What is classical conditioning and how is it relevant to phobias in humans?

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Department of Professional and Community Education

(PACE)

Integrated Degree in Psychology

Student Identification number/Name: 33066386

Core essay

Title of the essay: What is classical conditioning and how is it relevant to phobias in humans?    

Name of the tutor who will be marking it: Mike Griffiths

Date of Submission: 25/04/2007

Essay title

What is classical conditioning and how is it relevant to phobias in humans?

This essay will demonstrate a basic learning process known as classical conditioning along with the way it is associated with phobias in humans. Ivan Pavlov’s initial discovery of classical conditioning and his contribution to the understanding of this phenomenon will be outlined. Moreover, the definition and the basic principles of classical conditioning will be stated next to its significance in daily behaviour. Furthermore, different types of phobias as well as their acquisition through classical conditioning will also be presented. Finally, a number of techniques which could be applied in treating phobias will also be introduced.

According to Carlson, Martin and Buskist (2004), people acquire much of their daily behaviour throughout classical conditioning. For instance, when people hear a song they used to listen to when they were with loved ones they are likely to experience feelings of nostalgia. As a general rule, classical conditioning entails learning about the conditions that forecast that an important event will take place, e.g., when a balloon is being inflated in front of a person who has never seen one before then he/she will observe the expanding balloon but will not demonstrate any other reaction. When the balloon explodes the noise and the blast of air will cause a protective shock reaction (suddenly heaving his/her shoulders and moving his/her arms towards his/her body). Thus, a bursting balloon is an important stimulus which could result in an unlearned protective behaviour. After repeating the experience some times the person will learn to act protectively prior to the balloon in fact bursting. In effect two stimuli have become associated with each other. A prior neutral stimulus (the over inflated balloon) followed by a significant stimulus (explosion while the balloon bursts) can now set off the protective reaction by itself. In practice the protective reaction has been classically conditioned to the view of a highly inflated balloon (Carlson et al., 2004).

Thus, classical conditioning can be defined as a learning process in which a formerly neutral stimulus will become associated with a different stimulus in the course of repetitive pairing with that stimulus (Atkinson and Atkinson, Smith, Bem and Hoeksema, 2000).

Moreover, classical conditioning accomplishes two important functions. Firstly, the skill, for an organism, of learning to identify stimuli that forecast the occurrence of an important event permits the learner to make the proper response more rapidly and even more successfully. For example, when an animal sees an enemy its heart rate and the flow of blood to its muscles increase, it takes a protective and threatening posture and hormones are released which prepare it for combat or flight. Secondly, through classical conditioning previously unimportant stimuli may acquire some of the properties of the significant stimuli with which they have been related and so alter behaviour: people react differently in the view of a pile of money and of a pile of papers because money has been related with attractive goods, e.g. cars (Carlson et al., 2004).

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The research on classical conditioning began while Ivan Pavlov, a Russian physiologist, was studying digestion. Pavlov was investigating the neural control of different digestive reflexes, and his laboratory research was centred on the emission of saliva in dogs. In the course of this investigation, Pavlov noticed dogs that had been in the laboratory for some time would salivate not only at the touch and taste of meat in the mouth but at the simple sight of the meat to the view of the dish in which the food was normally positioned and also to the sight of the researcher who ...

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