How Mom Conditioned Me

This was part of an Educational Psychology Conditioning Essay that I recently wrote for class. Please enjoy reading about my adolescent experiences. All jargon has been italicized for you.

For this “experiment” section, I would like to rather cite an example of conditioning I have noticed rather than perform a new experiment. I am doing this because the conditioning I have witnessed is so applicable to what has been taught in chapter six, and would form just as powerful an example as a new experiment.

I was actually the subject of this experiment. It has to do with a type of conditioning known as classical conditioning and involved generalization. The unconditioned stimulus was a cup full of cold water with ice in it. I knew that it was cold. The unconditioned response was to get away from the cup full of cold water when I was aware of it. The environment consisted of my bedroom, immediately after my alarm clock was set off. This occurred during my senior year of high school.

The experiment began when my mother was frustrated with my tendency to sleep in on school days, often being late to class. My mother decided that if I did not respond to my alarm clock sounding, she would condition me, using an unconditioned stimulus: a cold cup of ice water, and an unconditioned response or respondent: my desire to avoid being doused by it. However, the sound of ice in the cup as she carried it into my room was a neutral stimulus, I did not, at first, associate it with being doused with cold water.

After the first two times of applying the unconditioned stimulus: the sound of ice in the cup, I learned that this meant that I would soon experience freezing cold water being poured on me. The sound of the ice in the cup quickly became a conditioned stimulus because I associated it with the negative experience of being doused with cold water and ice. This caused a somewhat involuntary response of my getting out of bed as soon as possible, which was a conditioned response (I was barely conscious when this occurred).

Since cold water and discomfort were contiguous, I only needed to learn that the stimulus (which was previously neutral) of hearing ice in a cup sloshing around, was associated with the presence of cold water. My mother was rather successful in conditioning me by generalizing the sound of sloshing ice in a cup with the negative experience of being doused with cold water. To this day, I get up as soon as I hear any sound associated with ice, even if it is not directed to me, because I was conditioned to do so.