Greetings Psychology Class.

While reading this weeks assignment on personalities I became reaquianted with the studies of individuals whose workds I have not read in years. People such as Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Albert Bandura and Ivan Pavlov. Pavlov wrote about the "classical conditioning in everyday life"....how life's experiences have a way of contributing to the forming of our personalities. The example in the textbook spoke of when each time the family was about to cross a brdige, the father would stop and explain how dangerous crossing the bridge would be. Needless to say, when the child grew up she developed a fear of bridges (and highway overpasses) so severe that she would not travel over them. This seems to be a bit extreme; however, each of us have been influenced to some degree by an experience or through education to believe or respond a certain way in a given situation. Either we are conditioned or we condition ourselves. I would suppose that some of this conditioning is for reasons of defense while others are simply the result of a process that we put our selves through as we travel through life.