Reinforcement
1. The psychological implication is that if you are rewarded for a behavior, you repeat it. This meaning is described below.
2. The military implication is of a new troop coming into a conflict. By extension, getting more attention from members of a group is getting reinforcements.
Reinforcement is a measure of biological reactions to a desirable substance or situation. Most commonly used in research involving addictive substances, reinforcement is measured in laboratories by the tendency of research animals to respond with seeking behaviors when given a substance then deprived of the same substance. Those substances identified by other research as acting on generalized "pleasure centers" in the brain are usually found to exhibit reinforcing properties.
Neurophysiologists have identified neural networks (groups of brain cells) associated with pleasurable responses, which can be manipulated with psychoactive drugs or by social influences. The networks, some researchers suggest, evolved to help animals identify and exploit useful situations, whether the situation is as simple as a tasty flower to a bee, or the sight of a family member for a human.
By associating a concept with ideas known to offer reinforcing properties, propaganda techniques such as motherhood terms exploit the biological tendency of humans to respond favorably to ideas that have been experienced as pleasurable. Propagandists learned to use reinforcement long before science identified the related biological mechanisms.
