Classical Conditioning Essay

Classical conditioning is the first type of learning to be discovered and studied by behaviorists. In classical conditioning, no new behaviors are learned, but rather associated or paired with something else. In the early 1900’s a Russian physician and physiologist, Ivan
Pavlov, was studying digestion in dogs, when he observed something remarkable about their behavior. Pavlov built a mechanism to measure the salivation of dogs when they were fed a meat powder. He monitored their natural reaction to the powder by attaching tubes to their salivary glands. Pavlov soon noticed that his dogs began salivating when they observed a sight, sound, or smell that they had come to associate with being fed. After observing the dogs’ association, he

Unlike Pavlov’s dogs that stopped salivating when the bell stopped, the child would continue to be afraid of these things because we are hard wired to avoid things that we fear or that may bring us harm. Without being unconditioned to the response, the child would likely go through life being afraid of the conditioned stimulus. Cases of classical conditioning can be observed in our everyday lives. About two years ago I adopted a kitten from a local family. The kitten was an outside cat in which the family fed dry cat food. When I brought the kitten home, I began feeding her twice a day, a wet cat food. I opened the cans with an electric can opener when I fed her, the sound would always frighten her away. She would run and hide, and I would have to try and coax her out from under my bed, or where ever else she decided to take refuge. The electric can opener was the unconditioned stimulus (UCS), and her fear of the can opener was her natural, unconditioned response (UCR).
After a few days, whenever I opened her cat food she would wait until the can opener stopped and sly into the kitchen after a minute or two once she was certain there was no threat to