What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [140]
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L. Ost, “Cognitive Therapy Versus Applied Relaxation in the Treatment of Panic Disorder.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the European Association of Behavior Therapy, Oslo, September 1991.
J. Margraf and S. Schneider, “Outcome and Active Ingredients of Cognitive-Behavioural Treatments for Panic Disorder.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Behavior Therapy, New York City, November 1991.
CHAPTER 6 Phobias
1. Through mistranslation, the CS and CR have become known as the “conditioned” stimulus and response. Conditions/ (that is, the conditional stimulus only acquires its properties conditionally, upon pairing with the US and the UR) is the actual meaning of the adjective, however.
2. J. Garcia and R. Koelling, “Relation of Cue to Consequence in Avoidance Learning,” Psychonomic Science 4 (1966): 123–24.
3. For the detailed discussion and debate about these five problems, start with M. Seligman and J. Hager, eds., The Biological Boundaries of Learning (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1972).
4. The anesthesia experiment can be found in D. Roll and J. Smith, “Conditioned Taste Aversion in Anesthetized Rats,” in Seligman and Hager, The Biological Boundaries of Learning, 98–102.
Garcia tried his experiment with coyotes who made a habit of killing sheep. He laced ground lamb with nonlethal doses of poison. When the coyotes recovered, not only did they hate the taste of lamb, but they ran away from sheep! Lambs would actually chase them around the barnyard. When around lamb meat, the coyotes urinated on it and buried it. They didn’t treat lamb meat as a mere signal that sickness was on its way; rather, they came to hate and fear sheep in themselves. See C. Gustavson, J. Garcia, W. Hankins, and K. Rusiniak, “Coyote Predation Control by Aversive Conditioning,” Science 184 (1974): 581–83.
Pavlovian conditioning is defined operationally: pairing of CS and US that results in a CR. This operational definition masks a basic distinction between two different processes that can be engaged.
The first is bloodless and intellectual: A CS is treated as a mere signal for the US. Dogs salivated to the sight of Pavlov because they expected to be fed. Pavlov himself had not become like food.
The second is deeper: The CS actually takes on the properties of the US, and becomes aversive in and of itself. Coyotes urinating on lamb meat, trying to bury it, and treating lambs as if they were dominant coyotes all indicate that the lamb has taken on aversive properties in itself. Unlike ordinary Pavlovian conditioning, whatever occurs during taste aversion does not occur at a rational level. Prepared CS-UR relationships, in my view, create conditioning at this deeper level.
5. L. Robins, J. Helzer, M. Weissman, et al., “Lifetime Prevalence of Specific Psychiatric Disorders at Three Sites,” Archives of General Psychiatry 41 (1984): 949–58; I. Marks, “Epidemiology of Anxiety,” Social Psychiatry 21 (1986): 167–71.
6. Until the early 1960s, psychoanalysis was the therapy used by default. The discovery of systematic desensitization and of flooding ended this. It is worth reading Freud’s famous “Little Hans” case, which originated the Oedipal theory of phobias. See S. Freud, “Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy,” in The Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 10, trans. J. Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1974), 5–100; and, for a demolition of Freud’s argument, J. Wolpe and S. J. Rachman, “Psychoanalytic ‘Evidence’: A Critique Based on Freud’s Case of Little Hans,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 131 (1960): 135–47. See also H. Laughlin, The Neuroses (Washington, D.C.: Butterworth, 1967), 545–606,