conditioning and learning: ch 4 pavlovian textbook readings

We seem to learn to dislike people and things in much the same way that we learn to fear them. This notion is supported by some brilliant experiments by ____ and _____

Arthur and Carolyn Staats.

Advertising can be viewed as the business of creating conditioned emotional responses toward products. One way marketing experts do this is by pairing products they want to sell with items that already arouse positive emotions. Advertising is not so much about providing information about a product as it is about creating ____ ___responses to those products

Conditioning emotional

After this ____ looked for evidence that the students' feelings for the two brands had changed. One measure was straightforward and included questions such as, "All things considered, if you were to purchase soft drinks on one of your next several trips to the supermarket, what are the chances in 10 that you would purchase Coke™?" A second measure was more subtle. The results indicated that the conditioning failed to move people who strongly favored one brand over the other. It could be that long-established preferences for a product are like long-established biases toward racial and ethnic groups (see the discussion of prejudice, above). People who grew up drinking Pepsi™ may have had thousands of conditioning trials from advertising campaigns and naturally occurring experiences (e.g., drinking Pepsi™ at a birthday party or while resting following exercise). It is unlikely that so much conditioning can be undone with a few ads for a competing product. It's also possible that the conditioning procedure used in the study was at fault. Like most ads, the brand name and the positive word or image coincided. You may recall that such simultaneous conditioning is one of the less effective procedures. Had the brand name preceded the words and images, perhaps there would have been more change.

Gibson

Can conditioning subvert brand loyalty? Research aimed at undermining the commitment of dedicated Coke™ and Pepsi™ drinkers paired images of the products (here identified as Brand A and Brand B) with positive words and images, such as those shown here, or with negative words and images. The most loyal fans were not moved.

Gibson

Studies have been done with actual brands, with similar results, at least when the participants were initially rather neutral toward the brands. But can conditioning change people's preferences when they are already strongly attached to a product? Some people, for example, have a strong preference for Coke™, while others are equally committed to Pepsi™. Could an advertising campaign shift people from one brand to the other through conditioning? _____ of Central Michigan University looked into this question. He asked college students to participate in a study ostensibly on vigilance. He showed them a large number of images and words on a computer, and their task was to hit the space bar when certain brand images appeared. Unknown to the participants, one brand (Coke™ or Pepsi™) always appeared together with a positive image or word (see Figure 4-8) while the other always appeared with a negative image or word.

Gibson

He had American college students listen either to a tune from the film Grease or to classical Indian music. _____assumed that the students would enjoy the popular American music more than the unfamiliar Eastern variety. While listening to the music, the students viewed a slide showing either a beige or a blue pen. Later, the students were allowed to have one of the pens. Of the students who heard the popular music, 79% chose a pen of the same color they had seen while listening to the music; of those who heard the Indian music, 70% chose a pen different in color from the one they saw on the slide.

Gorn

____ (1982) conducted the first experiment on the role of conditioning in marketing

Gorn

_____ came in for criticism because of problems with his methodology, but his basic findings have been confirmed by a number of other studies. For example, two Dutch researchers, Edward Groenland and Jan Schoormans (1994), paired pens with music that people either liked or didn't like. Their liking for the pens afterward reflected their liking for the music that accompanied the pens

Gorn

In a variation of this procedure, _____ (1980) treated ten exhibitionists. Just as a patient imagined that he was about to expose himself, Maletzky held a bottle of a foul-smelling acid under the patient's nose. (The odor was described by patients as a cross between rancid butter and dirty gym socks.) The patients went through these sessions twice a month for an average of about three months. Not only did the patients report fewer instances of exhibitionistic fantasies and dreams, but claims of improved behavior were corroborated by police reports and field observations. The men also expressed increased self-confidence and self-esteem. Some of them had been referred for treatment by legal authorities and may have been in therapy involuntarily, but this made no difference in the results. A follow-up 12 months after treatment revealed no occurrences of exhibitionism.

Maletsky

A recent variation of exposure therapy involves the technology called virtual reality. Virtual reality technology uses computer software, a helmet, and goggles to create a highly realistic electronic simulation of an environment. A person afraid of heights and wearing the helmet and goggles may, for example, see a bridge to her left, and turn toward it so that the bridge now appears to be in front of her. She may then approach the bridge, then step onto it and look over the side at the river far below. This form of treatment, called virtual reality exposure therapy (VRET), falls somewhere between __________ in vivo treatment and _____imaginary treatment. With VRET the person interacts in an environment that is neither imaginary nor real!

Mary cover Jones:; wolpes

Although VRET and even Wolpe's systematic desensitization look very different from the in vivo exposure therapy _______ devised to treat Peter in the 1920s, in fact all three are merely different ways of implementing Pavlovian conditioning. They are, in essence, the same procedure Pavlov used to train dogs to salivate at the sound of a metronome.

Mary cover jones

___ treatment is called in vivo (roughly translated, "in the flesh") exposure therapy because the person is directly exposed to the frightening stimulus. Other forms of exposure therapy have been developed since Jones's work with Peter. Probably the best known of these is systematic desensitization, developed by the psychiatrist Joseph Wolpe (1973; McGlynn, 2010). In this case the therapist works with the client to arrange a list of scary scenes. For example, suppose you are afraid of speaking before a group of people. You and the therapist work up a list of situations related to public speaking and arranged from those that arouse little or no discomfort to those that you find terrifying (see Fear of Public Speaking). After this the therapist asks you to imagine the first scene, perhaps describing it for you in detail, and then instructing you in ways to relax. Thus the scene (a CS for fear) is paired with a positive US (relaxation). When the initial scene no longer causes any discomfort, the therapist will move on to the next scene. This process continues until you feel at ease imagining yourself speaking to a large audience. Note that you never experience terrifying fear during this process; instead, desensitization to one scene prepares you for the next.

Mary cover jones

Sigmund Freud said that people are "polymorphously perverse," meaning that they can achieve sexual pleasure in a great many ways. Society approves of some of these activities and disapproves of others. Items on the disapproved list are widely considered perverse or unnatural and are called ______. They include voyeurism (viewing a person who is nude or partially clothed or who is engaging in sexual activity), exhibitionism (displaying one's genitals to another person without his or her consent), fetishism (an attraction to certain objects or body parts, such as the feet), transvestism (wearing the clothes of the opposite sex; also called cross-dressing), sadism (inflicting pain on a sexual partner), masochism (being humiliated or hurt by a sexual partner), pedophilia (sexual activity with a prepubescent child), and rape (having intercourse with a person without the person's consent). Various studies, many involving college students, have shown that the paraphilias are more common among males than many people would like to think (see The Boy Next Door). The paraphilias are uncommon in females (Feierman & Feierman, 2000).

Paraphelias

For example, Michael Olsson of the University of Tennessee and Russell Fazio of Ohio State University (2006) paired images of people engaged in various kinds of activities with positive or negative words. One part of the study involved pairing images of African Americans with positive words. For example, a photograph of an African American working as a cashier might be paired with the word outstanding. The researchers paired other images (e.g., farm equipment, umbrellas) with neutral words (e.g., waffles, electrical outlet). Altogether the study participants (nearly a hundred female college students) viewed hundreds of images. The procedure shifted their feelings about African Americans toward the positive, but it took a good many conditioning trials to get this result.

Parish

It might have occurred to you that the participants in this study noticed the systematic pairing of African Americans with positive words and responded differently to avoid accusations of racism. But only two participants showed any sign of awareness of the conditioning procedure or the purpose of the study, and their data were eliminated from the analysis. Thus, it seems that the same sort of experiences that lead to negative feelings toward a group can lead to positive feelings toward that group.

Parish

None of these or similar studies suggest that turning a hardcore racist into a true egalitarian will be as easy as training a dog to salivate at the sight of a food bowl (see Parish & Fleetwood, 1975). But the research on changing feelings through what some call "evaluative conditioning" (Davey, 1994; De Houwer, 2011; Gawronski & Walther, 2012; Hofmann et al., 2010) does suggest that there are things parents, teachers, and others can do to counteract the effects of racist teaching

Parish

____ changed the negative feelings of white American children toward Vietnamese people by pairing images of Vietnamese with positive words. The same tactic was not successful in changing feelings toward African Americans. The difference in results is not particularly surprising, given that the Vietnamese were relatively new to the area, so the children had received far less "hate training" toward them than they had toward African Americans. The implication was that more training aimed at undermining bias against African Americans would work, and this is supported by other research.

Parish

In another study, ____ and her colleagues (2000) applied VRET to treat a fear of flying. They compared virtual reality treatment with in vivo exposure therapy using real airplanes. They found little difference in effectiveness between the two treatments; people in both treatment groups fared substantially better than those in a no-treatment control group. Treated participants reported less anxiety about flying, and far more of them actually flew after treatment than did those in the control group (see Figure 4-2). By six months following the end of treatment, 93% of those who had received exposure therapy had flown in a plane.

Rothbaum

Many ads are based on ____ conditioning, and some are based on what amounts to backward conditioning since the brand name follows the positive stimuli. Presenting the brand name (the CS) first works better (Baker, Honea, & Russell, 2004; Macklin, 1996; Stuart, Shimp, & Engle, 1987). Advertisers also need to understand the blocking and overshadowing phenomena (see Chapter 3) or their efforts can be counterproductive.

Simultaneous

Their basic strategy was to pair a neutral word with one that was presumably a CS for a positive or negative emotional response.

Staats

You could argue that the ____ established certain words as conditional stimuli, not the people those words represent. But there is evidence (e.g., Williams, 1966; Williams & Edwards, 1969) that the two are connected—that if the word Arab is paired with words like terrorists and killing, this will affect how we react toward Arabs as well as toward the word Arab. It is probably not a coincidence that assaults against Arabs in the United States increased markedly after the attacks on September 11, 2001. Similarly, if the words Negro, Republican, black, Irish, and communist are paired with words that arouse hostility, we can expect those words, and the people they represent, to arouse hostility.

Staats

Conditioned prejudice. For participants in Group 1, Dutch appeared with positive words, while Swedish appeared with negative ones. In Group 2, the procedure was reversed. After training, participants rated the words Dutch and Swedish from pleasant (1) to unpleasant (7). The ratings reflect the words with which Dutch and Swedish appeared.

Staats and staats

Even factually accurate statements such as "On September 11, 2001, Muslim extremists hijacked two planes and flew them into the World Trade Center, killing thousands of people" pair emotionally charged words (extremists, hijacked, killing) with the words designating a particular group (Muslim) and are likely to affect our feelings toward members of that group. This is so even though the Muslim terrorists were not representative of Muslims in general.

Staats and staats

It seems likely that much of the prejudice directed toward certain ethnic, racial, and religious groups is a result of naturally occurring conditioning resembling the ... experiment.

Staats and staats

college students watched as ethnic words, such as German, Italian, and French, flashed on a screen. At the same time, the students repeated words spoken by the experimenter. The experimenters paired most of the nationalities with unemotional words such as chair, with, and twelve, but they paired the words Swedish and Dutch with more potent words. For some students, they paired Dutch with gift, sacred, happy, and other positive words, while they paired Swedish with negative words such as bitter, ugly, and failure. For other students, this procedure was reversed: Swedish appeared with positive words and Dutch with negative ones. Afterward, the students rated each nationality on a scale. These ratings showed that the feelings aroused by the words Swedish and Dutch depended on the emotional value of the words with which they had been paired. When the word Dutch had appeared with positive words, it got a more positive rating than when it had appeared with negative words

Staats and staats

Conditioning and brand appeal. Mean ratings of Brand L toothpaste as a function of number of trials for control group (light bars) and conditioning group (dark bars). Higher ratings indicate more positive feelings.

Stuart

____ had college students view a number of slides. Some of the slides depicted various fictitious products (e.g., Brand V candy, Brand R cola); others depicted a variety of scenes that were either neutral (e.g., a radar dish, a license plate) or aroused positive feelings (e.g., a mountain waterfall). For some students (the conditioning group), scenes that aroused good feelings regularly followed Brand L toothpaste; for the other students, the scenes that followed Brand L toothpaste were almost always neutral. The researchers evaluated the students' feelings about Brand L toothpaste with four rating scales. The result was that students in the conditioning group rated Brand L toothpaste more positively than did students in the control group. Moreover, the more times the toothpaste and pleasant scenes appeared together, the more positively the students felt about the product (see Figure 4-7). Students in the conditioning group were also much more likely than controls to indicate a willingness to buy Brand L toothpaste, should it become available.

Stuart

What is considered a paraphilia varies from time to ___ and ___ to place. In the Greece of Plato's day, homosexuality was quite acceptable. By contrast, until a few decades ago most people in the United States considered homosexuality a sin or a psychiatric disorder. Now it is increasingly acceptable.

Time and place

But if prejudice is largely the product of conditioning (and the evidence suggests it is), facts alone are unlikely to be an effective antidote. A related tactic is to put the prejudiced person in contact with people in the groups he hates. But this tactic may be _____ against a prejudice that is the result of decades of conditioning

Weak

Fear of flying. People with a fear of flying received no treatment (controls), VRET, or in vivo exposure therapy. After treatment, all had the opportunity to fly on a plane. Of the 15 people in each group, only one that received no treatment flew, 8 who received VRET flew, and 10 who received in vivo therapy flew.

Wolpe

Yet we may be able to counter "hate training" with "love training." If the word Arab (or Muslim) is often paired with negative words, such as fanatic and murderer, and with negative images, such as videos of Arabs burning American flags, then hatred for Arabs is likely to result. If, however, Arab is sometimes paired with positive words, such as charitable and peace-loving, and with positive images, such as videos of Arabs condemning violence, then the influence of the negative associations will be weakened. this is support by

parish et. al.

VRET stands for

virtual reality exposure therapy