Application of classical conditioning to humans

There is evidence that classical conditioning can explain how some human behaviours are learned and unlearned.

Phobias: Behavioural therapy

A phobia is persistent irrational fear of an object, situation, or activity that the person feels compelled to avoid. And that is only the start of it. Phobias can interfere with your ability to work, socialize, and go about a daily routine. People who have phobias are often so overwhelmed by their anxiety that they avoid the feared objects or situations. For most people, the simple pleasures of life are striped from them. Symptoms of a phobia include the following:
• Feeling of panic, dread, horror, or terror
• Recognition that the fear goes beyond normal boundaries and the actual threat of danger
• Reactions that are automatic and uncontrollable, practically taking over the person’s thoughts
• Rapid heartbeat, shortness of breath, trembling, and an overwhelming desire to flee the situation – all the physical reactions associated with extreme fear

A phobia can be explained as a learned assoication between a conditioned stimulus and the conditioned response of fear.

For example:

UCS (e.g. sudden noise)		UCR (e.g. fear response)
UCS (e.g. sudden noise) + CS (e.g. spider)		UCR (e.g. fear response)
CS (e.g. spider)		CR (e.g. fear response)

For example, in Watson’s experiment, Little Albert developed a phobia of white rats (and other furry objects) as a result of pairing the white rat with a loud bang. The phobia could have been extinguished by repeatedly exposing Little Albert to the white rat without the loud bang.

List of phobias

Evaluation

• Classical conditioning is an important mechanism in human learning. It helps us to explain the reactions we have to stimuli in the world around us due to prior associations such as dentists with pain. Understanding that phobias and fear responses as are only learned behaviors (as shown by Watson in the Little Albert experiments) allows us to use techniques such as COUNTER-CONDITIONING to replace this stimulus-response connection of fear with a more adaptive response such as relaxation.
• When practical applications from a theory are found to have value, this suggests that the theory is valid.
• Although conditioning can explain the rise of phobias, it is not clear to what extent it can explain the learning of more complex human behaviour patterns. Evidence suggests a more sophisticated language-based form of learning is available to humans (Dugdale & Lowe, 1990).
• Classical conditioning has been demonstrated in many different studies so results are reliable
• However most human learning is not based on classical conditioning, and behaviourists such as Watson overplayed its importance. Most people would no longer subscribe to his view that there is no such thing as a human mind, and seen thinking and emotions as important as behaviour (the actions).
• In laboratory studies of classical conditioning a passive animal is presented with various conditioned and unconditioned stimuli. In real life, on the other hand, learning typically involves the human interacting actively with the environment so the results cannot be generalised to humans.
• Classical conditioning mechanisms only explain how there is an association between stimui and reflexive actions. This does not explain all behaviours.

You can extinguish a phobia through:

Systematic Desensitisation is a type of counter-conditioning; developed by Joseph Wolpe.
It consists of three steps. They are:
• Introducing relaxation to the client. The client sits in a comfortable chair, tenses and relaxes each of the body muscles, this results in relaxation.
• Building an anxiety hierarchy. In this step, anxiety scenes are introduced, related to the client’s phobia. The client comes up with anxious scenes and they are rated on a 100 point scale.
• Getting anxious on a relaxed state. The therapist would start with the lowest rating scale and moves upwards, to the highest. For example, if the client has a phobia about snakes, the therapist first show him a picture of a snake, when the clients relaxation response had been conditioned to this stimulus, they move to the next stage.

UCS (e.g. deep muscle relaxation)		UCR (e.g. relaxation)
UCS (e.g. deep muscle relaxation) + CS (e.g. spider)		UCR (e.g. relaxation)
CS (e.g. spider)		CR (e.g. relaxation)

Click here to try an interactive systematic desensitisation animation

Evaluation of systematic desensitisation:

• systematic desensitisation seems to work but is better for small phobias than major ones such as agoraphobia.
• the success of systematic desensitisation is evidence that the phobia might have been caused by classical conditioning.
• to benefit you need a good imagination in order to maintain the relaxation response, they also need to transfer their learning to real-life situations, away from any institution where they might be recieving treatment.
• it is claimed that systematic desensitisation is only a way of treating maladaptive behaviour and is not dealing with the cause of the problem such as a phobia, it is better used alongside other forms of therapy.
• it is only useful for problems that link to natural responses, such as fear response, and does not work for all examples of adaptive behaviour.

Click here for notes on systematic densensitisation

instructions on how to systematically desensitise yourself!

Other ways of treating phobias:

Counter conditioning

A good example of counter-conditioning was done by Mary Cover Jones in 1924. A 3-year-old boy, called Peter had a rabbit phobia. Jones used counter-conditioning to get rid of Peter's phobia. Firstly she showed Peter a candy, and then brought a rabbit closer to him, nearly every day for 2 months. Over the months, Peter became less fearful of rabbit. At the end Peter was playing with the rabbit, Peter associated candy with rabbit, this means that un-pleasant stimuli are replaced with pleasant ones. Mary Cover Jones was arguably the first behavioral therapist.

Aversion Therapy:

The aim of aversion therapy is to make a pleasurable (unwanted) behaviour, unpleasurable. When the mind connects that behaviour with unpleasantness, it gradually gets rid off that behaviour. For example, alcoholics are given a drug which induces vomiting if alcohol is ingested. The stimulus that produces an undesirable response (alcohol) is repeatedly paired with a noxious or aversive stimulus (vomiting) and until the alcoholic learns or is conditioned to avoid or “be aversive to” alcohol. Those of you who have seen the movie “A Clockwork Orange” will have seen a particularly dramatic, noxious, and probably unethical application of aversion therapy

questions for you to answer!