Question

Every Friday, Dr. Cruz would give a quiz in his psychology class. Students quickly learned to be nervous on Friday mornings, just before each quiz. Halfway through the semester, Dr. Cruz stopped giving quizzes on Fridays and the students' anxiety began to diminish with each passing week in which there was no quiz. The decrease in the students' anxiety may be attributed to the process of:

Answer 1

Answer: Extinction

Explanation: The term Extinction refers to the process of disappearing a response from an individual's repertoire. In the responding paradigm, extinction occurs when a conditioned stimulus stops eliciting a particular response.

For example, a person who has developed fear of the elevator, as it comes into contact with the aversion object and nothing bad happens, the "elevator" stimulus loses the function of eliciting anxiety responses. However, it is precisely this need to expose oneself to the aversion stimulus that causes people to sustain the fear.