ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates some of these theoretical models and to describe some of the treatments derived from them. The thread running through all of these is learning, that is, the principle that behaviour, thought and experience are learned through the interaction of the person with his environment. The paradigm of classical conditioning refers to the way in which previously neutral stimuli can come to evoke responses which are normally only produced by ‘unconditioned’ stimuli. The phenomenon of generalization refers to the way in which stimuli similar to the conditioned stimulus can come to evoke the conditioned response even though they have never been paired with the unconditioned stimulus; in the above example of ‘little Albert’, the way in which the child came to show fear of a white rabbit is an example of this process. The phenomenon of ‘craving’, to take one aspect of alcoholism, has been explained using this paradigm.
