PS124 Week 8 Discussion

Topic Instructions:

In this unit, you are examining how people learn information, as well as how they remember it. Behaviorism is a school of thought in psychology that attempts to explain learning through different types of associations and conditioning. Think about how this type of learning occurs in your own life, as well as your own memory processes.

Choose one of the forms of learning that you read about in your text: classical conditioning, operant conditioning, or observational learning. Give a specific example of how this form of learning goes on in your life or the life of someone you know.

Explain how this example relates to this style of learning, with regards to associations (classical conditioning), shaping (operant conditioning), or reasons for social imitation (observational learning).

Describe what type of memory process you think may have occurred here and why. (For example, implicit, explicit, effortful processing, or automatic processing are types of memory processes.)

Discussion Text:

Ah, …

I have chosen classical conditioning for the form of learning that I am most fascinated with, as it was a method my parents both used with training their children.  By pairing an activity we didn’t like, such as sitting in the car for a long time without breaks, with outcomes like going to an amusement park while they did a different activity (it was the 1970’s and I’m not defending their actions), we learned to associate mom and dad wanting to go to the Mormon Temple with having fun at Celebrity Lanes (Myers, 2014).  This is a broad example, but there were plenty of other examples they used to train us.  If we performed acceptably at church, we were rewarded with lunch (associating food as a reward for positive behavior) (Myers, 2014).  If we broke a dish, even if it was an accident, we knew the outcome was going to be a spanking which had the effect of being very careful with the dinnerware.  

Pavlov was a name that was spoken in our house quite often and the brother directly older than me used to conduct his own “experiments” on me and considered me his personal Pavlov’s dog (Crash Course, 2014).  This had its own set of issues as I developed in school because the traits that were being taught and enforced at school were not the same traits that were being reinforced at home.  Before making the decision to break the cycle on my own, I had developed into a well-trained servant and I was terrified to both fail and to let on that I understood what was going on. I had developed unhealthy coping mechanisms and as a result have spent years working on changing the internal recordings in my head. For years, I never thought I was smart enough to go back to school and with hard work at changing that conditioning, here I am today, in class, participating in discussion!

The effect this has had on my memory on a personal level, is that much like Pavlov’s dog (Crash Course, 2014), I still have visceral reactions to smells, sounds and feelings.  I think that classical conditioning lies at the heart of PTSD in many ways, since what is learned is associated fear and that fear can be triggered later by stimulus outside the control of the individual which can lead to heightened distress.  Often knowing I am in the middle of an attack isn’t enough to logic my way out of it, because my brain has sent all the wrong signals out to my body and I have to address the physical impact that the conditioning has left behind.  This has also led me to have very specific feelings about pranks, practical jokes, scaring people because it’s supposed to be funny, and even physical comedy that includes physical abuse.  I’ve been conditioned well enough that these things are not funny to me; however, they may be perfectly hilarious to someone else.

Crash Course. (2014, April 21). How to Train a Brain-Crash Course Psychology #11 [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qG2SwE_6uVM

Myers, D. (2014). Exploring psychology (Ninth ed.). New York: New York. Worth Publishers.