When I was growing up as a child, in my hometown, there was this grocery store called Stew Leonard’s. Every so often my parents would take my siblings and I on a trip there to go grocery shopping with them. I loved to go with them and pick out snacks and try out the different sample foods they would give out to people on the weekends. But there was one thing I did not like about going. They had workers dressed in full on animal costumes that would walk around and hug and talk to the children shopping with their parents. For some reason I was deathly afraid of the people walking around in costumes, I knew they were just people dressed in funny costumes but I was still so afraid. From the moment I knew that there were those creatures lurking around the store I was conditioned to become a nervous and scared wreck. I would hide behind my dad’s leg as we walked through every aisle until I knew that I was safe. I would cry at the sight of one of the animal costumes and we would have to walk away and avoid any encounters. I was conditioned to associate that store and those animals together and whenever we would go there even if there weren’t any people dressed in costumes that day I would still feel scared and nervous that one would pop out from somewhere. I had associated that particle grocery store and grocery stores in general with fear and upon enter I automatically felt uneasy and weary. It was a case of classical conditioning.

My conditioned and unconditioned response was nervousness, fear and crying while the conditioned stimulus was someone dressed in an animal costume. This conditioning didn’t last forever though. I outgrew my fear of people dressed in costumes around the age of eleven or twelve (thankfully). Although that response is extinct now, I still remember the feeling of seeing someone dressed in one of the animal costumes and instantly becoming anxious and wanting to cry.