Behaviorism: Examples of Classical and Operant Conditioning

Classical and Operant Conditioning
Student’s Name
Institutional Affiliation
Course Name
Professor’ Name
Date
Classical Conditioning
Classical conditioning is one of the major types of learning. This kind of learning occurs subconsciously and occurs through associations. In classical conditioning, the process of learning occurs unconsciously (Olson & Ramírez, 2020). After learning about classical conditioning in class, I have investigated my own life carefully and discovered that there are many instances where I learned through classical conditioning. Following is a concrete example where I learned through classical conditioning. During my childhood days, I did not like school a lot. I felt like school was just a disruption of my rather good schedule at home. Consequently, I did not marvel at the idea of going to school every morning. I only went because my parents insisted that it was the right thing to do. Despite such feelings about school, something happened that changed everything. After some time in school, we received a new teacher. There were some unique things about this teacher that made me change my attitude towards school.
The first unique thing about the teacher is that she always waited for her students at the door of the classroom every morning. Before entering the classroom, she would give every student a warm hug and enquire how each student was doing. The warm welcome that I received from this teacher slowly but surely started changing my attitude towards schools. I slowly but surely started longing to go to school. In addition, the teacher would use very warm language while teaching. She was not harsh. Whenever a student committed a mistake, she would gently correct her. She never adopted harsh methods such as shouting or harsh punishments. Rather, she gently made a student understand that what they did was wrong and must not happen again. She also made the classroom environment very warm through her tone and method of teaching. She would ensure that every student felt important/ unique despite their academic performance. She would ensure that she gave every student as much attention as they needed to improve their grades.
Within a short while of being taught by this particular teacher, I interestingly started loving school. I would long to school every morning. From the above observations, it is true to conclude that my longing to go to school had a lot to do with the teacher. After going through this class, I have identified that the events mentioned above occurred due to classical conditioning. The unconditioned stimulus in this case is the warm and receptive teacher. Through her warmth and receptivity, some nice ideas about going to school started forming in my mind. The unconditioned response was that I felt connected to the teacher. The conditioned stimulus is associating going to school with the teacher. That is, the love to go to school was mostly because I wanted to encounter the teacher. Without the teacher, chances are I would still have had ill feelings about going to school. Enjoying going to school is the conditioned response. In classical conditioning, a previously neutral stimuli is paired with a natural one to produce some behavioural pattern (Domjan, 2...