conditioned response

American  

noun

Psychology.

1. a response that becomes associated with a previously unrelated stimulus as a result of pairing the stimulus with another stimulus normally yielding the response.

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conditioned response British  

noun

1. Also called (esp formerly): conditioned reflex.  psychol a response that is transferred from the second to the first of a pair of stimuli. A well-known Pavlovian example is salivation by a dog when it hears a bell ring, because food has always been presented when the bell has been rung previously See also classical conditioning unconditioned response

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conditioned response Cultural  

1. In psychology, the response made by a person or animal after learning to associate an experience with a neutral or arbitrary stimulus. Conditioned response experiments by Ivan Pavlov (see Pavlov's dogs) paired a neutral stimulus (sounding a bell) with a natural response (salivating) by associating the bell with the presentation of food. Conditioned response experiments by B. F. Skinner and other behaviorists (see behaviorism) associated an arbitrary action (an animal's pressing a lever) with a positive reward (presentation of food) or a negative reward (an electric shock).

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Discover More

Response conditioning is used in behavior modification. Stop-smoking clinics, for example, may use an electric shock whenever a patient lights up. The patient will then associate smoking with the unpleasant experience of the shock.

Etymology

Origin of conditioned response

First recorded in 1930–35

Example Sentences

It can be easy to dismiss micro expressions as conditioned responses taught by movies, television or other widely available visual stimulus.

From Encyclopedia.com

What we really are, Puett says, is “a messy and potentially ugly bunch of stuff”, a collection of emotions and conditioned responses, with no guiding inner core.

From The Guardian

But if you pick this snooze strategy, your body can’t learn the conditioned response between hearing the alarm and getting up.

From The Wall Street Journal

"Create a gap between impulse and conditioned response," she advises.

From US News

Both animal and human studies have linked this brain area to “extinction,” the psychological process by which we unlearn conditioned responses, including fear.

From Scientific American