Negative Feelings and Beliefs Are
Caused by Early Associations
We might experience negative feelings in our life on a recur-
ring basis: fear, anger, guilt, anxiety, and sadness. Such feel-
ings may occur every time specific events happen: fear when-
ever we make a mistake or someone gets angry at us; anger
whenever we are told what to do. Sometime early in life we
form an association between the triggering event and our neg-
ative feeling. Behavioral psychologists often illustrate this kind
of association using the landmark experiment on conditioning
conducted by the Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov.
Pavlov was studying digestion in dogs. He would come
into the lab and place a morsel of food on the dogs’ tongues,
then watch for saliva to form and record his observations. He
later noticed that the dogs started to salivate simply upon his
entering the room, before any food was present. His curiosity
prompted his now famous experiment that demonstrated the
phenomenon psychologists call “classical conditioning.”
Prior to feeding the dogs, Pavlov rang a bell. The dogs would
hear the bell then receive food. Pavlov repeated this process many
times until the pattern was well established. Then he rang the bell
but produced no food. The dogs salivated anyway.
The dogs salivated because they had associated the bell
with the food. In other words, an event that normally would not
produce a response (the bell) does so because it becomes asso-
ciated with an event that does produce a response (the food).
People are conditioned in a similar manner. Suppose Joe
experiences fear whenever he makes a mistake. Asked to iden-
tify the first time he experienced fear following a mistake, Joe
recalls that when he was a child, his father was never satisfied
with anything he did. When his father called him “stupid” and
yelled at him, he felt fear.
When Joe thinks further about what happened to him as a
child, he realizes his fear was not really caused by the mistake
itself. He sees that what really caused the fear was the meaning“There are certain kinds
of thoughts we might cul-
tivate to strengthen our
positive emotions.”
Richie Davidson68 E-Motion Picture Magic