Classical and Operant Conditioning

In simple terms, classical conditioning is a process involving creating an association between naturally existing stimulus and a previously neutral one. While operant conditioning focuses on using either positive or negative reinforcement to increase or decrease a behavior and through this an association is formed between the behavior and its consequence (Friedman, & Schustack, 2016).

Operant conditioning is used in learning environments. For example, a teacher will punish a student for talking out of turn by not letting the student go outside for recess. As a result, the student forms an association between the behavior and the consequence and will learn to not talk out of turn in class over time. Another example where this is used in schools beginning from elementary through graduate schools is the grading system. Although this might have different effects on each individual, the concept remains the same. Teachers will use grading and scoring to reinforce good practices or the lessons they seek to teach in their class or decrease ones they wish to remove. Sometimes the consequence of bad or good grades is understood by the students at different levels depending on how much they care about school and why they’re learning.

Kumar and Dubey (2016) wrote about using classical conditioning as well as other behaviorist theories in Cognitive Drill Therapy (CDT) in a customized fashion to help patients with anxieties, phobias and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Their patients learned to deal with the fears created from these disorders through CDT which conceptualizes stimulus bound to their fears in a structured setting. The patients are first educated about the process and diagnostic label of the problem, before beginning the therapy. The aim of CDT is to destroy the perceived predictability of the neutral objects leading to negative responses. The neutral objects are neutralized in the process of the treatments.

References

Kumar, R., & Dubey, B. L. (2016). Cognitive Drill Therapy: A Potent Application of the Principles of Psychology for OCD and Phobia. SIS Journal Of Projective Psychology & Mental Health, 23(2), 125-126.

Friedman, H. S., & Schustack, M. W. (2016). Behaviorist and learning aspects of personality. In Personality: Classic Theories and Modern Research (pp. 131-151). Pearson.