Psychological approaches to understanding people
Dominic Upton in Introducing Psychology for Nurses and Healthcare Professionals, 2013
Classical conditioning (see Figure 2.2) is a process of learning whereby an initially neutral stimulus comes to elicit a particular response, as the result of being paired repeatedly with an unconditioned stimulus. So let us break this down: The food (in the demonstration above) is an unconditioned stimulus (UCS) because it naturally evokes an unlearned reflexive response (salivation) which is known as the unconditioned response (UCR).The sound of the laboratory assistant’s footsteps is a neutral stimulus that comes to be linked with the food when the two events repeatedly occur close together in time. Once the two events become associated with one another the footsteps become a conditioned stimulus.After satisfactory repetition this conditioned stimulus will produce a salivation response. When the salivation response is produced by the conditioned stimulus as opposed to the unconditioned stimulus, salivation becomes a conditioned response (CR).
Questions and Answers
David Browne, Brenda Wright, Guy Molyneux, Mohamed Ahmed, Ijaz Hussain, Bangaru Raju, Michael Reilly in MRCPsych Paper I One-Best-Item MCQs, 2017
Answer: C. Skinner’s ideas of radical behaviourism made the effects of the environment a central feature of learning. Operant conditioning is a form of learning in which behavioural frequency is altered through the application of positive and negative consequences. Thorndike preceded Skinner in identifying the relationship between appropriate behaviour and experiences of success and failure. Pavlov and Watson are associated with classical conditioning, the association of a neutral stimulus with an unconditioned stimulus such that the neutral stimulus comes to bring about a response similar to that originally elicited by the unconditioned stimulus. Pavlov performed experiments examining the idea that learning occurs when two events occur closely together. Watson demonstrated classical conditioning can give rise to phobia-like behaviour in a famous experiment involving an 11-month-old infant in which he paired a loud noise with the sight of a white rat, leading the child to fear the rat and also similar objects, an example of stimulus generalisation. Bandura advocated social cognitive learning theory, which argues that the influence of environmental events on the acquisition and the regulation of behaviour is primarily a function of cognitive processes. [E. pp. 417–20]
100 MCQs from Dr. Brenda Wright and Colleagues
David Browne, Selena Morgan Pillay, Guy Molyneaux, Brenda Wright, Bangaru Raju, Ijaz Hussein, Mohamed Ali Ahmed, Michael Reilly in MCQs for the New MRCPsych Paper A, 2017
Skinner’s ideas of radical behaviourism made the effects of the environment a central feature of learning. Operant conditioning is a form of learning in which behavioural frequency is altered through the application of positive and negative consequences. Thorndike preceded Skinner in identifying the relationship between appropriate behaviour and experiences of success and failure. Pavlov and Watson are associated with classical conditioning, the association of a neutral stimulus with an unconditioned stimulus such that the neutral stimulus comes to bring about a response similar to that originally elicited by the unconditioned stimulus. Pavlov performed experiments examining the idea that learning occurs when two events occur closely together. Watson demonstrated that classical conditioning can give rise to phobia-like behaviour in a famous experiment involving an 11-month-old infant, in which he paired a loud noise with the sight of a white rat, leading the child to fear the rat and also similar objects, an example of stimulus generalisation. Bandura advocated social cognitive learning theory, which argues that the influence of environmental events on the acquisition and the regulation of behaviour is primarily a function of cognitive processes. (15, pp 541–7)
Fear Learning in Genital Pain: Toward a Biopsychosocial, Ecologically Valid Research and Treatment Model
Published in The Journal of Sex Research, 2023
A final concern regarding fear conditioning research in genital pain is that we cannot simply assume that exteroceptive aversive stimuli operate the same way as interoceptive stimuli in genital pain-related fear learning. Women with genital pain most often experience pain in the outer third part of the vagina, exactly where the largest pressure is experienced during penetration (Farmer et al., 2013). This means that vaginal sensations at initial penetration are experienced as most painful. A large range of aversive exteroceptive stimuli have been used in the context of fear conditioning, but interoceptive signals that stem from within the body are less commonly investigated (Meulders, 2020). Whereas most traditional fear conditioning research has relied on exteroceptive – often arbitrary – visual and auditory stimuli as CS and US, there is a growing body of research on interoceptive conditioning in which the CS, US, or both are endogenous events that reflect subjective changes in bodily signals (Meulders, 2020). There are indications that associative learning involving interoceptive stimuli operates differently than exteroceptive conditioning, yielding specific effects (e.g., rather unconscious, slower acquisition, more fixed, and resistant to extinction) on the physiological regulation of responses (Van Diest, 2019). Given that penetration pain is an interoceptive cue, research on fear of penetration pain may reveal unique insights that will further advance our knowledge on interoceptive fear conditioning and potentially reveal new targets for interoceptive exposure treatment.
Future projection therapy: Techniques and case examples
Published in American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, 2022
Joseph Tramontana, Anna Sharkey, Savannah Hays
In the 1960s, behavioral therapies such as Behavior Modification became popular. Behavior therapy was based on the concepts of learning theory. The tenet is that there is the acquisition of a functional connection between an environmental stimulus and a subject’s response. In classical conditioning (Pavlovian or respondent) a stimulus elicits a response, and the subject emitting the response to the situation alters its frequency of occurrence in the future by congruity. In operant conditioning, reinforcement of the emitted response leads to learning desired responses. Skinner’s book About Behaviorism (1974) gave a good description of what was called the science of behavior. Eysenck (1960) gives a comprehensive review of behavioral approaches in treating neuroses, and Ullmann and Krasner (1966) edited a book titled Case studies in behavior modification which shows how behavioral approaches can be used to change behaviors with many other clinical issues.
The White Paper: Wilder Penfield, the Stream of Consciousness, and the Physiology of Mind
Published in Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, 2019
Penfield first invoked Pavlov in 1936, when he obtained an unexpected response from electrical stimulation of the cortex, which he later characterized as an experiential phenomenon, and which he concluded “may well be explained by the process which Pavlov termed ‘conditioning’“ (Penfield, 1938). Pavlovian conditioning was central to the transition of the uncommitted cortex to the interpretive cortex through experience and learning. This was so because Pavlov’s description of “learning as a process based on the establishment of conditioned reflexes in the cerebral cortex [of dogs]” was, according to Penfield also “valid for man” (Penfield, 1969, p. 136).5The full quote is, “Working with dogs, he [Pavlov] described learning as a process based on the establishment of conditioned reflexes in the cerebral cortex, and he showed that cortical excision would abolish each newly acquired conditioned reflex – the animal lost what he had learned. In man, such heedless cortical excision as he carried out would have produced hand paralysis, as well, or aphasia, but it was nor so with the paw, or the bark, of a dog. Pavlov’s basic suggestion, however, is valid for man – that learning depends upon the establishment of acquired reflexes in the cerebral cortex and related thalamus.” There can be no clearer statement on Penfield’s materialism, a decade before his death.
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