Every Friday, Dr. Cruz would give a quiz in his psychology class. Students quickly learned to be nervous on Friday mornings, just before each quiz. Halfway through the semester, Dr. Cruz stopped giving quizzes on Fridays and the students' anxiety began to diminish with each passing week in which there was no quiz. The decrease in the students' anxiety may be attributed to the process of:
A)spontaneous recovery.
B)extinction.
C)stimulus generalization.
D)latent learning.

Question

Quizplus · Accepted Answer

The decrease in anxiety is a result of the process of extinction, which occurs when a conditioned response is no longer reinforced. In this case, the conditioned response of anxiety was no longer being reinforced by the absence of Friday quizzes, leading to a decrease in the students' anxiety.