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Anonymous 16/5/2009(Sat)06:18:01 No.34207  
Little Albert experiment

In the early decades of the twentieth century the discipline of psychology was still in its infancy, but beginning to make significant headway. Pioneering researchers were enthusiastically unraveling the human mind, and some were willing to go to alarming lengths to satisfy their curiosity.

One such trailblazer was a behaviorist named John B. Watson. In 1919, his curiosity was aroused after observing a child who showed an irrational fear of dogs. Watson supposed that a shiny new human would not possess an inborn fear of domesticated animals, but if "one animal succeeds in arousing fear, any moving furry animal thereafter may arouse it." In order to satiate his scientific appetite, he undertook a series of experiments at Johns Hopkins University to determine whether an infant could indeed be conditioned to fear cute-and-cuddly animals by associating them with scary stimuli. A couple decades earlier Pavlov's notorious dogs had been conditioned to salivate at the sound of a bell; Watson hoped to expand upon the concept.

In 1920 Watson secured access to a "healthy, stolid, and unemotional" nine-month-old infant named Albert B., the son of a wet nurse who worked in the hospital. He was assisted by Rosalie Rayner, a graduate student at the university. The researchers' first order of business was to establish a psychological baseline. They tried exposing the infant to a white rat, a rabbit, a dog, and a monkey, and Albert reached for each animal with cheerful curiosity. The researchers brought him items such as masks and clumps of cotton, and he manipulated the objects with interest. They placed a long steel rod behind Albert's head and struck the metal sharply with a claw hammer, and he flinched with evident distress. The infant's baseline reactions to these stimuli were duly noted, and two months later the peculiar series of "joint stimulation" experiments was underway. Excerpts from Dr. Watson's notes outline its progression:
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Anonymous 16/5/2009(Sat)06:18:55 No.34208
File: 79928.jpg - (26.16kb, 228x334, johnbwatson1sized.jpg)
Age: 11 months, 3 days

* White rat suddenly taken from the basket and presented to Albert. Just as his hand touched the animal the bar was struck immediately behind his head. The infant jumped violently and fell forward, burying his face in the mattress.
* Just as the right hand touched the rat the bar was again struck. Again the infant jumped violently, fell forward and began to whimper.

Age: 11 months, 10 days

* Rat presented suddenly without sound. When the rat nosed the infant's left hand, the hand was immediately withdrawn. It is thus seen that the two joint stimulations given the previous week were not without effect.
* Joint stimulation. Fell over immediately to right side and began to whimper.
* Rat alone. The instant the rat was shown the baby began to cry. Almost instantly he turned sharply to the left, fell over on left side, raised himself on all fours and began to crawl away so rapidly that he was caught with difficulty before reaching the edge of the table.
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Anonymous 16/5/2009(Sat)06:20:15 No.34209
File: 70738.jpg - (7.37kb, 288x229, fear_not_01.jpg)
Watson also wondered whether Albert would transfer these acquired fears to other animals or objects. After a five-day furlough, additional experimentation ensued:


Age: 11 months, 15 days

* Rat alone. Whimpered immediately, withdrew right hand and turned head and trunk away.
* Rabbit alone. Negative responses began at once. He leaned as far away from the animal as possible, whimpered, then burst into tears. When the rabbit was placed in contact with him he buried his face in the mattress, then got up on all fours and crawled away.
* Fur coat (seal). Withdrew immediately to the left side and began to fret. Coat put close to him on the left side, he turned immediately, began to cry and tried to crawl away on all fours.
* [A lab assistant] brought the Santa Claus mask and presented it to Albert. He was again pronouncedly negative.

Age: 11 months, 20 days

* Rat alone. Withdrawal of the whole body, bending over to left side, no crying. Fixation and following with eyes. It was thought best to freshen up the reaction by another joint stimulation.
* Just as the rat was placed on his hand the rod was struck. Reaction violent.
* Rabbit alone. Leaned over to left side as far as possible. Began to whimper.
* When the rabbit was left on Albert's knees for a long time he began tentatively to reach out and manipulate its fur with forefingers. While doing this the steel rod was struck. A violent fear reaction resulted.
* Rabbit alone. Started immediately to whimper, holding hands far up, but did not cry.
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Anonymous 16/5/2009(Sat)06:22:28 No.34210
File: 83370.jpg - (9.22kb, 317x172, little_albert.jpg)
Watson also wondered whether Albert would transfer these acquired fears to other animals or objects. After a five-day furlough, additional experimentation ensued:


Age: 11 months, 15 days

* Rat alone. Whimpered immediately, withdrew right hand and turned head and trunk away.
* Rabbit alone. Negative responses began at once. He leaned as far away from the animal as possible, whimpered, then burst into tears. When the rabbit was placed in contact with him he buried his face in the mattress, then got up on all fours and crawled away.
* Fur coat (seal). Withdrew immediately to the left side and began to fret. Coat put close to him on the left side, he turned immediately, began to cry and tried to crawl away on all fours.
* [A lab assistant] brought the Santa Claus mask and presented it to Albert. He was again pronouncedly negative.

Age: 11 months, 20 days

* Rat alone. Withdrawal of the whole body, bending over to left side, no crying. Fixation and following with eyes. It was thought best to freshen up the reaction by another joint stimulation.
* Just as the rat was placed on his hand the rod was struck. Reaction violent.
* Rabbit alone. Leaned over to left side as far as possible. Began to whimper.
* When the rabbit was left on Albert's knees for a long time he began tentatively to reach out and manipulate its fur with forefingers. While doing this the steel rod was struck. A violent fear reaction resulted.
* Rabbit alone. Started immediately to whimper, holding hands far up, but did not cry.
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Anonymous 16/5/2009(Sat)06:23:33 No.34211
File: Embedded Video
Albert's profound negative response to the rabbit was taken as evidence that the conditioned fear had indeed transferred to other animals, just as Watson had predicted. Albert also showed anxiety in the presence of a dog, and was vexed by a wad of cotton. However when the researchers gave Albert his wooden toy blocks, he immediately started playing and gurgling contentedly.

Watson next sought to determine whether these acquired fears had any substantial staying power. The researchers granted the infant a one month reprieve, after which they once again confronted Albert with his fuzzy phobias:


Age: 12 months, 21 days

* Santa Claus mask. Withdrawal, gurgling, then slapped at it without touching. When his hand was forced to touch it, he whimpered and cried. He finally cried at the mere visual stimulus of the mask.
* Fur coat. Wrinkled his nose and withdrew both hands, drew back his whole body and began to whimper as the coat was put nearer. In moving his body to one side his hand accidentally touched the coat. He began to cry at once, nodding his head in a very peculiar manner.
* The rat. He allowed the rat to crawl towards him without withdrawing. The rat was then allowed to crawl against his chest. He first began to fret and then covered his eyes with both hands.
* The rabbit. After a few seconds he puckered up his face, began to nod his head and to look intently at the experimenter. He reached out tentatively with his left hand and touched the animal, shuddered and withdrew the whole body. The experimenter then took hold of his left hand and laid it on the rabbit's back. Albert immediately withdrew his hand and began to suck his thumb. Again the rabbit was laid in his lap. He began to cry, covering his face with both hands.
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Anonymous 16/5/2009(Sat)06:25:43 No.34212
File: 78616.jpg - (52.61kb, 450x428, brooks2.450.jpg)
Without a doubt, the thirty day hiatus was insufficient to expunge the artificially-induced fear. One last scientific question remained: could these conditioned emotional responses be removed through laboratory methods? Watson had originally intended to end his experiment by "re-conditioning" the infant to neutralize the fear response, but he ultimately opted to drop that portion of the experiment due to a lack of time. When he published the results of his study, however, he suggested that the best re-conditioning method would have been to replace the traumatizing metallic CLANG! with a positive stimulus such as A) physical stimulation of "first the lips, then the nipples and as a final resort the sex organs"; B) candy or food; or C) constructive activities.

The psychological community received Watson's results with rapt fascination. Several months later, in spite of his new-found popularity, the officials at Johns Hopkins asked Watson to resign from the university. But the request had nothing to do with the questionable ethics of his baby-scaring experiments; he was dismissed due to unauthorized "experimentation" with a lovely young graduate student. Watson's wife discovered evidence that he and his assistant Rosalie Rayner had participated in unabashed physical stimulation of one another's sex organs, and consequently Watson lost his career and his marriage amidst a flurry of publicity.

By modern standards, Watson's infant-phobia experiment was grossly unethical for numerous obvious reasons. The research was undertaken during the rough-and-tumble adolescence of psychology, a time when the subjects' well-being was seldom considered equal to the scientific rewards. Moreover, the experiment itself was rife with procedural flaws which rendered the results ambiguous at best. For instance, the researchers only tested with one subject and one negative stimuli, and the tests tended to be improvised and slapdash. Although Watson himself conceded that the experiment was imperfect, he considered the results to be valuable to science. "These experiments would seem to show conclusively that directly conditioned emotional responses as well as those conditioned by transfer persist, although with a certain loss in the intensity of the reaction, for a longer period than one month," he wrote in his infamous paper. "Our view is that they persist and modify personality throughout life."

Today, the "Little Albert" experiment is the stuff of psychological legend. It has been thoroughly cited, scrutinized, expanded, and embellished since its publication in 1920. But as is true with many fundamentally flawed studies, the scientific community ultimately categorized the experiment as intriguing-yet-uninterpretable. Though Watson spent the rest of his career begging to differ, no firm conclusions can be drawn from his hard-earned data–except perhaps that one should avoid employing experimental psychologists as babysitters.
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Anonymous 16/5/2009(Sat)06:31:06 No.34213
File: 73672.gif - (16.05kb, 125x187, 0898627443.gif)
A detailed review of the original study and its subsequent misinterpretations by Harris (1979) found that:

Critical reading of Watson and Rayner's (1920) report reveals little evidence either that Albert developed a rat phobia or even that animals consistently evoked his fear (or anxiety) during Watson and Rayner's experiment.
It may be useful for modern learning theorists to see how the Albert study prompted subsequent research [...] but it seems time, finally, to place the Watson and Rayner data in the category of "interesting but uninterpretable" results.

It was also found that most of textbooks "suffer from inaccuracies of various degrees" while referring to Watson and Rayner's study. Texts often misrepresent and maximize the range of Albert's post-conditioning fears.

According to some textbooks, Albert's mother worked in the same building as Watson and didn't know the tests were being conducted. When she found out, she took Albert and moved away, letting no one know of where they were going. To this day, nobody knows who/where "Little Albert" is.
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Anonymous 16/5/2009(Sat)06:39:58 No.34218
File: 79640.jpg - (93.5kb, 886x540, plaqn.jpg)
A link to his original anotations.

CONDITIONED EMOTIONAL REACTIONS
By John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner(1920)
First published in Journal of Experimental Psychology, 3(1), 1-14.
http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Watson/emotion.htm
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Anonymous 18/5/2009(Mon)02:34:25 No.35850
Nothing new or interesting, we already know everything there is to know about psychological conditioning.
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Anonymous 19/5/2009(Tue)03:55:04 No.36957
File: 77680.jpg - (147.89kb, 500x500, 124261813196.jpg)
I think it was Eric Berne, the founder of Transactional Analysis psychotherapy, who coined the phrase "The long dark night of Behaviorism". The Behaviorist approach to experimental psychology was inaugurated by J.B. Watson in a manifesto entitled "Psychology as the behaviorist views it", published in Psychological Review in 1913. He was the editor of the journal at the time and head of the psychology department at Johns Hopkins University. Behaviorism became the ruling paradigm in psychology for at least fifty years - until the early 1970s - and probably its best known exponent was B.F. Skinner. To sum up what Behaviorism stood for, I'll quote a passage from Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World Revisited" (published in 1958). Huxley uses the British spelling of 'behaviour':
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Anonymous 19/5/2009(Tue)03:58:52 No.36958
File: 82018.jpg - (42.44kb, 450x348, pla.army.jpg)
For practical or theoretical reasons, dictators, Organization Men and certain scientists are anxious to reduce the maddening diversity of men's natures to some kind of manageable uniformity. In the first flush of his Behaviouristic fervour, J.B. Watson roundly declared that he could find "no support for hereditary patterns of behaviour, nor for special abilities (music, art, etc.) which are supposed to run in families." And even today we find a distinguished psychologist, Professor B.F. Skinner of Harvard, insisting that, "as scientific explanation becomes more and more comprehensive, the contribution which may be claimed by the individual himself appears to approach zero. Man's vaunted creative powers, his achievements in art, science and morals, his capacity to choose and our right to hold him responsible for the consequences of his choice - none of these is conspicuous in the new scientific self-portrait."
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Anonymous 19/5/2009(Tue)04:00:18 No.36959
File: 86662.jpg - (21kb, 400x299, 49dossier97.jpg)
Huxley misquotes slightly. Skinner actually wrote "his original accomplishments in art, science, and morals..." The statement can be found in "Cumulative Record" by B.F. Skinner (Reprint edition: Copley Publishing Group, 1999). In other words, the Behaviorists considered that human behavior was mostly shaped by environmental conditioning and that hereditary factors counted for very little. That was the ruling paradigm in academic psychology for fifty years until the pendulum swung in the other direction. Now, 'evolutionary' psychology and the search for 'genetic predispositions' have taken its place. It seems to be very hard for most psychiatrists and university psychologists to get it into their heads that both factors are fundamentally intertwined.

To most students of psychology B.F. Skinner's name is associated with conditioning experiments on rats and pigeons in 'Skinner boxes', and J.B. Watson's name with the induction of phobias into an infant child known as 'Little Albert'. What happened to Little Albert later in life is unknown.
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Anonymous 19/5/2009(Tue)04:10:35 No.36961
J.B. Watson's children
Watson subjected his own children to a harsh upbringing regime - scheduled feeding and no physical affection. His first marriage to Mary Ickes produced a daughter, Mary (a.k.a. Polly), and a son John. Polly made multiple suicide attempts later in life and 'Little John' became a rootless person who often sponged off his father. Little John was plagued by stomach trouble and intolerable headaches throughout his life. He died in his early 50s from bleeding ulcers.
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Anonymous 19/5/2009(Tue)04:13:03 No.36962
After a scandalous affair with a graduate student young enough to be his daughter, Rosalie Rayner, Watson's wife Mary divorced him and he was fired from Johns Hopkins University. Soon after, he married Rosalie and they had two sons - Billy and Jimmy. In adulthood Billy rebelled against his father's behaviorism and established a successful career as a Freudian psychiatrist. Nevertheless, he too attempted suicide. His first attempt was stopped by younger brother Jimmy. He killed himself at his second attempt. Jimmy suffered chronic stomach problems for years (a legacy of scheduled feeding during infancy?), but managed to do well in life after intensive analysis. An article about J.B. Watson on the website of Clayton State University refers to the suicide:

"Sadly, although B.F. Skinner got to brag that his "baby in a box" grew up healthy and happy, Watson's application of science to child-rearing lacks that testimonial validity: William, the older of his and Rosalie's two sons, committed suicide at age 40, just four years after John Watson's death."
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Anonymous 19/5/2009(Tue)04:13:50 No.36963
In 1930, when the boys were still young, Rosalie Rayner Watson wrote an article for Parents Magazine titled "I Am the Mother of a Behaviorist's Sons," in which she expressed the wish that her sons would grow up to appreciate poetry and the drama of life. She said: "In some respects I bow to the great wisdom in the science of behaviorism, and in others I am rebellious. ... I like being merry and gay and having the giggles. The behaviorists think giggling is a sign of maladjustment." She died five years later from pneumonia. There's an article about John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner in Johns Hopkins Magazine, published by the university where he was professor of psychology: It's All in the Upbringing. John Broadus Watson became a recluse towards the end of his life. He burned all of his papers prior to his death in 1958.
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Anonymous 19/5/2009(Tue)04:14:26 No.36965
Mariette Hartley - Breaking the Silence
That's not the end of the family saga. Watson's daughter Mary had a daughter in turn, Mary Loretta Hartley (a.k.a. Marietta or Mariette), who later achieved success as the actress Mariette Hartley (www.mariettehartley.com). She is probably best known for her TV commercials for Polaroid in which she played the role of James Garner's wife. However, the circumstances of her childhood were dire. Her rage-filled, silence-prone mother was a secret drinker who repeatedly tried to commit suicide, first one way and then another. Her father, a retired advertising executive, took his own life at the age of 67 after a long period of depression. Mariette was eating breakfast with her mother when they heard the gunshot. These circumstances led Mariette herself into alcoholism and thoughts of suicide until her career hit bottom. She managed to pull through and rebuild her life with help from a friend and mentor. Later on, she wrote a memoir of her experiences, "Breaking the Silence" (Putnam Group, 1990). She has this to say about her grandfather's childrearing principles:
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Anonymous 19/5/2009(Tue)04:15:15 No.36966
"Grandfather's theories infected my mother's life, my life, and the lives of millions. How do you break a legacy? How do you keep from passing a debilitating inheritance down, generation to generation, like a genetic flaw?"

J.B. Watson was the author of a bestselling child rearing manual: "The Psychological Care of Infant and Child." After her recovery, Marietta Hartley became honorary director of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, and a public speaker and campaigner. She has received humanitarian awards from numerous organizations including, in her home state of California, the California Family Studies Center, the L.A. County Psychological Association and the University of California Brain Imaging Center at Irvine.

Mariette Hartley scripted and performed a solo stage show based on her autobiography. In "If You Get to Bethlehem, You've Gone Too Far," which premiered in January 2006, she portrayed the main characters who shaped her life.

There are lecture notes about John Broadus Watson on the website of Sonoma State University in California which begin with extracts from Mariette Hartley's "Breaking the Silence".
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Anonymous 19/5/2009(Tue)04:16:30 No.36967
John B. Watson's background
John B. Watson's childhood is documented in K.W. Buckley's biography of his life and work, Mechanical Man. He was raised by a pious mother who hoped that he would become a Southern Baptist preacher. She chose the surname of the most famous Baptist minister of the period, Broadus, as his middle name. In 1894, he enrolled at Furman University, which at the time was a Southern Baptist Academy and Theological Institute. However, a philosophy professor at Furman became his mentor and inspired his interest in psychology, still a branch of the philosophical tradition.

In his later career Watson became a champion of the 'scientific method' in psychology. Yet despite the trappings of science, it appears Watson's advice on child-rearing in "The Psychological Care of Infant and Child" was mostly a recapitulation of the Southern Baptist attitude to children.
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Anonymous 24/5/2009(Sun)09:08:37 No.43468
Is there some kind of structure to this thread or what?
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Anonymous 23/6/2009(Tue)12:33:37 No.83182
>>43468
Idk, but it was a good read. I liked the video, as well.
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Anonymous 23/6/2009(Tue)01:58:27 No.83202
>>43468
I think it is more like a "interesting dump"

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