Conditioning essays

Conditioning essays Conditioning and Its Effects For my paper I wanted to examine the idea of conditioning and focus mainly on the emotional aspect of it. Continuing affects us in several ways. Most the time, in ways we are not fully aware of. One of the more indirect ways is emotionally. I have a close friend, who well call Jordan for reasons of privacy, who seems to be deathly afraid of medicine. While I find this fear irrational and unrealistic, he finds it extremely real and sometimes Until recently I saw no real problem with his fear, but a strange thing happened and I found myself trying to analyze and almost diagnose what had happened. Due to some sort of food poisoning, he was forced to be taken into the local emergency room. His reaction to the food he had eaten seemed to be serious and upon arrival, the first thing the nurse did was place an IV in his arm. Immediately his fear of medicine came into play. Though the IV was different than the medicine he was normally afraid of, the IV fell into a category I believe to be a stimulus generalization. A stimulus generalization is defined as the occurrence of a learned response not only to the original stimulus, but to the other similar stimuli as well. His conditioned response to antibiotics in the past, became a conditioned reaction to all forms of medicine. Jordan acted out the way anyone would to such a fear. He began screaming at the nurse, and tearing at the needle in his arm. After later recalling the incident, he told me that it bothered him even more than taking a pill that they were putting things directly into his blood stream. I was interested by the whole incident and became determined to find the psychological reasons behind his response. As you read this, bare in mind that I am not a psychologist nor a scientist, so if I am far off in my conclusions, forgive me. I began by analyzing Jordans...