Classical Conditioning And Its Effects On Personality

At birth, everyone is born with a blank slate. Everyone functions solely on their needs instincts, or according to Sigmund Freud, our id. As people grow older and gain experiences, they develop other aspects to their personality. Typically this includes learning life lessons based upon how one was raised, circumstances (such as class and race), and significant moments in one’s life. These moments can range from a first love, going through a rite of passage, or even something as little as an intellectual conversation. All these moments can depict what kind of a person someone will become. Although experiences are not always pleasant. One type of experience that heavily affects one’s personality is often a traumatic experience. As complex
One of the main ways trauma can alter behaviour is through classical conditioning. Classical Conditioning is the act of learning something by associating it with a different event or subject. For example, if a bell were to continuously go off when feeding dogs, the dogs would associate the bell with feeding time. With trauma, a connection between the traumatic event can be built causing one to subconsciously avoid the event from occurring again. For instance, if a person gets in a car accident, they may associate being in a car or driving with the crash, causing them to fear being in the car again. This is called PTSD or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. PTSD is a type of anxiety disorder that occurs after a traumatic event. When the traumatic event occurs, the person develops an association between environmental factors of the event and the event itself. The traumatic event becomes the unconditioned stimuli and how they react is the unconditioned response (LoBue, 2011). The difference between normal classical conditioning and PTSD is that the traumatic event only needs to occur once, whereas with classical conditioning the event must
Traumatic events incidentally was found to be the leading cause for depression and anxiety disorders by a study from the University of Liverpool. The most common mental illness caused by trauma is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The victims of PTSD are often left with guilt, a feeling of helpless, and fear long after the event had occurred. Similarly to hypermnesia, the victim feels as if they cannot move forward, feeling obsessed, in addition to having nightmares and flashbacks. The person would also develop a phobia that corresponds with the trauma. One suffering from PTSD may avoid activities or conversations that relate or remind the person of the incident as well (Boyes, Comer, Gould, Ogden, 2015). Often coexisting alongside PTSD and other anxiety disorders, trauma can also cause its victims to enter a state of depression. Depression being a mood disorder that causes persistent sadness and lack of desire (Mayo Clinic, 2015), it often worsens other illnesses when coexisting (Iliades, 2015). The depression doesn’t have a set timeframe of when it could take affect. The depression may take place during or after the trauma, even years later. To prove this, a consensus was performed by A. Negele, J. Kaufhold, L. Kallenbach, and M. Leuzinger-Bohleber. They had concluded that about 76% of chronically depressed adult patients reported to have extremely significant