I have been fascinated by the ideas of conditioning the human brain since my first psychology course back at Parkland Jr. College in 1980.  So much so, that when my daughter was born in 1983 I wanted to experiment on her actions and reactions to certain stimuli.  I wanted to find a way to make her laugh, smile, be happy when she heard a certain song or piece of music.  I was envisioning the positive results I could elicit when she most needed it.  She could feel happy, peaceful whenever she heard this music.  My approach was going to be to play this song whenever she was happy thinking she would associate her happiness with the song.  Unfortunately, this experiment didn't last.  I had difficulties trying to catch her being happy and having the song ready to play, among other difficulties.  I've not sure if this reversed association would have worked. It would have been easy to play music and give her candy to make her happy but the association between the music and the candy would not be the results I was seeking (I certainly wasn't wanting to make her crave sweets when hearing the song).  I abandoned my efforts after a short period of time, but find myself still very interested in this topic.  I've enjoyed reading through my classmates responses and trying to refresh my memory of these terms. Here is my experience.

When I was a young girl, about 10 or 11, we went down to St. Louis for the weekend with another family.  We were swimming in the campground pool.  My older brothers and their friends were all playing dunk each other. I was trying to avoid the chaos by hanging on to the edge of the pool in the deep end.  My brother's friend swam up from under me, jumped up and pushed me under.  I have very few memories of childhood, but this day I can remember with great clarity.  I saw his dark hair and red suit coming towards me.  I was beginning to panic even before I went under.  He came up top, grabbed my head and pushed me down holding me under water for what seemed like an eternity.  I tried to pull away.  I can remember thinking I was going to die, that I never stayed under water that long before.  I even thought about how bad he was going to feel when I ended up dead.  When he finally let me up, he was laughing and playing and I was coughing and gagging. I now have a great fear of being pushed under. For a long time I didn't like water touching my face at all.  I can now go under water but I feel a great panic if someone swims up close to me.

My initial thinking is that the UCS, a boy swimming towards me, became the CS because of the association of being held under water. The CR is the fear of being dunked and the anxiety that accompanies that fear.  The more I read, however, the less clear I'm becoming.  One web site stated that, "Conditioning just means the opposite. It means that we are trying to associate, connect, bond, link something new with the old relationship. And we want this new thing to elicit(rather than be elicited) so it will be a stimulus and not a response" (Classical Conditioning).  Conditioning happens though, whether we are "trying" to link something to a stimulus or not.   And, is there always a transference of the response becoming the stimulus?  How is the boy swimming a response?  Can this experience be considered classical conditioning?  In my understanding, classical conditioning occurs when you are "replacing" or adding a neutral stimulus with a conditioned stimulus.(Huitt)    Is a neutral stimulus the same as an UCS?  Could the boy swimming be considered the neutral stimulus which is added to the conditioned stimulus of being held under?
 

Book:

C. M. Charles- chapter 3 Building Classroom Discipline

Websites:

http://tiger.chm.bris.ac.uk/cm1/KimM/Welcome.htm
 

http://www.biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de/genetics/behavior/learning/classical.html

http://www.as.wvu.edu/~sbb/comm221/chapters/pavlov.htm
 

http://chiron.valdosta.edu/whuitt/col/behsys/classcnd.html