Scared of Insects?

I wasn't always afraid of insects. When I was five years old, I was the child who fearlessly killed spiders, cockroaches, mosquitoes, and crickets for my mother. I remember that my family would be screaming and shouting, "Kill it!" as I swatted a shoe at the bug. As I got older, something happened, though. When they wanted me to kill a bug, I would do it, but not as willingly. In fact, I would scream throughout the entire act...just like they did. Now, as an adult, the sight of an insect makes me do a mad dash across the room, all the while screaming for my husband to, "Kill it!" Sometimes I am so afraid and disgusted at the sight of an insect that I get goose bumps. How did I, a once brave bug-killing child, develop into an adult who is scared at the sight of an insect?

Ivan Pavlov, a Russian psychologist, developed the framework of learning that is called classical conditioning. Pavlov conducted an experiment in which he conditioned a dog to salivate at the sound of a bell. Pavlov's experiment proved that through classical conditioning a human or animal can be conditioned to associate involuntary biological responses or urges with an object or event that normal does not produce that response. For example, in Pavlov's experiment the dog was conditioned to salivate (unconditioned response--unlearned, involuntary) to the sound of a bell (neutral stimulus-an object not associated with producing salivation). Pavlov did this by feeding the dog a bowl of meat immediately after ringing the bell. The meat (unconditioned stimulus) naturally produced salivation in the dog. The dog soon began to hear the bell as a sign that it was time to eat and began to salivate at the sound of the bell (now a conditioned stimulus) (Feldman, 2005).