[2] Mary Cover Jones was the first to show the effectiveness of the counter conditioning process in her rabbit experiments.
But Jones was not the only one working on this process of conditioning, John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner suggested a process similar to that of Jones and also shortly after the rabbit experiments were published Ivan Pavlov used a similar procedure for a dog that was agitated by his experiments.
When counterconditioning is successful, the process can not just be explained by simply substitution of a stimulus.
The most common goal is to decrease or increase the want or desire to the stimulus.
This technique uses muscle relaxation instead of food as the positive counter stimulus.