eneral

sychology

Bell and Pad

In 1938, O.H. Mower used classical conditioning procedures to treat enuresis or bed-wetting. The bladder is under the control of the autonomic nervous system. During toilet training, the child learns to bring its natural tendencies to urinate and defecate under voluntary or conscious control. It must learn to pay attention to the proprioceptive signals or feedback coming from its bladder or bowels to inhibit its urges to relieve itself except under certain socially approved circumstances. Such conditioning involves discrimination. That is, the child must learn to pay attention to some internal stimuli and to ignore others.

Most of us have learned to listen to the signals that our bodies give us. Therefore, in most people, the proprioceptive feedback acts as a CS that elicits the CR of waking up and going to the bathroom. Mower believed that many enuretic children simply hadn't made this CS-CR connection, so he devised a device to help the child gain control. He put electric wires in a thin cloth pad that could go under the bottom sheet on the child's bed. These wires were connected to a loud bell near the child's head. Whenever the child urinated while asleep, the urine (which is an excellent electrical conductor, a fact that rural male children know well) closed the circuit that rang the bell, waking the child up. Although the amount of current involved was so small that the child received no electrical shock to its body, being rudely aroused in the middle of the night was often so distressing that the child learned to heed the proprioceptive signals coming from its bladder and woke up before an accident could occur.
 
 

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