Psychological Conditioning

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Learning is quite an influential aspect of every organism’s lifetime. We learn through experience, which over time allows for a certain amount of change in our behaviour. The process of learning influences and alters the way we act, interpret, and perceive, and may effectively adjust our views on numerous subjects. If we are trained or become accustomed into acting a certain way, our behaviour may alter to allow for this new change in perception. The field of psychology is full of previous and recent studies which revolve around conditioning a subject. This method of conditioning is a learning process through which an organism relates a stimulus to another simultaneously occurring event. This process has been used for a very large number of studies with different topics and objectives, one of these topics being alcohol and drinking behaviour. The two following studies incorporate and test different conditioning techniques related to altering attitudes toward drinking behaviour. The objective of both studies is to determine whether alcoholism and drinking behaviour can be influenced either positively or negatively through conditional learning.

The first study, performed in the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Augusta, Georgia used a covert conditioning treatment on multiple subjects. Covert sensitization was used, which is sometimes referred to as aversion therapy. This type of behaviour modification allows the subject to “associate unwanted behaviour with negative stimuli using their imagination rather than actually experiencing these negative consequences” (Covert Sensitization in Alcohol Rehab). As it was explained to the patients of this study (Elkins, 1980), this procedure was designed to alter the drink...

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...an be concluded that these methods are valid forms of conditioning that prove to be effective in altering human behaviour. It has been proven that personal adaptation can result from conditioning the body. Furthermore, from the results of both studies, we can deduce that conditional learning of a subject can be quite influential to the individual’s drinking behaviour and attitude toward alcohol.

Works Cited

Elkins, R. L. (1980). Covert Sensitization Treatment of Alcoholism: Contributions of Successful

Conditioning to Subsequent Abstinence Maintenance. Addictive Behaviors, 5(1), 67-89.

doi:10.1016/0306-4603(80)90023-4

Havermans, R. C., Houben, K., & Wiers, R. W. (2010). Learning to dislike alcohol: Conditioning negative implicit attitudes toward alcohol and its effect on drinking behavior. Psychopharmacology, 211(1), 79-86. doi:10.1007/s00213-010-1872-1

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