Main principles of behavioural learning theories and using examples discuss its potential therapeutic application.

4. Outline the main principles of behavioural learning theories and using examples discuss its potential therapeutic application. Humans are very complicated, but how do humans’ behaviours construct? We are not born with knowledge or personality, but we never stop learning from the day we birth. We change the way how we perceive different environments as we learn. Therefore, humans’ behaviours can be developed or changed by learning association and experience. There are two main behavioural learning theories which are Classical Conditioning and Operant Conditioning. Also, there are many principles of conditioning that are useful to the therapeutic application in clinical practice which will be discussed. There are few important concepts that I would explained before the main principles. Classical Conditioning is a type of learning in which a neutral stimulus (NS) comes to bring about a response after it is paired with another unconditioned stimulus (UCS) that naturally brings about that unconditioned response (UCR). Example, initially a dog will salivate when he brings food, but it does not salivate to a tone. At this point, the food is an UCS which causes dog’s salivation (UCR) because no learning is required for food while the tone is the NS. Next, the tone and the food are paired, it salivates. After pairing several times, the tone (NS) eventually become a conditioned stimulus (CS) because when the tone presented by itself, the dog salivates which is the conditioned response (CR) that is similar as UCR.
So, the first main principle of classical conditioning is acquisition, first stage of learning when a response is evoked and slowly strengthened (Kendra, 2013). At this stage, NS-UCS pairings must be occurred several times or a very intense, tragic or aversive event with one occurrence of NS-UCS pairing could elicit a strong CR (Michael & Ronald, 2009). For instance, the person had an experience of free-fall in a lift during blackout. After that, when

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