The APDT Chronicle of the Dog Summer 2018 | Page 46

FEATURE | BEHAVIOR MATTERS
involves offsetting anxious, tense responses with
deep muscle relaxation and creative visualization.
Wolpe’s model of reciprocal inhibition has now
become the preferred approach for treating
phobias and other fear-related anxieties in
humans. Those working with non-human animals
have also adopted reciprocal inhibition as an
effective approach to alleviating fear, anxiety and
stress in their subjects.
Behavior Matters:
Counterconditioning and the Cognitive Revolution
By Laura E. Donaldson, Ph.D., CDBC, KPA-CTP
I
f you have ever sought help for a fearful, anxious or reactive dog, the trainer
you consulted probably suggested counterconditioning as a remedy. Indeed,
counterconditioning is one of dog training’s most widely disseminated
behavior change methods. Popular versions of this technique often define it as
presenting an animal with a reward in the presence of a worrying trigger – or, as
one participant in an online discussion group vividly described it, “just raining
treats from the sky” on a dog when “his trigger is far enough away not to cause
a reaction.” While traditional counterconditioning may not look to the sky to
“just rain treats,” it does literally enact its name: “countering” one emotional
response to a stimulus by “conditioning” the subject to adopt another that actively
interferes with and blocks the original.
Joseph Wolpe (1958), one of modern counterconditioning’s founders, named
this process “reciprocal inhibition.” Most often (but not always), this process
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Building Better Trainers Through Education
Like many dog training professionals, I have
used and recommended counterconditioning as
a behavior modification technique. Over years
of trial and error experience, however, I found
that traditional counterconditioning failed to
generate behavior change in my clients’ dogs
that was as consistently reliable as I had hoped.
Because of this, I gradually forged a hybrid form
of counterconditioning that I call Cognitively
Modified Counterconditioning™ or CMC. CMC
combines the physical relaxation techniques
embraced by traditional counterconditioning
with insights from the emerging research on
animal cognition. Cognition in animals can be
broadly characterized as an organism’s capacity
for information processing. It describes the
way animals acquire, process, and interpret
environmental information through mechanisms
of perception, learning, memory, and decision-
making (Sara Shettleworth, 2010).
It is important to note that all behavior in
humans, as well as non-human animals, is
cognitively mediated, i.e., it is filtered through
the information processing mechanisms of
perception, learning, memory, and decision
making. In naming my hybrid CMC technique
as “cognitively modified,” then, I am making
a conscious distinction. Although CMC does
emulate counterconditioning’s focus on deep
physical relaxation in the presence of aversive
stimuli, it also intentionally modifies the cognitive
apparatus by developing skills that are critical
for dogs worried about their environment.
This is why I believe CMC offers everyday dog
trainers an effective technology for permanent
behavior change. But to test this argument,
I want to consider it in terms of an iconic
version of counterconditioning for dogs: Jean
Donaldson’s (no relation) (2009) “open bar/
closed bar” technique, which she describes as
“counterconditioning without desensitization.”
Photo: Shutterstock