Introduction to Approaches in Psychology Essay 1

Introduction to Approaches in Psychology 1 - Essay Example Pavlov who trained dogs to salivate in response to two stimuli, noise or light, and food or a sour solution. John B. Watson, considered as the father of behaviourism, conducted an experiment with an 11-month-old child, Albert. He presented the child with a loud frightening bang and a rat at the same time. After six or seven repetitions of the noise and rat together over a week, the child became afraid of the rat, which he was not earlier. 1. Conditioned fear and anxiety – the phobias that many people experience are due to conditioning. We can consider an example of a child and his father travelling in a plane. The father jokes about how the plane can crash. Since he finds it very funny, he decides to say it whenever they travel in a plane. Many years later, even though the child has grown up, he is afraid to travel in a plane. Conditioning has caused the fear. 2. Advertising – In a beer advertisement featuring a young attractive woman wearing a bikini, the woman (US-unconditioned stimulus) evokes a mildly aroused feeling (UR-unconditioned response) in most men. The beer is associated with the classic conditioning effect. (Classical Conditioning, 1996.) Waschulewski-Floruss H, Miltner W, 1994, investigated whether experimental pain responses can be conditioned using auditory stimuli in a differential trace conditioning paradigm in 16 healthy subjects. An intracutaneous electrical stimulus applied to the left middle-finger (10 ms duration) was the UCS. Tones of 1000 and 1400 Hz were used as CS+ and CS-, respectively. A trace conditioning paradigm was used with an 800 ms interval between CS and UCS. Twenty nine electrode sites recorded somatosensory event related potentials (SEP) and auditory event related potentials (AEP). Subjective pain reports were noted. The results revealed significant differences of the subjective sensations between the CS+ and CS-, but not in the amplitudes and latencies of the P50, N100, P200, and P300 AEP