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Classical Conditioning Experiment

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Fear admits a strong presence in children around certain animals. Some of these fears can turn into phobias such as Bovinophobia , Cynophobia , and Ophidiophobia . All of these animals seeming harmless but to their ‘victim’ they are horribly dangerous. A well-known person with ophidiophobia is everyone’s favorite archeologist/professor, Indiana Jones. Most phobias are created at childhood, teenage years or early adulthood (before the age of 35). How phobias are created can be seen through classical conditioning responses. Phobias also represent a process of overgeneralization. An easy way to understand phobias is evaluating the experiment on “Little Albert”, an experiment conducted by Watson and Rayner to show evidence of classical conditioning in humans. In the process, they showed ‘Albert’ (a 9-month-old baby) who did not show any fear to rats. They then put a white rat on the table in front of ‘Albert’ and he did not react. On the second attempt, they placed the rat on the table and also made loud noises. Alberts response was crying. After repeating this process many times Albert was conditioned to cry when the white rat was exposed without a loud noise. They then concluded that this experiment was a prototypical example of classical conditioning. …show more content…
We will start with teaching her a deep muscle relaxation techniques and breathing exercises. During this step, we will be practicing reciprocal inhibition where one's response is incompatible with another. Next, we will have kate create a fear hierarchy starting with the stimuli that create the least amount of fear for her. We will then build up to more events that produce more fear. Starting with thinking about a snake and working her way up to holding a snake with bare hands. We will meet every weekday and each week progressing onto a higher frequency of fear-inducing activities. Kate will be determined no longer afraid of snakes when Kate has reached a comfortable state with

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