Example Of Classical Conditioning Theory In My Life

In my life, an example of classical conditioning was that I once had a fear of bees. One day, I went for a walk around the block with my babysitter. During our walk, a bee flew up to me, I tried shooing it off, and it stung me. For a long time after this incident, whenever I saw a bee coming close to me, I would do everything I could to avoid it. So, the unconditioned stimulus (UCS) was the bee stinging me, the conditioned stimulus (CS) was the presence or sight of a bee, the unconditioned response (UCR) was the pain of the sting, and the conditioned response (CR) was to panic at the sight of a bee. Luckily for me, my fear of bees went through the process of extinction, because many times after the initial incident, I was in the presence of bees without being stung.

My fear of bees also extended to wasps due to stimulus generalization. Since bees and wasps look, act, and attack similarly, wasps also scared me. However, by using stimulus discrimination, my fear didn’t extend to other insects, such as flies because, unlike bees, they look different and can’t sting. An example of operant conditioning in my life would be how speaking English in my SPAN 130 class is negatively punished. In this class, the TA will take away participation points for that specific day whenever we speak in English during the class. This is negative punishment because the TA is trying to decrease the amount of English we use by taking away points whenever we use English. This would be an example of a continuous schedule of punishment, meaning that every time someone speaks English, they have points taken away. When our TA talks with us, she only uses Spanish, which is a discriminative stimulus for us, because it reminds us that we need to be using Spanish only.

Despite the TA’s intention to get us to use more Spanish, everyone in the class still uses a large amount of English, so there wasn’t a large change in behavior. The main reason for the lack of success is that punishment isn’t typically as effective as reinforcement, so the curriculum should focus on reinforcing the use of Spanish instead of punishing the use of English. One thing that can’t be well explained by classical or operant conditioning is when I laugh at jokes that aren’t funny. This can’t be explained well by either type of conditioning because it’s missing an important factor: what makes me feel the need to pretend I find the joke funny?

It’s likely because I don’t want to seem rude to whoever told the joke, but that still can’t be explained by the two types of conditioning. This shows that there has to be some higher, more complex thinking that goes on during conditioning, called cognitive conditioning, which can affect the way that conditioning changes behaviors.