This page is part of the Classical Conditioning portion of the Auxiliary Section
of the D.S. Dog Training Workshop, and an element of the Dog Science Network
Comprehensive Behavioral Conditioning for Dogs
Making the Most of Your Use of Classical Conditioning
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The Mechanism of Emotion and the Key to Your Dog's Heart
B. F. Skinner and those who built on his work taught us about operant conditioning, which is the science of influencing behavior by arranging the consequences that occur after a response is made. Most of the procedures you read about in this workshop are operant procedures.
A good deal of your dog's behavior can be accounted for in terms of operant conditioning. But if you want to understand how certain people, places, and things, come to evoke feelings of love, hate, fear, and several varieties of physiological arousal, you have to look back a decade or two earlier to the work of Ivan Pavlov, whose research with dogs taught us the power of creating a close temporal association between someone's physiological functioning and external events.
Although Pavlov's original work had to do with the association between the response of dog's salivating to food and the ringing of a bell, the body of knowledge that grew from that work provided a world of insight into how what would otherwise be neutral objects come to take on emotional properties and elicit emotional and physiological responses from dogs and humans alike.
Without going into detail about Pavlov's work, the bottom line is this: Pavlov's work led to a succession of experiments, conducted over many years, from which we learned that anything that is consistently paired over time with some sort of strong physiological response will begin to elicit the same properties as that response.
So, for example, in Pavlov's case, he waited until his dogs were salivating in response to food that had been laid before them, then, he paired the ringing of a bell with the salivation response and soon found that the dogs began to emit the physiological reaction (salivation) in response to the bell, even if there was no food.
That may not sound important at first, but it led to the discovery of classical conditioning, which is the mechamism of emotion for both humans and canines. That is to say that classical conditioning is the psychological machinery whereby both species come to love some things and hate others. It is the unseen apparatus that causes emotional feelings to be generated toward the things we encounter in our environment, causing both us and our dogs to feel affectionate toward some and angry or indifferent toward others.
But while in the grand scheme of things, classical conditioning is the much exalted mechanism of emotion, behavioral psychologists have, nonetheless, managed to reduce it to a set of actionable procedures you can use to cause your dog to hate some words and some behaviors so much that, after conditioning, has taken place, you can count on him never to engage in those responses, just as, thereafter, you can count on him to always avoid doing anything that might prompt you to speak one of the dreaded words to him that he has been conditioned to loathe.
In parallel fashion, through classical conditioning, you can cause the animal to love his training and to value the sound of some words so much that, after conditioning has taken place, you can employ them as powerful reinforcers that will afford you great sway over his behavior. Indeed, classical conditioning is the mechanism of emotion. It is the way to your dog's heart and it is one of the two great keys to his comportment.
The better you grasp the mechanism of classical conditioning, the better you will be able understand what makes your dog tick and the greater will be your facility when it comes to fine-tuning and accelerating the process.
For that reason, before focusing on classical conditioning as it apples to dog training, we will first focus briefly on the mechanism of classical conditioning itself, to give you a better sense of what it is and how it works, before we refocus on the application of that technology to the task of training your dog and ensuring his behavior. With that in mind we will start by focusing briefly on classical conditioning as it impacts human sexuality.
Classically Conditioning Human Sexual Fetishes
Some people discover that, for them, lingerie-type garments are sexually arousing. Did you ever wonder why? It is because of classical conditioning.
In classical conditioning, something that is naturally sexually arousing, (like a healthy, attractive female), comes to be associated with something that, by nature, is not sexually arousing, like lingerie. After all, that's what happens when someone consistently sees two things paired together, like sexy young women and lingerie. In the mind of the viewer, the two things become almost inextricably bound together, because that's what happens when a person, place, or thing, becomes paired and, thereby, strongly associated with sex, pain, physical pleasure, or strong, physiologically-based emotion, over time.
After the two stimuli have been paired together and, thereby become associated over time, the lingerie itself can take on the sexually arousing properties associated with human females.
We can abbreviate it like this:
The Pairing: Sexually attractive females wear, and, thereby, become paired with lingerie
The Result: Lingerie itself becomes sexually arousing
All sexual fetishes are brought about through classical conditioning.
Classically Conditioning Phobias in People
Phobias can also be brought into existence by classical conditioning, because the mechanism is very much the same.
The Pairing: A toddler is repeatedly left in the backyard to be sunburned by his drunken and abusive mother.
The Result: The child develops a phobic, irrational fear of the backyard.
Over time, after repeated pairings, the child comes to associate the backyard with pain and suffering, which causes him to develop an irrational, phobic fear of the area, as he learns to fear and hate the location almost as much as he fears and hates being sunburned.
Classically Conditioning Phobias in Canines
The same thing can happen to dogs.
The Pairing: Every time a dog is taken to the vet, he experiences great pain.
The Result: Every time his owners drive by the vet's office with him in the car, the dog trembles in fear.
Conditioning a Distressed Response to Music
Songs and television shows, among other things, can also take on strong emotional properties through classical conditioning.
The Pairing: You come to associate a certain song with someone you love. However, after being painfully rejected by the object of your affection, you listen to that song many times over while in a state of profound upset, thereby pairing your emotional upset with the song.
The Result: After that, whenever you hear that song you become upset, because the song has become a conditioned stimulus that now carries the same upsetting properties as the thing with which it was paired over time.