Classical Conditioning Essay

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Psychology 221 Please describe an example of classical conditioning. Be sure to label the US, UR, CS, and CR. Can you think of an example in your life where classical conditioning has occurred? Classical conditioning is learning that occurs when a neutral stimulus generates a response that was initially generated by another stimulus(Krause & Corts, 2014). A great example of classical conditioning is the study of Pavlov’s Dogs conditioning for salivation. Pavlov knew that the meat powder causes the dog to salivate. In this experiment, Pavlov presented a sound generated by a metronome to the dogs, and right after, give meat powder to them(to make the impression that whenever the sound is made, then the dog will receive food).After a while, …show more content…

In school, many students become what their teachers expect them to become. In a study, Psychologist Rosenthal had the teachers in one elementary school give their students a test that was to predict which students were going to dramatically grow their I.Q. score during the school year. After the tests were collected, Rosenthal randomly picked a small group of students to be labeled as the “academic spurters”. Then, Rosenthal told the teachers that those certain group of students were for sure going to grow their I.Q. over the following year. The teachers had no idea that these students were chosen at random, so this claim was completely imaginary. Towards the end of the school year, Rosenthal retested every student’s I.Q. in the school and found that the particular students that were randomly selected as the “academic spurters” actually increased their I.Q.’s on an average of about 12 points, while the rest of the school only experienced an average of an 8 point increase(Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968). This shows that Rosenthal’s imposed self-fulfilling prophecy tricked the teachers into actually believing their students were destined for greater academic