Week #3 - Watson & Rayner

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After making your mind map for the article, briefly discuss the article. Here are some questions that might help you formulate your response. You pretty much have the freedom to respond how you see fit. However please write with some authority over the topic (Let me know if this doesn't make sense).

What did you find interesting? What were some of the main points? Why did the authors write the article? How does the text and your reader handle the related material if any? What do think the impact of this article was / is? How does it relate to the other articles we have read so far?

Here is a good presentation on finding Little Albert http://www.thepsychfiles.com/2010/01/episode-114-video-finding-little-albert/

 

 

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I would have to say that I found it to be a little interesting, but also a little dry. This is to be expected of this style of work, however. It was written in a very detailed fashion. I like how he takes you through the whole process step by step. One thing that always sticks with me is how bad I feel for the Albert in this study. I don't think it is right to purposely manipulate someone's behavior without them knowing, or, in this case, a young child. It wouldn't have been so bad if it weren't for the fact they were trying to make him be afraid. I have heard the jokes that somewhere the little boy from that study is in/needing therapy because of his childhood. This may not be true, but I do think it makes a point.

I think it relates well with what we have been talking and reading about. It puts emphasis on the methods that are involved. In order to condition Albert to fear, they had to be careful and consistent on how they taught him. Approximation comes to mind. They only caused the noise when his hand actually touched the animal. This is reverse to reinforcement. They are only reinforced when they reach a certain point. It also carries the weight of the Watson paper. His ideas of "observable behavior". The study he did was a prime example of what psychology should be, according to him. The difference, however, is that he accepted the idea of emotions; rage, fear, and love. I think the most obvious implication of this study was that it showed behavior modification can alter things as strong as emotions. It showed the strength of conditioning and the human emotional response. Overall I think this article was very effective and served its purpose in the psychology world.

I liked how Watson went through each step and the reaction Albert emitted with each animal. It was boring though since I have read about little Albert many times. I feel bad for him. Wonder if he is still alive...

The main points were to see if they could condition Albert to fear a white rat. After they accomplished this, they decided to see if that fear transferred to other similar texture and colored animals/objects.

The authors wrote this article to obviously show proof that this experiment was done. If it wasn't written down in detail, we may have never known what happened in that lab with Albert. Today we can relate to this article because conditioning is reliable and valid because it can be experimented and will get the same results in most cases.

This definitely relates to the text and reader we are reading. They had to manipulate as many things as possible to they would be sure to condition him to the right object and not another outside factor. In this article it seems like everything they predicted actually happened. I do not see anywhere in the article that they happened to be wrong on a prediction/hypothesis.

I have read about little Albert studies before but never in this much detail. When I learned about this study before I was just given the procedure and outcome, not all of the details. I also feel sorry for the Albert in these studies. Normally you want to comfort a child who is scared not be the one scaring them. This article was written to discuss the study in detail that’s why it is presented in that way. The main point of the article was to show that the study worked and Albert feared the white rat.

The text does give the information about the experiment but not in as much detail as the article. The reader goes into the classical conditioning aspect of training but not the Little Albert study itself.

One of the stronger points and more interesting for me to read about is the fact that even though fear is an innate response for human beings, there is still a learning aspect involved.

For example, little Albert never cried when first introduced to an unpleasant stimulus (the rat with the loud noise when he reached out to touch it). The crying came after another two similar experiences. This tells us that little Albert wasn't sure what to expect from first encountering the rat, and he wasn't even sure that the rat was going to make that god awful noise again, but by the third time he was crying because he had expected the sound to be there.

Another thing that I found interesting is that little Albert wasn't only afraid of the rat, but he was afraid of organisms similar to the rat. Learning to be afraid of the rat branched off into being afraid of small furry creatures in general instead of rats specifically.

This article had a strong impact on how innate emotions have an effect on behavior and how human beings still shape their behavior based on life experiences.

First off, I would like to present this article to any who are interested about the rest of little Albert’s life. http://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/01/little-albert.aspx
I found this study to be a very huge break through from a behavioral perspective. My favorite part has to be the idea of transferring emotional responses to other objects. It amazed me how they decided to transfer fear from one object to the next. Starting with conditioning the fear of an animal, then turning it into a fear of Santa Claus was unbelievable. I enjoy how Watson and Rayner went through the four main ideas that they were going to accomplish. They decided to condition the fear of the animal, transfer emotional responses, see the effect of time on the conditioned emotional responses, and lastly, find methods of removal of the conditioned emotional responses. Sadly, the day before they were able to test the final stage, Albert was transferred from John Hopkins University. Afterwards, these processes became illegal, so, they never really had a chance to finish this task. This article shows the idea of positive punishment, which, is on the opposite end of the spectrum. It seems as though “Don’t Shoot the Dog” encourages engaging in positive reinforcement.

I found the article regarding Little Albert to be quite interesting. Of course, I had heard of the experiment and its effects before but I had never heard of it in quite so much detail. It was interesting to hear the step-by-step process of exactly how they trained Albert to fear the rat and other objects with similar characteristics. I am amazed the experimentors allowed the experiment to continue for so long, especially after seeing the negative emotional affects Albert was experiencing.
The article focuses primarily on learned behavior and how we can condition a person/child to feel the way we want it to feel. The experimentors took an object (white rat) that the child previously had no fear of and conditioned the child to cry/shy away every time the object was presented to it. Through this experiment the authors were able to prove that we can be trained to feel certain emotions when presented with a conditioned stimulus. When this behavior is conditioned, the experimentors showed that they can quickly and relatively easily trasfer the learned emotional behaviors to other object when presenting those objects alongside the same negative punishment.
I feel that this article, though it was potentially damaging to the child, did help us learn a great deal about learned behaviors and how they can affect a human. If the experiment were allowed to continue it may have also taught us a great deal about reversing prior learned behaviors. The book and the reader can be easily related to the article with the fact that all three resources discuss conditioned/learned behaviors and how they can be molded and modified using either negative/postive reinforcement or negative/positive punishment.

This is a very interesting experiment, mainly because research like this cannot be done anymore due to potential harm to participants. This means that this experiment may have yielded valuable data that would be impossible to observe in modern experimentation.

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate the impact of establishing conditioned emotional responses in a child. More specifically, the observers wanted to see if they could: 1. Condition fear of an animal to the child, 2. Transfer this fear to similar animals/objects, 3. Examine the effects of time on the emotional response, and 4. Test possibilities of reversing the conditioning of the fear response.

I believe this article has made a strong impact in the field of condtioned emotional responses, however, I believe that the same research could have been carried out with similar results using animals first, then perhaps extending the experiment to include humans. Also, I find it strange that the researchers made no effort to condition other, more positive emotions (such as love), as they mentioned earlier in their article.

This reminds me of Watson's "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It" article because they are observing the infant's behaviors to make conclusions about his emotions. Every response to stimuli presented to Albert is described in the article is very be behavioral (fell to left side, puckered lips, crawled away on all fours).

I enjoyed the article. One learns about this study in many psych classes but never in the detail that the article itself goes into. It was great to be able to read and know all of the steps Watson took to make Little Albert fear the stimuli. It was also much easier to read this article than the previous one we read by Watson. I believe it was easier to follow and understand because Watson used less psychology jargon that I don not know and because I already had background knowledge of the area.
Reading about this study has always made me feel bad for the little boy; both because he began to fear so many things and because they were never able to take his fear away. After reading this article, I felt even worse for the boy. I found it upsetting how they would startle the boy again if they he appeared scared, but not scared enough that he cried. It made me upset with the authors that they wanted to cause even more harm to the boy. I also found it interesting that the authors reasoned with themselves that it was okay to execute this experiment because the boy would be exposed to the same fears after he left the nursery.
Finally, I enjoyed the parts of the article that referred to Freud. It was interesting that they had planned to use some of Freud’s beliefs to get rid of the boy’s fears, but then in the end of the article, the authors poked fun of Freud. I feel that this article was likely the beginning of the movement away from Freud and to behaviorism.

The article we read for this week (Watson & Rayner) focused on conditioned emotional reactions. In the article the experimenters presented a baby (little Albert) with various fuzzy objects and then proceeded to startle Albert to start a negative conditioned response. The most interesting part I found was how Albert’s reactions progressed form being started to being afraid of the fuzzy object. As a result of dinging a hammer on steel, Albert was conditioned to not want to touch/steer away from the object presented. I am blown away how babies are able to remember and react accordingly. I then rationalized that maybe (as humans) we do not remember a lot of our baby days because of the traumatic nature of the new world we are exposed to. Another thought that came to mind would be that maybe psych disorders are specific to individuals that remember these events as they grow. A few of the main points of this article would be that emotional reactions can be established in humans specifically infants. Based upon how the article was written I could conclude that procedure is most important in establishing conditioned emotional reactions. Another main point established after the experiment, would be that it is not ethical to experiment on infants.
This article relates to the information we are going over in class. The first association would be that Albert’s behavior had to be observable. Just as in conditioning, if the experimenter can not observe the behavior than the behavior can not be manipulated. Another comparison would be that positive punishment was used in this study. The positive punishment would be the presentation of the “Ding” whenever Albert touched something fuzzy. The impact of this article would be that it is not ethical to preform experiments on infants. Other impacts might be that if Albert would have be studied on later in life, Freud’s theories may gain a little better understanding.

I think that this article was really interesting because it shows the little albert study in much greater detail then is normally discussed. Little Albert is one of those studies that is talked about in almost every psychology course, but I have never read about it in such detail.

What I find interesting about this article is the way that they describe how the researchers think that they can uncondition him. watson and Raynor explain ways of using Freudian theories to uncondition him, this make sense becasue Freud would have been very popular at the time. Also Watson and Raynor are some of the first psychologists to try to find ways of unconditioning a participant. Although they didn't get the chance to, they did have some ideas of where to start.

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