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Case study on classical conditioning
Principle of classical conditioning
Principle of classical conditioning
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Classical conditioning is the first type of learning to be discovered and studied by behaviorists. In classical conditioning, no new behaviors are learned, but rather associated or paired with something else. In the early 1900’s a Russian physician and physiologist, Ivan Pavlov, was studying digestion in dogs, when he observed something remarkable about their behavior. Pavlov built a mechanism to measure the salivation of dogs when they were fed a meat powder. He monitored their natural reaction to the powder by attaching tubes to their salivary glands. Pavlov soon noticed that his dogs began salivating when they observed a sight, sound, or smell that they had come to associate with being fed. After observing the dogs’ association, he …show more content…
Unlike Pavlov’s dogs that stopped salivating when the bell stopped, the child would continue to be afraid of these things because we are hard wired to avoid things that we fear or that may bring us harm. Without being unconditioned to the response, the child would likely go through life being afraid of the conditioned stimulus. Cases of classical conditioning can be observed in our everyday lives. About two years ago I adopted a kitten from a local family. The kitten was an outside cat in which the family fed dry cat food. When I brought the kitten home, I began feeding her twice a day, a wet cat food. I opened the cans with an electric can opener when I fed her, the sound would always frighten her away. She would run and hide, and I would have to try and coax her out from under my bed, or where ever else she decided to take refuge. The electric can opener was the unconditioned stimulus (UCS), and her fear of the can opener was her natural, unconditioned response (UCR). After a few days, whenever I opened her cat food she would wait until the can opener stopped and sly into the kitchen after a minute or two once she was certain there was no threat to
The study by Watson and Rayner was to further the research of Ivan Pavlov. Pavlov was a Russian physiologist whose most famous experiments involved that of animals, specifically the unconditioned and conditioned reflexes of canines, in reference to salivation and conditioned emotional response. Pavlov demonstrated that if a bell was rang each time a dog was fed; ultimately the animal would befall conditioned to salivate at just the sound of the bell, even where food is was no longer present (The Salivation reflex). Watson and Rayner set out to further the research of conditioned stimulus response, with little Albert. ‘These authors without adequate experimental evidence advanced the view that this range was increased by means of conditioned reflex factors.’ (B.Watson, R Rayner , 1920).
Kurayama, Matsuzawa, Komiya, Nakazawa, Yoshida, Shimizu, (2012) confirmed that these neutral stimuluses deed indeed has an effect and played a role in fear conditioning in people. The case showed that Treena had indeed learned to be scared of the incident and it proceeded to become a cue for to get anxious and get panic attacks. It has been claimed that patients with panic disorder exhibited fear potentiated startle responses to safety cues and therefore reduced discrimination between safety and danger signals during acquisition, indicating that the safety signal was processed as the aversive event in contrast to the danger signal (Nees, Heinrich, Flor, 2015). It also showed that the her failing to answer the question had affected her in other classes when she would not participate in other classes hence, this showed that the neutral stimulus has developed and grew into a conditioned stimulus which evoked feelings of fear and anxiety in her, in other words it had become a cue for her to be scared and
Watson, J. B. (1920). Conditioned emotional reactions. The American Psychologist, 55(3), 313-317. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com.southuniversity.libproxy.edmc.edu/
He discovered classical conditioning after seeing how the dogs were stimulated to respond to their food and anything related to food such as the noise of the door or person coming towards them (King, 2016). He eventually conditioned the dogs to respond to a bell as it did when it was exposed to the food (King, 2016). Pavlov accomplished this by introducing a neutral stimulus, the bell, which is a stimulus that doesn’t result in a response like conditioned or unconditioned stimuli (King, 2016). Initially, in this experiment salivation was an innate response to food, but after the introduction of the bell, it became a conditioned response because the dog learned that every time the bell rang, its food came along with it (King, 2016). Consequently, making the bell a conditioned stimulus which is a stimulus that resulted in a response after many times that the neutral stimulus was presented with the food (King,
We have all heard of Pavlov's Dogs, the experiment where the dogs "drooled" at the sounding of a bell. But, do we know of the details of this infamous experiment? What do we know of the man, beyond that he could ring bells? It is my intention, in this brief dissertation, to shed more light on his life and his experiments.
One of the most famous example of fear conditioning is the Little Albert experiment conducted by Watson and Rayner in 1920. In this experiment, an infant, Albert, was presented with a white rat, and as expected, Albert initially displayed no signs of fear and began touching and playing with the rat. Soon, the experimenters began pairing the presentation of the rat with a loud noise (US) produced by banging a hammer on a steel bar. The noise caused Albert to startle and cry (UR). After several pairing, Albert learned to fear the rat (CS) and would crawl away or cry (CR) when the rat was subsequently presented (Watson and Rayner, 1920)
The most famous behaviorist experiment is also one of the simplest example, in which Ivan Pavlov induced such a significant association in dogs (test subjects), that they would salivate at the sound of a ringing bell, because he had taught them to associate the sound with food. Emphasis within the behaviorist approach itself range from simply observing behavior as a convenient heuristic of psychological research, a branch that uses only behavior to gauge psychological processes, and a third that only behavior is relevant to the study of the human mind, as less observable terms refer only to behavior.
Behaviorism and conditioning has its share of success stories especially when used to curb undesirable habits such as smoking and drinking, however they have also had their moments of darkness as well as seen in 1920 with John Watson and his little experiments that starred a young boy dubbed Little Albert. During Watson’s experiments to help explain conditioning, During his experiments Watson exposed Albert to a number of animals and recorded Albert’s initial reactions which were next to none at all. Watson then began exposing the same animals to Albert, and providing loud bangs that startled Albert at the same time. Eventually Albert began to cry at the sight of the animals even when they were not seen simultaneously with the loud bang.
using a bell to trigger the dog's salivary glands. Before conditoning, there has to be a neutral stimulus before a reflex occurs. During this process, a unconditioned stimulus will result in a uncondtioned response. During the second phase, the neutral stimulus is continuously paired with the unconditional stimulus. As a result, a connection between the neutral stimulus and unconditional stimulus. Now the neutral
Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov in the early 1900’s while making an attempt to better understand digestion accidently stumble on what we now know as classical conditioning (Ormrod, 2012, p. 34). Using dogs, a bell and meat powder, Pavlov discovered when a stimulus that give a unconditioned
intense or extensive than others” (Rapee, et al 17). Some fears may be more common at certain ages; for example, children the ages of three-five will be afraid of the...
Classical conditioning can be describe as a reflexive or automatic type of learning in which a stimulus acquires the capacity to evoke a response that was originally evoked by another stimulus. It was first described by Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936), a Russian physiologist, in 1903, and studied in infants by John B. Watson (1878-1958). In the 1920 's John b. Watson and Rosaline Rayner trailed to show how fear can be induced in an infant through classical conditioning. Designating conditional emotional reactions attempt would become the most infamous psychology studies that has been conducted and would be entitled "the case of little Albert”. Watson goal was to get Albert very afraid of the white rat by comparing the white rat with a very loud, clashing
The strength of classical conditioning is that it can help to explain all aspects of human behavior. Any of behavior can broke down into stimulus-response association, so that according to the classical conditioning, conditioned stimulus will lead conditioned response to occur, then the scientist can observe and determine the behavior (McLeod, 2014). In the case of Pavlovian conditioning, he found that when the conditioned stimulus (bell) was paired with an unconditioned stimulus (food) was presented to the dog, it would start to salivate. After a number of repeated this procedures, Pavlov tried to ring his bell by its own...
Many psychologists have contributed to behaviorism becoming the approach that is today. Behaviorism was first presented by the American psychologist John B.Watson. The new concept that Watson presented perceived behavior as a physiological response to environmental stimuli. He disagreed with the belief that mental processes could not be studied scientifically (Behaviorism, 2013). Watson sought to make psychology “a purely objective, experimental branch of natural science,” with conditioning as one of its chief methods (Irvine, 2007). Watson took an extreme standpoint on environmentalism and stated that personality can be created (Irvine, 2007).
...first started out with cats being exposed to mild shocks accompanied by specific sounds and visual stimuli. The cats connected the shocks with the sounds or visual stimuli that produced fear in them. When the cats were exposed to the same sounds or visual stimuli plus receiving food instead of shocks, they eventually unlearned their fears. Eventually this behavior therapy would be applied to humans.