Question

A cancer patient becomes nauseated following chemotherapy treatments. After a few treatments, the patient begins having a sick feeling whenever entering the treatment rooms. The treatment room has become a _______

Answer 1

Answer:

conditioned stimulus

Explanation:

The patient’s experience can simply be explained using the concepts in classical conditioning. In classical conditioning, we have following terms:

Unconditioned response: this is the response that is triggered naturally. In this case, the nausea is the feeling triggered by chemotherapy (unconditioned stimulus).

Unconditioned stimulus (chemotherapy treatment): this is anything that creates a naturally occurring response such as nausea (unconditioned stimulus) in this case.

Conditioned response (sick seeking the patient gets later on): This is a similar response that is produced by a different stimulus (treatment rooms for chemotherapy) which is closely associated with the unconditioned stimulus (chemotherapy treatment).

Conditioned stimulus (treatment room for chemotherapy): This is a neutral stimulus which after being presented before an unconditioned stimulus, would produce similar response (conditioned response i.e. the sick feeling)

In chemotherapy treatment (unconditioned stimulus), side effects such as nausea (unconditioned response) is very common in patients.  The sick feeling (conditioned response) patients get is as a result of the association of treatment room (conditioned stimulus) with chemotherapy treatment (unconditioned stimulus). This explains the sick feeling patients get whenever they enter treatment rooms.