Month: November 2019

Classical Conditioning, Phobias and White Coat Syndrome

Classical conditioning is a type of learning in which an individual learns to associate stimuli. For example, if someone sees lightning, they expect thunder. Therefore, whenever they see lightning, they wince because they are anticipating thunder. Meanwhile, phobias are a persistent or irrational fear of an object or situation that disrupts behavior. Both phobias and classical conditioning relate to my white coat syndrome. White coat syndrome is the phenomenon where people experience a higher than normal blood pressure in clinical settings, mostly due to anxiety. In my case, I become very anxious whenever I get a physical.

My white coat syndrome relates to classical conditioning because I associate the stimuli of the doctor’s office with anxiety. I think this is because whenever I visit the doctor’s I know that I am going to be uncomfortable and may have to get a shot. My unconditioned stimulus was getting a shot, and my unconditioned response was to become fearful. Since I associate the doctor’s office with shots, the doctor’s office can be classified as my conditioned stimulus. And finally, my conditioned response is anxiety towards the conditioned stimulus which is the doctor’s office.

Knowing that my white coat syndrome is linked to classical conditioning is very relieving because it assures me that my anxiety is associated only with this particular setting. I generally do not become too anxious when I stand near a cliff or speak in public. This is because I never had negative experiences with the two. Therefore, I do not have a fearful reaction to the stimuli of heights or public speaking.

My white coat syndrome can also be related to phobias because my anxiety is irrational and disrupts my behavior. There is no reason that I should be afraid of the doctor’s because it is safe, and my anxiety causes me to become too nervous. Although my white coat syndrome can be classified as a phobia, it is a very mild one. While most phobias are persistent, I managed to calm myself down and lower my blood pressure to a normal level. My behavior may be disrupted by my nervousness, but I can still communicate with my doctor and perform the tasks necessary to complete my physical. If I was not able to calm myself down and had a complete panic attack, then I would classify my phobia as severe.

Extinction is the process in classical conditioning in which a conditioned response is gradually reduced because the unconditioned stimuli no longer follows the conditioned stimuli. In order for my white coat syndrome to end, I need to no longer associate the doctor’s office, my conditioned stimuli, with shots and uncomfortable situations, my unconditioned stimulus. Fortunately, the next time I get a physical I will most likely not need a shot. As a result, there will no longer be an unconditioned stimulus and my conditioned response of anxiety will be less.

 

Sensory Adaptation

One topic that we covered in class is sensory adaptation. Sensory adaptation is when someone experiences a stimulus and your sensitivity to this stimulus decreases over time usually to the point of you no longer even noticing it at all. In class he related it to putting on a bandaid and sometime later you can no longer feel it. This reminds me of when I got braces and all of the things that lead up to them and the things that come after them. When it was first decided that I needed braces I had to get what is called an expander. Its basically this metal bridge-like object that connects to your two back teeth and slowly pushes them apart spacing out your teeth. And once I had it everyday or every other day I had to turn it with a key which would expand it further. I remember it being extremely uncomfortable and sometimes painful at the beginning of the day and not hurting at all by lunch time. Similarly, when I first got my braces they felt really weird and awkward having all this extra metal in my mouth, but a few weeks later I wouldn’t even be able to tell the difference. Lastly, there’s the retainer and just like the the other two steps (and the couple that I skipped), the retainer is very uncomfortable when you first put it in, especially if you stop wearing it for some time, but once you wear it for some time it does not bother you at all. This is a perfect example of sensory adaptation. Thee are all things that you cannot help but notice at first and then over time you may forget that they are there at all. This is also like selective attention. Your brain assesses that these stimuli do not require any focus and neglects them in favor of more important stimuli.

I accidentally published this to the wrong site on my account initially.

Classical Conditioning

Classical conditioning is where you learn to associate stimuli. This is something that happens to me all the time but one specific example is that I used to listen to a specific playlist every time I played a certain videogame. After about a week or so every time I played that game I would think of those songs and any time I heard any of those songs I would think of that game. There are still times now that I will hear a song and it will trigger memories of things I used to do when I heard it. This is a perfect example of classical conditioning. My brain associated the two stimuli and now whenever I encounter one I think of the other.

Phobias!!!

A phobia is an irrational fear of an object. In class, we often talked about people’s fears and how they adjust their life in order to avoid that thing. We also talked about exposure therapy and ways people can overcome the fear in order to continue on with a normal life. Exposure therapy allows a person to come in contact with the object they are afraid of in a controlled environment for the purpose of the person becoming more accustomed to the fear. 

In my experience, I have an irrational fear of balloons. I used to not be able to think about a balloon without having a panic attack. To this day, I don’t know what caused the fear or when I realized that it appeared. I never formally went to an aversion therapy but I still carry the fear with me to this day. How I overcame some of my fear was by slowing being exposed to the fear through different situations. All four years of high school I was head of the spirit club committee which meant decorating for school events with balloons. As the years went on I became less afraid of them due to the high volume of them I was around all the time. I still jump when people squeeze them and get abnormally anxious yet, I have come to a better relationship and coping mechanisms for it. 

Without realizing it, I did my own version of exposure therapy. I put myself into controlled situations where I knew what was going on and when it got too much I could leave or make someone else handle what I couldn’t. Although I still experience fear, it doesn’t alter my life like it used to. I can function more normally and don’t have to eject myself from places where blown up balloons are or might be.

Phobias

A phobia is an extreme or irrational fear of something. Having a phobia can completely change the way one lives their life. For example, the video shown in class of the lady who had a phobia of spiders. She altered her life to revolve around being protected from spiders. Some may be squeamish when it comes to certain things, like blood for example, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they have a phobia. Phobias cause people to avoid every day situations or events so they do not come in contact with their phobia. Unlike generalized anxiety, which is anxiety geared towards aspects of life in general, phobias are specific to one thing. There are many different names for different phobias, including claustrophobia (closed spaces), arachnophobia (spiders), and even pogonophobia (beards).

I personally have 2 phobias. Only one greatly affects my life though. I have social phobia and trypophobia. Trypophobia is the fear of clusters of small holes or bumps. For me, I only get anxiety from it when it’s on skin or skin-like materials. Since I never see this in real life, it doesn’t affect my life that much. If I see a picture of it, I get sick to my stomach. On the other hand, my social phobia severely has affected my life. Social phobia, also known as social anxiety disorder, is the fear of social situations. I have dealt with this for the past 4 years. It has completely changed the way I live my life. Luckily, I got the courage to get help and now don’t experience nearly as much social anxiety as I have in the past. I am now on medication which has allowed me to stop avoiding people, places, and situations. I can say first hand that having a phobia takes a lot of energy out of a person.

Shaping and Successive Approximations

Operant conditioning is learning that occurs based on the consequences of behavior and involve the learning of new actions. It commonly uses reinforcement and punishment to influence behavior. Reinforcement is anything that increases the desired behavior, while punishment is anything that decreases the undesired behavior. Additionally, there is both positive and negative types for reinforcement and punishment. Positive is when something pleasant is added, while negative is when something unpleasant is removed. For example, when your mom is nagging you to clean your room, and then you clean it, so she stops nagging; the nagging is the negative reinforcement because the stimulus is removed (nagging) to increase the desired behavior (cleaning your room).

One type of operant conditioning that is used is called shaping, which is how reinforcers guide behavior closer towards a desired behavior. This is how dogs are trained. Complex behaviors are able to be created through this technique. By using successive approximations, or “middle steps,” animals are able to be trained to do complex behaviors such as discriminating many types of objects and events.

I trained my dog, Hudson (pictured above), to play dead using shaping and successive approximations. I used a high-value treat as positive reinforcement when Hudson completed the desired behavior. We started by having him lay down from a standing position. This was easy because he had learned to lie down previously. Then we had him roll onto his back with his feet up. This was a little more challenging because it was not necessarily biologically predisposed to voluntarily lying on his back. This took about 2 days to get him to do correctly. Then we also taught him to “come alive” which was his release phase. This did not take long for him to learn. Through shaping and using in between steps to teach him, Hudson successfully learned to play dead and come alive!

 

Operant Conditioning

Shaping is a part of operant conditioning used to develop a behavior in an individual. “Shaping reinforces guide behavior closer towards a desired behavior,” also known as successive approximations (Wede). Shaping was first used by B.F. Skinner when he invented the Operant Chamber to study animal behavior. Skinner would use the chamber as a box to train the rats to press down on a lever in order to get food, water, or another reinforcer. He trained the rats by using successive approximations, he continued to reinforce until the final behavior was reached. If the rat was close to pressing down the lever it was rewarded. Rewards were given until the rat learned to press down on the lever. Shaping is common in everyday life, like learning how to do something. For example, I have used shaping to train my brother’s cat. Similar to a dog, I have shaped the cats behavior by first giving him a treat, repetitively telling him to give me his paw, and then once he does I will give him another treat. The treat served as a positive reinforcement, which worked to increase the cat’s behavior by presenting a positive stimulus. After many cycles of this, he eventually learned that when he wanted a treat that he would give me his paw first and then I would give him a treat. It is important to understand if the individual is not progressing, to use simpler steps of reinforcing. They will not learn the new behavior right away, so it will take time. I think shaping is a really interesting principle because essentially this is how both humans and animals learn. Our parents raised us with techniques involving shaping. How do you think we were able to walk, talk, be potty trained, as infants? I am sure we would have learned eventually by observing others, but the only way for it to be built into us was for our parents to shape it. 

 

Wede, J. (2019). Introduction to Psychology, lecture 15 notes [Powerpoint slides]. Retrieved from https://psu.instructure.com/courses/2006917/files/104343631?module_item_id=27881395

 

Successive Approximations

About 67% of all US households have some sort of pet, whether it be a dog, cat, fish, or even a lizard. Out of these 85 million families sustaining animals, for about 12 years now, I have been included within this percentile. In my particular case, I have had two dogs, both Golden Retrievers, and like many have trained them in certain ways to perform special tasks. It starts out with name recognition, then housetraining, and any others that one might want to follow through with like sitting, laying down, or rolling over. For any pet owners out there, we all know this is not an easy task and requires immense amounts of patience and repetition. One way to make something like this easier for both the owner and the dog is a type of operant conditioning we learned about called shaping. The idea of shaping first came from B.F. Skinner who discovered this phenomenon while expanding upon Edward Thorndike’s view on operant conditioning. Shaping offers an easier way to teach animals to act as a desired behavior through a method of positive reinforcement of behavior patterns. This term can also be called successive approximation and has been known to train animals to discriminate many types of objects and events. Skinner tested this theory on rats by breaking down behaviors into small, achievable steps in order to get them to press a lever to release food. Skinner would reward the rats for each step closer to the desired behavior, even if it meant them just slightly getting closer to the lever. By using this method of operant conditioning, Skinner trained the rats to perform proper behavior while deterring improper behavior.

Just like Skinner did with his rats, I used the same method of shaping on my dogs to teach them proper behavior. The main tasks my family and I would focus when training them were talents like sitting, laying down, and rolling over, as well as normal operations like, housetraining. For the talents, I started with teaching my dogs to sit by pushing their behind to the ground while saying the word “sit”. I would do this a couple times before rewarding them with a treat. This became a repetitive process for a couple days until they finally got a hang of it and it became instinct for them. After this, I proceeded with the same actions to teach them how to lay down. I would start out with saying “sit” in which they would sit to make sure the behavior is instilled in them and then repeated the previous process. I would physically push them to the ground multiple times, without causing any harm don’t worry, and then reward with a treat. Once again, I repeated this for a couple days and then used the same process for rolling over until all three activities were implanted within their minds and they could perform them without the retrieval of any treats. As well, I used the same system of treats for housetraining. Whenever they would go to the bathroom in the house, no treat was rewarded and we would occasionally yell at them, but if they went to the bathroom outside, a treat was rewarded. Both dogs eventually began waiting by the front door whenever they would have to go to the bathroom and then expected a treat afterwards. The desired behavior became so repetitive that both dogs could be let outside alone, with no leash, and would wait by the door until let in expecting a treat in the end. Even though this may not be successful in all cases of animals or dogs, it was quite fascinating to me how this worked so well for my dogs that we could trust them outside with no leash or electric fence with no worries.

References

https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-psychology/chapter/operant-conditioning/

https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-pet-statistics

Anxiety

Anxiety is your body’s natural response to stress. It is a feeling of fear or apprehension about whats to come. Many different things can lead you to feel anxious like a big exam, a job interview, or public speaking. In class, we discussed different explanations for experience anxiety which include; psychodynamic, cognitive (irrational thinking), behavioral (reinforcement), and biological (chemical imbalances). The symptoms for anxiety include; feeling nervous, restless, or tense, having a sense of impending panic, increased heart rate and rapid breathing.

Ever since high school I have personally struggled with anxiety. Anxiety Disorders run in my family so it came as no surprise to my parents when anxiety became a problem for me. Before playing a soccer game i would get really anxious and it would end up affecting how I played. Before a big test I would get that same anxious feeling and it started to affect my grades. It got to the point where my anxiety was effecting my life daily and I needed to seek some help with how to deal with it.

In class, we also talked about mood disorders and depression. I think anxiety and depression go hand in hand. If you recognize your anxious feelings are taking control of you, you need to see help before it becomes a more serious problem and can lead to other mood disorders like depression. The socio cognitive approach suggests that depression arises partly from self defeating beliefs and negative explanatory styles which can start with not knowing how to deal with your anxiety.

After I got help and learned how to deal with my anxiety I noticed an over-all movement in my mental health and my life as a whole. Just small things like taking deep breaths, or realizing that there is only so much in your life that you can control really helped me in dealing with my anxiety. Another thing that really helped me was looking into the biology behind anxiety which relates back to what we talked about early in the class about our bodies autonomic nervous system which creates the flight or fight response in our sympathetic nervous system and rest and digest response in our parasympathetic nervous system.

Everyone has anxiety from time to time, but chronic anxiety can interfere with your quality of life. As long as you are equipped with the skills and knowledge of how to deal with your anxiety and why you are feeling a certain way it becomes easier to have a hold on your anxiety. Rather than your anxiety controlling you, you control your anxiety.

 

 

 

 

Operant conditioning

Operant Conditioning is a way in which someone learns something by rewards or consequences. Basically if someone gets a positive consequence from an action, then they will likely do it again, whereas if they receive a negative consequence, they are unlikely to do that action again. People tend to repeat behaviors that obtain positive effects and make you feel good about yourself. For example if someone sings on stage and receives a lot of applause afterwards, that person is more likely to sing again or gain more confidence than if they did not get a lot of applause or got booed. Operant Conditioning uses shaping to positively or negatively reinforce certain behaviors to strengthen them in some way. Positive reinforcers increase behaviors by adding something that someone likes such as getting a hug after they do something good. A negative reinforcer increases behavior by removing something that someone does not like. For example if you don’t complete your homework you will get a bad grade but you do the homework to avoid receiving that grade. On the other hand a punishment decreases as behavior instead of a reinforcer which increases it. A positive punishment adds an aversive stimulus while a negative punishment removes a desired stimulus, both to decrease a behavior.

My parents used operant conditioning on my sister and I when we were younger in order to behave properly and have good manners. They would yell at us or ground us if we cursed or did something bad. Yelling at us is an example of a positive punishment because we don’t want to be yelled at therefore it is decreasing the likelihood of us doing that again. Grounding us would be an example of a negative punishment as we would be forbidden to do things that we want to do such as hang out with friends or use our phones because they are removing something that we desire. We also used shaping when we trained our dog. For example in order to make her sit or wait we had to use positive reinforcement by giving her a treat. Eventually she would sit or do the command without gaining a treat which is how operant conditioning is successful.

https://www.simplypsychology.org/operant-conditioning.html