A 19-year-old girl visits the London Dungeon. Her startle response increases with each fearful stimulus.
This phenomenon is related to :
A. This is an example of sensitization. Systematic desensitization is a therapy based on conditioning procedures that can be effective in the elimination of conditioned fear and the reduction of phobic behaviour. It has three steps: relaxation training, hierarchy formation, and exposure to the stimuli. By remaining relaxed while imagining the lowest item in the hierarchy, the fear of that situation or object is counter conditioned. In a similar fashion counter conditioning then proceeds to situations higher in the hierarchy.
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A 40-year-old lady is waiting to see her dentist after three painful extractions. She could hear the noise made by the dentist’s drill. This makes her feel anxious.
This anxiety could be termed as which one of the following?
C. The anxiety produced by the sound is the conditioned response (CR). Pain produced by the situation of drilling is the UCR. This is called fear conditioning and is one of the theories to account for the origin of phobias. When this classical conditioning paradigm is combined with operant conditioning, in the form of avoidance (negative reinforcement), a phobia is likely to have developed. So in fully developed dental phobics, not only there is anxiety produced by the noise of the drill, but also avoidance of the situation by not keeping the appointment (or waiting outside the waiting room). The stimulus itself may become generalized to a fear of all drills.
Whenever Jack had to feed his pet dog, he would ring a bell in order to get its attention. He would stop ringing the bell before he served the meat. As days passed, the dog started salivating to the sound of the bell.
Which of the classical conditioning paradigm is being used here?
A. This is an example of trace conditioning. There are fi ve paradigms that are used in classical conditioning. They differ with respect to how a CS is paired with a UCS. In delayed conditioning, the onset of the CS precedes the onset of the UCS and termination of the CS occurs either with the onset of the UCS or during UCS presentation. In trace conditioning, the CS is presented and terminated prior to the onset of the UCS. In simultaneous conditioning, the CS and the UCS have onsets at the same time. In backward conditioning, the UCS is presented and terminated before the onset of the CS. In temporal conditioning, the UCS is presented at regular time intervals allowing the timing of the UCS to serve as the CS eliciting the CR. Short delayed conditioning is the best arrangement that facilitates the acquisition of most conditioned responses. Ideally the delay between the onset of CS and UCS should be about half a second.
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Habitual consumption of paracetamol to relieve headache is related to which one of the following phenomena?
D. Negative reinforcement occurs when a response is strengthened because it is followed by the removal of an aversive stimulus. In this case, the headache. Other types of negative reinforcement include escape and avoidance learning. The term negative reinforcement should not be confused with punishment, which is an event following a behaviour which reduces the behaviour, for example stopping rash driving after getting a speeding ticket. Positive reinforcement occurs when a response is strengthened because it is followed by the presentation of a rewarding stimulus. For example a prize given for a desired behaviour increases the behaviour. It should be noted that both positive and negative reinforcements increase the behaviour in question. Punishment, on the other hand, decreases the behaviour.
Dave meets his girlfriend at a pub daily at 8 O’clock. As the time approaches, he keeps looking out for her more and more frequently through the window.
This behaviour is suggestive of which of the following schedules of reinforcement?
A. In operant conditioning, the relationship between a response and the likelihood of reinforcement is known as a schedule of reinforcement. There are two major classes of schedules:
Both types are subdivided into fixed and variable. In a fixed ratio schedule, a fixed number of responses produce the reinforcement. For example, a rat is reinforced every 10 times it presses the lever. In variable ratio schedule, an average number of responses produce the reinforcement. It is similar to fixed, but here the frequency of behaviour required to elicit the reinforcement changes after each reinforcement, for example slot machine in the casino pays off once every 10 times on an average, so it can take five attempts for some while 15 attempts for others. The fixed interval schedule involves a contingency in which reinforcement for a response is produced only after a specified period of time has elapsed since the previous reinforced response, for example students earn grades after a test every 3 weeks. In this case, they don’t read during the initial weeks, but start reading just before the exam, that is the response increases just before the reinforcement. The variable interval schedule is the same as a fixed interval schedule, except that the interval changes after each reinforced response, for example repeatedly dialing a phone number till one gets through to a lucky draw contest. When reinforcement depends on both time and number of responses, the contingency is called a differential reinforcement schedule.
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