Psychology for Dummies (25 page)
Read Psychology for Dummies Online
Authors: Adam Cash
Tags: #Psychology, #General, #Body; Mind & Spirit, #Spirituality
Anger need not be destructive, as long as it is expressed appropriately and constructively. Research shows that children who appropriately express their anger have less emotional and social problems growing up. Infants and toddlers sometimes use anger as a signal that they’re frustrated and may need help with something, like eating.
In this part . . .
I
n Part IV, I introduce you to the extremely important contributions that Ivan Pavlov, the “father” of classical conditioning, has made to the field of psychology. I briefly discuss his classic experiments and provide some good examples (at least I think they’re good) designed to illustrate the basic principles of how humans learn. After talking about Pavlov and his dogs for a while, I introduce the second coming of learning theory, operant conditioning. I provide some basic definitions that cover the concept and some more edge-of-your-seat examples. Well, maybe they’re not that exciting, but they’re still pretty good.
In This Chapter
Conditioning made easy
Teaching an old dog new tricks
Making connections
H
ave you ever wondered why you get hungry for pizza when the doorbell rings? Maybe you don’t. If not, a pizza company has spent a lot of money on an ad campaign that doesn’t seem to be working. Why would you get hungry for pizza when the doorbell rings? The commercial presents the viewer with images of a pizza, melted cheese, and glistening pepperoni. This should whet your appetite at least a little bit. Then, a doorbell rings, and the pizza delivery person is at your door. The pizza people want you to think pizza when you hear the doorbell ring! How are they trying to do that?
Shifting focus from pizza to philosophy for a second can uncover the genius of the pizza makers in question. Well over a hundred years ago, a group of British philosophers tried to figure out the nature of thought. They considered thought to be a succession of integrated ideas that come together through experience. Any two sensory experiences that occur together will become associated with one another. When one experience or event happens, the other one happens automatically. These British philosophers called this process
associative learning
because events are associated with each other simply by occurring with each other. Every time I get on the freeway I run into traffic. Freeway → traffic. They go together. They’re associated!
In order for associations to form, they must follow two very important rules:
Contiguity:
Associations are only formed when events occur together. For example, I feel depressed when I wake up every Monday morning and think about going back to work. Therefore, for me, work and waking up have become associated.
Frequency:
The more often two (or more) events occur together, the stronger the association will be.
The genius behind the pizza commercials must have studied the British associationists. Or, he or she could have learned about associative learning in psychology class. The commercials try to use the law of contiguity to get you to associate the sound of a doorbell with being hungry for pizza. That way, every time the doorbell rings, you’ll think “Let’s order a pizza” because you’ll be hungry for it.
Kind of a gross title, huh? How would you feel if you conducted research on the salivation patterns of dogs? Personally, I would rather go to the dentist. That’s just me. But one brave man, Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov, was up for the job. Pavlov was actually studying digestion with dogs when he became interested in how the presentation of food automatically activated the salivation response in the dogs that he was studying. He found that the formation of saliva was automatic.
Try it. Think about something really tasty and see if your mouth waters automatically. Did it work? It should have because salivation is a reflexive response to food. It’s the body’s way of preparing to receive food. Saliva helps break the food down into digestible bits.
Pavlov constructed a device to collect the saliva directly from the dogs’ salivary glands as the glands went to work. He could then measure how much saliva the dogs reflexively produced. Picture a dog strapped into a cage with a tube attached to its salivary glands and this wacky scientist counting each drop. Not even Hollywood could have come up with a more eccentric scene.
At this point, Pavlov was probably happy with his research, but one day, he noticed something strange — the dogs salivated sometimes even when the food wasn’t presented. What was going on? Was something else causing the salivation? Pavlov came up with an associationist explanation. The dogs had learned to associate other stimuli with the food. But what? Pavlov conducted a whole series of experiments to figure out how the dogs had learned to automatically associate non-food stimuli with food in a way that produced salivation. A typical experiment went something like this:
1. Pavlov placed his dogs in their cages with the saliva tubes attached to the dogs’ salivary glands.
2. He rang a bell and observed whether the dogs salivated or not. He found that they didn’t.
3. Then, he rang the bell, waited a few seconds, and then presented the food to the dogs. The dogs salivated.
4. He repeated the bell plus food presentation several times. These pairings are called
trials.
5. After Pavlov was satisfied with the number of trials, he presented the bell alone, without the food.
6. He found that the bell by itself then produced salivation.
Pavlov’s discovery became known as
classical conditioning.
After conducting his experiments, he outlined four necessary components in classical conditioning:
Unconditioned responses (UR):
Pavlov’s dogs automatically, or reflexively, salivated when presented with food. They didn’t have to learn or be conditioned to salivate in the presence of food. Pavlov called this response the unconditioned, or not-learned response. It happened without learning. Pizza companies count on the image of their tasty pizzas automatically making you feel hungry for pizza. It’s probably a pretty safe bet, unless you’ve just eaten a huge dinner. That’s why pizza companies don’t usually show commercials just after dinnertime — they usually show the commercials before or during dinner.
Unconditioned stimuli (US):
The food that Pavlov presented to his dog is called the unconditioned stimulus. The US is the thing that causes or produces the unconditioned response. Food → Salivation. It’s that easy!
Conditioned stimuli (CS):
The bell that Pavlov rang in a typical experiment is called the conditioned stimulus. It was
conditioned
or associated with the food through the process of pairing trials. The idea is that after enough trials, the conditioned stimulus will produce the desired response on its own.
Conditioned responses (CR):
Once the CS produces the UR on its own, the desired response is called the conditioned response. In symbolic form, it looks something like Table 8-1.
Table 8-1 Classical Conditioning Trial Number Stimuli US → UR (food automatically produces salivation) 1 CS + US → UR (bell + food produces salivation) 2 (bell + food) 3 (bell + food) ... (bell + food a few more times) 10 CS → CR (bell alone produces salivation)