There are two major types of classical conditioning:
- Unconditioned stimulus and response: a response that is unconditionally triggered by a stimulus. For example, if you were to smell something good, you will begin salivating and become hungry.
- Conditioned stimulus and response: a response that is conditionally triggered by a stimulus. In other words, something you’ve learned or trained yourself to do (even if you may not realize it). For example, if somehow you associated scratching your nose after yawning. In a later instance you would scratch your nose first and then the yawn would be triggered afterwards.
These two types can be further broken down into a number of further categories (such as delayed triggers, forward conditioning, backward conditioning, etc., but for the purpose of this post, I want to speak about conditioned stimulus and responses.
You can train yourself by associating two things positively together. For example, you can somehow associate stretching with a diurnal activity or smile after scratching your head.
