How to make someone a nervous wreck

I’ve been enjoying reading along in Alain de Botton’s The Romantic Movement (I'm not sure I am learning much about The Romantic Movement at all, but it’s an entertaining read, which would seem to be primarily about relationships). There are a few chapters on the dynamics of inter-personal relationships, such as predictability, love permanence, power and so on. I thought this excerpt below was interesting, from the chapter on predictability:

In one of his lesser-known experiments, the great Russian psychologist Pavlov discovered that a dog could be driven to a state of neurosis, trembling, urinating and defecating, if the signals it had been trained to respond to were sufficiently confused. If a bell which had come to be associated with food suddenly became the herald of an empty plate, the dog could, after a few examples of this, be reconditioned to accept a state of food-less affairs. But if the bell sometimes produced food and sometimes did not, if there was total irregularity in the proceedings, the creature would no longer know what to think: confused by the mysterious connection between the food and its non-appearance, between bells that sometimes meant one thing and sometimes another [though always the opposite of what one expected] the dog would slowly slide into a form of canine insanity.

P.S. This is an interesting article from the Guardian on Alain de Botton's latest book on Religion for Atheists. I think some of his incidental observations in other books about religion, and what it gives, are quite interesting. But I agree with this article, that he is usually being patronising in the process, and it's just plain ridiculous to attempt to construct the out-workings of Christianity without their source. I do enjoy his light-hearted rambles through philosophy however.