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1 Emotional Conditioning

Kristopher Burnett Conditioned Emotional Response Jackson State University

2 Emotional Conditioning

Abstract

This paper is to inform its readers about conditioned emotional responses and the factors that influence them. Our environment and society play a large role in creating conditioned emotional responses and shaping our behavior. This paper discusses the various ways this occurs. Practical uses of conditioned emotional responses are also briefly discussed by the author. Conditioned emotional responses are closely linked to classical conditioning, so people may develop conditioned emotional responses without ever knowing that their brains are making associations. The author also explains how authorities and advertisers try to manipulate people's actions by using conditioned emotional responses, fear, and positive emotions. The information for this paper was gathered from various web sites and scholarly articles written by researchers who have . studied conditioned emotional response in depth

3 Emotional Conditioning

Conditioned Emotional Response

A conditioned emotional response is defined as an emotional response that has been acquired as a result of conditioning. Conditioning involves pairing unnatural stimuli with natural events that trigger innate biological responses so that the unnatural stimulus can cause the biological response without the presence of the natural stimuli or event occurring. Emotional conditioning is any negative emotional reaction, generally worry or fear, which comes to be paired with an unconditioned stimulus due to pavlovian conditioning- the fundamental of conditioned suppression, according to the Psychology Dictionary- an online database of psychological and psychiatric related terms. However, Dr. Russ Dewey states, “Conditional emotional responses (CERs ) are learned emotional reactions like anxiety or happiness that occur as a response to predictive cues. Most American psychologists use the -ed form of the word, calling CERs "conditioned emotional responses." However, to be consistent with earlier arguments about the translation of Pavlov's terms from Russian to English, we will stay with the term conditional except when quoting people who use the -ed form” in his text “Psychology: An Introduction.” The difference in the two definitions is that Dr. Dewey included positive emotions which he explains thoroughly within his text. The Psychology Dictionary explicitly stated that the stimulus evoked specifically negative emotions, which baffles me because conditioned stimuli may evoke positive emotional responses such as joy and happiness. An example of a conditioned stimulus evoking a positive emotional response is, hearing a song that you and your mate first . danced to and smiling because it evokes positive emotions that are associated with your mate

4 Emotional Conditioning Emotional responses are typically regulated by the autonomic nervous system. The autonomic nervous system consists of two subdivisions, the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems. They have largely opposite functions. The sympathetic nervous system is activated in the so-called "fight or flight" reaction, which produces a raised heartbeat, sweating, and other symptoms of arousal. Many psychologists believe CERs involving the sympathetic nervous system are responsible for panic attacks, stage fright, test anxiety, and similar unpleasant emotions. These responses tend to be unconsciously learned and therefore difficult to control, so they drive people .to seek help The process of acquiring a CER is similar to the process of acquiring any other conditional response. A signal comes before a biologically significant event, and the organism learns the correlation (literally "making the connection" on a neural level). For example, we could sound a tone and give you an electric shock. Such fear conditioning establishes a CER quickly. After one or two pairings, the sound of the tone will send a wave of apprehension through amygdalar circuits of any organism capable of processing fear. How does a CER get set up, in natural circumstances? All it takes is an experience that causes strong emotion. In the case of CERs that send people to therapy, the strong emotion is a negative emotion such as pain, fear, or anxiety. A car crash, for example, will normally be preceded by certain stimuli such as driving a car. After the car crash, the prospect of driving a car might fill a person with dread. The dread would be a .CER Being exposed to an UCS before conditioning starts can hinder or delay the acquisition of a CER.(Randich, LoLordo 1979) Four experiments examined the UCS preexposure phenomenon using conditioned suppression of food-reinforced responding as a measure of excitatory conditioning, and electric shock as a UCS. In Experiment 1, groups of rats were pre-exposed to

5 Emotional Conditioning unsignaled 0.8-mA electric shocks for 0, 1, 3, 5, or 10 days, and then conditioned with a 0.8-mA electric shock. Preexposure to electric shock 1 day prior to conditioning enhanced the acquisition of a CER, whereas preexposure to electric shock for 3, 5, or 10 days prior to conditioning attenuated the acquisition of a CER as a direct function of the number of days of preexposure. In Experiments 2 and 2A, groups of rats were pre-exposed to unsignaled electric shocks of 0.3, 0.5, 0.8, or 1.3 mA for 10 days, and then conditioned with a 0.8-mA electric shock. All groups preexposed to electric shock acquired the CER at a slower rate than a group not pre-exposed to electric shock. The greatest attenuation of CER conditioning occurred when the same intensity electric shock was used during both the preexposure and conditioning phases. In Experiment 3, groups of rats were pre-exposed to signaled electric shocks of either 0.5, 0.8, or 1.3 mA, and then conditioned with a 0.8-mA electric shock. All groups pre-exposed to electric shock acquired the CER at a slower rate than a group not pre-exposed to electric shock. As in Experiments 2 and 2A, the greatest attenuation of CER conditioning occurred when the same intensity electric shock was used during both the preexposure and conditioning phases. In Experiment 4, groups of rats were pre-exposed to series of 0.5, 0.8, or 1.3-mA electric shocks which they could escape by performing a chain-pull response. Rats in each of these groups had yoked partners which received the same number, intensity, and temporal pattern of electric shocks, but could not perform a response to escape shock. All groups were then conditioned with a 0.8-mA electric shock. Rats pre-exposed to escapable electric shocks showed equal or greater attenuation of CER . conditioning than rats which could not escape shock during the preexposure phase

6 Emotional Conditioning Factors that Influence Conditioned Emotional Responses

All conditioned emotional responses are learned behaviors. People and animals may learn CER’s without consciously knowing so. In 3 experiments, rats were used to investigate the conditions that influence the transfer of a conditioned emotional response from 1 context to another. The subjects experienced training in 2 contexts on each day. In Experiment 1, subjects received a single conditioned trial with a different target stimulus in each of the 2 contexts. Conditioned responding was found to be more vigorous when the target was presented subsequently in the context in which conditioning had taken place than when it was presented in the other context. Experiments 2 and 3 confirmed these results and also showed that neither the unconditioned response evoked by the target stimulus nor the conditioned response acquired after multiple training trials showed evidence of context for the difference in outcome between single-trial and multi-trial conditioning procedures are discussed. (Hall, Honey 1990) Children often learn a CER through a process called vicarious conditioning. An example of vicarious conditioning is a group of kids in a line to get shots. After the the first kid receives a shot, he cries. The other kids see this and they anticipate that the shot is painful and eventually they begin to cry before they receive a shot. Adults can learn a CER the same way but maybe in a different context. If the theory advanced by Watson and Morgan (in 'Emotional Reactions and Psychological Experimentation,' American Journal of Psychology, April, 1917, Vol. 28, pp. 163174) to the effect that in infancy the original emotional reaction patterns are few, consisting so far as observed of fear, rage and love, then there must be some simple method by means of which the range of stimuli which can call out these emotions and their compounds is greatly increased. Otherwise, complexity in adult response could not be accounted for. These authors

7 Emotional Conditioning without adequate experimental evidence advanced the view that this range was increased by means of conditioned reflex factors. It was suggested there that the early home life of the child . furnishes a laboratory situation for establishing conditioned emotional responses

Disorders Caused by Emotional Conditioning

There are certain psychological disorders that are directly caused by conditioned emotional responses. Post traumatic stress disorder, panic attacks, and anxiety are all the results of a CER. A study in which 43 American combat veterans from 2 wars, with the clinical symptomatology of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), exhibited abnormal behavior and physiological arousal, as compared with 56 controls from a variety of groups, when exposed to meaningful stimuli reminiscent of combat. It is suggested that the biological assessment of these studies offers the potential not only of diagnostic identification of a special subgroup of war-induced PTSD but also of the severity of the disorder. Biological assessment could also be used to monitor responses to various therapeutic interventions. The historical recognition of PTSD, follow-up studies on World War II veterans with chronic PTSD, symptoms of PTSD, and attempts at ( deconditioning victims of PTSD are also discussed in the article. (Kolb 1984 Fear and avoidance of trigger cues are common to many anxiety disorders and resemble the arousal and avoidance responses shown by normal subjects to conditioned fear cues. Thus, a common element of anxiety disorders may be an abnormally elevated fear response. Based on animal models of fear learning, this hypothesis leads to the prediction that amygdalar dysfunction is common to a variety of anxiety disorders. Indeed, amygdalar hyperactivity has been observed during symptom provocation or negative emotional processing in people with

8 Emotional Conditioning PTSD, panic disorders, and obsessive compulsive disorder.( Etkin, Wager 2007) People with any of the three disorders consistently showed greater activity than matched comparison subjects in . the amygdaloid and insula, structures linked to negative emotional response

Conditioned Emotional Response and Anti-Anxiety Drugs

Researchers use the CER to study the effectiveness of anti-anxiety drugs. The effects of major and minor tranquilizers on an animal analogue of anxiety, the conditioned emotional response (CER), are surveyed. The apparent inconsistencies in results can be traced to drug interactions with acute versus chronic regimens of administration, and to the occasional failure to employ sensitive, stable behavioral baselines. The CER is analyzed into its relevant behavioral components, and an interactive motivational model is used to rationalize the effects of drug treatments. Although the evidence still remains far too fragmentary to evaluate the validity of the CER as a prototype of anxiety, human or animal, the technique is likely to continue to find a useful role as one element in the behavioral profile of pharmacological agents. (Milleson, Leslie 1974) In another separate study researchers found that, stimuli consistently paired with shock become capable of suppressing ongoing operant or consummatory behavior (the conditioned emotional response—CER) or elevating the amplitude of the startle reflex (fear-potentiated startle). These changes are used to infer a central state of fear which involves the central nucleus of the amygdala and its efferent projections to the brainstem. The present paper reviews how psychoactive drugs affect these measures. Both the CER and fear-potentiated startle are reduced ( by benzodiazepines, barbiturates and opiates.(Davis 1990

9 Emotional Conditioning Practical Uses of Conditioned Emotional Responses

There are ways to manipulate a person's or animals’ CER for practical purposes. Parents, authorities, advertisers, and animal trainers use techniques to achieve obedience, compliance, or conformity. I think most people have memories of subtle things that their parents could do to make them immediately stop whatever they're doing and give their parents their full attention. You didn't give them your full attention because you were thrilled to hear what they were about to say, it was because of the fear of what might have happened had you not given them your full attention. Some animal trainers do the same thing to train their animals. They use collars that deliver an electrical shock to train dogs via punishment. Some trainers pair the electrical shock with a noise, using a device such as a whistle or a clicker, which creates a conditioned stimulus. . The electrical shock is no longer needed to evoke the desired response Advertising experts also use CER’s to influence people to buy their products. Children's toys are often displayed with bright vibrant colors, and they show happy babies and children playing with them to evoke positive emotions that are associated with young children. If you have ever watched the ASPCA commercials, that try to get you to donate money to take care of stray animals, you will notice that the camera focuses on the eyes of every animal they show. That's to try and get you to empathize with that animal. The eyes are what humans have that is most similar to any other part of an animal. They always show smaller animals also, so people can . associate that with being helpless Authorities such as police rely on your fear of punishment to force compliance and obedience. The death penalty only exists as a deterrent to violent crime. All criminal punishment is meant to evoke fear of committing a crime. I think the problem with that premise is that there

10 Emotional Conditioning is no unconditioned stimulus to pair the punishment with initially. Police use sirens to alert people of there presence, yet the sound and sight of the lights probably evoke a fair amount of anxiety in most people. The mere sight of police officers or patrol cars evoke fear and anxiety in some people. We consider politicians as quasi authorities. I think they constantly try to evoke fear and anxiety of the impending doom that will come if their opponent is elected. They also use . fear for the rationalization and justification of wars I believe our environment and society constantly conditions us. Our behavior is not genuinely ours. We are influenced by so many factors that we aren't even conscious of. We are essentially robots programmed to behave a specific way based on our situational environment. Our conditioned emotional responses overrides our cognitive processes, if only for a very brief time. I think conditioned emotional responses are the single most influential factor of situational .behavior

11 Emotional Conditioning References

Davis, M. (1990) Animal models of anxiety based on classical conditioning: The conditioned emotional response (CER) and the fear-potentiated startle effect. Pharmacology and Therapeutics Vol. 47(2) 147-165 doi:10.1016/0163-7258(90)90084-F Dewey, R. Conditioned emotional response. Psychology: An Introduction. Retrieved from: http://www.intropsych.com/ch05_conditioning/conditional_emotional_responses.html Etkin A, Wager, T. (2007) Functional neuroimaging of anxiety: A meta-analysis of emotional processing PTSD, social-anxiety disorder, and specific phobia. Am I Psychiatry Vol. 164 14761488 Hall G, Honey R. C. (1990 Jul). Context-specific conditioning in the conditioned-emotionalresponse procedure.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, Vol 16(3), Jul 1990, 271-278. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0097-7403.16.3.271 Kola, Lawerence C. (May 1984). The post-traumatic stress disorders of combat: A subgroup with . a conditioned emotional response. Military Medicine Vol. 149(5) 237-243 Milleson, J, Leslie, J. (1974 Jan). The conditioned emotional response (CER) as a baseline for the study of anti-anxiety drugs. Neuropharmacology Vol. 13(1) 1-9 doi:10.1016/00283908(74)90002-1 Pam. What is conditioned emotional response (CRE )? Psychology Dictionary. Retrieved from: / http://psychologydictionary.org/conditioned-emotional-response-cfr Randich, A, LoLordo, V. (1979 Aug). Preconditioning exposure to the unconditined stimulus affects the acquisition of a conditioned emotional response. Learning and Motivation Vol. 10(3) doi:10.1016/0023-9690(79)90033-X Watson, J, Rayner, R. (1920 Feb). Conditioned emotional reactions. Journal of Experimental Psychology, Vol 3(1) 1-14 doi:10.1037/h0069608...