Reflective Paper #8: Applying Classical Conditioning
According to the National Institute of Mental Health in 2012, 30.5 % of people had arachnophobia– the fear of spiders ("Fear/Phobia Statistic," 2012). This fear was ranked third out of the top ten most common fears. Some people believe that this fear is learned by means of classical conditioning. If arachnophobia can be classically conditioned then there would need to be an unconditioned stimulus (UCS), an unconditioned response (UCR), a neutral stimulus (NS), a neutral response (NR), a conditioned stimulus (CS), and a conditioned response (CR). The unconditioned stimulus would be the feeling …show more content…
Stimulation discrimination may help prevent the subject from associating spiders with being tickled if the subject can differentiate between the feeling of being tickled and the feeling of a spider crawling on them.
APPLYING CLASSICAL CONDITIONING 3
Similarly, a pet can be trained using classical conditioning. For example, to train a dog to shake a paw the unconditioned stimulus is a dog treat and the unconditioned response would be eating the treat. The neutral stimulus would be grabbing the dog’s paw and saying “shake a paw” and the neutral response from the dog would be confusion. After repeating the neutral stimulus to get the dog into the habit of moving it’s paw, the conditioned stimulus would be saying “shake a paw” while bribing the dog with a treat and hopefully the conditioned response would be the dog giving the owner its paw. Stimulus generalization may occur after the dog has been trained a number of tricks and showing the dog a treat may cause it to perform a different trick, therefore saying “shake a paw” while showing the treat will cause stimulus discrimination by specifying which trick you would like the dog to