BA400 Unit 2 Respondent Conditioning Paper Example

The Van That Made Dolores Cry: A BA400 Unit 2 Respondent Conditioning Paper

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

BA400: Foundations of Behavior Analysis

Unit 2 Respondent Conditioning Paper

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The writer, the group home and the resident are composite; the studies and books cited are real.

The Event and the Fear

The house where I work as a direct support professional is home to four adults, and Dolores is the oldest of them. Dolores, a 58-year-old resident with a mild intellectual disability, rode the agency's white passenger van to her day program every weekday for years without difficulty. Two years ago, the van braked hard to avoid a car that ran a red light. Dolores was thrown forward against the seat in front of her, bruised her forehead and screamed. No one was seriously hurt, and the van was back in service the next day.

Within a week, Dolores began trembling and crying when the van pulled into the driveway. By the end of the month, she would not walk to it, and staff were driving her to the day program in a car. Last spring, she started crying in a parking lot when a white delivery van parked near her. This paper analyzes her fear as respondent conditioning.

The Elements

Pavlov (1927) described how a stimulus that originally has no effect on a reflex can come to elicit a response after being paired with a stimulus that does. In his experiments, a sound repeatedly followed by the sound alone began to produce salivation. The vocabulary he established names each part of that process.

In Dolores's case, the unconditioned stimulus was the sudden jolt and the blow to her head, which elicit startle, pain and fear without any learning. That startle and fear are the unconditioned response. The van, including its sight, the sound of its engine and the feel of its seats, was at first a neutral stimulus: it elicited nothing in particular. After being paired with the jolt, the van became a conditioned stimulus, and her trembling and crying when she sees it are the conditioned response.

A single pairing was enough. Conditioning after one intense event is common for fear, and Dolores's case shows why the number of pairings matters less than their intensity.

The van did nothing to Dolores; it was simply present when something did, and that was enough to make it frightening.

Generalization

Her crying near the delivery van shows stimulus generalization: stimuli that resemble the conditioned stimulus also elicit the conditioned response, usually more weakly. Her reaction to a white delivery van is weaker than to the agency van, and she shows no reaction to small cars, which share fewer features with the agency van. This pattern, a gradient of response depending on similarity, is what respondent conditioning predicts.

Watson and Rayner (1920) famously reported a similar process in an infant, Albert, who was conditioned to fear a white rat by pairing it with a loud noise, and whose fear then spread to other furry objects. The study raises serious ethical problems by modern standards, but it was an early demonstration that emotional responses can be conditioned and can generalize.

What the Van Predicts

Rescorla (1988) argued that Pavlovian conditioning is not simply the pairing of two stimuli close together in time. Instead, organisms learn the relations between events, especially whether one event predicts another. A stimulus becomes a strong conditioned stimulus when it carries information about the unconditioned stimulus, not merely when they happen together.

From that perspective, Dolores has learned that the van predicts danger. Every weekday ride before the incident had been safe, yet a single dramatic event overrode that history. The goal of treatment is therefore not only to separate the van from pain, which already happens on every ride, but to give Dolores many new experiences in which the van reliably predicts something else.

Respondent Extinction and Counterconditioning

In respondent extinction, the conditioned stimulus is presented repeatedly without the unconditioned stimulus, and the conditioned response weakens. Because Dolores's fear was strong, the agency's behavior specialist designed a graduated approach. First, Dolores sat on the porch while the van was parked in the driveway with the engine off, listening to her favorite gospel music. Next, she walked to the van and touched it. Then she sat inside it while it was parked, then while the engine ran, and finally rode around the block with a staff member she trusts.

The plan also used counterconditioning, pairing the conditioned stimulus with something that elicits a response incompatible with fear. Wolpe (1958) developed this idea in therapy, pairing feared stimuli with relaxation. For Dolores, the van was paired with gospel music and her favorite peppermint candy, which reliably calm her. Over ten weeks, she progressed through each step and returned to riding the van to her day program.

Measuring Progress

Respondent responses can be hard to measure, so the team chose observable indicators. At each step, staff recorded whether Dolores trembled, cried or asked to stop, and how many minutes she stayed at the step. A step was considered complete when she stayed for the planned time without crying on two consecutive days. The data showed a pattern typical of respondent extinction: the first exposure at each new step produced some trembling, which faded over several sessions, and occasional spontaneous recovery after a weekend away from practice, when fear briefly returned before fading again. Tracking these patterns helped staff stay patient when progress seemed to slip.

Where Operant Behavior Entered

The analysis would be incomplete without noting an operant component. When Dolores refused to walk to the van, staff drove her in a car instead. That arrangement removed the van from her presence, which is escape, and likely strengthened her refusal through negative reinforcement. Her trembling is respondent, elicited by the van. Her refusal is operant, maintained by its consequence. The treatment plan addressed both by keeping each exposure step brief and voluntary while no longer offering the car as an automatic alternative.

Conclusion

Dolores's fear of the van is a clear case of respondent conditioning: a jolt and a blow as unconditioned stimuli, fear as the unconditioned response, the van as a conditioned stimulus and trembling as the conditioned response, with generalization to similar vans. Rescorla's account explains why one event outweighed years of safe rides, and why treatment had to build new predictions. Respondent extinction and counterconditioning, together with attention to operant escape, brought her back to the van and to her day program.

References

Pavlov, I. P. (1927). Conditioned reflexes: An investigation of the physiological activity of the cerebral cortex (G. V. Anrep, Trans.). Oxford University Press.

Rescorla, R. A. (1988). Pavlovian conditioning: It's not what you think it is. American Psychologist, 43(3), 151-160. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.43.3.151

Watson, J. B., & Rayner, R. (1920). Conditioned emotional reactions. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 3(1), 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0069608

Wolpe, J. (1958). Psychotherapy by reciprocal inhibition. Stanford University Press.