Phobia And Classical Conditioning

Classical conditioning is defined as a neutral stimulus being paired with a stimulus that leads to a reflexive response. These are events that happen in the everyday world and we predict them to happen, anticipating what’s to come next. Pavlov’s dogs have been served as an infamous example of classical conditioning, as they would salivate when he opened the door to feed them. My example is not of with Pavlov’s dogs, but of my own. Although, my dog is very playful and has a plethora of toys. Using his toys, usually come in handy when trying to

Known as a mental disorder a phobia is a persistent fear of a specific object, activity, or situation that leads to compelling desire to avoid it. Phobias tend to affect the way people live their lives, for example, their working and social environments, considering that they last for a very long time and are capable to cause intense psychological physical stress. It is considered today the most common mental and anxiety disorder in the United States (Matig Mavissakalian & David H. Barlow 1981 pp 2). There are many phobias such as: the fear of aging, fear of changing, fear of clowns, fear of getting fat, fear of being in closed spaces, etc.

Everybody that you come into contact with on a daily basis will have a fear of something but a phobia can be defined as an irrational fear, this can provoke feelings of intense anxiety and initiate avoidance behaviour.

Classical conditioning is a type of associative learning which occurs when two stimuli are paired together repetitively and therefore become associated with each other eventually producing the same response. Classical conditioning was developed from the findings of Ivan Pavlov to account for associations between neutral stimuli and reflexive behavior such as salivation. Pavlov (1927) accidently discovered that dogs began to salivate before they had tasted their food. To support his theory, he carried out experiments using dogs which involved measuring the amount of saliva they produced. In his experiments, food started off as an unconditioned stimulus (UCS) which produced salivation, an unconditioned response (UCR). They are both unconditioned as they occur naturally without being learned. The dogs were presented with a bell (NS), this provided no salivation. The bell and food were presented together and after many trails an

Classical conditioning is the relationship of an automatic response with a neutral occurrence. There are many main components to classical conditioning. Acquisition which is the learning part of classical conditioning where the conditioned stimulus is paired with the unconditioned stimulus. An unconditioned stimulus is a stimulus that instinctively causes a response. An unconditioned response is the response to the unconditioned stimulus that the researcher will document. A Neutral stimulus is a stimulus that may not get a response initially however after time, develops an instinctive response. A conditioned stimulus is a neutral stimulus after is has taught the response by training based on the conditioning. A conditioned response is the response to the conditioned stimulus. Extinction, spontaneous recovery, generalization, and discrimination are all a part of the classical conditioning process (Nevid,

You are in an airport waiting for your plane to arrive. You've never flown before, and are more terrified than you can ever remember being. Everyone has told you the supposedly comforting statistics - "millions of planes take off each day and there's only a handful of crashes," "flying is safer than driving." You know rationally that there is no reason to be so scared, but regardless your heart is racing, your palms are sweating, and you're light-headed. Simply the thought of being up in the air, out of control, makes you feel faint. Finally the flight attendant announces that your plane has arrived. But as all the other passengers line up to get onboard, you grab your luggage and walk straight out of the airport,

Phobias, an extreme fear of something, can best be understood through use of the psychodynamic perspective. Oftentimes, childhood traumas or exposure to the object of the fear at an early age can lead to the phobia to manifest itself when the patient is an adult.

A phobia is an overwhelming and unbearable fear of something, such as an object, place, situation, feeling or animal. Phobias are a lot profounder than fears. In my essay I will be looking at a scenario of a woman called Amy with an extreme phobia of birds and how we can explain her fear looking at different psychological theories that explains learnt behaviour.

Phobia in clinical psychology context is an irrational fear of something or situation. The person suffering from phobia will try their best to avoid their phobia. In the extreme case that the person suffering from the phobia cannot avoid it, they will attempt to endure through the situation with a lot of distress ADDIN EN.CITE Swanson1986158(Swanson, 1986)15815817Swanson, Guy E.Phobias and Related Symptoms: Some Social SourcesSociological ForumSociological Forum103-130111986Springer08848971http://www.jstor.org/stable/684555( HYPERLINK l "_ENREF_2" o "Swanson, 1986 #158" Swanson, 1986). Phobias can cause difficulties in a person performing their daily activities.

The dogs would start to salivate just by hearing the bell ringing, which normally would not produce this response. The first part of the process involves an unconditioned response, like blinking or salivating. The next part needed for classical conditioning is an unconditioned stimulus. The unconditioned stimulus is one that automatically produces the unconditioned response, such as the smell of food triggering salivation. During conditioning, the neutral stimulus, like the bell in Pavlov’s case, is repeatedly paired with the unconditioned stimulus, or the meat powder. After a while, the neutral stimulus becomes the conditioned stimulus. The conditioned stimulus then produces a conditioned response, since the subject of the experiment has associated the conditioned stimulus with the unconditioned response. Many interesting experiments have been conducted using classical conditioning. Another scientist that preformed an experiment with classical conditioning is John B. Watson. Watson used classical conditioned to make a young boy fear white fluffy objects. He scared the child by making loud noises every time the child was presented a white rat.

This is known as the unconditioned stimulus (UCS). Meat is the unconditioned stimulus because at the sight of the meat the dogs begin to salivate (Feldman, 2010).   The dog’s response to the meat educes salivation and is known as the unconditioned response (UCR). An unconditioned response is defined as a reflexive and natural response that is not connected to prior learning. Unconditioned responses always occur in the presence of the unconditioned stimulus (Feldman, 2010).   While conditioning the dogs, Pavlov would ring a bell right before the presentation of meat. Eventually, the dogs would associate the ringing of the bell with the meat. Therefore, the dogs would begin to salivate at the sound of the bell. At this point, Pavlov could state that he had classically conditioned his dogs. The bell which was a prior neutral stimulus had now become the conditioned stimulus (CS) that brought forth the conditioned response (CR) of salivation (Feldman, 2010). Moreover, we have to ask what would happen if these poor dogs were never again received food upon the ringing of the bell. This would lead to extinction. Extinction occurs when a prior conditioned response decreases in frequency and eventually disappears (Feldman, 2010).   In order for Pavlov to unconditioned his dogs he would have to break their association with the sound of the ringing bell and the presentation of food. To do so he

Classical conditioning says that we learn behaviours by associating the response to the stimulus. An example of this can be found from the work of Ivan Pavlov. In the 1890s Pavlov, a Russian physiologist, carried out some experiments with a dogs. He noticed that when a dog eats food, they salivate: this is an unconditional response to an

Classical conditioning was stumbled upon by a Russian physiologist, Ivan Pavlov. His unexpected discovery led him to win a rightfully earned Noble Prize. Classical conditioning is defined as “a form of learning in which reflex responses are associated with new stimuli (Coon & Mitterer, 2016, p. 201).” This form of learning is also called Pavlovian conditioning or respondent conditioning. He found a connection between the stimuli for his dogs’ salivation during his experiment. To begin explaining classical conditioning, it is best to explain how Pavlov conducted his research. He began his experiment by ringing a bell, which was a neutral stimulus (NS) for his dogs. A neutral stimulus is defined as “a stimulus that does not evoke a response (Coon & Mitterer, 2016, p. 201).” Directly after, he put meat

However, phobia can even cause people to risk their health. For example, the fear of dentists can leave people suffering from it willing to risk the health of their teeth in order to avoid having to go through an exam or procedure ( MacKay). When one knows about an upcoming confrontation, it can be the reason why one can not sleep or finds it hard to focus on important tasks. Due the change in daily routine, this unrealistic fear can interfere with the ability to socialize, work, or go about everyday life, brought on by and object, event or situation. But even animals have anxieties and phobias just as every human being (www.phobia-help.de). A phobia is an irrational fear, one knows that the object or situation, one is scared off, can not hurt one, but one is still afraid. A reason for this is that the human mind can not distinguish what is real and imaginary. When one has uncontrollable anxiety attacks, he loses rational judgement, leading to complicated problems. However, anyone can develop a phobia, men and women, teens and young adults, and elderly lady or a one-year-old boy (MacKay).

Briefly, Pavlov`s classical conditioning theory explain learning new behavior. He used dogs in his experiment. He explained three stages of classical conditioning. The unconditioned stimulus means that a stimulus in the environment has created a behavior (meat salivate the dog), Neutral stimulus that itself will not create a reaction (bell is ruining no salivate dog), conditioned stimulus means that neutral stimulus and the unconditioned stimulus together (meat and bell together salivate dog) and after conditioning means that neutral stimulus creates a conditioned response and becomes a conditioned stimulus(rang bell salivate