Essay On Evaluative Conditioning

While learning to drive a car, I have experienced the elements of classical conditioning. Conditioned stimulus was a car that rapidly stopped in front of me.

While many people may believe that learning is just a natural response that all animals are capable of, there is actually a more complex explanation on how we learn the things we do in order to survive in the world. Classical conditioning and operant conditioning are both basic forms of learning, they have the word conditioning in common. Conditioning is the acquisition of specific patterns of behavior in the presence of well-defined stimuli.

Classical conditioning is a form of learning that is taught to us through experiences we encounter in our lives. It involves outside stimuli to trigger the condition we have learned to expect. For example, the sound of a lunch bell would trigger our stomach to start growling soon after hearing the bell ring. The expectation of food to come soon after hearing the bell and satisfy our hunger is what makes our stomach growl. This is something learned over time. Expectations can be both good and bad. Sometimes these negative experiences cause us to have certain behaviors when we are reminded of such an event.

Chen et al was interested in whether or not the findings would differ when pairing the sporting event with a sporting celebrity compared to a non-sporting celebrity would make a difference in participant’s attitudes.  The participants who were in the experimental condition with a celebrity who had viewed the slides had developed a positive attitude than those in the control condition with no celebrity and sports.

Operant conditioning has made a significant contribution into the development of psychology. However, as with most psychological theories, this theory it has its strengths and weaknesses. Nevertheless, operant conditioning, with both its positive and negative aspects, is very important in promoting learning of desirable behaviors or removal of undesirable

In a world of incessantly flashing products and logos, advertisements have become an inseparable component of our lives. These commercial propagandas have encroached upon stores, streets, and cable channels, sparing nothing; not even the very games on phones. While we mindlessly stare at these billion-dollar, seconds-lived advertisements, psychology confirms their worth. In his 1968 experiment, Zajonc demonstrated that "the mere exposure...is a sufficient condition for the enhancement of his attitude toward it", explaining people's tendency to like a song after hearing it several times. Environment and individuals are intertwined. So while on the surface they appear as crude drawings, Roy Lichtenstein’s garish, comic strip paintings mirror

Have you ever wondered how the news affects our daily thinking of life? From all the debates between politicians to the ideas the news anchor argues about without effective evidence. About 75% of the people in the united states believe that the news is biased and tend to favor one side. Even with, a vast number of people still act as if the news is right and their behavior reflects it. When it comes down to classifying the races and religions in this world, many people including unbiased people classify them as what the news categorize them in the world. Many of these classifications may be bad but there are some good ones. Regardless if it is bad or good, the basis of this classification comes from the psychological term, classical conditioning. “Classical conditioning is the learned response in which a neutral object comes to elicit a response when it is associated with a stimulus that already produces a response (Phycology in Your Life,2017).” All types of social media are factors into classical conditioning and are proven from my experience, the scientific side of it, and the effect it has had on my life.

For instance, the results from the cartoon amusement ratings for their second study found that the ratings for their participants differed based on when it was evaluated. When their subjects were evaluated at the time of the presentation of the cartoon, the participants in the teeth condition had higher amusement ratings. In contrast, after the presentation of the cartoons, the teeth condition rated the cartoons as less amusing than the lips condition. These results highlight that the conditions changed the participants’ affective states, but did not change their humor. Since the facial feedback hypothesis as described by Buck (1980), described an impact on a subjects emotional state this would provide a potential reason for the lack of statistically significant results for our subjects’ ratings of the funniness of the cartoons. Furthermore, this would also provide a potential reason that our BMISpositive ratings were statistically

Music’s ability to arouse emotions fascinated psychologists and the complex psychological mechanisms that act as a pathway to musically induced emotions intrigued them even more. By considering a simulated situation in which the audience’s emotions fluctuate as a music piece plays, people readily found one single mechanism incapable of rationalizing all occasions. Two psychological mechanisms—evaluative conditioning and musical expectancy—were hypothesized and agreed commonly. Evaluative conditioning (EC) refers to “a process whereby an emotion is induced by a piece of music simply because this stimulus has been paired repeatedly with other positive or negative stimuli” (Juslin & Västfjäll, 2008, p.564). In other words, a recurrent incident

Muscarella, Brintazzoli, Gordts, Soetens, and Van Den Bussche (2013), conducted a study that focused on both, subliminal and supraliminal advertisements incorporating familiar brand logos. They intended to measure behavioral effects after a short, medium, and long intervals. However, they did mention that there is controversy with subliminal advertising, and that it is highly unlikely to influence consumers. For the first primed experiment, consisting of twenty four psychology students, were to perform a lexical decision task on target letter strings. There was logo primes within these letter strings. There was two separate groups for this experiment. The first group was received the conscious condition where the primes were presented to them

picked up the wallet and ran away, then Kevin is likely to see this as

Example of Operant conditioning, is when you decided to snooze the alarm in the morning after partying all night long. Finally you decide to get up to go to work you are running 15 min late. And decide to step on gas pedal. You are now driving 50 mph on a 35 mph road. You think you are fine and won 't get caught because everyone else is driving fast also. All of sudden a cop is hidden in between the trees and bushes. You try to brake, in order to slow down a bit, but it 's too late…. The cop has turn on the lights and tail-gating you already. You pull over and you try to convince him that you had a “tough night”… even though it 's a lie, and to let you off with a warning. The cop tells you he doesn 't care and you should know better. Therefore he gives you a speeding ticket of about two hundred dollars and a court date if you decide to fight it. In order to go to court you will have to miss work, which means you won 't get paid. Then you have to pay for all the additional court fees if you want to go to clear your record; your insurance will go up, have to pay for driving school and miss more work also. You will have to go through all this trouble, time and money. Just for being too lazy and “tired” to get up on time.

Evaluative conditioning is a subclass of Pavlovian conditioning effects. Unlike classical conditioning, which is considered to be a learned behavioral response to a signal, evaluative conditioning is defined as the learning of likes and dislikes (Walther, Nagengast, and Trasselli 2005) that does not depend on awareness of the contingencies (De Houwer et al. 2001; Levey and Martin 1975; Walther 2002).

As a dog owner, I know how important it is to teach your pets how to behave. Yet, it is important to understand how learning works so that you can develop a strategy to properly and quickly teach your dog. The example of training a dog to roll over is a great model for analysing the aspects of learning involved with this process. Understanding how operant conditioning works and how to reinforce a desired response to that stimuli will help trainers effectively teach dogs. Psychologists, such as Myers (2013), define learning as the process of acquiring new knowledge and behaviors. In this case we are specifically discussing the acquisition of a certain response to a stimulus. The stimulus is the trainer’s command and the desired behavior is the dog to roll over onto his back. These ideas all are based on Edward L. Thorndike’s principle called the law of effect, wherein he stated that behaviors followed by a positive outcomes are more likely to increase in probability. These are all important components of the learning process, especially on the level of training a dog or instilling a simple behavior.

Using examples of both classical and operant conditioning, discuss the contributions and limitations of learning theory for the understanding of behaviour (Schacter et al., 2nd Ed, Chapter 6, also see Chapter 1 for historical context)