Definition
A response elicited by an unconditioned stimulus that occurs naturally to a given stimulus (Chance 2009).
Introduction
Unconditioned response (UR) is a term used in the classical conditioning literature to describe an innate reflex that occurs following the presentation of an unconditioned stimulus (US) (Chance 2009). Classical conditioning (also called Pavlovian or Respondent Conditioning; Catania 2013) was brought to the scientific community’s attention by a Russian physiologist, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, who at the time was studying the physiology of digestion in dogs. Pavlov noticed his dogs would salivate at the presence of a sound after the sound had been repeatedly paired the presence of food. Upon this discovery, Pavlov described two distinct responses, or reflexes: the UR and the conditioned response (CR).
URs are elicited by an US, which is a stimulus that is biologically relevant. Conversely,...
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References
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LaBrot, Z., Dufrene, B. (2017). Unconditioned Response. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_1032-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_1032-1
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