Questions to reflect on
- Why do I sometimes feel guilt or tension even though rationally I don’t think I’m doing anything wrong?
- Why can a song, smell, building, or certain word trigger an immediate emotional response?
- Why can a birthday or holiday feel strange or uncomfortable even though I now think differently about it?
- Why can my body react faster than I can consciously think?
- Why do my feelings sometimes lag behind what I’ve already changed rationally?
- Can positive feelings also be learned?
- And how do new emotional associations form?
What is emotional conditioning?
By emotional conditioning, we mean that through earlier experiences, a stimulus can become linked to an emotional response.
A song, smell, word, person, building, date, or action may initially be neutral. When that stimulus repeatedly occurs together with something pleasant or unpleasant, the stimulus itself can later trigger an emotional response.
First:
certain stimulus
+
strong emotional experience
↓
repetition or meaning
Later:
same stimulus
↓
emotional responseThis principle aligns with associative learning and classical or Pavlovian conditioning.
Research on evaluative conditioning, for example, shows that our liking for a stimulus can change because it repeatedly occurs together with something positive or negative. A large meta-analysis of 214 studies found a clear average effect for this, although the strength varied greatly between situations.
Emotional conditioning is not a psychiatric diagnosis.
It’s not only fear that can be learned
When people think of conditioning, they often immediately think of fear.
But associative learning can also involve:
joy,
aversion,
safety,
shame,
warmth,
tension,
relief,
pride,
or attraction.
Research on evaluative conditioning, for example, specifically looks at how something can start to feel more positive or more negative because it is linked to other positive or negative stimuli.
A song
↓
can evoke warmth
A building
↓
can evoke tension
A smell
↓
can evoke sadness
A holiday
↓
can evoke joy or
discomfortA learned emotional response therefore does not have to be negative.
Why can our brain do this?
Our brains are constantly learning connections.
When events regularly occur together, one event can start to provide information about what may come next.
That is useful.
A child who hears the door open and then sees a parent learns to recognize those sounds. A certain smell can become linked to a beloved place. A tone in someone’s voice can predict that something pleasant or unpleasant is about to happen.
In threat learning, brain networks are involved in which the amygdala, hippocampus, and prefrontal areas play a role. So it is too simplistic to say there is just one “fear center” that causes conditioning.
Because of this learning capacity, we do not have to consciously think every time:
“What did this situation mean again in the past?”
A reaction can happen quickly.
Stimulus
↓
recognition
↓
learned meaning
↓
emotional response
sometimes before you’ve spent
a long time thinking about itThat does not mean every quick emotion is caused by conditioning. Emotions can have many causes.
Can conditioning happen without you realizing it?
This is where nuance matters.
People sometimes say:
“Your subconscious stores everything and reacts without you knowing it.”
That is too broad.
Research on evaluative conditioning shows that associative effects exist, but scientists still debate the exact cognitive processes involved and how much conscious knowledge of the link is required. For example, one meta-analysis found stronger evaluative-conditioning effects when participants were aware of the connection between the stimuli.
A recent review likewise emphasizes that open questions remain about how automatic evaluative conditioning really is and how important conscious awareness of the link is.
So a more cautious formulation is:
An emotional response
can feel fast and automatic
without your consciously
thinking through all the
earlier learning experiences
at that momentThat is different from saying that a mysterious “subconscious” determines everything outside your awareness.
Everyday example: taking a break
Suppose that during his childhood someone regularly heard:
Why are you just sitting there doing nothing?
Surely you can do something useful?
Laziness is bad.
Others keep working too.
When rest is often paired with criticism, disapproval, or shame, something striking can happen later.
As an adult, someone may think rationally:
“Rest is healthy, and I don’t have to be productive all the time.”
But as soon as they sit down on the couch:
I’m doing nothing
↓
unease
↓
guilt
↓
“I really should be
doing something useful”These days, the person may no longer believe that rest is wrong at all.
Even so, the old emotional reaction can still resurface.
This example can involve several learning processes: associative conditioning, social feedback, internalized norms, and beliefs. So it is too simplistic to call such a pattern exclusively classical conditioning.
Feeling and belief can move at different speeds
This explains an experience many people recognize:
“I know it’s not wrong, but it still feels wrong.”
That is not a contradiction.
Your conscious judgment can change while previously learned reactions do not change right away.
My current belief:
“This is safe”
“This is allowed”
“This suits me”
↕
My old reaction:
tension
guilt
disgust
uneaseThe emotion does not automatically prove that your current belief is wrong.
But the reverse is also true: the fact that a reaction may have been learned does not prove that the thought behind that reaction is untrue.
This distinction matters:
“This feels wrong”
≠
“So it is wrong”
But also:
“This may be learned”
≠
“So it is right”Psychology can help explain why a feeling arises.
It does not automatically determine what is morally, religiously, or factually correct.
Emotional conditioning is not the same as emotional reasoning
These concepts are closely related, but they mean different things.
In emotional conditioning, the focus is on how a particular situation has learned to trigger an emotional response.
In emotional reasoning, you then use the feeling as evidence for a conclusion:
CONDITIONING
“I feel tense
in this situation”
EMOTIONAL REASONING
“I feel tense,
so this situation
must be wrong
or dangerous”A conditioned emotion can make emotional reasoning easier, but they are two different processes.
A song, smell, or place can bring up a lot
Associations are not tied only to abstract beliefs.
Sensory triggers can also evoke powerful memories and emotions.
A certain song can become linked to a relationship.
A perfume can remind someone of a person.
A building can evoke safety or tension.
A season can trigger memories of the past.
That does not mean every reaction can be fully explained by conditioning. Memory, meaning, context, and personal associations also play a role.
Song
Smell
Place
Date
Word
↓
old context
is activated
↓
emotionThe reaction can sometimes occur before you fully understand why.
How can this happen within religious communities?
Religious environments can contain especially strong emotional associations.
That does not have to be negative at all.
A song can become associated with:
community,
hope,
family,
safety,
God,
a special meeting,
or an important moment in someone’s life.
A religious building can therefore still evoke warmth years later.
But the same kinds of learning processes can also occur when certain subjects are often paired with fear, guilt, shame, or threat.
The same religious
environment can contain:
love
hope
connection
and sometimes
fear
guilt
tensionWhich associations someone forms varies greatly from person to person.
How might this be recognizable among Jehovah’s Witnesses?
Jehovah’s Witnesses officially teach that they do not celebrate birthdays because they believe God disapproves of birthday celebrations. JW.org also explicitly says that the Bible does not directly prohibit birthdays, but that the organization concludes from various biblical and historical considerations that Witnesses should not celebrate them.
They also do not celebrate various other holidays when, according to the organization, these conflict with Bible principles. For some other observances, JW.org says individual Witnesses make their own conscience-based decision.
For someone who shares these beliefs, avoiding such a celebration can be deliberate, meaningful, and voluntary.
But someone who later comes to think differently may notice:
“I don’t think a birthday is intellectually wrong, but it still feels strange.”
Or:
“I know I judge Christmas differently than I used to, but as soon as I take part, I feel guilty.”
One possible explanation is that certain actions have been linked for years to meanings such as:
birthday
↓
“God disapproves of this”
holiday
↓
“This doesn’t belong
to my faith”
taking part
↓
guilt or tensionWhen the conscious belief later changes, the emotional association does not necessarily disappear right away.
That does not mean every former Jehovah’s Witness experiences this. Some feel immediate enjoyment or relief, others still do not find celebrations appealing for personal reasons, and still others experience a mix of emotions.
Emotional conditioning is therefore one possible explanation, not automatically the explanation.
The same applies to positive JW associations
It works the other way around too.
A Kingdom song may, for example, have been linked for years to family, friends, conventions, and a sense of belonging.
After leaving, someone may hear it and unexpectedly feel warmth, sadness, or nostalgia.
“I no longer believe
what I believed back then”
and
“This song still moves
me”Those two experiences can exist side by side.
A positive emotion does not prove that someone wants to go back.
A negative emotion does not prove that the former situation was only negative.
Emotions can carry traces of meaningful past experiences.
Why can an old reaction persist?
A commonly heard phrase is:
“You just have to unlearn the old conditioning.”
That too is too simplistic.
Research into fear conditioning shows that when a learned fear response decreases, that does not often mean the original association has been completely erased. During so-called extinction or extinction learning, what may actually be learned is new information:
Old association:
this stimulus
↓
danger
New experience:
the same stimulus
↓
no danger
↓
new safety
associationResearch on fear conditioning shows that old reactions can return under certain circumstances, for example when the context changes.
That is why modern models of exposure therapy often describe new learning rather than simply erasing an old memory.
This research is mainly about fear learning. So we should not automatically apply it to every guilt, shame, or religious reaction.
But it does help explain why an old feeling can sometimes resurface unexpectedly without all progress being lost.
New experience can give new meaning
Suppose someone attends a birthday party for the first time after changing beliefs.
The first time may feel:
strange,
uncomfortable,
guilty,
or awkward.
But then nothing happens that the person experiences as morally wrong or threatening.
There may even be warmth, connection, or enjoyment.
Old connection:
birthday
↓
“wrong”
↓
guilt
New experiences:
birthday
↓
family
warmth
voluntariness
↓
new meaningNew experiences can thus come to sit alongside old associations.
That does not need to be forced.
Someone does not have to celebrate a birthday to ‘prove’ they are recovering. After doing research, a person may also consciously decide not to adopt certain customs.
The goal is not for everyone to make the same choices.
The goal is for the current choice to come as much as possible from current values and beliefs, rather than solely from an automatic old reaction.
Should you deliberately confront yourself with triggers?
Not necessarily.
With mild, everyday reactions, gradual new experiences can be helpful.
But with very strong anxiety, trauma-related symptoms, panic, or dissociation, it is not wise to expose yourself recklessly to difficult situations just because you think you need to “break the conditioning.”
Exposure is a real psychological treatment method and is applied carefully. Modern approaches aim to promote new learning and test expectations, not simply make someone tolerate fear for as long as possible.
So there is a difference between:
small safe
new experiences
and
flooding yourself
with something that
causes very strong symptomsFor severe symptoms, guidance from a psychologist can be useful.
Not every strong emotion is conditioned
This deserves its own place.
Suppose you feel sad when you walk past the house of a deceased family member.
That does not necessarily mean:
“I am conditioned.”
Maybe the place simply brings up a meaningful memory.
Or you are tired.
Or you are in a difficult phase of life.
Or the topic touches on a value that matters to you.
Or several factors are at play at once.
Strong emotion
↓
may be related to
conditioning
memory
meaning
stress
loss
expectation
beliefs
contextPsychological concepts are tools for understanding experiences, not labels that assign every emotion to one cause.
What can you do with it?
When an emotion suddenly comes up, you do not have to push it away immediately.
But you also do not have to treat it as truth right away.
Try to separate three things:
1. WHAT AM I FEELING?
guilt
fear
warmth
disgust
sadness
2. WHAT HAVE I LEARNED?
What meaning did
this have before?
3. WHAT DO I THINK NOW?
What meaning do
I give it today?For example, it can become:
“I notice that I feel guilty.”
Then:
“I was taught that this was wrong.”
And then:
“Do I still think it is wrong according to my current values?”
That creates space between emotion and conclusion.
What if the emotion does not go away right away?
That does not have to be a problem.
The goal does not have to be:
“I must never feel this again.”
You can also think:
“This feeling
is still here”
and
“I do not have to
act on it
automatically”An emotional reaction can be real without needing to make the decision.
Sometimes a reaction changes after new experiences.
Sometimes that takes a long time.
And some associations remain to some degree.
That does not automatically mean something is going wrong.
Questions to reflect on
Which words, songs, smells, places, or events bring up emotion very quickly for me?
Which emotion appears then: fear, guilt, shame, warmth, sadness, or something else?
What meaning did this situation have for me before?
Which experiences used to come along with it at the time?
Is my current belief about this situation still the same?
Do I feel something because I now think it is wrong, or because it used to be experienced as wrong?
Do I sometimes use my feelings as evidence that something must be right or wrong?
Are there now new experiences that give it a different meaning?
Am I trying to force an old reaction away?
Can I let the feeling exist for a moment without immediately making a decision?
And perhaps the most important:
What do I feel?
What have I learned?
And what do I
myself think today?Summary
Emotional conditioning describes how situations, words, smells, songs, places, or actions can become linked through earlier experiences with emotional reactions.
Research into classical and evaluative conditioning shows that people can learn emotional and value-based reactions through repeated associations between stimuli. At the same time, the exact processes are more complex than simply “the subconscious stores an emotion”. Conscious knowledge, expectations, context, and other learning processes can also play a role.
Therefore:
A feeling is real
but
a feeling is not
automatically proof
of what is true,
good, or dangerous right nowFor some current or former Jehovah’s Witnesses, religious songs, words, places, birthdays, or holidays can evoke strong positive or negative associations. That doesn’t have to be the case for everyone, and conditioning is only one possible explanation.
New safe experiences can help form new associations. Research on fear learning in particular shows that new learning does not necessarily completely erase old reactions; an old reaction can sometimes return.
The useful question is therefore not only:
“Why do I feel this?”
but also:
“What meaning do I want to give this from my current knowledge and values?”
Sources and further reading
Jan De Houwer, Sarah Thomas & Frank Baeyens (2001), Associative Learning of Likes and Dislikes: A Review of 25 Years of Research on Human Evaluative Conditioning, Psychological Bulletin, 127(6), 853–869. A classic overview of research into changes in evaluation when stimuli are paired with positive or negative stimuli.
Wilhelm Hofmann, Jan De Houwer, Marco Perugini, Frank Baeyens & Geert Crombez (2010), Evaluative Conditioning in Humans: A Meta-Analysis, Psychological Bulletin, 136(3), 390–421. A meta-analysis of 214 studies on evaluative conditioning; found an average effect and important differences depending, among other things, on awareness and research procedure.
Tal Moran, Yahel Nudler & Yoav Bar-Anan (2023), Evaluative Conditioning: Past, Present, and Future, Annual Review of Psychology, 74, 245–269. A modern overview of what is known about evaluative conditioning and which questions remain open, including automatic processing and application outside the laboratory.
Research on Pavlovian threat learning. An overview of psychophysiological and neural studies describes the role of a network including the amygdala, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex in learning and regulating responses to threat.
Michelle G. Craske et al. (2014), Maximizing Exposure Therapy: An Inhibitory Learning Approach, Behaviour Research and Therapy, 58, 10–23. About exposure and the idea that treatment for anxiety can mainly promote new, competing learning rather than simply erasing an old fear association.
Bram Vervliet et al. (2013), Extinction, Generalization, and Return of Fear: A Critical Review of Renewal Research in Humans. Discusses why extinguished fear reactions can reappear under certain circumstances and why context matters.
Jehovah’s Witnesses – Why don’t Jehovah’s Witnesses celebrate birthdays? Official JW.org explanation stating that the Bible does not explicitly forbid birthdays, but that Jehovah’s Witnesses conclude based on their Bible interpretation that they should not celebrate them.
Jehovah’s Witnesses – Why don’t Jehovah’s Witnesses celebrate certain holidays? Official explanation of the principles by which Witnesses determine which holidays they do or do not participate in; with some observances, this is described as a matter of personal conscience.
