@mheppell Here's an example of when they are in conflict: A human toddler is having a tantrum in public. If you as the parent take an operant conditioning approach, you don't pay attention to the toddler until they have calmed down and can use their words again, and then you pay them lots of attention or provide another reward for calming down. We are now finding this ends up with an adult child that struggles with emotional regulation because their need for acceptance in the family was dependent on their suppression of their negative emotions, and did not get a regular opportunity to use their mirror neurons to help upregulate the parasympathetic nervous system which, compared to the sympathetic, is far less developed at birth and needs coregulation to learn how to work. The inner belief of the child is that acceptance is continent on their behavior, when children thrive better when unconditional love is a foundation of their upbringing instead. [The "cry it out" method of sleep training infants was based on Skinnerian behavior science but has been proven to harm children long term.] The new attachment theory approach based on our newer discoveries in neurobiology would instead have you provide calm soothing attention to your toddler who is experiencing an emotional overwhelm, the sympathetic nervous system has gone into overdrive, and they are having a developmentally appropriate response to what their bodies are doing. Instead of motivating the child to change the behavior, you provide support via your own nervous system, validate the emotions being experienced if you can, and allow the experience of recovery without applying pressure to strengthen the neural pathways of emotional regulation, in addition to ensuring physical safety while the child's forebrain is out of service and they cannot remember not to do things like lie down in the path of a car or whatever.
All social mammals have the same kind of neurological development, and we know that a transactional relationship approach is dysfunctional and requires therapy to overcome for humans. Kawalec, if I am understanding it correctly, encourages gifts and appreciation treats, and even treats for tricks are fine, but for lifestyle behaviors she prefers to use a more autonomous and less authoritarian partnership approach that lets each individual contribute more for the joy of working together by strengthening the bond and communication.
It's not that +R is wrong in any way, it just might not be the most useful way to have emotionally healthy families, and since dogs are generally family and are designed for family social settings, using coregulation instead of conditioning seems like it's the next big thing to me at least.
As a human with emotional regulation problems and a lack of developmental coregulation I find a lot of parallels between cPTSD and dogs who show fear reactivity, and when I can translate the somatic techniques that have been so useful to my own healing into dogs I tend to see really good responses. Personally I love OC and believe it has a place in our communication with our dogs, but I also want to encourage canine autonomy and mental health through decreasing the transactional nature of the OC mindset to behavior management. And my efforts in that direction do seem to be paying off with my own dogs.
ETA:
A reference on "cry it out" science in response to a very recent study in support and including older science in opposition that I believe sums up the current outlook pretty well.
