Stimulus Generalization And Phobias
Fear generalization occurs when a fear response acquired to a particular stimulus transfers to another stimulus.
Stimulus generalization and phobias. For example if a child has been conditioned to fear a stuffed white rabbit it will exhibit a fear of objects similar to the conditioned stimulus such as a white toy rat. Generalization of fear responses in c57bl 6n mice subjected to one trial foreground contextual conditioning. Some predictions from a model of pavlovian conditioning.
The phenomenon of fear generalization in which a conditioned fear. Generalization is often an adaptive function that allows an organism to rapidly respond to novel stimuli that are related in some way to a previously learned stimulus. Conditioning and generalization stimuli gss used in the experiment.
Then fear is exhibited to anything that else resembles a. The sufferer can be exposed to the object of his or her fear in a controlled environment while in a state of relaxation. Once a phobia is learned for example a fear of spiders stimulus generalization can occur.
However as this field of research has then been neglected for several decades after the initial interest surprisingly little is known about fear generalization especially in clinical populations. Fear related symptoms of trauma and stressor related disor ders such as ptsd and speciļ¬c phobias dymond dunsmoor et al 2014. The phenomenon of fear generalization in which a conditioned fear response spreads to related stimuli has been explored in animals e g.
Toddlers who were taught to fear moving cars in order to prevent them from trying to cross busy streets by themselves also experienced stimulus generalization. In the conditioning process stimulus generalization is the tendency for the conditioned stimulus to evoke similar responses after the response has been conditioned. They began to fear not only moving cars but moving trucks vans buses and motorcycles.
This involves the ability to distinguish between two similar stimuli. See full answer below. 95 179 189 10 1016 s0166 4328 98 00039 4.