Download Melody Demarest, a former bank teller at a Loveland bank, was shot

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Melody Demarest, a former bank teller at a Loveland bank, was shot in the chest and arm during
a robbery
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Four years later, she still had occasional nightmares and tried to avoid banks
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“I'm still scared to even go in banks…When I have to go in, I'm thinking I want to get in and get
out as fast as possible.”
- Is it rational for a person to have a fear of banks?
- We’re going to take a look at a form of learning that can cause phobias (irrational fears)
Classical Conditioning
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A type of learning in which one learns to link (associate) two or more stimuli and
anticipate events
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Ivan Pavlov's Experiments; Pavlov was studying digestion in dogs by giving them meat
and measuring the amount of saliva produced in the dog’s mouth.
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One day he noticed that the dog would begin salivating at the sight of the food
dish or even the sight of Pavlov; he realized that the dog had learned a new
behavior and he conducted more tests to see if he could teach the dog to
salivate in response to other objects
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For example, he taught the dog to salivate in response to a musical tone
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Let’s look at how this process of classical conditioning works
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Before conditioning (learning), the unconditioned stimulus (US) of food produces salivation (the
unconditioned response or UR). Unconditioned means unlearned; if you put meat in the dog’s
mouth, it’s going to salivate (it didn’t have to learn that behavior).
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A neutral stimulus, such as a tone, does not produce salivation (that’s why it’s called a NS)
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To teach the dog to salivate in response to the tone, we present the NS first, followed by the US
(meat), which produces the UR (salivation)
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If we do this several times, the dog will learn to associate the tone with the meat, and he will
salivate in response to the tone even if there’s no meat present
So now the tone becomes a CS and the salivation is a CR, because learning has taken place
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Let’s apply this to some real-world examples of classical conditioning in humans
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Food Aversions
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My son, Ryan, used to love hamburgers when he was younger, but one day he ate a
hamburger and then got very sick from the flu. To this day, he will not eat a hamburger.
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Let’s a take a look at how this food aversion was created by classical conditioning
(review diagram)
Sexual Fetishes – being aroused by a body part or object that isn’t normally associated with
sexual arousal; some people might be aroused by the smell of perfume or leather, or the sight of
high-heeled shoes or cowboy boots.
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A fetish could be acquired through classical conditioning (review diagram)
As we saw earlier, fears and phobias can also be learned through classical conditioning
- e.g., John Watson & Rosalie Rayner wanted to see if fears and phobias might be learned through
classical conditioning
- So in the 1920s they decided to try to condition a fear of rats in Little Albert (9 months old)
- Little Albert was the son of an employee in the clinic where Watson worked.
- They paired the sight of rat with a loud noise (hammer against steel bar).
- Afterwards, Little Albert cried and fell over
- (Review diagram)
- This fear generalized to other stimuli such as a rabbit, dog, even the experimenter's white
beard.
- Watson and Rayner never attempted to treat Little Albert to rid him of these fears.
- However, a graduate student by the name of Mary Cover Jones, who saw Watson’s lectures on the
Little Albert experiment, developed a behavioral therapy to treat phobias, and it’s still used today.