The ability to interpret potential threats and react immediately is an essential evolutionary construct. One of the most important mechanisms for recognizing potential danger is fear generalization: the ability to apply an untrained response to various, similar stimuli. Inventions for overcoming fear generalization are essential to creating treatments for fear and anxiety-associated psychological disorders; however, as Dunsmoor and Murphy illustrate in their article, the Pavlovian-conditioning methods used on animals ignore the crucial nuances of applying experimental practices on animals to clinical treatment in humans. They propose that in order for the development of more effective treatments to advance, psychologists must study cognitive
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For contingency, there are differentiate types of experiences: temporal—correlation between two events based on time—and spatial—correlation between two events in proximity to each other. Contingency—when a reward is dependent upon a stimulus and therefore the stimulus gives specific, credible information about the environment—is the mechanism by which conceptual knowledge and prior experience not only create logical premises, but specifically allows for humans to predict likely events. In terms of induction, contingency dictates that a person’s general “theory” of how to process a particular fear is created by her experiences of a particular event. For example, with a fear of dogs, Dunsmoor would argue that investigating how the person correlates particular memories is crucial to understanding how she generalizes her fear to all dogs, and anything that would be associated with dogs; this person may have had negative experiences with dogs attacking her and therefore she now generalizes a negative reaction to all dogs. Moreover, not only would this person be afraid of all dogs, but also anything associated with dogs: parks, leashes, chew toys, the sound of barking. This occurs because these additional associations not only are conceptually associated with dogs, but also are predictive of a likelihood of encountering a
For contingency, there are differentiate types of experiences: temporal—correlation between two events based on time—and spatial—correlation between two events in proximity to each other. Contingency—when a reward is dependent upon a stimulus and therefore the stimulus gives specific, credible information about the environment—is the mechanism by which conceptual knowledge and prior experience not only create logical premises, but specifically allows for humans to predict likely events. In terms of induction, contingency dictates that a person’s general “theory” of how to process a particular fear is created by her experiences of a particular event. For example, with a fear of dogs, Dunsmoor would argue that investigating how the person correlates particular memories is crucial to understanding how she generalizes her fear to all dogs, and anything that would be associated with dogs; this person may have had negative experiences with dogs attacking her and therefore she now generalizes a negative reaction to all dogs. Moreover, not only would this person be afraid of all dogs, but also anything associated with dogs: parks, leashes, chew toys, the sound of barking. This occurs because these additional associations not only are conceptually associated with dogs, but also are predictive of a likelihood of encountering a