Question

In the Week 3 lectures, you learned about some basic classical conditioning phenomena.  Apply your understanding of basic classical conditioning phenomena to the following situation:

Your little sister has begun to cringe at the sight of your brother because he always slams the door. You would like for her to stop cringing at her brother

Finally, describe how you could you disrupt extinguishing the CR during the extinction procedure? What is this procedure called?

Answer 1

B.F. Skinner's classical conditioning is a learning procedure in which a neutral conditioned stimulus (CS) is repeatedly paired with a biologically influential unconditioned stimulus (US), which is naturally capable of producing unconditioned response (UR). This leads to the evocation and learning of a behavioral response known as a conditioned response (CR). Thus, the conditioned response is the learned response to the previously neutral conditioned stimulus.

In classical conditioning, a learned response can be unlearned by the process of extinction. Extinction is a technique in which a conditioned stimulus is not further associated with the unconditioned stimulus. In other words, the conditioned stimulus is presented alone, due to which the conditioned response gradually fails to exist. So, it can be said that the strength of the conditioned stimulus alone decreases to produce the conditioned response, thereby reducing and eliminating the strength of the conditioned response to exist independently.

In the above-mentioned situation, the gradual elimination of the response of the sister's cringing at the brother could take place by not associating the brother as an individual with the same slamming the door (unconditioned stimulus). In other words, if the brother stops slamming the door, which naturally evokes sister's cringing at the brother, the conditioned response of cringing at the very sight of the brother (conditioned stimulus) will fade away gradually, leading to extinction of the conditioned response. The process of extinction of the CR can be facilitated by a process called habituation. Habituation is the repeated subjection to a conditioned stimulus, causing one to become used to it or habituated to the same. Precisely speaking, habituation makes it easy to ignore the conditioned stimulus, thereby facilitating the extinction of the conditioned response.

But the process of extinction can be disrupted by the strength of the original conditioning. In this regard, it is important to note that longer the conditioning, more is the magnitude of the conditioned response, which makes the same more resistant to extinction. So, if the sister's cringing at the brother was firmly established by a long period of active conditioning taking place by the association of the slamming of the door by the brother (unconditioned stimulus) and the very sight of the brother (conditioned stimulus), the CR may become extremely resistant to extinction. This will disrupt the process of extinction.