and learning. Conditioning, in psychology, is causing an organism to

exhibit a specific response to a stimulus. A stimulus is anything that

Classical conditioning is a form of learning, in which a reflexive or

automatic response transfers from one stimulus to another. For instance,

a person who has had painful experiences at the dentist's office may

become fearful at just the sight of the dentist's office building. Fear, a

natural response to a painful stimulus, has transferred to a different

stimulus, the sight of a building. Most psychologists believe that classical

conditioning occurs when a person forms a mental association between two

stimuli, so that encountering one stimulus makes the person think of the other.

People tend to form these mental associations between events or stimuli that

occur closely together in space or time.

Classical conditioning was discovered by accident by Russian

physiologist Ivan Pavlov. Pavlov was studying how saliva aids the d

that classical conditioning explains many emotional responses-such as

also respond to similar stimuli without training. If a child is bitten by a large

noise. Although their experiment was ethically questionable, it showed for the

first time that humans can learn to fear seemingly unimportant stimuli when the

human behavior. American psychologist John B. Watson conditioned a baby

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