Starting around the last few weeks of June up until the Fourth of July every year, my Facebook page starts to become flooded with my military friends sharing posts regarding fireworks on the 4th of July. While this is a common way to celebrate for the 4th, these posts serve as a reminder that fireworks may be a trigger for many military member’s PTSD symptoms due to the similarity between the sound and the sound of bombs or gun fire. The reason that fireworks are a common trigger is due to stimulus generalization. These veterans have paired the sound of guns and loud noises with fear and many emotions that they feel while they are overseas. Because of this, when they return back to the states, and stimuli similar to the sound of gun fire will elicit the same fear response as they experienced overseas.

        One of the topics that we focused on in Fundamentals of Learning was the acquisition of conditioning a stimulus as well as extinction of that conditioned response. These ideas of acquisition and extinction tie into how to use therapy to effectively help clients by decreasing their reaction to certain stimuli. The first step in being able to address a client with a disorder such as PTSD is to be able to determine when the symptoms started and what may have caused these symptoms. In a case such as PTSD in the military, many times a veteran’s PTSD is developed through the experiences that they have in war zones overseas. While not every soldier comes home from deployment with PTSD about 20% of all military members who have experienced first hand conflict during their deployment will be diagnosed with PTSD in their lifetime. One of the most well known symptoms associated with PTSD is the anxiety that occurs with any events that the soldier may have associated with his or her time overseas.

         One of my interests in studying PTSD in the military is to determine what specifically may make one military member more prone to developing PTSD over another and, further, how to help these military members by lessening the connection between stimuli overseas and responses to similar stimuli back home. While there are many treatment options to potentially help this population of clients, I have recently become very interested in the effect that PTSD trained service dogs can have on helping their owners function more normally after deploying. These dogs help to extinguish the learned fear response that is associated with their time overseas. Whether it is helping the veteran with public access or waking him up if he is having a nightmare, these dogs provide a sense of comfort and security for veterans during every day tasks. While stimulus generalization is typically a negative concept when it comes to stimuli that create a fear response, this same idea of generalization can be manipulated to train dogs to react to any of these similar stimuli that their owner may react to.