Many people experience some level of anxiety in their day to day lives. Some may experience more than others, however, anxiety is an emotion that everyone deals with. Generally speaking, anxiety can be defined as a feeling of excessive fear or nervousness of current and or future events. We can describe the physical symptoms as tense and apprehensive, and furthermore persistent and at times uncontrollable.

Firstly, I would like to mention that although I do experience a lot of anxiety and nervousness, I do not like to define myself and my personality under these premises. Unfortunately many people end up focusing a lot of their mental space and energy on anxiety and many people let it fester on their minds 24/7.  In my experience with anxiety, most of the cause occurs right before a task that I need to complete. A common event that induces anxiety for students is obviously exams, projects, or assignments. For me, these do induce the strong level of unease and jitteriness tha anxiety produces. The worst level of anxiety that I ever experienced was when I went on my first ever date. For the entire day I felt anxious and extremely nervous and as the time approached closer to the time I was supposed to meet her, my body started to shiver like how our bodies shiver when it’s cold outside. My friends definitely noticed whenever I handed them stuff and it was very difficult to be calm. Fortunately though, the anxiety did go away during the date and at that moment I was calm again. Luckily I have been working on fixing this by talking to people more often, calling people more often (I would get very nervous whenever I needed to call someone), and being more expressive of my thoughts.

I would say these experiences of mine strongly reflect the material we covered about anxiety because my anxiety always occurs in anticipation of an event that I plan to do like on my first date, as mentioned in the powerpoint as well, my shivering and fearfulness was persistent and very uncontrollable as it happened all throughout the day up until the date itself. I would definitely define this state of mind as extremely excessive when comparing to how other people would have reacted and anticipated their first date, or any future event for that matter. Anxiety is definitely a nuisance and it hinders everyone’s interactions with the environment around them.

Ivan Pavlov was physiological doctor and an academic in field as well.  He became famous from a certain experiment in which the idea of classical conditioning was developed.  Classical conditioning is a type of learning in which an organism learns to associate stimuli, Pavlov was able to demonstrate this using a dog, a bell, and food. Before starting the experiment, Pavlov noticed that the food caused the dog to salivate.  He labeled the food as the unconditioned stimulus and the salivation as the unconditioned response. The reason for labels is to display that all the stimulus and the response are not manipulated by Pavlov. He would then condition the dog by ringing a bell when serving the dog food over a period of time.  The bell is labeled the neutral stimulus because the stimulus doesn’t serve any purpose besides being stimulus. Eventually the bell becomes conditioned stimulus because every time the dog hears a bell it assumes it is going to be fed. This results in the dog salivating everytime it hears the bell, which is conditioned response.  This was revolutionary for the time because it shows subconscious learning that can be examined.

My last year in highschool I took a psychology course and my teacher had us participate in a similar experiment to show just how real classical conditioning is.  The unconditioned stimulus in the experiment was exercise and unconditioned response was an increase in heart rate. We then incorporated the neutral stimulus, a bell, to signal the commencement of the exercise.  The exercise was only jumping jacks for thirty seconds but there was still a noticeable jump in heart rate. After ten trials of repetitively doing jumping jacks, we measure the student’s heart rate after simply ringing the bell.  As expected, her heart rate had increased almost as much as it had during the exercise. Similar to Pavlov’s experiment, the bell was the conditioned stimulus because it resulted in the conditioned response, the increase in heart rate.  Subconsciously her bodied recognized that it should increase heart rate because the bell means there is going to be physical activity. Although it doesn’t seem like she actually learned anything, her brain learned that it needs to increase heart rate in order to adapt to the current environment.

Encoding Failure is a term that refers to the brain’s occasional failure to create a memory link. According to the University of Cambridge, there exist 7 types of memory failure but here’s 2:

Repressive Erasure: This is when something is purposely erased. It was most commonly seen in the efforts of totalitarian regimes to “erase” the memory of people or things deemed ‘enemies of the state’. This was done by destroying artifacts, omitting references in writing, and forbidding any kind of information transmission on the banned thing. More subtly today, a group called the Futurists in Italy wanted to remove almost all of the museums in Italy. They wanted this because they felt like it was embodying a cult of the past that obfuscated appreciation for the present. To aestheticize the past meant opposing aestheticization of the everyday — airplanes, cars, technological advancements.

Prescriptive Forgetting: This type of forgetting is used when it is in “the best interest of all parties”. The Ancient Greeks utilized this when they were coming off of a civil war; they made it forbidden to remember all the crimes and wrongdoing perpetrated during the civil strife

Personal Application:

As a Christian, the idea of “forgetting” is a very common motif. In the Bible, it says the God forgets our sins that and that we in turn are supposed to forget the sins of others. In terms of what I mentioned earlier, this most directly correlates with “prescriptive forgetting”. The forgetting of sins is most salutary to both parties because there is no burden to be carried by the transgressor. I think Prescriptive Forgetting is very hard though because as humans we tend to hold grduges, but I think over the long term it’s so benefical.

Operant conditioning is the idea or concept that learning comes from adding rewards or punishments for a behavior. An example of this would be a student doing his homework every night knowing he will receive a piece of candy once it is completed. There are different elements associated with operant conditioning, like positive and negative reinforcement, which strengthen a desired behavior. Negative reinforcement is taking something adverse away to increase a desired behavior.  Punishment refers to the idea of taking away an undesired behavior. This can happen through positive punishment, and negative punishment. Positive punishment is adding something negative in order for the behavior to decrease or go away. An example of this would be getting hot sauce to the mouth by your parents if you say a curse word. This will decrease the amount of times you are likely to curse. Negative punishment is the idea of taking away something good to decrease a specific behavior. An example of negative punishment would be taking away recess for a student who didn’t do their work. You are removing something the child likes, which will prevent the child from performing the behavior a second time. The concept of operant conditioning  is used in so many places throughout the world. Humans use operant conditioning on animals they would like to tame. An example of this would be giving a dog a treat in order for it to do a specific trick for you. There are many behaviors developed today in mature adults that were specifically derived from an element in association with operant conditioning.  There are effects directly in response to the concepts of positive and negative punishment, and positive/negative reinforcement. It is important to note that this theory has lots of evidence provided through given examples and stories, and can be used at any moment to promote or take away a behavior.

Lecture 18 teaches us that a phobia is a persistent and irrational fear towards an object or situation that disrupts behavior. We learn that some people have social phobias and many random things. Many of you may know that triskaidekaphobia is the fear of the number 13, but do you know what emetophobia is? It is the fear of vomiting. Now you’re probably thinking no one likes vomiting, but it is much more than a dislike towards it.

I suffer from emetophobia and it is very debilitating. It started in 3rd grade. I woke up on the morning of the last day of the PSSAs, a standardized test for PA elementary and middle school students for the non PA people. I felt horrible, but the test is super mandatory so I went to school. Breakfast was served to keep our minds sharp for the test. I had Cinnamon Toast Crunch. As I finished the math section of the test, I suddenly felt worse. I couldn’t breathe and I kept burping. Then it happened. I threw up on my desk.

Since then, I am horrified of the idea of vomiting. This includes coughing too hard, getting the stomach bug, food poisoning, motion sickness and anything else. I sometimes will stay with a relative if someone in my house is remotely ill or mentions being sick in any way. I won’t hang out with friends for a week after they have been sick. I compulsively check expiration dates on anything with dairy to avoid food poisoning. I make my mom check my chicken twice to make sure it is fully cooked whether its at home or out to eat. At one point, I stopped eating all meat because I was so worried about salmonella. I still won’t eat salad since the lettuce incident with E. coli.

For years I had a taste aversion to Cinnamon Toast Crunch because it was the last thing I ate before I threw up. I know it was not food poisoning from the milk or the cereal but the thought still crosses my mind.

This phobia has very much affected my normal behavior and caused me to be a bit weird around, well, everyone. It caused me to be diagnosed with anxiety, but I have gotten a hold on it. Emetophobia still affects my life. I may not enjoy the compulsiveness, but I have not thrown up in 10 years so I think that is a bonus.

Classical conditioning is a theory coined by the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov. His theory is centered around the idea that a when an environmental stimulus is accompanied by a naturally occurring stimulus, a new learned response can be created. When looking at classical conditioning, it helps to segment conditioning into phases to better understand what is happening. Classical conditioning tends to be separated into “pre-” “during” and “post” phases (wording may vary).

Phase 1: Pre-conditioning

• • This phase requires that a naturally occurring stimulus be present to elicit a response.
    • In other words, a stimulus needs to result in an unconditioned response (UCR)

Phase 2: During Conditioning 

•  This phase requires that the naturally occurring stimulus be paired with a neutral stimulus
  • In other words, an unconditioned stimulus (UCS) needs to pair with a naturally occurring stimulus in order to become a conditioned response (CS)

Phase 3: Post Conditioning

• Once an association is made between the UCS and the CS, presenting the conditioned stimulus even by itself will evoke the conditioned response (CR). It no longer depends on the naturally occurring stimulus to be there

Personal Application

When I was about 7 years old, I would always catch my parents watching 24. 24 was a very popular television show about a government agent named Jack Bauer. One night my family was eating Chinese takeout (UCS) while watching an episode of 24. In the episode, Jack Bauer was eating Chinese food alone while on mission when all of a sudden he was dragged out of the restaurant and thrown in prison. The episode went on to show Jack Bauer being tortured as his captors attempted to solicit information from him. Watching something painful (naturally occurring stimulus) terrified me (UCR). For years after that evening, I stayed away from Chinese food (CS). Every time I was around it, terror gripped me (CR) and I was reminded of the horrific scene I witnessed as a kid.