Classical Conditioning

In 1913, an American psychologist, who happens to mark a milestone in the history of psychology, is a founder of Behaviorism- a School of Thought. John B. Watson was of the view that a human behavior was not the result of internal mental processes. Also, claimed that the process of Classical conditioning could explain all the aspects of a human behavior.

Now let’s have a little insight about how the idea of this Classical conditioning popped up. Like many great scientific discoveries, classical conditioning, also known as Pavlovian conditioning, was also discovered accidently. In1890, a Russian Physiologist Ivan Pavlov couldn’t help not notice an apparent bilious behavior of his dog, who would start salivating every time Pavlov entered the room, even without food. A decade later, after strenuous study, Pavlov took off with an idea that there are some reflexes present that does not need to be acquired by learning.

In the dog’s case, it is food which is the unconditional stimulus, on the contrary, the process of salivation is the unconditional response- in a behaviorists terms.
John Watson, completely denying the existence of consciousness or mind, was of the view that everything from speech to mental responses were patterns of Stimulus and Response.

He famously said
“Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations and the race of his ancestors” (Watson, 1924, p. 104)

The Dog Experiment

To prove the existence of an unconditioned response, Pavlov conducted an experiment with the dog. He presented the dog with food and checked for salivation. However, Pavlov noticed that Dog has developed an association with the Lab assistant who would take food for him on regular basis. He was sure of it because he observed that the same response would be triggered every time the lab assistant went into the room even without food. That was the moment he realized he had discovered something un-usual and decided to devote the rest of his career studying this type of learning.

The little part where the dog associated the lab assistant with food, was considered to be a learned behavior by Pavlov. He called it a learned behavior because he further noticed that dog would often do it, and at a certain point they would not, showing a change in their behavior. He believed that this kind of change in the behavior must be an outcome of learning.[sky]

In a behaviorist terms, the lab assistant was actually a neutral stimulus. He is called neutral because he has no response. Now what happened here was that the dog associated the neutral stimulus (Lab assistant) with unconditional stimulus (Food). Every time Neutral Stimulus (Lab assistant) came around, it triggered an unconditional response (Salivation). Also, once the neutral stimulus has become associated with the unconditioned stimulus, it becomes a conditioned stimulus (CS). The conditioned response (CR) is the response to the conditioned stimulus.

Phobias

Ivan Pavlov worked mainly on animals to prove the validity of classical conditioning. The question that if it applied to humans too, was answered by Watson and Rayner in 1920, who proved that it did by conducting an experiment

In this experiment, little Albert, a 9-month-old infant, was tested for his reactions to numerous stimuli such as a white rat, a rabbit, a monkey and various masks to which Albert show know response, and remained unemotional and impassive. Conversely, when a hammer was struck onto a steel bar behind his head, that startled Albert who burst into tears, this caused him to be afraid of the hammer and he loud noise made him cry.

A few months later, Albert was shown a rat immediately after which a hammer was struck against the steel bar behind his head, this was repeated a few times over every time making Albert cry. This caused him to associate the loud noise of the hammer hitting the steel bar with the rat. So a few days later, every time the rat was shown to Albert he experienced all the fear and started crying even when the hammer was not struck against the steel bar. Albert would try to crawl away each time he was shown the rat.

This experiment not only helped Watson and Rayner prove how the classical conditioning also applied to humans, but also came to a conclusion that you could create phobias in humans with classical conditioning. Phobia is an irrational fear, the one which is out of proportion to the danger. However, over the next few weeks it was observed that little Albert’s fear was a lot less marked. He fear faded away. This slowly dying out of a learned response is called extinction. However the influence remained for over a month. Over the years, Classical conditioning have been studied to its far of extends, and the more it was studied the more benefits were learnt of its implications. For instance, we can show the importance of classical conditioning from a very contemporary example.

Classical Conditioning in the Classroom

In classrooms, particularly, it is important for a teacher or a professor to make sure the students are attentive and gaining the most from the lessons delivered. This is up to a teacher to make sure that students to do. For this purpose they try to associate positive and efficient experiences with learning. Because if a student has a negative emotional association with learning in the class, like if a student is bullied, he would associate fear with school, he would obviously perform bad in school, have poor results or even form a phobia of schools. Or if a student is punished or humiliated by a teacher in the class, he might develop a disliking for that particular subject or period. And this kind of disliking could sojourn for the rest of their academic phase.