Logged out
Access All our Essays in an Instant
Swap your work for FREE access, or pay £4.99 for instant access
What is Fear Conditioning? What are the neural mechanisms underlying it?
Member rating: No Rating | Words: | Submitted: Mon Jun 06 2005
Page Preview
On the left is an image preview of every page of this document, and below are the first 150 words with formatting removed:
What is Fear Conditioning? What are the neural mechanisms underlying it? To understand what fear conditioning is, we must first understand what the term conditioning means. Classical conditioning is a type of learning, in which a neutral stimulus, which initially elicits no response in a subject (conditioned stimulus), is paired with a stimulus that provokes a strong response (unconditioned stimulus). If the conditioned and unconditioned stimuli are presented consecutively and repeatedly, the subject will associate the first stimulus with the second, and will react to the first stimulus alone. Fear conditioning is simply classical conditioning where the unconditioned stimulus evokes fear and thus a fear response is elicited on presentation of the conditioned stimulus. It is one of the mechanisms of survival, so that dangerous situations can be avoided after learning that they have unpleasant effects. Pavlov's experiment in 1901 with dogs is perhaps the most famous of classical conditioning experiments. He...
Get instant access
- Instant, unlimited access to our documents in full
- Swap your work for free access, or pay £4.99
- To see the full version of this document and 147,187 others
Receive email updates for this category
- Simply tell us your email address and receive a weekly Study Help Email for FREE
- Receive 3 FREE essay views with each email
- Get all the latest essays from Coursework.Info & discussion from TheStudentRoom.co.uk
