Classical Conditioning

For this month, I shall talk about Classical Conditioning. This is a behaviourist approach to managing children’s behaviour, and it stems from Ivan Pavlov.

It talks about using stimuli to condition certain behaviours, and his experiment involved triggering a salivating response from dogs just from hearing a bell ring (Cherry, 2023). This was done by constant exposure of the bell with food, so eventually the dogs started to salivate without the need for food to be present. This is a theory that has been criticised for treating humans as animals and is not used in educational settings. But it does reveal itself in certain situations. For instance, a fear response can be conditioned. If a child hears a phone ring, and it is the parent screaming at the child, the child may eventually associate a phone with fear. The neutral stimulus has become a conditioned stimulus (Cherry, 2023).

Can you think of other examples?

References

Cherry, K. (2023, May 1). What Is Classical Conditioning in Psychology? Retrieved from Verywell Mind: https://www.verywellmind.com/classical-conditioning-2794859