Unreasonable Emotion

On Sam’s 5 years old birthday, Dad and Mum bring him to his favorite place to have celebration, which is Ocean Park. As usual, they passed the subway near their home and arrived Ocean Park in just half an hour. Once they arrived, the weather was fine, just a bit cloudy. However, after few hours, it started to rain. Sam’s family decided to have a ride on the cable car. At first, Sam enjoyed riding on it so much as he refused to stay in mother’s arms. He kept on asking questions about whatever he saw from the window, the hills, the trees, the sea and etc... Suddenly, an announcement telling that was an accidentally breakdown due to the bad weather and the cable cars needed to stop temporarily. After half an hour stopped in the air, Sam was frightened, impatient; he screamed, and started to cry seriously and uncontrollable. Unfortunately, the cable cars still stopped for an hour until it backed to normal.
After this incident, Sam’s mum discovered that Sam was frightened to stay in any closed spaces. He didn’t sleep but only keep on crying when mum closed the room door. He was not willing to go washroom alone although he can do it since four years old. He showed nervous when passing the subway near their home. He refused to go into the elevator. If his parents bring him into it, he screamed until the door opened. He even felt frightened when his mum brought him on a taxi. His parents tried to comfort him but he still kept on shouting, screaming and crying. He is so uncontrollable that makes his parents really confused.

To explain Sam’s unreasonable emotion, we can use the concepts of classical conditioning. Before conditioning, cable car accident is an unconditioned stimulus (UCS) that produced frightened and impatient feeling and uncontrollable responses like screaming and crying seriously. A closed space initially was a neutral stimulus (NS) which cause no special response.
During conditioning, closed space, which is the former neutral stimulus (NS), became