Static Electricity Shock as Classical Conditioning; Somnambulism as Nrem Event

685 Words3 Pages
Umar Al-Sheikh California Southern University 1. Lately you have been getting a shock of static electricity every time you touch a door handle. Now there is a hesitation in your door-opening movements. Analyze this situation in terms of classical conditioning. Classical conditioning is concerned with learning by association, and refers to the conditioning of reflexes. The principles of classical conditioning were first outlined by Pavlov, and were then adopted by behaviorists, such as Watson, who attempted to use them to explain how virtually all of human behavior is acquired. Ivan Pavlov was a physiologist who, while studying the salivation reflex, found that the dogs he was using for his experiments would sometimes start salivating before the food had reached their mouths, often at the sight of the food bucket. Clearly the dogs had learnt to associate new external stimuli, such as sights and sounds, with the original stimulus, food, that caused the salivation reflex. In a series of thorough and well controlled experiments, Pavlov found many new stimuli could be associated with reflexes, and went on to introduce terms for, and investigated many aspects of, the conditioning process. When you touch a door handle and you get an electric shock, the immediate response of removing your hand from the handle is automatic reflex. Once you have got an electric shock from the door handle, then you are more reluctant to open the door, thinking of the electric shock may happen again. The conditioned emotional response (CER) which is fear in this case, is controlled by the amygdala in the brain. The door handle becomes the conditional stimulus that triggers fear of electric shock. Electric shock is the unconditional stimulus as it does not always happen when you touch the door handles. In 1941, B.F Skinner and William Kaye Estes demonstrated the conditioned fear

More about Static Electricity Shock as Classical Conditioning; Somnambulism as Nrem Event

Open Document