Reinforcements and punishments

One lecture that I found interesting was the rewards section. Reinforcements increase the likelihood of a behavior while punishments decrease the likelihood. Reinforcers depend on the organism, situation, and needs. The same reinforcements and punishments do not always work on the same people. For example I work as a counselor at a YMCA during the summer and the other counselors and I found out early that the younger kids behave better when you punish them for bad behavior and the older kids behave better when they get a reward for not getting in trouble. The younger group did not care to much when we would reward them but would behave much better when we would take pool time away, and the older group would just behave even worse when we would take things away from them. This showed me that different reinforcements and punishments motivated each age group differently to behave well.