first note is played then the fretting hand pulls off the finger and lets the one fretted behind it to play.

6. Picking Directions

Either picking of the individual chords or notes or up or down strumming. One should put more efforts on being good at playing or picking in both directions to make the music flow.

7. Chords

They are a group of notes that are sounded by a single or series of up or down strokes with your strumming. To tab a chord, notes would be positioned vertically upon the horizontal lines ones.

8. Bends

This is where the fretting hand bends the string to provide a wobbly effect. Often it is used in blues, rock, country and Christian music. Bends add attitude to the music in a good way.

9. Vibrato

This is another technique for adding amazing sounds to your music. It is just like a constant rhythmic bending off the string. It’s a wiggling of the string up and down to bring a variation on the pitch up and down.

10. Natural Harmonics

Natural harmonics can add up bell-like sounds when you touch a string with your finger over a particular fret bar. The most commonly used notation is the fret that one touches with romb sign before.

Your faithful canine companion isn’t just for staying at home, waiting for their master. They can become film and TV stars as well! Here’s 5 famous, extremely well-trained dogs in movies and television, in no particular order.

1. Scooby Doo

The phrase “Scooby Doo, where are you?” might induce an endless-playing song in your head, but there’s no doubt that this Great Dane is known all throughout the world. Scooby, Shaggy and the gang of mystery-solving misfits go where no one dares and manages to save the day and uncover the masked villain scheming behind the scenes.

Did You Know? Scooby Doo held the Guinness World Book Record for the 2006 edition for the most episodes in a cartoon series. The cartoon’s 350 episodes outnumber the Simpson’s 335 episodes and Tom and Jerry’s 209 episodes in 2004.

2. Snoopy

Who could ever forget the lovable, black and white beagle of Charles Schulz? Although Snoopy started out in comics, this human-like dog catapulted to the bigger world of film. He has become one of the most iconic characters of all time. The last appearance of Snoopy was in the recent 2015 “The Peanuts Movie”. Ain’t Charlie Brown lucky to have this pet by his side?

Did You Know? Snoopy was an inspiration for Charles Schulz’ family pet named Spike. He wasn’t able to “verbalize” his thoughts until around a couple of years after the canine appeared on the comic strips!

3. Hachi

Who is Hachi, and why do people get misty-eyed whenever his name is mentioned? It all has something to do with a poignant, true story of an Akita Inu who has devoted his entire life to his owner. You see, Hachi was left behind by his owner and never came back. The dog kept on revisiting and waiting for his master until his last breath. A true heart-warmer that you must watch at least once!

Did You Know? Hachiko’s story became widely known in Japan in 1932 by an article made by Hirokichi Saito. The people loved it so much they made Hachi a public icon.

4. Lassie

All dogs are inherently loyal, but there are some that are more loyal than the other dogs. Meet Lassie, the super dog who is able to do it all, and still remain a good-natured pet to her owners! The half-collie represented all the good things a dog could have- bravery, a sense of honor and the ability to save people’s lives.

Did You Know? Lassie is originally a female dog as portrayed in TV, but her stand-ins are all male dogs! The reason for this is because male dogs retain their shiny, healthy coat during summer.

5. Beethoven

Beethoven is a slow, fun-loving dog in the movie featuring the same name. He’s big, he drools and he stumbles around but his loyalty and protective nature wins the family over.

Did You Know? The movie came under fire because their portrayal of a vet as a criminal dognapper irked the American Veterinary Association.