Pavlovian conditioning

1 Laboratory of Comparative Psychology and Behavioral Biology, Departments of Psychology and Zoology, Oklahoma State University, 215 N. Murray, Stillwater, OK 74078, USA 2 Uludag Universitesi, M. Kemalpasa MYO, M. Kemalpasa, Bursa 16500, Turkey 3 Northwestern ...

Kenneth Spence (1936, 1937) formalized a quantitative, elemental approach to association theory that has had a broad and dominating influence on learning theory for many years. A set of challenges to the basic approach has spurred the subsequent evolution of elemental theory in various ways. Four of the challenges and some resulting theoretical accommodations are described in the context of Pavlovian conditioning. The evolution involves departures from important specifics of Spence’s theory, but is viewed as demonstrating the utility of the basic, elemental approach that is one of his legacies.

Using an online survey and a week-long diary study, the relationship between music listening behaviors in everyday life and the occurrence of involuntary musical imagery (INMI) is investigated. It is expected that musical imagery may occur as a consequence of everyday conditioning through music listening, with everyday listening shaping INMI experiences. The results confirm a close relationship between listening behavior and experiences of INMI, providing tentative support for this prediction, as the study is exploratory and correlational. In particular, a differentiation is found between positive and negative experiences of INMI, which relate to frequency and type of music engagement. Additionally, support is found for the notion that INMI may function as a substitute for actual music listening and can serve similar functions in the absence of music.

El trabajo se enmarca dentro de los estudios de recepción de las ideas psicológicas
en Argentina. Se aborda la figura y la obra del médico y fisiólogo
alemán Georg Nicolai, exiliado pacifista que se instala en la ciudad de Córdoba
entre 1922 y 1927. Se estudia el período de formación con el fisiólogo
ruso Iván Pavlov y el impacto de la difusión de sus ideas en Córdoba, Argentina.
A su vez se estudian las redes intelectuales con las que tuvo contacto
y se muestran los espacios institucionales y editoriales que posibilitaron la
mencionada difusión.

Misophonia is a condition in which a person has an acute emotional response of anger or disgust to a commonly occurring innocuous auditory or visual stimulus referred to as a trigger.  This case details the effective treatment of misophonia in a young woman that included a counterconditioning treatment called the Neural Repatterning Technique (NRT), which combines a continuous positive stimulus and a reduced intensity, intermittent trigger.  The treatment was delivered via the Misophonia Trigger Tamer smartphone app and all treatments were conducted independently by the patient.  In this patient, the trigger elicited a physical reflex of contraction of the flexor digitorum profundus, which caused her to clench her fist.  To enhance the effect of the NRT treatment, Progressive Muscle Relaxation was incorporated to increase her ability to deliberately relax the affected muscle during treatment.  During NRT treatment sessions, the patient experienced a weak physical reflex to the reduced trigger stimulus but no emotional response.  Her emotional response of misophonia was not treated, but when the physical reflex extinguished, the emotional response also extinguished.  This case indicates that the misophonic response includes a Pavlovian-conditioned physical reflex.  It is proposed that the trigger elicited the physical reflex and the physical reflex then elicited the conditioned emotional response that is characteristic of misophonia.  Because of the conditioned reflex nature of misophonia, it is proposed that a more appropriate name for this disorder would be Conditioned Aversive Reflex Disorder.

Classical conditioning of sexual arousal has previously been demonstrated in human males but not in females. This study explored the role of classical (Pavlovian) conditioning in the activation of genital sexual arousal in both women and men, and assessed the effects of varying conditioned stimulus (CS) duration (subliminal/conscious) and relevance (sexually relevant/irrelevant). Twenty-seven female and 29 male participants received either subliminal or conscious presentations of a photograph of either a sexually relevant (abdomen of the opposite sex) or irrelevant (gun) CS+, which was followed by the unconditioned stimulus (US-erotic film clip). A CS−, a stimulus not paired with the US, was also included in the 11 conditioning trials. Ten participants were assigned to a control group that received unpaired presentations of the CS+, CS−, and the US. Both women and men showed more evidence of conditioning to the abdomen than to the gun when the CS was presented subliminally. When consciously perceived CSs were used, however, gender differences emerged. Men again showed the expected cue-to-consequence specificity but women showed the opposite effect, that is, conditioned arousal to the sexually irrelevant rather than to the relevant CS. The latter finding may be due to increased autonomic nervous system arousal associated with the irrelevant CS (gun). Skin conductance responses indicated more general arousal to the gun than to the male abdomen in women. This is the first study to compare the effects of a subliminal and conscious CS and to find classical conditioning of sexual arousal in women.

Reproduz as aulas dadas na disciplina de "História e Sistemas Psicológicos: Behaviorismo" no 2o semestre de 2015 e no 2o semestre de 2016 (concluído em 2017) no Curso de Psicologia da UFSCar. Inicia-se por uma história interna dos conceitos fundamentais da reflexologia entre os séculos XVIII e XIX, acompanhando a formação do behaviorismo por Watson no século XX. Também são exploradas diversas vertentes, como as de Thorndike, Hull, Tolman e finalmente o behaviorismo radical de Skinner. Apresentamos o conceito de "condicionamento operante" como uma ruptura epistemológica com relação ao behaviorismo metodológico de Watson. Por fim, são abordadas consequências ético-políticas do behaviorismo e sua dimensão social.

How Cues and Programming Work in Mind Control and Propaganda
by Neil Brick

This may be very heavy for survivors. This transcript is not a substitute for other ways of recovering from ritual abuse is not meant as therapy or therapeutic advice. Readers should use caution while reading this transcript. If necessary, make sure other support systems are available during and after reading this transcript.

Many triggers or cues are innate. An example of a trigger or cue could be a hot feeling when going near an oven burner. Almost instinctively, a person would pull their hand away from the burner. This would be an unconditioned response. There are conditioned and unconditioned triggers or stimuli and conditioned or unconditioned responses. Pavlovian classical conditioning involves pairing an unconditioned stimuli with a conditioned stimuli to get a conditioned response.

The famous example of dogs salivating when a bell rings is an example of classical conditioning. The dogs were conditioned to do this. The unconditioned stimuli may have been the smell of food and the unconditioned (normal) response was salivation. The unconditioned stimuli, the smell of food was paired with the soon to be conditioned stimuli, the bell. Eventually when one withdraws the smell of food stimuli, the bell alone produces salivation. This is the new conditioned response. Extinction is when the conditioned response diminishes. In other words, if the bell conditioned stimuli is not reinforced with the giving of food, the response (salivation) will diminish after a while. The more trials performed, the more there will be resistance to extinction. In other words, the more often the bell is paired with the smell of food, the longer it will take for the conditioned response to fade away. Generalization is when a similar stimuli produce a similar response. In this case, a bell with a similar tone or note may also produce salivation. Pavlov’s Law of Strength states that when higher intensity conditioned stimuli are paired with conditioned stimuli with shorter intervals between them or if they are overlapping, this will produce better conditioning. If the bell was rung a long time after the smell of food, the conditioning would be weaker than if it was rung at the same time or close to the same time as the smell of food.

Programming is similar to this in several ways. A survivor may be tortured repeatedly until an new alter is created. This alter will be given a cue to let them know when to come out, this could be a smell, word, number, sound, color and so on. This cue is either paired with the alter’s creation and is given to the alter to listen for or to look for. The law of strength applies to the strength of the trauma and the strength of the cue. A stronger smell may be easier to associate with a strong trauma, which makes the conditioning stronger. Also if the alter and cue are paired together or closer in terms of time, they will associate more easily.

Extinction may occur or at least the cue and programmed connection could be weakened when the survivor avoids the cult and other cues for long periods of time. But these cues could also lie dormant and be regenerated unless the survivor does the necessary work to undo the program and all its components, including the emotional components.

How to Avoid Being Mind Controlled at a Conference – Presentation at the 2016 Annual Ritual Abuse, Secretive Organizations and Mind Control Conference – August 2016

The information in this article was written with the help and research of several survivors and well-known, well-published therapists in the child abuse, ritual abuse and mind control fields over almost a twenty year period. Participants of several ritual abuse conferences helped research the information in this article.

The most recent updated version of this information is at:
https://survivorship.org/survivorship-articles/how-to-avoid-being-mind-controlled-at-a-conference/

This presentation has been adapted for the Internet. It was presented at the conference by Neil Brick, a survivor of ritual abuse and mind control. His work continues to educate the public about child abuse, trauma and ritual abuse crimes. His child abuse and ritual abuse newsletter S.M.A.R.T. has been published for over 20 years. His articles can be found at http://neilbrick.com

The idea for this article originally came from two presentations written for the early S.M.A.R.T. conferences by several people. It was re-written this year by the Survivorship Board of Directors and can be found on their website. I have adapted and changed some of this article for this presentation.  https://survivorship.org/survivorship-articles/how-to-avoid-being-mind-controlled-at-a-conference/

The considered model of experimental neurosis can serve as a method of determining inadequate perception of reality and is a transitional link from physiological experiments to the study of psychological phenomena.
Рассмотренная модель экспериментального невроза может служить методом определения неадекватоного восприятия реальности и является переходным звеном от физиологических экспериментов к исследованию психологических явлений.

Adjunctive behaviors such as schedule-induced polydipsia are said to be induced by periodic delivery of incentives, but not reinforced by them. That standard treatment assumes that contingency is necessary for conditioning, and that delay of reinforcement gradients are very steep. The arguments and evidence for this position are reviewed and rejected. In their place data are presented that imply different gradients for different classes of responses. Proximity between response and reinforcer, rather than contingency or contiguity, is offered as a key principle of association. These conceptions organize a wide variety of observations, and provide the rudiments for a more general theory of conditioning."

Attempts at combining Uexküll’s ideas with those of Peirce within a
single quasi-discipline called ‘biosemiotics’ are ill-founded. Peirce’s
‘interpretant’ sensu lato refers to two qualitatively different mental
states, one relating to indexes and icons (INT 1) and the other to
symbols (INT 2). Animal communication is dyadic – the referent is
a directly induced mental state (INT 1). Glottocentric
communication is triadic because the connection between symbol
and INT 1 is mediated by INT 2. Whereas the gradualist view of
glottogenesis is erroneous, Müller’s and Chomsky’s saltationist
theories may imply that the idea of language Rubicon is antievolutionary.
However, the views of Pavlov and Vygotsky and of
their modern followers, Deacon and Tomasello, while being
Darwinian, support the saltationist scenario. The emergence of the
second signal system, of symbols, and of INT 2 was a
psychological leap. In human communication, apart from the
semiotic triangle (INT 1 – INT 2 – symbol), the dyadic relation
between non-symbolic signs and INT 1 still holds.

Over a hundred years have passed since the birth of behaviorism or behavioristic psychology, often regarded as the "first force" in contemporary psychology. Many might assume that "the dark night of behaviorism" has subsided once and for all, especially since the behavioristic paradigm has been superseded by the cognitive revolution and other developments, such as psychoanalysis ("second force"), humanistic psychology ("third force") and transpersonal psychology ("fourth force"). However, this assumption would be incorrect as it initiated one of the most powerful currents of modern psychology in the twentieth century. Thus it launched an assault on the human microcosm by decisively abolishing, if not radically trivializing, the role of the psyche or soul and the spiritual dimension in an unparalleled fashion. Although less known, this destructive paradigm was perhaps even more influential than psychoanalysis that predates its existence but did not emerge into a movement in America until later on, nonetheless behaviorism has had an irrevocable impact on the way that the human psyche was universally understood across the diverse cultures prior to the advent of modernism and the development of modern psychology.

Some Endorsements for Behaviorism: The Quandary of a Psychology without a Soul:

“This very concise, compact, and thoughtful book offers an important reflection on the challenges and downside of behaviorism and the bias behind this influential perspective in psychology and the mental health field in general. It also highlights how psychology in an attempt to be empirical and scientific pushed spirituality and religion off to the side consequences that are still felt in the field today. Worth a read for those with interest in this important area.”
—Thomas G. Plante, Ph.D., ABPP is the Augustin Cardinal Bea, S.J. University Professor at Santa Clara University and adjunct clinical professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine. He is the author of Contemplative Practices in Action: Spirituality, Meditation, and Health

“This book critiques behaviorism from both a philosophical and practical perspective. Its unique contribution, in my view, is its inclusion of many direct quotations from the literature which show, in devastating fashion, what happens when psychology is based on mechanistic assumptions and attempts to exclude, the ‘inner life’ of human beings, including the soul. Samuel Bendeck Sotillos does an excellent job of showing how original behaviorism took away almost everything that makes us human and how that dark legacy continues to permeate modern psychology. The book is an excellent reflection on the foundations of modern psychology.”
—David N. Elkins, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Pepperdine University, author of The Human Elements of Psychotherapy, Past President of Division 32, Society for Humanistic Psychology, American Psychological Association 

“This is a brief, succinct exposition of Behaviorism, a psychology created by an American John Watson in the early 20th Century which has had a profound impact on Western thinking and has now become increasingly influential right through out the world to the extent that it is no longer questioned. India is one of the few cultures left which actively affirms the transcendental nature of reality and in the coming decades we shall see behaviorism and its adjunct consumerism threaten the sacred tenets of the sanātana dharma. The author analyses this school of psychology in the light of the perennial philosophy. There are ‘four forces’ in psychology today namely, behaviorism, psychoanalysis, humanistic and transpersonal. Though behaviorism has been supplanted it nevertheless influences modern thought with its reductionist thinking. It is based on two suppositions: scientism which denies anything that cannot be verified by the five senses and psychologism which reduces an understanding of what is reality to psychological criteria. Mechanized man is reduced to numbers, uniformity, and in distinction from the ‘masses’. Our worth is according to financial currency which is the modern day criterion of what is valuable. It is the triumph of quantity over quality. Guénon called it the ‘Reign of Quantity’ and denotes the degeneration of human values and negates the opportunity of divinity, for Behaviorism denies the reality of the soul and states that humankind is simply a machine that responds to positive and negative stimuli. The behaviorist denies that there is anything more to a human being than behavior. The traditionalist affirms that the human being has a soul who participates in the Divine and has an inherent essence which can transcend the limitations of the human body and mind. 
The author has with profuse citations delved into this malaise and the influence it holds on the modern mind. Though it would mainly interest those in the field of psychology, for the general reader this is a sobering and intelligent exposé.”
—The Mountain Path journal

Th e article analyzes Sergej Chakhotin's transfer of the concept of refl ex from Russian physiology to German propaganda. Chakhotin had been working at Ivan Pavlov's laboratory in St. Petersburg in the 1910s. Th e experiences he had there with refl ex conditioning, the boom of psychotechnics, and the application of psychological practices for aesthetic purposes were his basis for the invention of a socialist propaganda program against the Nazi regime. It is shown how the concept of refl ex changed as it meandered through diff erent disciplines.

Misophonia is a recently identified condition in which an individual has an acute reaction of hatred or disgust to a specific commonly occurring sound. We propose that misophonia is a form of conditioned behavior that develops as a physical reflex through Pavlovian conditioning.  Although misophonia is generally considered to be a one-step reaction, in which the sound elicits rage or disgust, as well as typical autonomic responses associated with these emotions, we propose that misophonia is a two-step reaction, in which the sound elicits an aversive conditioned physical reflex, and the aversive conditioned physical reflex elicits hatred or disgust. We also propose that the emotional response to trigger stimuli creates a Pavlovian conditioning paradigm that maintains or strengthens the misophonic physical reflex. Finally, we propose that new misophonic trigger stimuli are developed through the pairing of a neutral stimulus with a misophonic trigger stimulus. We suggest that a better name for misophonia is Conditioned Aversive Reflex Disorder (CARD) since it focuses attention on the reflexive nature of this condition and incorporates multiple stimuli modalities. A counterconditioning treatment for misophonia is presented with brief case descriptions which demonstrate the conditioned reflex nature of this disorder.

An organism's ability to adapt to environmental challenges is aided by disparate neural systems, acting independently and interactively to influence behavioral responding. With respect to associative learning, emotional , contextual, and sensorimotor conditioning is established, maintained, and expressed by the amygdala, hippocampus, and cerebellum, respectively. In delay eyeblink conditioning, rapidly expressed emotional (fear) conditioned responses (CRs) tied to the conditioned stimulus (CS) and conditioning context accelerate the development and generation of a specific sensorimotor (eyeblink) CR, in accord with the two-stage model of aversive classical conditioning. This review discusses the model based on the behavior, neural pathways, and plasticity associated with the unconditioned stimulus (US), CS, and conditioning context. We conclude by introducing a putative third stage of conditioning, whereby cerebellar-mediated 'conditioned emotional sup-pression' mitigates and stabilizes fear responding as eyeblink CRs increase in frequency over training. Impaired sensorimotor learning due to cerebellar damage or dysfunction is proposed to limit conditioned suppression leading to a sustained, heightened state of emotional arousal that, over time, could generalize to anxiety or mood psychopathology.

Objective: Misophonia is typically characterized as an extreme emotional response to auditory and visual stimuli. In several case studies, physical responses have also been reported. This study sought to determine whether adults with misophonia experience physical responses in addition to emotional responses in the presence of triggering stimuli. Method: Twenty-seven adults with misophonia were interviewed via teleconferencing. Participants self-reported the presence of physical and emotional responses to triggers (i.e., two auditory and one visual). Results: All participants reported physical responses to at least one of their triggers. There was great variation in the region of the physical responses across participants. Approximately half of the sample reported region consistency across triggers. Likewise, all participants reported emotional responses to at least one of their triggers. Conclusion: These results suggest including an immediate physical response as part of the conceptualization of misophonia.  They also support classical conditioning of a physical response as a possible contributing mechanism for the etiology of misophonia.

The role of conscious awareness in human Pavlovian conditioning was examined in 2 experiments using masked fear-relevant (snakes and spiders; Experiments 1 and 2) and fear-irrelevant (flowers and mushrooms; Experiment 1) pictures as conditioned stimuli, a mild electric shock as the unconditioned stimulus, and skin conductance responses as the primary dependent variable. The conditioned stimuli were presented briefly (30 ms) and were effectively masked by an immediately following masking stimulus. Experiment 1 demonstrated nonconscious conditioning to fear-relevant but not to fear-irrelevant stimuli. Even though the participants could not recognize the stimuli in Experiment 2, they differentiated between masked stimuli predicting and not predicting shocks in expectancy ratings. However, expectancy ratings were not related to the conditioned autonomic response.

Differential aversive Pavlovian conditioning with a foul odor as unconditioned stimulus (US) and neutral faces as conditioned stimuli (CS) was compared between 9 noncriminal psychopaths as defined by the Hare Psychopathy Checklist Revised and 12 healthy controls. Event-related potentials (ERP), heart rate, skin conductance response, corrugator EMG, and startle response potentiation as well as valence, arousal, and contingency of the CS were assessed. Whereas the healthy controls (HC) showed significant CS +/CS- differentiation, the psychopaths (PP) failed to exhibit a conditioned response although unconditioned responses were comparable between the groups. N100, P200, and P300 to the CSs revealed that psychopaths were not deficient in information processing and showed even better anticipatory responding than the HC group indicated by the terminal contingent negative variation (tCNV), that lacked, however, CS+ and CS- differentiation. These data indicate a deficit in association form...

The growth of Human–Animal Studies, multi-species, and posthuman scholarship reflects an “animal turn” offering important theoretical, ethical, and methodological challenges to humanities, science, and social science disciplines, though psychology, in particular, has been slow to engage with these developments. This article is the first to apply the conceptual lens of the “animal turn” to Pavlov’s experiments with dogs. It is unique in applying in particular the work of feminist cultural theorist Donna Haraway, to radically reframe the human–animal relationship at the core of these landmark experiments. This original portrait is contrasted with contemporary retellings of those experiments which ignore or are indifferent to the complexities of that relationship. Paying attention to nonhuman others that constitute animal experimentation in psychology, historically, today, and in retellings, is argued to be a vitally important step for psychology today. The analysis provided constitutes a distinctive, radical shift in the way psychology might approach the lives of nonhuman animals, in its own past and present, with far-reaching implications for the future development of psychology.

Politics is a construct of civil order and an overthought stratagem for peaceful domesticity. The role of politics however does the ironic service of keeping dominion rather than instilling domestic sovereignty. It is a broad term that only gets broader with its disseminators and dissenters wanting more and wanting less. Language is a transient trapping and release both consequential and sequential to the specificity of what politics' purpose and definition is. Since politics is a global game board with constant diplomatic decisions being made at the toss of a die, public opinion influences government opinion as much as government opinion influences public opinion. A solution to an issue that caters to a minority will assuredly win favor in the majority who brings that solution forward. Likewise, a majority that welcomes and concedes to a solution is met with willingness and expectation from the minority. The public and the republic are the duality in a democracy in which both are participatory functions and reactions of each other. Richard Condon's novel The Manchurian Candidate introduces this participation during the Cold War as a predilection for competition between freedom and loyalty which is strained by both the powerful and the powerless in society, limiting any potential changes, political and domestic. These choices are masked by entertainment treating the idea of espionage and exploitation as exciting as science fiction. Unbeknownst to the masses, entertainment, like satire, can be an attractive Pavlovian distraction that conceals the truth more than it reveals the truth.