Psychological conditioning is apart of everyone's life, and influences the person we become. As soon as we are born our parents, relatives, and friends immediately begin to influence and condition us to the society that we are raised in. There are three main conditionings that affect everyone throughout their lives; classical, operant, and vicarious. These conditionings help mold our personalities and help explain why we react to certain stimuli. Ivan Pavlov and his dogs made classical conditioning, one of the better-known conditionings, famous. Classical conditioning involves pairing a conditioned stimulus with an unconditioned stimulus, which creates an innate reflex in the form of behavioral learning. Everyone throughout his or her lives has been classically conditioned in one way or another, and for everyone it's different. While living with my parents, my mom loved to cook, she would cook dinner every night for our family around 5-6pm and even make some type of desert for us also. Those were the good ol' days. Since leaving my house there is still one type of alarm that will still remind me of my mom's home cooked meals, BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! It was fairly high pitch and would beep in intervals of three, pause for about 5 seconds, and then repeat. This sound could be heard throughout my entire house, no matter which room you were in around the same time every day. We had that oven since the day I was born and I knew if the alarm went off, I needed to go wash my hands and get ready for dinner. For this example, the oven alarm going off would be the neutral stimulus but only until I became old enough to realize that alarm meant food, and food meant to wash my hands and get the dinner table ready. At that point the alarm would become the conditioned stimulus and me coming downstairs to wash my hands and prepare for dinner would be the conditioned response. I thought of this example almost immediately as we were covering this chapter in class, and how other way I am classically conditioned.
