Please read the chapter assigned for this week.
(Reading Schedule: http://www.uni.edu/~maclino/hybrid/hs_book_s11.pdf)
After reading the chapter, please respond to the following questions:
Of the various aspects of History & Systems presented in the chapter, which did you find the most interesting? Why? Which did you find least interesting? Why? What are three things you read about in the chapter that you think will be the most useful for you in understanding History & Systems? Why? What are some topics in earlier chapters that relate or fit in with this chapter? How so?
Please make sure you use the terms, terminology and concepts you have learned so far in the class. It should be apparent from reading your post that you are a college student well underway in a course in psychology.
Make a list of key terms and concepts you used in your post.
Let me know if you have any questions.
--Dr. M
I found the Watson’s conditioning on little Albert to be the most interesting topic in this chapter. I found it very interesting how you can condition people to like or dislike things. You can created a conditioned response or reflex to a conditioned stimulus. A conditioned stimulus is a presented stimulus. The conditioned reflex occurs when a conditioned stimulus is paired with a unconditioned stimulus. It was so interesting to me how Watson could create or condition this little kid into hating rabbits and white rats. Watson conditioned him to hate them by banging a bar behind the kids head when a rabbit or white rat was presented in front of him. This conditioned Albert to become fearful and would cry whenever a rabbit or white rat would be placed in front of him.
One of the three things I’ll remember from this chapter is the conditioning. This is most likely the most important information I took from this chapter. Another subject I found important are all the factors to conditioning. Such factors include unconditioned reflex, unconditioned stimulus, conditioned stimulus, and conditioned reflex. I will also take away the importance of how animals and humans can have their behavior changed due to this type of conditioning.
One subject I found uninteresting was the topic of how behaviorism was popularized. I just felt like the information wasn’t very important and didn’t relate so much to the other topics. The reading was just hard to read because it wasn’t interesting to me. Some topics from previous chapters that fit in this chapter are such things as functionalism. These psychologists are interested in figuring out why we behave or do what we do.
Terms: Conditioned reflex, Conditioned stimulus, unconditioned reflex, unconditioned stimulus, classical conditioning, functionalism, Little Albert
I found the most interesting topic in this chapter to be Watson's transition from Johns Hopkins hospital into a life of advertisement. After his affair with Rosalie Rayner and his resignation from Johns Hopkins, he choose to pursue the psychological nature of advertisement. He developed themes of selling a product such as fear, telling them they need it, evoking emotions to sell a product, etc. Although he didn't really come up with any of these techniques, his use of the scientific method into areas of marketing and helped in development of training programs for sales personnel.
I understand the importance of Little Albert to psychology and how we can eventually associate certain things with another (in this instance, a white rat is feared when paired with a loud noise until eventually no noise needs to be present yet fear of the rat still exists), but I have learned about it in pretty much every psychology class I have ever taken so it has lost interest to me.
Pavlov's dogs would be one thing most helpful in learning H&S. His founding of classical conditioning unintentionally started the field of behaviorism. Little Albert study took this further to show that behavior can be learned when pairing 2 different stimuli. Finally the research done by Mary Cover Jones and systematic desensitization helps us show that fear and other aversive behaviors can eventually be corrected if you chip away at it bit by bit.
Terms: Watson, Little Albert, Pavlov, classical conditioning, stimuli, Mary Cover Jones, systematic desensitization.
The thing that was most interesting to me as I read this chapter was the Little Albert study. The study was based around the actions of a child concerning fear, rage, and love. John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner conducted the Little Albert study. They believed that emotional reactions develop through conditioning. They used an eleven-month old baby as the subject for their experiment. Albert did not show any fear when he was shown a white rat, a rabbit, dong, monkey, masks with and without hair. He was more afraid of loud unexpected noises. When they put the two stimuli together it developed the fear of object. I find this interesting because it shows how we associate things together and how we basically start from a a "white sheet" as John Locke stated. We learn and progress quickly and associate different stimuli with other stimuli because it is what we have been conditioned to learn.
Although this chapter was full of interesting information, I did not find the different love stories very interesting. I understand that they played roles in his dismissal from Johns Hopkins when he had an affair with Rayner over Mary Ickes. I felt like that is the only relevant thing that had anything to do with psychology. I did find it interesting that he soon turned to adverstising after these love ordeals, though.
The three things that I feel will be the most important in understanding the history of psychology are the Little Albert study because it shows us how we learn and how we associate and condition our brain with different stimuli. The second thing that I feel was most important to my understanding was the section on Pavlov and his experiment with the dogs and saliva. He was able to condition the dogs to salivate by showing them different stimuli and record how much saliva the different stimuli recorded by feeding them with some stimuli and not feeding them with others. This shows how early research on behaviorism was done. The third thing that I felt was most important to the history of psychology was Pavlov's idea of replication. When a new student was in the lab he assigned them something that had already been done to reinforce what the outcome would be and to replicate to calm the student down and make them feel better. I feel like this was important to the history of psychology because many experiments are done over and over again today. Not many times do people do something once and then throw it away and never try it again.
As I said earlier I feel as if John Locke's "white sheet" theory fits into this chapter well because we all are conditioned differently but all of us start with a white sheet. Different stimulis make us react differently from many people. Another one that fits into this chapter is the functionalist approach. Watson and Pavlov are both functionalists because they study conscious experiences and are concerned with studying how we adapt with our behavior and mental processes.
terms: Watson, Pavlov, conditioning, Little Albert study, John Locke, stimuli, saliva expirament, Rosalie Rayner, white sheet, functionalist, conscious experiences, replication
I really liked how you related the little albert study to John Lock's tabula rasa! Right on.
have always found Pavlov’s Classical conditioning to be interesting. Yes, the concept has been pounded into my head through the years, but there is a reason for it, because it is cool! Pavlov won a Nobel prize for his research in the physiology of digestion. He considered himself more of a physiologist than a psychologist. While he was studying digestion, he stumbled upon research on conditioning. He used dogs. He conditioned them to associate food with the sound of a bell.
I also enjoyed reading about John B Watson’s Little Albert study. They took a baby and determined he was not scared of mice, rabbits, dogs or monkeys, but was afraid of loud noises. They then showed him the animals with loud noises present. This resulted the baby to be frightened of not only loud noises but also the animals present. This is an example of classical conditioning. The loud noise would be considered the unconditioned stimulus, and the fear from the noise is the unconditioned response. The animal would be the conditioned stimulus and the fear would be the conditioned response. This would be an example of comparative psychology.
Watson is noted as the “founder of behaviorism.” I was very conflicted when reading about his views on how children should be treated by their mothers. He though that there were “serious rocks ahead for over-kissed children.” Um.. He also wrote… now this is out of context but.. “Never hug or kiss them, never let them sit on your lap. If you must kiss them once on the forehead when they say good night.” Wow, kind of speaks for itself. He said later that these statements were not supported by his research and he regretted writing them.
The part in the chapter about the relationships, I felt was least interesting. Although it did humanize some of the people to me, I felt it was not something I NEEDED to know about Watson to understand the concepts presented in the book. The fact that he cheated on his wife, Mary Ickes, with Rayner was scandalous, but I felt not that important for ME to know. I do now have a better understanding of WHY he went to John Hopkins.
I think the concept of conditioning is the most important thing to take away from this chapter when attempting to understand History and Systems better.
TERMS: John Hopkins, Conditioning, Mary Ickes, Rayner, Little Albert Study, John B Watson, Classical condition, unconditioned stimulus, conditioned stimulus, unconditioned response, founder of behaviorism, comparative psychology
Initially, Positivism was a term that emerged that was associated with August comte. It was one of the first terms that had something to do with behaviorism, more or less starting the phenomenon off. He argued that we could only be certain of knowledge that resulted from observable events and that positive knowledge was the result of objective obervations using systematic methods of science to be made unbiased. Comte believed that we could control nature—specifically by inventing things like steam engines that involved understanding and manipulating principles of physics. Controlling the environment became the centerpiece of behaviorist thinking. I think that structuralism actually relates to behaviorism mildly. Structuralism was the study of how everything is broken into smaller elements, and how we must understand those elements and how they work to fully understand the big picture. I believe behavioralism has a lot to do with that. We must understand how and why a behavior must be emitted and what the conclusion would be. Everything decision and behavior is a result of other factors.
Something I found interesting was Pavlov’s early research in not just psychology, but science—It’s interesting to learn how his scientific discoveries came about. Pavlov was first interested in studying digestion in animals—particularly dogs, by isolating various parts of the digestion system and extracting digestive fluids. The quantities that were secreted were measured as a function of the type of food fed to the animal. The Pavlov pouch was the most notable invention within this research that involved isolating about a tenth of the stomach and creating a kind of second stomach, the food could not enter this part of the stomach when it came from the esophagus. A small fistula was attached to this part of the stomach to the exterior of the body and the fluids secreted that were untouched by the food could be accurately measured. Pavlov then began measuring saliva secretion by attaching viles to the salvary ducts and presenting the dogs with different types of food—which lead him to his research on behavior.
I have learned about Unconditioned stimulus, conditioned stimulus, unconditioned response, and conditioned response, as well as extinction so many times that it was pretty uninteresting—considering it’s something we’ve learned a million times throughout the course of our psychological studies. Not to mention I’m in behavior modification right now so I’m basically learning the same thing.
I’ve often found watson’s studies and discoveries to be interesting and pivitol to psychology. Some of his first studies were with Carr when he developed the Watson/carr maze. They eliminated different senses in rats to see how well they could navigate through different mazes . They found that even with removing things like eyes, whiskers, and the rat’s hearing, they all learned the mazes with ease by associating sequences of muscle movements.
I’ve learned about the little albert study many times as well, but I still think it’s important to the history of behavioral psychology. They paired a fluffy animal with a loud “bang” which conditioned little albert to be afraid of the animal, and in time, all fluffy creatures. Basically using the simple process of conditioning. Systematic desensitization was also discovered by Watson—which was gradually introducing things that were phobias to subjects in non threatening manors. For instance, while a young boy who was afraid of rabbits was eating, the rabbit was placed some distance away from him, in a non-threatening way, and was gradually moved closer to the boy and eventually the boy was less afraid of it than it had been initially.
Terms:Conditioned response, unconditioned response, conditioned stimulus, unconditioned stimulus, positivism, behaviorism, little albert, systematic desensitization, Watson/carr maze, Pavlov pouch, extinction
One thing that was interesting was learning bout Watson’s study of emotional development. Studying infants he found three emotions; fear, rage and love. Each emotion had specific stimuli that elicited that emotion. For fear, it was sudden loud noises and loss of support. For Rage it was hindering the movements of the infant and for love it was gently stroking, rocking or patting.
Also kind of interesting was learning about the beginning of Pavlov’s work. I learned a lot about him in Behavior Modification last semester but mostly his work with classical conditioning. He won the Nobel prize and his entire acceptance speech was about his future work with conditioning. First he studied digestion and found that dogs salivate more to dry food. He was especially rigorous in producing a steril environment and perfecting and even inventing his own procedures. He used replication to both train new students working in the lab and to double check past procedures.
Less interesting but important to learning the history of psychology was all the work about classical conditioning, the unconditioned and conditioned stimuli and responses and extinction. It also talked about generalization and differentiation. Something that was new was experimental neurosis. This is also called pathological disturbances; this is the breakdown of the ability to make normal differentiations.
Important to learning the history of psychology was John B. Watson and the founding of behaviorism. It talked a lot more about rat mazes. He proved that the rats were capable of associative learning. He discovered that rats learned to associate sequences of muscle movements with various turns in the maze.
Watson also wrote the Behavorist Manifesto, which I think was very important to the understanding of psychology. This book contained all that Watson felt about his work. In this book he does four things. First he assigns psychology to natural sciences, second he articulates a clear set of goals for a scientific psychology. Third he rejects introspection which is the method of experiencing some phenomenon, then giving a description of the experience. And last he fully accepts the evolutionary model of behavior.
The beginning of the chapter was interesting because it tied in a lot of what I’ve learned in past chapters and how it came to create behaviorism. The British Empirists and Associonists from chapter one emphasized the importance of environment even before psychology was born. Agust Comte invented positivism, which meant that you can only be certain of knowledge that results from publicly observable events. Positive knowledge is the result of objective observations using systematic methods of science. The next step was Morgans Law of Parsimony which made the observation of animals much more simple and objective. Thorndikes cat boxes demonstrated the manifestation of behaviorism in America, while Pavlolv’s work with classical conditioning did the same for Russia.
Terms used: classical conditioning, unconditioned stimulus, conditioned stimulus, unconditioned response, conditioned response, generalization, differentiation, extinction, experimental neurosis, positivism, positive knowledge, introspection
Positivism is an interesting concept that draws parallels with the British empiricism and associationism movements. This concept was associated with Auguste Comte who was a French philosopher. He believed in Positeve knowledge that was derived from direct obeservation from the use of the scientific metod. He believed if these steps were used then the information would be unbiased. Then what I found most interesting about his thought was that truth was maintained by the agreement of unbiased observation. He looked down on the metaphysical speculation believing that if it wasn't observed it wasn't objective and wasn't worth anything. This lead to practical knowledge of nature and that the ability to control nature meant that we truely understood it.
I'm also very interested in classical condiction as presented by the Russian Physiologist, Ivan Pavlov. Pavlov did not like being associated with the Psychology movement maintaing that he was a physiologist. In classical conditioning there are several parts. The first is the unconditioned reflex (UCR) whic is the existing reflex, or response. This appears when the unconditioned stimulus (UCS) is presented. The conditional stimulus, later conditioned stimules, gets paired with the UCS and which results in the Conditioned Reflex (CR). The Conditioned Reflex can be rervesd by just applying the CS alone and this is called Extinction.
One thing I found unintersting was Pavlov's work with the digestive systems of dogs. It was important with develooping surgical techniques. Pavlov would section off a part of the dogs stomach and set a tube to it to collect the fluids secreted by the stomach. He would measure gastric secretions and amount of salivation. He discoverd that there was more salivation when presented with dry food as to moist food. It was also stated that Pavlov was a noted and precise surgeon.
Another thing were the Watson/Carr maze studies. John Watson wanted to find out which senses helped rats learn mazes. He would remove the organs associated with certain senses and found that the rats would still be able to learn the maze. He found that the rats learned by a sequence of muscle movements. He called this the kinesthetic sense.
Three things that I thought will help with history and systems are the Positivism thought, the importance of surgical accuracy, and the studies of behaviorism.
Positivism, Auguste Comte, Classical Conditioning, Ivan Pavlov, Uncondtioned Reflex, Unconditioned Response, Conditioned Reflex, Conditioned Stimulus, Extinction, John B. Watson, Kinesthetic Sense
The thing I found most interesting from this chapter on Behaviorism was the work of Pavlov. Pavlov worked with animals like a comparative psychologist, which is why I found it interesting. Originally, he was interested in the physiology of the digestive system. Through this research he began to study salivary responses. Pavlov’s was meticulous with his research, which made the process of replication easier for other researchers. Replication occurred when students would practice experimental procedures by following Pavlov’s earlier work. They weren’t expected to find new findings, they were just practicing their skills. Through his extensive research, Pavlov found that dogs would excrete saliva in the anticipation of food, not just when the food was in their mouths. He found this to be a conditioned response. An unconditioned reflex was the already existing reflex. For his experiments, this was the salivation when an animal was presented with food. The food served as the unconditioned stimulus, a stimulus that the animal had not been trained to react to. When an animal was conditioned, it reacted to a stimulus that had been neutral to it prior to the conditioning. The neutral stimulus was referred to as a conditional stimulus. The reflex that resulted from it was the conditioned reflex. The conditional stimulus used by Pavlov was the sounding of a metronome. The conditioned reflex was the salivation. Pavlov paired the sound of the metronome with food and soon the dogs would salivate at the sound of the metronome. He also found that extinction existed. When he stopped pairing the sound of the metronome, the animals eventually stopped salivating. These discoveries led to more. Generalization and discrimination stemmed from his original work with conditioning. He found that if a stimulus similar to the conditional stimulus is presented, the same reflex should still exist. He demonstrated this by dropping the pitch of the metronome. Even with the lower pitch, the dogs still began to salivate. This process was generalization. When the dogs were presented with a higher tone and food, then a lower tone without food, they eventually only began salivating to the higher tone. This process was called discrimination.
The thing I found least interesting was Watson’s work with Little Albert. I found it uninteresting only because it’s always used as an example of behaviorism. Little Albert was examined and it was found that he was not scared of rats, rabbits, dogs, monkeys, etc. Unlike other babies, he was not afraid of a loss of support and like other babies, he was afraid of loud noises. Watson used the process of conditioning to induce feelings of fear into the objects that Albert was not originally afraid of. Watson paired the white rat with the banging of a hammer. Eventually, the rat itself could cause Albert to show fear. Watson then was interested in seeing if he could transfer the fear of the rat over to other similar stimuli (generalization). Albert also showed fear to a fur coat, dog, and rabbit. He even became uninterested in hair. They also studied retention. They found that after a month outside the lab, Albert still showed fear to their conditional stimuli, although they were not as strong as before. Watson also supervised the work of Mary Cover Jones. She found the behavior therapy technique of systematic desensitization. This occurred when the feeling of fear was replaced with a positive feeling. She did this by gradually moving a rabbit closer to a boy who was eating. The original feelings of fear that existed within the boy were negated by the positive feelings associated with eating; therefore, introducing the rabbit to the boy became easier. The three most important things to the history of psychology were Pavlov’s work with conditioning, Watson’s work with emotional development and also his work with animal behaviors.
Terms: Behaviorism, replication, conditioned response, unconditioned stimulus, conditional stimulus, conditioned reflex, extinction, generalization, discrimination, systematic desensitization
Something I found interesting from the chapter was Pavlov’s classical conditioning and its different components including unconditioned reflex/response unconditioned stimulus, conditioned stimulus, and conditioned reflex/response. In Pavlov’s experiment the UCR was the dog salivating when food was presented; the UCS was the food that was presented; the CS was the tone; and the CR was the dog salivating to the sound of the tone without food present. I have already grasped this concept from having it being presented in many other classes but I still find it to be very interesting and important in psychology.
Another topic I found to be interesting from the chapter was John Watson’s subvocal speech. Subvocal speech according to Watson was our way of thinking and the subject of this thinking is determined by “laryngeal habits.” He believed that when we are younger we think out loud but as we get older, we tend to think/talk to ourselves silently. Because of this he believed that central processes were involved in thinking and that peripheral actions could be measured. This all deals with his behaviorist view to psychology. I haven’t heard about this concept before in other classes and it seems interesting to me because it deals with our behaviors as individuals. It may suggest different thoughts for why we act the way we do.
Something that was less interesting to me was generalization and differentiation. These are general terms and there isn’t a whole lot to them. I have also heard about them before in other classes and it didn’t really catch my attention. Generalization is when a response is made to one stimulus and the same response is made when a second stimulus similar to the first one is presented. Differentiation is when a difference between two stimuli can be distinguished.
Another thing that was less interesting was systematic desensitization. I have also learned about this topic in previous classes as well. It is simply a procedure involved in behavior therapy that involves a fear response being replaced by a conflicting response like relaxation. Jones and Wolpe named this.
One thing that I believe to be important from the chapter in understanding the history of psychology are classical conditioning and its components including UCR, UCS, CS, and CR. I think this is a very important part of the history of psychology because it supported the concept of conditional learning. Another thing I think is important in understanding psychology is replication. Replication is so important in learning about psychology because experiments must be replicated in order to find support for them. Replication allows for advancements and can show us new things based off of old ones. One final topic important for understanding psychology’s history is the concept of generalization and differentiation. Even though I didn’t find these to be extremely interesting I still believe that they are important to psychology. These two terms allow us to relate things to one another as well as distinguish differences between a variety of things.
Some previous terms that I think relate to this chapter would be the concept of thresholds. This would be related to the differentiation idea presented in this chapter. Independent and dependent variables would be used in different experiments demonstrated in this chapter so they would relate to it as well. Also, the idea of cause and effect could be related to this chapter especially in the experiments done by Pavlov. He discovered that one stimulus caused a particular response to occur. The term reflex would also be used in experiments done by Pavlov like the dog salivating. Each of this ties into the new information that we are learning about now. It is getting clearer that everything we have learned so far relates to what we will be learning in the future. This chapter was mostly a review for me but it doesn’t hurt to review the material and learn a little more about the details involved.
Terms used: Pavlov, UCR, UCS, CR, CS, John Watson, Subvocal speech, generalization, differentiation, systematic desensitization, replication, threshold, independent variable, dependent variable, cause and effect, and reflex.
There were multiple parts of chapter ten that I think would be helpfully to know for future testing/understanding. Behaviorists believe that the importance of the environment in shaping behavior goes hand in hand with the British empiricists that the experience is the all-important determiner of ones mind. Being there to experience it first hand and then categorize after.
One that everyone has heard of is Pavlov. Pavlov grew up with a father as a priest and a mom as a daughter of a priest. His interest in research did not begin until studying at the Ryazan Ecclesiastical Seminary. Pavlov first went into medicine. He focused primarily on digestion. This lead him to be more interested in the digestive fluids. How much were secreted and how he could measure this amount. Because of his background in medicine Pavlov was able to insert his “pavlovs’ pouch” into his dogs and have the process be fairly ethical and precise. Pavlov began his study of classical conditioning. He explained that the dog presented with food shows both secretory reflexes and motor reflexes. Some major terms he found was the reflex was the unconditioned reflex (salivating), unconditioned stimulus (food), conditioned stimulus (bell with food), to the conditioned reflex (salivating when hearing bell). If he used the bell too much, or to little then extinction would occur. Generalization is when a response conditioned to a stimulus as different extraneous variables of tone, light, shape, etc. Differentiations, is when it is required to differ between these variables to emit the correct behavior.
Watson who was also interested in animal behavior began his interest. Watson demonstrated that rats showed minimal learning ability for the first three weeks of their lives, but that their ability to form associations improved dramatically in their fourth week. He then began to study rats in mazes from 1903 to 1908. Watson believed that the rat must use their sense to complete the maze. When covering different senses the rats began to learn by muscle movements. After animals Watson made claims that the ability of behaviorism to deliver applications would improve the uality of life, based on conditioning, especially of the motor reflex. He began to study the human emotions. One of his studies was “little Albert”. Because the infant has not experienced much of the world in understanding (empiricist) then Watson began by controlling the condition that Albert experienced different stimuli. The loud noise was the (UCS) and the fear was the (UCR). The rat ins the (CS) and then the pairing of these becomes the (UCS).
The parts I did not particularly enjoy were the part about Advertising and Watson. After his research with behaviorism and emotion he then converted them to the media. I would of liked to see more of the “little Albert” studies with different types of conditioning. Could he make someone cry or angry by administering a stimulus. And secondly I did not like the Popularizing Behaviorism part. Behaviorism has already begun to be popular because of Pavlov and Watson and this section just reiterates that.
Terms: conditioning, behaviorism, stimulus, empiricists, UCS, UCR, CS, association, classical conditioning, generalization, deferentitiation, Watson, Pavlov,
The most interesting topic I found in this chapter was Ivan Pavlov's research with the physiology of digestion. He studied digestion by isolating some parts of the digestive system, the stomach as his main area, and made it so food could not enter into the stomach, and then extracted fluids from this area by inserting a tube and collected these fluids that could then be measured. Following this procedure, he then studied salivary responses by testing this on dogs and measured their saliva. He would present food (unconditioned stimulus)to dogs and after presenting the food to the dogs multiple times (conditioned stimulus) this would create a conditioned reflex or response. His findings resulted in that dogs salivated more to dry foods and also before the food arrived. He found this to be a conditioned response. Once he learned about conditioning, he described two procedures that went along with conditioning. The first was generalization in which if one amount of stimulus is close the same amount as the first stimulus, the dog will still salivate. The second procedure was differentiation in which one stimuli makes the dog salivate and another amount of stimuli which is somewhat close to that amount does not. These two procedures remind me of the chapter of when I learned about Webers Law. The different thresholds and weights they described can be compared to the amounts of stimuli for making a dog salivate. Pavlov also trained many student's and through his experimental procedures it became known as replication.
I also found the Watson/Carr maze studies on kinesthetic sense to be quite interesting because these studies proved that muscle memory was important even without certain parts of our body, although when the rats were put in a different maze, they could not find their way through and some were badly injured. The public thought of this as brutal towards animals.
I didn't necessarily find the Little Albert experiment to be uninteresting but I did find it to be misleading and somewhat incorrect. The only real reason the infant was alarmed was because of the loud noise which every baby will be alarmed by loud noises, and he was conditioned to be scared of the rat because of the his previous experiences with the loud noise when grabbing for the rat. It would have resulted the same if it were any other animal. They also did this experiment at the end of the month and once again Albert showed fear towards the rat and this showed retention on the experiment.
Three important things important for understanding the history of psychology from this chapter is Pavlov's experiments with salivation and digestion, Watson's animal studies on behaviorism, and replication because we can create new ideas and learn from previous experiments.
Terms: conditioned response, unconditioned stimulus, conditioned reflex, conditioned stimulus, generalization, differentiation, replication, Webers Law
I found Pavlov’s research to be interesting. He worked with dogs to initially study the different types of fluid that come out in the stomach. He won a Nobel Prize for this because of his precision in the surgery performed to study this. During this time he was also study salivary responses by seeing the difference in salivation a dog had when eating dry food compared to eating wet food. At first he saw that they salivated more for the dry food, but eventually the dogs were salivating before they even got the food, which made if very hard to study. This led him to realize that the dogs could be trained to have a conditioned reflex. He started with an unconditioned reflex and unconditioned stimulus such as the dogs salivating (reflex) when presented with food (stimulus). Through conditioning, a neutral stimulus would be paired with the unconditioned stimulus and become the conditioned stimulus. The conditioned stimulus would create the conditioned reflex in the animal. They also studied extinction to see if the conditioned reflex no longer happened if the conditioned response did not accompany the unconditioned response. He also discovered that generalization happened when the response that occurs to one stimulus occurs to another that is similar to that stimulus. Differentiation happens when one sound is associated with food, and a sound similar to it never has food with it, eventually the dog knows which sound comes with food and which doesn’t.
I did not find Watson as interesting, mostly because I think what he did to the rats was pretty cruel and his Albert study was not very thorough, even though it received a large amount of attention. He is thought of as the founder of behaviorism. He started out testing rats to see what senses were necessary for a rat to get through the mazes they built. He did this by removing parts of their eyes, ears, and noses and observing their responses. He discovered that the rats did not need their senses, but learned the maze by remembering at what point they needed to turn and such according to the number of steps they were taking. This study is called the Watson/Carr Maze Study. He also did a study of conditioning on an infant named “Albert”. Every time Albert was shown a rat, a loud noise was played simultaneously and he came to fear the rat. Albert was then tested to see if his fear transferred to similar things, which Watson said it did. It was also observed that the infant sustained his fear for a period of time, for when he came back after a month the child still feared rats. There are several problems with this study. One thing is that Albert may have already shown a fear of rats. Also when they were testing to see if the fear transferred, Albert’s reactions were very weak, and sometimes reinforced by replaying the loud noise with the rat again. Another problem is that there is a chance he was not afraid of rats at all, but Watson himself. All of this combined makes this study unreliable, and in fact others were unable to replicate it.
I think Pavolov’s study of stimulus and reflex is important to know about the background of psychology. Also Watson’s work with the three fundamental human emotions are also important. Fear, rage, and love were the emotions he studied in infants. He had different ways of defining and bringing out these emotions. Watson’s speech at Columbia University was also very important to psychology. It helped to start the behaviorist movement in America. He said that introspective psychology was not reliable, as everyone experienced different things. Psychologists needed to study something tangible that could be seen by others.
Titchener relates to this chapter because he was an advocate of introspective psychology, which behaviorism was against. It is important to know the differences between the two. Also the work of Thorndike had an impact on behaviorism. He was one of the first to work with animals and studied how chicks worked their way through mazes, and how cats learned to get out of the puzzle boxes he created.
Terms: Pavlov, unconditioned stimulus, unconditioned response, conditioned stimulus, conditioned response, generalization, differentiation, Watson, behaviorism, Watson/Carr Maze Studies, Albert study, introspective psychology, Titchener, Thorndike
One of the most interesting parts of the chapter for me is the emphasis that Pavlov never really intended on his research becoming one of the first prominent examples of conditioning and extinction in the history of psychology. Pavlov's main interest was in the digestive process and physiology of canines. In studying the digestive system of animals he noticed a pattern of behavior occurring which led him to pursue the ideas of conditioning and extinction. The reason this is so interesting to me is because it points out that many times, science is accidental. We develop new ideas by studying something we're interested in and accidentally discovering something else.
One of the less interesting portions of the reading for me was the push for objectivity. I am a firm believer in the idea that psychology, for the most part, should be a subjective area of study because it involves the individual differences between people. I am fully aware that objectivity was a necessity to psychology developing to the science it is today, but my interest tends to just vanish when I hear the word objectivity in relation to psychology.
One thing that I am certain to remember from the reading is the term systematic desensitization. I use this method with myself and with high school students to make typically frightening ideas and topics more approachable.
Another thing I'm likely to remember is the development in studying emotions in human beings. John Watson was one of the first people to study the topic and it is a highly relevant topic today in psychology.
The third thing I'm highly likely to remember is how highly Pavlov emphasized the importance of replication in data. He would teach students his methodology and not pressure them to find results, but just to report findings. This gives a highly unbiased set of data to support the research.
These ideas are important to my understanding of history and systems of psychology because they were all highly relevant issues of the time period. How objective people should be was and is still a question up for debate in the field. Conditioning and extinction are ideas used in the work place, in school, and even at home to effectively teach people appropriate behaviors. These are all things that were studied years ago that hold importance in the world today.
Terms:
Physiology, Conditioning, Extinction, Objectivity, Individual Differences, Systematic Desensitization, Emotion
To me, the most interesting topic of this chapter was John Watson's life. I've been in many child psychology classes, and almost every class mentions him and his views on child rearing. He is looked upon negatively for his beliefs that children should not be kissed too much, and as I recall one of his grandchildren wrote a book about how her father was severely affected by Watson's lack of affection.
However, his life was very interesting and he achieved many accomplishments in his life time. His studies on rats and their ability to memorize mazes was a huge step forward in psychology, even though today (and even then people were bothered by it) it would be consider animal cruelty and PETA would be all over that. Through his maze studies he found that mice could remember the mazes when various senses were removed because the mice weren't memorizing the mazes by sight, smell, or hearing. They were remembering them because of their muscle movement (5 steps forward, turn right, etc..). His research done on Little Albert is also very famous and a staple in introductory psychology. I think it was very interesting that Rayner and Watson knew how much time they had left with Albert and that unlearning the fear was entirely possible but instead they chose to further research how much exactly Albert was afraid. However, they published in their research a way to unlearn fears called "systematic desensitization" but never experimented it. Mary Cover Jones however, did. Her research area was the unlearning of fears and she found this technique to be quite successful. I also thought it was very interesting to learn that after Watson had been kicked out of Hopkins, he obtained a job as an advertiser using his techniques in behaviorism to get people to buy products (which if you think about it, at the time this was unheard of and Watson was constantly looking for ways to apply his behavior techniques on animals on humans)
Pavlov's research was also very interesting but it has been beat in to my brain so many times now that it's almost boring to read about. I love that he never intended to be a psychologist and his research as a physiologist lead to him to discover classical conditioning (after many, many studies). It was also interesting to learn about his patriotism and how he adjusted to the Soviet Union even though it was clearly obvious his did not support their views. I also liked to see how his research developed from physiology to psychology because he obviously didn't discover the dogs salvation and then automatically quit his research on digestive physiology.
I believe this chapter fits in with John Locke's idea of Tabla Rasa or the "white sheet" because it ties in closely with the idea that environment affects our behavior tremendously and that our experiences shape us (as can be seen in the Little Albert experiment).
terms: Watson, Pavlov, classical conditioning, little albert, behaviorism, physiology, child rearing, systematic desensitization, Hampton Court Maze, Mary Cover Jones, fear, JOhn Locke, Tabla Rasa
Generally I find the behavior side of psychology to be very interesting. I like how the chapter presented the reader with a lot of information on the different types of experiments and differences within behaviorism itself. Watson and Pavlov are always intriguing to read, even if it is the same information over again because it just strikes a place in my mind. Also, another reason I believe I find the work of Pavlov and Watson to be interesting is the fact that in today's world their experiments most likely would not be allowed to happen. I am not saying that scientific and experiemental ethics should not be in place, but if these men had not done these specific experiments we might still be in the dark about things such as classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and the components that go along with those things.
There was not really a section in the chapter that I disliked, because as I mentioned previously, I enjoy most things in relation to behaviorism. As far as helping me to understand the history of psychology I think that the people who came before the big names of behaviorism such as Auguste Comte, Francis Bacon, and even Skinner. The ideas of these men play into the ground work for behaviorism. I think that Comte's philosophical point of view was important, because it added a life component to the study of the mind and the interactions between people and possibly led to ideas of nature/nurture, or our environment playing a role in our behaviors.
Term: Watson, Skinner, Pavlov, Comte, Bacon, classical conditioning, operant conditioning, nature, nurture, behaviorism, environment
One thing I found interesting in this chapter is the study on Little Albert. Watson believed that older children showed a wider range of emotional responses due to conditioning. He also believed that younger children were only able to show three distinct emotions known as fear, rage, and love. Due to growing older, many children are able to control their emotions and what they choose to respond to and how strongly. I found this interesting because it supports my belief in tabula rasa aka blank slate. I think we are born as a blank canvas and life experiences shape who we are as a person. Things that occur early in life often shapes how people are later in life.
One thing I found less interesting in that chapter is Pavlov’s Classical Conditioning Research. This was not as interesting to me because this is a concept that is taught in basically every Psychology class from Intro on, which is good because it is an important idea to understand, but I just find it to be redundant. Pavlov’s experiment was set up as the reflex being the unconditioned reflex (UCR) of salivating when food (the unconditioned stimulus) was presented to the dog. This conditioning also involved a neutral stimulus which Pavlov called the conditioned stimulus, because the resulting reflex depended on the conditioned stimulus-unconditioned stimulus pairing. The conditioned reflex was the result of this. The idea of conditioning is an important one to understand, it is just taught so much that it is hard to find it interesting.
Three things that I think will be most helpful in understanding the history of psychology is Pavlov’s Classical Conditioning. Even though I don’t necessarily find it that interesting, I think it is important for people to understand how early psychology helped shaped our currents standings science with Psychology. The second thing I believe is helpful in understanding the history of Psychology is the Little Albert study. It is a good example of behavioral psychology. By making a loud noise every time Little Albert was exposed to the stuffed animal, it ultimately upset him every time he saw this animal. I like this study because it would not be acceptable today, but I think it provides a good example that conditioning is indeed a real thing. The third that that I think will be useful to know about the history of Psychology is the idea of generalization and differentiation. Understanding these two concepts help one understand the differences and variety between objects.
The topic of Mary Cover Jones relates to previous chapters because it wasn’t very common for women to have anything to do with science during this time period. In earlier chapters it is stated that it would harm women’s reproductive organs if she pursued to further their learning career. Jones founded the idea of systematic desensitization by lowering a young boys’ level of fear caused by rabbits. She did this by placing the animal a certain distance away from the boy while he was eating and gradually moved it closer. The pleasure response that went along with eating eventually replaced the fear associated with rabbits. The experiment in Little Albert related back to John Locke’s idea of tabula rasa.
Terms: Conditions, tabula rasa, Pavlov, unconditioned stimulus, unconditioned response, conditioned stimulus, conditioned response, generalization, differentiation, Watson, behaviorism, Jones, systematic desensitization
In this chapter I realized that Ivan Pavlov was a much more interesting man than we usually give him credit for. In this book he is cited as being the first one to establish the area of science known as Behaviorism. Pavlov would never have viewed himself as such, he was clearly only studying physiology. He certainly had an interesting start into that field as well. I mean, really, he was studying the digestive system and even sold gastric juices of dogs to raise some cash; probably not the glorious studies some people link his name to. During his time studying the digestive system in dogs he became a very skilled surgeon and was extremely methodical in all he did, from research to surgeries. It was quite on accident that he began to study classical conditioning. He began to note that the dogs had “psychic” secretions, salivating before any food was present, and it bothered him quite a lot because it interfered with his attempts to measure saliva. During this time Pavlov was a professor and he had his students learn through a program of replication. This program forced his students to learn experimental procedures without being forced to produce any new findings. I can only imagine the amount of stress that I would be under if I came into college being expected to make new findings. It was during some of this research that Pavlov initially ran into the “psychic” secretions which led him to study it for 25 years or so thus giving us, as we all know, unconditioned reflex with an unconditioned response then paired with a conditional stimulus which thus creates a conditioned reflex. Some expansions on all of this old knowledge were the ideas of extinction and generalization. Extinction happens when the conditioned stimulus is presented too many times without being paired with a reward. Generalization occurred when there was an overextension of the conditional stimulus. For example if the CS was a red flag, the subject may also demonstrate the conditioned reflex to a pink flag. The key to fixing this is to teach the subject Differentiation, which enables them to tell the difference between the two. Pavlov also observed experimental neurosis or pathological disturbances when he studied differentiation to a greater degree. Whenever there was a breakdown in differentiation the result was neurotic, or anxious/nervous/fearful, patients. His thoughts were that there was a limit to how well differentiation could be achieved. If one went past this point, or did a poor job with training the subject then the subject would become neurotic because of the uncertainty of how they should behave. I did find it entertaining that Pavlov pretty well hated the Soviets but still remained in their good graces because he was pretty much the founder of their curriculum for the state. My favorite quote of his was, “I deplore the destruction of cultural values by illiterate Communists.” So great! And still they loved him.
John B. Watson was another interesting guy who offered a lot to the development of Behaviorism, being he is the guy who wrote and presented “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It”. Watson got his start early on in life with studying animals, he preferred their company to that of humans; can’t say that I blame him sometimes. This then drove him on to observe their behavior in order to find out what drives them to act the way that they do. His later study with rats in mazes with Harvey Carr also led him to continually scrutinize and examine animal’s behaviors. He was even able to determine what was absolutely necessary for rats to be able to navigate a maze; eventually he determined that they only need a kinesthetic sense for this, even despite having lost legs, sight, smell and other sensory organs. Then came Watson’s boldest move, by discrediting all other current branches of psychology (structuralism, introspection, and functionalism) in his Behaviorist Manifesto. He said that all these other branches were lacking in huge ways. Structuralism depended too heavily upon introspection, which he argued was a huge waste of time and that it had no place in the scientific community because it was too objective (not up to par with his precise methods either). Functionalists, he thought, were too closely tied to the structuralists and yet again depended too heavily upon looking into and studying consciousness. Watson described his desires best when he said, “never use the terms consciousness, mental states, mind, content, introspectively verifiable, imagery and the like…It(psychology as a science) can be done in terms of stimulus and response, in terms of habit formation, habit integrations and the like.” After the reading of the manifesto, which received little notice from the scientific community, Watson had a lot to back up with his new method. His opportunity came with Little Albert, to show the world that his methods could be applied practically to everyday life, like the raising of children. Poor little Albert was scared to death by Watson, ultimately leading him to be scared of a rat and other furry objects. This research gave Watson some solid ground to stand upon which led to Behaviorism taking off as an accepted branch of psychology. He famously said that it is our environment that shapes us into who we are, not our genes, as was the popular belief of the day. He over exaggerated his stance by stating that he could take 12 babies and shape them to be whoever he wanted them to be, in spite of their ancestral lineage. Then Watson threw it all away while cheating on his wife with his grad student…idiot.
The most useful part of this chapter to helping me understand history is the fact that so much of it was drawing from earlier chapters in the book. It showed how important knowledge of past chapters was to understanding how we got to Behaviorism in chapter 10. One example of tying into an earlier chapter was John Watson’s work with Harvey Carr on their mazes. While reading this new chapter I thought that the name Carr looked very familiar so I looked back in my notes and sure enough there he was. Then I was able to tie in what I had learned exclusively about Carr to expand my new knowledge of Watson. Carr had standardized the maze to make it a replicable in other labs, thus again highlighting Watson’s dedication to precision and having solid empirical data. Another such example of this came up during Watson’s speech of the Behaviorist Manifesto when he denounced structuralism, introspection, and functionalism. While reading his slams against these thoughts of reasoning it really pushed me to remember what all of their main tenants were. Structuralism was like anatomy in that researchers sought to organize what they knew about the body into little structures and to subdivide the human mind and body into their most basic units. Functionalism on the other hand sought to “examine how the various parts of the body operate and the functions they serve to help keep the individual alive”. They also saw the mind as just another resource that helps us to adapt and survive. These earlier taught subjects and others demonstrate how Psychology, just like any other subject matter, builds upon itself.
Terms: functionalism, structuralism, John Watson, Harvey Carr, little albert, behaviorist manifesto, differentiation, experimental neurosis, “physic” secretions, replication, extinction, generalization, Ivan Pavlov
One thing that I found to be especially interesting was Little Albert and how Watson had conditioned him to associate a rat with being afraid. When he did the experiment he used a human for classical conditioning using unconditioned stimulus was the loud noise and unconditioned response was the fear of the loud noise. The rat in the experiment was the conditioned stimulus and presents itself as the conditioned response, by pairing together the conditioned stimulus with the unconditioned stimulus. Watson proved you could do the same thing with humans as you could do with animals using food and a sound as Pavlov proved. I found all this to be interesting because it somewhat gives an explanation as to why we may be afraid of what we're afraid of. My example would be thunderstorms, I hate them. Now that I know about Pavlov and Watson I can understand my fear based off of when I was 4 and a tree fell on my daycare during a thunderstorm. To this day I am still afraid and had that not happened when I was 4 I wonder if I would still be afraid of them. Connected with classical conditioning, I found Jones' systematic desensitization to be interesting as well that you can pair the thing that the child fears with something that is pleasurable to lower the response of the thing that the child fears. I found Pavlov's past history to be kind of boring and generic, it sounded just like everyone else's history before they became psychologist. I know that the history of the person is relatively important, but I'd rather have a short introduction to their life before and read more about their accomplishments. I think the most useful thing about this chapter and understanding psychology would definitely be the classical conditioning, to me it's pretty much the entire basis for psychology and what's it's all about. It sums up how the brain works in a nutshell. Overall Pavlov's classical conditioning led the way to behaviorism. The past things that we have learned in class just build up each chapter to further explain a topic especially functionalism fits very well in this chapter.
Terms: Little Albert, Classical Conditioning, Unconditioned Stimulus, Unconditioned Response, Conditioned Stimulus, Conditioned Response, Watson, Pavlov, Systematic Desensitization, Jones, Behaviorism, Functionalism.
I found Pavlov’s work to be very interesting in so many ways. His work on conditioning was very unique; he decided to investigate why his dogs often salivate before food reached their mouths. It was interesting when he examined a large phenomena, including acquisition, extinction, generalization, differentiation, and experimental neurosis. The second thing I found interesting in the chapter was Watson’s finding of behaviorism. It was really fascinating reading about how he studied newborns and young children, especially when dealing with their emotional development. He told us three fundamental emotions in which each resulting from specific stimuli; he argued that fear, rage, and love made up the stimuli. The case of Little Albert was also very intriguing when it spoke about pairing a loud noise with a white rat. The fear would be generalized to similar stimuli and would last at least a month
I found the section of Behaviorism and psychologists objectives to be quite interesting. Starting with the study of nature through a scientific view done by Positivists. Their study on "controlling nature" grabbed my attention the moment I read it. The theory of Evolution made this popular in the psychology world. This lead to the study of animal behavior and it's relation to nature based off of the changes that have occurred over the years. Positivism stated that the only way to obtain valid knowledge of a situation or theory is through systematic observations so you can actually experience what you're trying to discover. With all of this arising at once, Psychologist James McKeen Cattell stated that psychology should not be limited to just studying the conscious experience and introspection (method of experiencing some phenomenon, then giving a description of the conscious experience of the phenomenon) should be a more commonly used method in the psychology world.
Watson's study on how rats discover their ways through mazes is always interesting to read about. We all know many animals have extraordinary sense of smell so the cheese scent helps guide them, but the fact they become used to the maze and find the cheese faster than the previous times shows how intelligent animals can really be. Based off of his studies, Watson felt that introspective psychology should be replaced with behavioral psychology studying the relationship between the stimuli and responses. Shifting from using behavioral psychology on animals to humans is definitely intriguing since after all, we are humans who are reading this. Him stating the fear, rage, and love are the are the three main emotions of babies I believe is something most of us would agree with since babies learn and respond to their environments and experience.
Pavlov's Life and Work really didn't appeal to me too much. Like I've said before I LOVE finding out new things about psychology and different experiments and research that have been conducted and help us to understand the different things that occur in life today. His experiment that he conducted trying to figure out why his dogs would salivate before the food entered their mouths in a way is interesting, but since I understood how the senses work and the reason for salivation before reading this it just didn't catch my attention too much. It's not boring by any means, but if I had to choose out of the chapter this is the section that doesn't appeal to me as much as the others. It seems that others felt the same way seeing how his work took years to make it to the United States and become appreciated.
One of the most interesting things that I read about in this chapter was that when they taught their blind mice to go through mazes, and then changed the mazes, the mice would still try to use their original path, causing them to run into walls. Another interesting part about this chapter is the experiment with Albert. I found this to be interesting because it shows that humans can be trained the same ways that animals can and it shows that we are not as different from animals as we might believe.
One thing that I didn't like is that they never talked about the lifelong affect that this experiment had on Albert. While i already do know what ended up happening to him, it would have been nice to read the specifics again. Other than that i didn't notice anything in the chapter that i didn't find interesting or informative.
The information in this chapter will be incredibly useful for the class as a whole. That is because the subject of Behaviorism is a large part of the study of psychology. Some of the information that might have roots in the other chapters would include the nature vs nurture debate, which would have conditioning as one of the components that would determine how someone behaved.
In this section I found Pavlov's experiments to be fairly interesting. He found out many things including conditioning and extinction. He found the unconditioned reflex, unconditioned stimulus, conditional stimulus, and the conditioned reflex. His work in this are had a great impact on a young B.F. Skinner.
John B. Watson was also interesting in this chapter. He is considered the founder of behaviorism. He used maze studies with rats and studied animal beahvior. He also created the Behaviorists Manifesto in which he assigned psychology to the natural sciences, articulated a clear set of goals for scientific psychology, and rejected introspection based research of his peers. He also fully accepted the evolutionary model of behavior. He also did experiments dealing with infants such as little Albert and found that on a few stimuli could elicit thre instincitve emotions of fear, rage, and love. Also this lead to the discover of systematic desnsitization, in chiche fear response is replaced by an incompatible response.
When it was mentioned that blind mice were able to memorize mazes and find their food after numerous trials, but when put into different mazes were running into walls was pretty funny. But it also bring us back to the questions in an earlier chapter about cognition in the mice's brain wondering if they memorized the mazes or used more of their senses to find their prize quicker. This study shows that mice CAN memorize a specific pattern.