A student experiences a traumatic math testing experience that was humiliating and now suffers from fear and anxiety when taking a test. What is occurring?

In this scenario, the student’s fear and anxiety related to math testing can be understood through the lens of classical conditioning. This psychological concept occurs when a neutral stimulus, in this case, the math test, becomes associated with a negative or traumatic experience. When the student faced humiliation during the math test, their emotional response to that stimulus shifted, leading them to feel anxiety when confronted with a similar situation again.

Classical conditioning involves the pairing of an unconditioned stimulus, which naturally elicits a response, with a neutral stimulus. Over time, the neutral stimulus alone can provoke the same emotional or physiological response that was initially tied to the unconditioned stimulus. In this case, the test was the neutral stimulus that became associated with feelings of fear and anxiety due to the traumatic experience.

The other options relate to different psychological principles. Operant conditioning, for example, is about learning through the consequences of behavior, such as rewards or punishments. Reinforcement refers to any consequence that strengthens a behavior, while intrinsic motivation relates to performing an activity for its inherent satisfaction rather than for some separable consequence. None of these concepts accurately explain the specific emotional response the student is experiencing in relation to their past traumatic event involving math testing.