The establishment of new S-R relations through respondent conditioning might be said to add to an individual's behavioral repertoire in the sense that although not novel, the response is now being elicited by a different stimulus.
While respondent conditioning seems to play a role in developing taste aversions, sexual arousal, and phobias, little is known about what role it plays in language development and everyday language behavior.
As previously mentioned, the employment of a zero contingency per se is not what explains the differences in performance when compared to subjects receiving training with a positive contingency in the
respondent conditioning paradigm (see Papini & Bitterman, 1990).
However, in both operant and
respondent conditioning, the changes typically targeted for observation and measurement are those relative to behavior with respect to a biologically significant stimulus of which organisms are deprived.
The
respondent conditioning phase consisted of 10 presentations to each of a CS+ and CS- in a quasi-random order with random inter-trial intervals of 10-40 seconds..
This does not occur in
respondent conditioning because, since the beginning, the pairing is between stimuli (CS--US) and not between responses and stimuli (R--US).
In particular, the transformation of functions in accordance with derived relations suggests that sexual arousal in the world outside the laboratory may sometimes arise in the absence of direct reinforcement or
respondent conditioning. Thus, these findings significantly extend the existing behavioral literature on the development of sexual arousal patterns in humans.
Central to contemporary models of
respondent conditioning is the expanded concept of the conditioned response (CR; Forsythe & Eifert, 1998).
Respondent conditioning procedures using verbal stimuli similar to those outlined above have also been used to modify the "maladaptive" associative histories of particular clinical populations.
The N1, N2, N3, and N4 stimuli were included as incorrect comparison stimuli but were not employed during
respondent conditioning or during the test for a transformation of function.
Likewise, the three agreed on the differential location of the two types of learning, asserting that
respondent conditioning occurs in the autonomic nervous system and operant conditioning occurs in the skeletal system.
In turn, language-emotive functions can be acquired directly through aversive
respondent conditioning or indirectly through semantic conditioning (Staats & Eifert, 1990).
