The Pavlov's dog effect

(AI says)  "Pavlov's dog" refers to the famous experiments by Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov that demonstrated classical conditioning. Through repeated association, dogs learned to salivate at the sound of a bell because it was consistently paired with the presentation of food. This led to the discovery of classical conditioning, where a neutral stimulus becomes a conditioned stimulus, triggering a conditioned response after being paired with an unconditioned stimulus.

    I have a cockroach phobia, which I don’t with spiders, or snakes, or other creepy crawlies.  Cockroaches generally don’t bite (not in the sense of attacking, anyway), so my phobia can’t be due to that.

    One day, it struck me that it might’ve come from one of the ways of childminding that I’d observed in my younger days in Singapore.

    I’d seen old people (usually the grandparent generation), using verbal control to stop toddlers from getting into a dangerous situation (e.g., getting too close to the main door and therefore to the street), to save themselves from having to physically chase after them and bring them back, which is very tiring for the old person.

    I’d hear them saying (in dialect and in a breathless, alarming, scary, warning tone of voice), “Don’t go, don’t go.  Police, police, arrest, arrest!”  

    And the toddler would usually stop or pull back, more because of the tone of voice than the semantics.  My theory is that the Pavlov’s dog effect then sets in for the rest of their lives, associating the concept of (or word) “police” with something frightening, scary, terrifying.

    I think they might have used “cockroach” with me instead.