Personal Narrative Essay: My Fear Of Dogs

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My fear of dogs In this paper I will explain how and why I am afraid of dogs. I will describe what I learned and how it could have occurred through classical conditioning, operant conditioning and cognitive-social learning. I also will discuss the influence of media and prejudice on learning. Finally I will conclude my paper by comparing and contrasting classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and cognitive-social learning. When I was 5 years old, I had a terrifying experience. I was playing outside with a ball when a big Rottweiler came running up to me barking. I was scared of the loud barking and the Rottweiler coming close so fast, so I ran. By running of course, I made the dog chase after me. I was terrified. I thought the dog was going to eat me.…show more content…
The unconditioned response to this was that I got scared and tried to run away. After this experience the conditioned stimulus was just seeing a dog, and the conditioned response to seeing a dog was to get scared. Now I will explain how learning this fear could have occurred through operant conditioning. Since I was trying to run away from the dog, because I was so scared, the dog chased me. The consequence of this behavior was, that I became even more terrified. So by not running away the next time a dog came, and seeing it didn’t chase me because of that, it would have reinforced the behavior of not running away from dogs. If I had repeated this process on the base of the fixed ratio of schedule of reinforcements I would have learned not to run away from the dog when I was scared. Last I will explain how my learning could have occurred through cognitive-social learning. I could have learned to be scared of dogs trough this theory. For example, I could have seen my mother or other person I looked up to, get afraid of dogs and run away from it. Through observing this I already was
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