Conditioned emotional reactions.

Abstract

speculations havebeen entered intoconcerning possibility of conditioning various typesof emotionalresponse. but diexperimental evidence in support of such a view has been lacking. If the advanced by Warson and Morgan to the effect that in infancy the emotionalreaction patterns are few, consisting. so far as observed of and love, then there must be some simple method hy means of range of stimuliwhichcancallout these emotions and theircomis greatly increased. Otherwise, complexity in adultresponse could authors withoutadequate experimental evidence advanced the view.that this range was increased by means of conditioned factors. It was suggested there, that the early home life a laboratory situation for establishing conditioned emotional responses. The present authors have recently put the whole experimental test. Experimental work had been done so faron only infant was reared almost from birth in a hospital environmenf was a wet nurse in the Harrier Lane Home life was normal: he was healthy from developed youngstets ever brought to the hospital, weighing rwenty-one months of age. He was on the whole stolid arid uneniciiorial, stability was one of the principal test. We felt that we could do experiments as those outlined At approximately nine months tests that have become whether fear reactions can be the sudden removal of supporr. the senior author in another CHAPTER SEVEN-LEARNING 116 \ Ever since, psychologists have been struggling to come up with a more nuanced view of learning. As we saw from Pinker's selection in Chapter 6, Chomskys view has only become more plausible over time. Capacities such as the human gift foracquiringlanguagedo indeed seem to require much more than simple conditioning. And, in fact, there maybe no such thing as a single general mechanism for learning; different kinds of learning may each depend on different mental mechanisms. In place of a one-size-fits-all view in which simple conditioning is the motor of learning, psychologists and animal ethologists are working toward a new view, presentedin the selection fromMarc Hauser s WildMinds (2000), in which each species has its own unique set of tools for learning. 2. Rat alone.Whimpered immediately, withdrew righthandand turned headand trunk away. Blocks again offered. Played readily with them, smiling and gurgling. 4. Ratalone.Leaned overto the leftside as far away fromthe ratas possible,then fellover, gettingupon allfoursandscurrying away as rapidly as possible. Blocks again offered. Reached immediately for them, smiling and laughing as before. W',TSON AND RAYNER • CONDITIONED EMOTIONAL REACTIONS 121 CHAPTER SEVEN-LEARN I N G i. Tested first with blocks. He reached readily for them, playing with them as usual. This shows that there has been no general transfer to the room,table,blocks,ere. is thus seen that the two joint stimulations given the previous week were not without effect. He was tested with his blocks immediately afterwards to see if they shared in the processof conditioning. He began immediately to pickthem up. dropping them, p...

Pattern Analyses Reveal Separate Experience-Based Fear Memories in the Human Right Amygdala

“…These studies often pointed toward the amygdala (Morris et al, 1998;Critchley et al, 2002;Knight et al, 2009;Tabbert et al, 2011) as the neural substrate of Pavlovian fear learning, but also received substantial criticism based on methodological (potential residual CS awareness; Mitchell et al, 2009) and statistical (Vadillo et al, 2016) grounds. Even evidence for fear conditioning in nonverbal human children (Watson and Rayner, 1920) still leaves open the main question that motivated our research: once a human becomes verbal, can these verbal processes override learning pathways via experience, or do we keep separable pathways for experience-based fear conditioning instead? In other words, it remains unclear whether the human brain reserves space for the unique impact of actually experiencing CS-US pairings, in the face of explicit fear instructions.…”

The time course of attentional bias to cues of threat and safety

“…Bekhterev, 1913;Kim & Jung, 2006;Pape & Pare, 2010;Pape & Stork, 2003), and has also long been proven effective in humans (e.g. Fendt & Fanselow, 1999;LaBar, Gatenby, Gore, LeDoux, & Phelps, 1998;Sehlmeyer et al, 2009;Watson & Rayner, 1920). In a classic fear-conditioning paradigm, an initially neutral stimulus (CS) such as a sound is associated with an aversive unconditioned stimulus (US) such as an electrical shock, while another neutral stimulus remains unpaired (CS−) (Maren, 2001;Pavlov, 1927).…”

Spider Fear and Avoidance: A Preliminary Study of the Impact of Two Verbal Rehearsal Tasks on a Behavior–Behavior Relation and Its Implications for an Experimental Analysis of Defusion

“…The traditional behavioral approach to the study of irrational fears and their treatment drew heavily on respondent conditioning and extinction (Rachman, 1977;Watson & Rayner, 1920). The basic model involved a conditioning history in which a neutral stimulus (CS) was directly paired with an unconditioned stimulus (UCS) that evoked a fear response.…”