Fear of

Fear of

  • Submitted By: shogo
  • Date Submitted: 11/20/2008 10:20 AM
  • Category: Psychology
  • Words: 345
  • Page: 2
  • Views: 505

A very amusing, but rather unethical use of classical conditioning would be teaching a child to flinch and feel pain at the word “cookie”. In order to do this, one must follow the verbalization of the word “cookie” with great pain, by hitting them upside the head very hard, for example. In this case, the unconditioned stimulus is a smack in the head, and the unconditioned response is pain and flinching. The neutral stimulus is the exclamation “cookie!” After enough trials, the child will learn that the word “cookie” predicts a smack upside the head and thus pain and fear, making the word a conditioned stimulus resulting in the conditioned response of pain and flinching (fear) every time the experimenter says the word. Through even more trials, the child conditioned response will get closer and closer in magnitude to that of the pain and fear (unconditioned response) caused by the hit (unconditioned stimulus). Even if only one person in the child’s life says cookie and the hits them, generalization will likely occur and he will fear the word when anybody says it, from a deep voiced man to a squeaky woman. In order to increase the intensity of the conditioned response, the unconditioned stimulus can be made even more painful by either hitting harder or doing something more painful, like a punch in the nose. While the child might forever feel pain and flinch when they hear cookie, if the conditioning is done when they are young enough for this to become one of the first and most permanent things he learns, he will probably discriminate between the sound “cookie” and reading it on paper, even though they have the same linguistic meaning, because written language is learned differently than spoken language (temporal vs. occipital lobe). He will also, obviously, discriminate between the word “cookie” and the word “cake” because even though they are both sweets, it is the sound, not the meaning he is reacting to, thus the conditioned response will not show...

Similar Essays