2. Real Life Situations
Learning to like
Learning to fear
Accounting for taste
Reacting to medical treatments
Prejudice
Phobias
Advertising
3. Learning to Like
Where do sentimental feelings
come from?
Objects have been associated in
the past with positive feelings.
5. Learning to Fear
An 11-month old boy – named
“Albert” – was conditioned to
fear a white laboratory rat
Each time he reached for the
rat, Watson made a loud
clanging noise right behind
Albert
7. Learning to Fear
Albert’s fear generalized to
anything white and furry
◦Including rabbits and Santa
Claus
8. Unlearning Fear
Counter conditioning
The process of pairing a
conditioned stimulus with a
stimulus that elicits a response
that is incompatible with an
unwanted conditioned response.
9. Unlearning Fear
Counter conditioning
Another child’s fear of
rabbits was removed by
pairing the stimulus which
elicited fear with a stimulus
that elicited happiness.
11. Unlearning Fear
Flooding is a behavioral fear-
reduction technique based on
principles of classical
conditioning. Fear-evoking stimuli
are presented continuously in the
absence of actual harm so that fear
response are extinguished.
12. Unlearning Fear
Systematic desensitization is a
behavioral fear-reduction
technique in which as hierarchy
of fear-evoking stimuli is
presented while the person
remains relaxed.
13. Accounting for Taste
Classical conditioning can
also explain how we learn to
like and dislike many foods
and odours.
14. Accounting for Taste
Researchers have taught
animals to dislike foods or
odours by pairing them with
drugs that cause nausea or
other unpleasant symptoms.
15. Accounting for Taste
Humans also quickly learn
to associate illness with food
even when the food is not
the cause of becoming sick.
16. Reacting to Medical Treatments
Stimuli associated with drug
treatments that produce nausea can
become conditioned stimuli,
creating problems for cancer
patients undergoing chemotherapy.
17. Reacting to Medical Treatments
Non-drug treatments, such as placebos,
are a beneficial application of classical
conditioning, through association with
real drugs.
18. Prejudice
Prejudice—the Clark Study in the
1930’s and Powell-Hopson &
Hopson in the 1980’s illustrate how
prejudice can be classically
conditioned through repeated
pairings of characteristics or traits
with one group of people.
19. Phobias
Phobias—through the
application of Watson’s
experiment and understanding
of conditioned emotional
responses (CER), we can
understand irrational fears and
how to treat them.
21. Advertising
Advertising pairs neutral stimuli
(the product) with positive
conditioned stimuli (models, sex,
fun)
The reverse can also be true when
creating negative associations such
as in political advertising
22. Applying Classical Conditioning
Conditioned Fears
◦We have preferences for some
fears
They are learned more quickly
and the associations last longer,
even during the extinction phase
23. Applying Classical Conditioning
Social Behaviors
◦People form strong positive
and negative attitudes toward
neutral objects by virtue of
their links to emotionally
charged stimuli
25. Classical Conditioning in Humans
Phobia: Intense, unrealistic, irrational
fear of a specific situation or object
(e.g., arachnophobia, fear of spiders)
Conditioned Emotional Response
(CER): Learned emotional reaction to a
previously neutral stimulus
26. Classical Conditioning in Humans
Desensitization: Exposing phobic
people gradually to feared stimuli
while they stay calm and relaxed
Vicarious Classical Conditioning:
Learning to respond emotionally to
a stimulus by observing another’s
emotional reactions
