Evaluative Conditioning

Classical conditioning experiments are reviewed in which the dependent variables are subjective responses, typically involving the evaluation of stimulus materials. These experiments suggest that classical conditioning produces a positive or negative change in the evaluation of previously neutral stimuli. We re-interpret these studies as well as presenting data of our own to support the view that apparently disparate conditioning techniques have an underlying common mechanism the elicitation and transfer of an evaluative response. We postulate that a subjective evaluative response, rather than implicit or explicit behaviour acts, carries the mechanism of conditioning. This leaves free the actual repertoire of responses (adaptive or maladaptive) in which the subject engages, and also suggests a way through the complex problem of how behaviour can be generalized outside clinical and laboratory situations. Subjective evaluations are differentiated from states of pleasure (and hence from hedonism), attitude, emotions and approach-avoidance behaviour. The experiments reviewed are selected from the verbal, attitude and evaluative response conditioning literature, and they are used to shift attention from a model of classical conditioning in which the emphasis is on a specific motor or autonomic response as “the” UCR to one which substitutes a process of unmediated appraisal which we have called the evaluative response. The relevance of this formulation to behaviour theory and to behaviour therapy is discussed in relation to cognitively oriented models. OVERVIEW AND ARGUMENT The re-evaluation of fundamental aspects of behaiiour theory, viewed in the context of its application to behaviour therapy, is engendering a lively debate. In particular, the question of how a general conditioning model can accommodate subjective experience is the focus of many contemporary discussions. In this monograph we will suggest that some of the power and economy of objective behaviour theory can be retained by attending to a narrow but significant aspect of responding: the subjective evaluation of stimulus situations by the individual. We will suggest that these subjective evaluative responses can be conditioned in a “pure” form under appropriate circumstances, and will further suggest that they may carry the primary mechanism of conditioning. They also offer a partial solution to one of the problems which underlies current discontent with older models, namely the problem of defining meaningful units of behaviour. Traditional conditioning theory, based on discrete, externally observable responses, opened the route to what was believed to be a genuinely “scientific” psychology, i.e. one based on comparative studies and with roots in biology and in the laboratory. Interest became firmly fixed on explicit glandular and motor responses; in Pavlov’s work on the glandular response of salivation, in Skinner’s on the skeletal-muscle response of bar-pressing. Other behaviour theorists were willing to admit implicit or covert stimulus-response sequences. Watson’s interest in the small movements of the vocal muscles accompanying speech and of the musculature of the arms and face during thinking began this trend, and Guthrie subsequently emphasized the sequence of proprioceptive responses and patterns of muscular activity underlying movement.