Author: Grace Milan

In the 1900’s, neurologist Sigmund Freud developed what is known as psychoanalysis, emphasizing the relationship between unconscious conflict and past traumatic events. Freud believed that a person’s experiences as a child greatly influence the type of personality traits and psychological problems they will face later in life. Fear is among the most frequent types of emotions originating from experiences one faces in the past, often expressed as certain phobias later in life. To this day, I suffer from Arachnophobia, more commonly known as the fear of heights. In order to fully understand the reasoning behind this ongoing fear, I will give an explanation of the sympathetic nervous system and the role it plays. 

 

In the presence of fear, our bodies tend to respond with what is commonly known as “fight-or-flight” response. This response to stress associated with specific psychological actions within the brain’s sympathetic nervous system, which is driven through a series of interconnected neurons. It is located within the spinal cord, allowing the rest of the body to function according to the situation at hand, whether it be a fight or flight reaction. The sympathetic nervous system is what stimulates neurons to react in response to fear.  

 

This reaction through the release of the body’s sympathetic neurons relates to Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis as it emphasizes unconscious conflict and past events. When I was younger, my mom and I went on a trip to Yosemite, during which we hiked up Half Dome. Once we reached the top, a young girl walked toward an area with bushes surrounding one side. Little did she know there was a slit down the side of the cliff that could only be seen from the opposite side of the bushes. The girl was no more than 2 feet away from falling through the rock before my mom saw from the other side and ran as fast as she could to hold the girl back; she was successful. In this situation, my mom’s sympathetic nervous system entered the “flight” mode, releasing a rush of neurons and adrenaline in order to save the girl’s life.  After witnessing this near-death experience first-hand, I have never been able to face open heights, as that early childhood experience influenced my psychological development of a phobia.

Organisms naturally process new information through daily experiences and observations. This concept may be referred to as biological preparedness, when the mind sequentially connects experiences in order to learn by association. However, there are many different ways that the brain can be conditioned to form these connections. Classical conditioning is a learning theory discovered by Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov. In general terms, this type of learning associates an environmental stimulus with a naturally occurring stimulus in order to produce a new learned response in a person or animal. Classical conditioning can be broken down into stages before, during and after conditioning to better understand how organisms develop a response to stimuli. The chart below pictures the general relationship between stimulus and response in each stage of classical conditioning that can be applied to the Little Albert experiment example discussed in the next paragraph. 

Pavlov found that objects or events could trigger a conditioned response, which was further proven in this experiment with Little Albert. Before conditioning, the baby would hear a loud noise (unconditioned stimulus / US) and naturally begin to cry (unconditioned response / UR). He was also separately shown a white rat before conditioning but had no response to it. During conditioning, the baby heard the loud noise  (US) at the same time that he was shown a white rat (neutral stimulus), making the baby cry (UR) in the presence of both. After showing him the white rat each time a loud noise was played, the baby eventually began to cry whenever the white rat was shown even when a loud noise wasn’t played. This means that the white rat turned from being a neutral stimulus into a conditioned stimulus (CS) and the crying became the conditioned response (CR). 

This past summer, my family and I got a new puppy. The puppy was not trained at the time so my family and I had to condition it to behave and follow certain commands. In order to get her to sit down when we did a certain hand gesture, we decided to use treats as incentive. Before conditioning, the puppy would see the treat (US) and jump up to try to get it (UR). During conditioning, we showed the puppy the treat (US) at the same time as we did the hand gesture (neutral stimulus) but placed her into a sitting position when she tried to jump up on us (UR) and didn’t give her the treat until she was in that position. After doing this for a while, the puppy eventually learned to sit (CR) each time we did the hand gesture (CS) because she eventually associated the hand gesture to getting rewarded with food.  

Sources: 

Trimmer, Lisa. “Learning: Classical Conditioning.” PlayLearnParent, 6 Oct. 2011

Neese, Brian. “Consumer Behavior Theories: Pavlovian Theory.” Husson University, 26 Aug. 2019