What I would like you to do is to find a PERSON or TOPIC from chapter 10
that you are interested in and search the internet for material on that
PERSON or TOPIC. Please use 3 or more quality resources.If you did a
Person: Once you have completed your search and explorations, a) I would
like you to say WHO your PERSON is, b) how exactly HE OR SHE fits into
the chapter, and c) why you are interested in THIS PERSON. Next, I would
like you to take the information you read or viewed related to your
PERSON, integrate/synthesize it, and then write about it. At the end of
your post, please include working URLs for the three websites. Keep in
mind that it will be easier if you keep it to one topic.
If you did a Topic: Once you have completed your search and explorations, a) I would like you to say WHAT your TOPIC is, b) how exactly the TOPIC fits into the chapter, and c) why you are interested in THIS TOPIC. Next, I would like you to take the information you read or viewed related to your TOPIC, integrate/synthesize it, and then write about it. At the end of your post, please include working URLs for the three websites. Keep in mind that it will be easier if you keep it to one topic.
Additional instructions: For each url.(internet resource) you have listed. Indicate why you chose it and the extent to which it contributed to your post.
If you did a Topic: Once you have completed your search and explorations, a) I would like you to say WHAT your TOPIC is, b) how exactly the TOPIC fits into the chapter, and c) why you are interested in THIS TOPIC. Next, I would like you to take the information you read or viewed related to your TOPIC, integrate/synthesize it, and then write about it. At the end of your post, please include working URLs for the three websites. Keep in mind that it will be easier if you keep it to one topic.
Additional instructions: For each url.(internet resource) you have listed. Indicate why you chose it and the extent to which it contributed to your post.
I chose to write about Ivan Pavlov, he fits into that chapter in that he is one of the founders for classic conditioning and his work on the salvia glands of his dogs, and work on the digestive system that won him a noble peace prize in 1904. I am interested in this person for his research that the soviet union used as a way to help create model soviet communist citizens and therefore subsidized Pavlov’s research according to the text book.
Ivan Pavlov was born in September 26, 1849 Ryazan, Russia. His father was a priest and Pavlov had started out his education at the Ryazan Ecclesiastical Seminary, but later withdrew his studies their and chose to study physiology and enrolled in the University of Saint Petersburg. Pavlov was continually interested in his field of study and even on his death bed he had a student document the subjective experiences until his last moment.
In the 1890’s Pavlov was offered to create and head a department of Physiology studies and the Institute of Experimental Medicine. The institute became a center for some of the most progressive physiological research; Pavlov headed this department for 45 years.
Around the same time Pavlov was appointed to Professor of Pharmacology at the Military Medical Academy. Just five years after that he was offered to be the chair of physiology, held this position until 1925.
In 1881 Pavlov married a fellow student, who was a friend of the author Fyodor Dostoyevsky (I assuming he is famous, never heard of him before). They were extremely poor and lived apart at the beginning of their marriage. Pavlov has given his wife credit for much of his successes. His wife’s name was Seraphima (Sara) Vasilievna Karchevskaya, she was also a teacher. They had three sons, one of which would become a professor of physics. They resided in the city of Stalingrad.
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1904/pavlov-bio.html - I chose this website because it provided detailed information on his personal life, which I find to be some of the most interesting about the psychologists.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Pavlov I chose this website just to get a brief overview of Pavlov’s personal life.
http://www.biography.com/people/ivan-petrovich-pavlov-9435332 I came across this website in a general internet search and found this website to provide information that filled in the spaces where the other websites lacked in personal information as well as to double check the accuracy of dates and facts.
This week I chose to write about Mary Cover Jones. She was briefly mentioned in this chapter in the section discussing John B. Watson and his work with Little Albert. I wanted to find out a little more information about Jones and the work that she did.
Mary Cover Jones was born in Johnston Pennsylvania. She went to further her education by attending Vassar College. Here, she took “every psychology course offered.” After graduating Vassar in 1919, in that same year, Jones attended a weekend lecture given by John B. Watson. He gave his lecture on the Little Albert study that he had done with Rosalie Rayner, who was a graduate from Vassar and a friend of Mary. This lecture encouraged Mary to want to go to graduate school. She began her graduate work at Columbia University where she received a Master’s Degree in the summer of 1920. Soon after, Mary conducted her study of Peter under the supervision of John B. Watson.
The case of Peter illustrates how a fear may be removed under laboratory conditions. Peter was selected over a number of other candidates for the following reasons: progress in combating the fear of reactions was so marked that many of the details of the process could be observed easily. It was possible to continue the study over a period of more than three months. Finally, the notes of a running diary show the characteristics of a healthy, normal, interesting child, well adjusted, except for his exaggerated fear reactions. This study was a sequel to the work Watson had done with Little Albert. In Watson’s study, he demonstrated how fear could be produced experimentally under laboratory conditions. In Mary’s study, she wanted to remove Peter’s fear of a white rat; this fear that Peter had extended to a rabbit, a fur coat, a feather, and cotton wool, but not to wooden blocks and similar toys. After Peter was introduced to a rat, it was clear that he did not like it being around him or playing with his things. The day after being put around the rat, Peter was introduced to different situations and objects. For example, a fur coat was hung over his crib and he cried until it was removed. From the test situations that were used to reveal fears, it appeared that Peter showed more fear towards a rabbit then he did the white rat. From this, the decision was made to use a rabbit for unconditioning. Next, Peter would be put in a room with three other children (who were not afraid of rabbits) during play period and a rabbit would always be present. New situations requiring closer contact with the rabbit had been gradually introduced and the degree to which these situations were avoided, tolerated, or welcomed, at each experimental session, gave the measure of improvement. These “degrees of toleration” represented the stages in which improvement occurred. The rabbit started out being in a cage located in the room to eventually being held by the experimenter, to Peter actually touching the rabbit and allowing it to nibble on his fingers. However, Peter was taken to the hospital for scarlet fever and would not return for two months. Upon leaving the hospital, the nurse who was bringing Peter back was entering the taxi when all of the sudden a large dog running past jumped at them. Both Peter and the nurse were very frightened. Being threatened by a large dog when ill, in a strange place, and being with an adult who also showed fear, was a terrifying situation that went against training. This led them to begin another method they referred to as “direct conditioning.” Peter would be sat down in a high chair and be given food that he liked. The rabbit would then be presented to him but without disturbing his eating. Through the presence of the pleasant stimuli (food) whenever the rabbit was shown, the fear was eliminated gradually in favor of the positive response. Also having other children present proved to help Peter as well because he would follow them. In one of the last sessions, Peter showed no fear towards the rabbit even when there was another child present who was disturbed by the rabbit. It is noted that the study is still incomplete. All of the fears that were “unconditioned” were transferred fears, and it has not yet been learned whether or not primary fear can be eliminated by training the transfers.
Overall I found this experiment to be very interesting. This study is one that Mary is well recognized for among all of the work that she did. I think that it sends a very powerful message that Mary pursued a higher education in the psychology field, which it was evident that it was a male dominated field like many other professions throughout much of the twentieth century. However, this didn’t stop her. Mary’s work did not stop at the study of Peter. She became involved and committed to the Oakland Growth Study (OGS) which highlighted the rest of her career. From this, Jones published over one hundred studies using the data from OGS. Among these were a series of studies on the long-term psychological and behavioral effects of early-and-late-physical maturing in adolescence. Regardless of her behaviorists beginning, Jones’s work reflected an electric theoretical outlook and an emphasis on the whole person in his/her developmental, environmental, and social context.
Mary Cover Jones dedicated her life to a science that was, at the time, only a career for males. Her work with Peter landed her a spot in the history books and she will forever be remembered as a woman who pursued her dreams and didn’t let anyone stop her. I have enjoyed the fact that the more we read, the more we not only learn about the field of psychology advancing, but we also get to learn about how society made advancements along the way. Altogether, it is an amazing transformation.
http://www.psych.yorku.ca/femhop/Cover%20Jones.htm : I liked this link dealing with Jones because it gave a brief background of her life and provided more information dealing with the work she did.
http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Jones/ : I enjoyed reading through this link because it talked about the study done with Peter in great depth and gave us actual notes from the study, very interesting.
http://www.feministvoices.com/mary-cover-jones/ : This link gave additional information on other work that Jones was involved in and the work she did until the end of her life.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVJMhk4oANM&feature=results_main&playnext=1&list=PL557A34FBD721698F : enjoyed this video because it took us through all of the psychologists, including Jones, and their contributions to behavior, conditioning, and responses to conditioning.
I choose to research Harvey Carr. Carr worked with Watson, as a graduate student, in the infamous maze studies. I am interested in Carr because he is only mentioned in passing in this chapter and I want to know more about what he did in the field of psychology. He must be of some importance if he worked with names like Watson.
Harvey Carr is considered to have played an important role in establishing functionalism in the United States because of his work at the University of Chicago. While he was there functional psychology reached its peak; Carr was active in functionalism at a time in history when functionalism had already proven itself to be a viable part of psychology. Carr is best known today for his work with Watson and the maze studies, or kerplunk experiments. He would later replace Watson as supervisor of the animal laboratory at the University of Chicago, even improving upon the maze design.
As a functionalists Carr was interested in how people adapt to their surroundings. Like all psychologists Carr believed his branch of psychology was the best compared to other branches at the time. He thought that since people and animals were different they shouldn’t be lumped together to study their behaviors. And in n 1926 he was elected president of the APA. He was also the department head at Chicago for thirty years, until 1938.
Carr had other interests in psychology besides functionalism. For example his doctoral dissertation involved the perception of movement when eyes are closed. He also was interested in comparative and educational psychology. While at the University of Chicago Carr encouraged his students to choose thesis topics in comparative psychology, though few did.
In all I learned a lot about Carr. I now know why there is relatively little information on him in this behavioral chapter. I don’t remember reading about Carr in the functionalists chapter, but he may not have seemed interesting while I was reading that chapter. Carr played an important role in functionalism, but also played a role in behaviorism, even if he didn’t agree with it completely, with his work with Watson.
http://faculty.frostburg.edu/mbradley/psyography/datelines_harveycarr.html
I used this site for information on Carr and his dedication to functionalism.
http://www.igs.net/~pballan/Carr.htm
I used this site for information on Carr’s work with other psychology fields and his accomplishments within the field of psychology.
http://health.howstuffworks.com/mental-health/psychologists/harvey-carr-info.htm
I used this site for general information on Carr and his work in psychology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_A._Carr
I used this site for some basic information on Carr and his work in psychology as a whole.
I decided to research Mary Cover Jones for this blog post. She relates to the chapter in that she had much to do with the theory of systematic desensitization, a "behaviorist" way of treating phobias. Jones was mentioned in a very small portion on Watson and his research on Little Albert. I chose to research her simply because she sounded like one of the most interesting psychologists in the chapter, yet her section was by far the smallest. I thought I might be able to learn some interesting information on her to supplement the small section in the book.
Mary Cover Jones was primarily known as "the mother of behavioral therapy", given the name by her associate and friend, Joseph Wolpe. Her best-known research involved the unconditioning of the fear response in infants. She is most commonly associated by her research on the "Little Albert" study by Watson, as well as her own research on a child named Peter. During a time when the field of psychology was largely dominated by males, Jones stood out (and continues to do so today, even after her death in 1987) as a pioneer of behavioral psychology.
Jones supposedly took "every psychology course offered" at Vassar college, where she studied for four years. During her time at Vassar, she attended a lecture given by John Watson, which greatly inspired her. The lecture, which concerned his work with Little Albert, sparked an interest in Jones to attend graduate school to further study psychology. She went on to work with Watson himself during the 1920s, and it was during this time that she conducted her study of Peter (at the Institute of Educational Research). Peter was a three-year-old boy with a great fear of rabbits. Jones unconditioned Peter's fear using different variations of fear-reducing procedures, which she called "direct conditioning." This was when a pleasant stimulus (in this case, Peter's favorite food) was presented to the child at the same time as the rabbit. Thus, Peter learned to associate the rabbit with pleasant feelings, rather than fearful reactions. He was eventually able to tolerate the rabbit and touch it without fear.
After she published these results, Jones went on to complete her work on the development of children and their behavior patterns. Then, she accepted a position at the Institute for Child Welfare in California, where she became involved in a study known as the Oakland Growth Study. She next worked as a professor for many years, receiving the prestigious G. Stanley Hall Award from the APA in 1968. She died in 1987, but Jones is still known to us today as one of the most important pioneers of behavioral therapy, and she made a very important contribution to the field of psychology in terms of understanding development across the lifespan.
http://www.psych.yorku.ca/femhop/Cover%20Jones.htm
This was an extremely helpful biography of Mary Cover Jones. It detailed not only her work, but her personal life as well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Cover_Jones
This was a very brief description of Jones' life work and major research.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVJMhk4oANM
This video is a very detailed account of behavior and fear conditioning in infants. It talked mostly about John Watson and Little Albert; however, the portion on Mary Cover Jones begins at about 3:40 in the video. It talked about her attempts at unconditiong the fear reaction in infants.
I chose to research the topic of figure-ground organization. If you are not familiar with that name think about a picture of two faces looking at each other. These faces are on a sheet of paper. They are mirror images of one another. They are directly across from one another. In between these two faces is just empty space. However to a keen eye, one would see that this empty space is actually another figure. That figure is sometimes a lamp or another object. Maybe it is a face within another face. So within this picture you are visualizing or actually seeing, there are two images instead of one.
This topic fits into this chapter because it relates with Gestalt psychology. Figure-grounds are a demonstration of how we illustrate phenomena and how our brain interprets it. Figure-grounds provide the foundation for all object perception. Gestalt means a unified whole. Figure-grounds are unified wholes.
I am interested in this because I think it is cool how the borders of each figure in the figure-ground acts as the background. I also like the art you can create with it. Some are hard to see and some are easy. I like trying to figure out the hard ones.
After searching through multiple figure-ground images I have yet to be able to comfortably perceive both images in the figure. It is said by some to be impossible. I believe this relates to things we see every day. For example we have two eyes and they only focus on one thing at a time usually. Try this. If you slowly move your eyes in a large circle like around a clock, you will probably notice that your eyes take split second pauses as it is going around. I believe that although we don’t think we’re focusing on something in that short time, we actually do. As our eyes move around they pause very shortly because they are focused on something. It happens so fast though we do not remember what it is most of the time.
Now try this. Do the same things again except this time take your finger, focus on it with your eyes and move it around in a big circle so your eyes move in a big circle like a clock. You will notice I hope that the movement of your eyes is much smoother. That is because it is already focused on something. I think this relates to figure-grounds. We cannot see both images at once. We can only focus on one thing at a time. That is why our perception of the images may rapidly bounce back and forth between the two because as we take our focus off the one object, our brain notices the other and locks on to it. It happens fast. I find this to be very interesting. It makes me think about a lot of other things. For example look directly at your finger. It is a clear piece of y0ur body.
Now look at whatever is directly behind it. You probably see two of your one finger. That is because both your eyes are seeing your finger however they are focused on something else with the finger in its path. It makes me wonder if it is possible to focus enough to control both eyes and make them see separate objects. This would allow us to see figure-grounds as a whole.
http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/gestalt.html
This website takes one deeper with the thinking behind Gestalt psychology and perception.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Figure%E2%80%93ground_(perception)
This website helped me understand more details with figure-grounds.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4u64HDXoKVM&feature=relate
This website provided multiple illustrations of different figure-grounds and optical allusions for one to look at. If you watch this video make sure you wait for the last optical illusion. Follow the directions. It is wild how our mind works.
I decided to do my research on John Watson. After reading chapter 10 I thought he was kind of strange and had a different view on things, which made the chapter an interesting read. He is one of the founders or behaviorism and studied with animals.
John Broadus Watson was born January 9, 1878 to Pickens and Emma Watson in Greenville, South Carolina. They were a poor family. His father was an alcoholic and his mother was a very religious women. The marriage was not the greatest; his father had multiple affairs and ended up leaving the family in 1891. The book stated that his family was classified as dysfunctional. I think I would have to agree. I do feel bad for him, parent separation is hard on everybody and having and alcoholic for a father can’t be a walk in the park. However, Watson was closer to his father than his mother. He went against his mother’s beliefs and practices and got involved in crime and violence. As he grows older he turned his life around.
At the age of 16, Watson entered Furman University. While there he joined Kappa Alpha Order. In five years he would have his Masters degree. He took a year off of school and had a job as a principle at an elementary school. Watson only stayed there for one year. He left his job and applied to the University of Chicago. Here he studied philosophy with the famous John Dewey.
It’s now 1903, Watson graduated from the University. Even though he was done as a student he stayed there for many years. His main focus was on sensory input and bird behavior. During these years is when Watson started to get into the learning of animals. In 1908 he moved over to John Hopkins University to teach.
In 1913 Watson started working with Behaviorism. He published an article called “Psychology as the Behaviourist Views It” also known as “The Behaviorist Manifesto”. The article talked about his the features of his theory of behaviorism. Not his best work. The article lacked some references to certain principles.
One thing that I really got on Watson’s case about was his ideas on child-rearing. Lucky for me I found some more information about his thoughts! Of course, he wrote an article on this as well. The article was called “Psychological Care of Infant and Child”. Remember the dozen children statement, yep that’s the article! He ate his words on this one and regretted writing it. He even said “he did not know enough” on the topic. He said that his advice was meant for teaching the children respect but was seen as an emotional detachment, which is what I said in the last blog.
This did not stop him though; he turned the article into a book in 1928. Watson did not do this alone; he had help from his mistress, Rosalie Rayner. He stated that behaviorist like himself; believe that psychological analysis and care should be required for both infants and children. Watson was on the nurture side of nature-nurture. He argued that pregnancies should be put to an end for about twenty years so that there would be enough time to gather data about child up bringing…ah yah, can’t see that ever happening! Watson also said that parents are held responsible of their children since they used the environment to help their children develop. Isn’t every parent responsible for the children no matter what?
Speaking of parents, Watson followed in his father’s footsteps in the affair department. Before he meant Mrs. Rayner he was married to Mary Ikes. In 1920 Watson was at John Hopkins University when he was asked to step down from his position. Why? Because he was having an affair with a graduate student, Rosalie. This hit the front page of the news papers. He and his wife divorced and Watson and Rayner married in 1921. After Rosalie’s death in 1935 Watson moved to a farm house for the remainder of his life. He died on September 9, 1958, not long after receiving a certificate from the American Psychological Association. He left behind four children: two with Mary, and two with Rosalie, but had a poor relationship with them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Watson --> of course, this is where I got most of my information at. Wikipedia is awesome.
http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesofmajorthinkers/p/watson.htm --> also had good information!
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/watson.htm --> this site got more involved with his marriage and children
This week I chose to research more on the topic of the "Little Albert Experiment" by Watson and Rayner. This experiment fits into the chapter because the experiement was on emotional behavior and was an important study of behaviorism. I have always been interested in this experiment and the conditioning of fears.
John Watson and Rosalie Raynor conducted one of behavorisms most famous experiments, "The Little Albert Experiment." Watson had been studying infants and their emotional development. Watson and Raynor devloped an experiment with an infant (Albert) and conditioning a fear response. Little Albert was born to a wet nurse who worked at the Harriet Lane Home for invalid children. Little Albert was said to have been developing perfectly and very healthy. Something very interesting about Little Albert though it was that he was very unemotional, he barely cried and showed little anger, according to sources. When Albert was 8 months, they performed some tests to see what stimulus Albert did fear. They took him into a room and had him focus on the nurses hand while someone in the back stood with a hammer and a pole and banged them together. Albert was startled and by the third time he was crying which was the first time they had seen him cry. When Little Albert was 11 months old, he was used in Watson and Raynors study. Noted in the experimenters notes was that they were kind of skepitical about doing this experiment in fear harming the child. They reassured themselves that he would be fine because he would be leaving to go back to the rough home and he wouldn't have the enviornemental stimulus. They did give Little Albert emotinal tests and still had no reaction. Once the experiment began Albert was shown fire, a monkey, a dog, a rabbit, a mouse, and masks with hair all of which he ahd never experienced before. He was then shown the rat and as soon as he reached for the rat a loud stunning noise came from behind, causing Albert to jump, and than the noise came again, causing Albert to whimper and draw away. The next week Albert was given the rat again, but he was incredibly cautious. He was given blocks after these experiments to see if it generalized over to blocks, which it didn't Albert was able to play just fine with these. As the experiemnt went on Albert became very frightened of the rat that as soon as it was brought out he went the opposite direction and whimpered. Than Watson brought out outher stimuli, such as a rabbit which Albert immediately turned away from and created negative responses. Watson and Raynor were able to prove generalizability among furry things that Albert was afraid of. As the study went on Albert even feared a santa clause mask because of the beard. Watson was able to prove that fear was conditioned. He applied it to when people have anxietys or fears it is because they were conditioned to it. Watson also proved generalizability and that one fear can lead to another fear of similiar stimuli.
http://www.psychology.sbc.edu/Little%20Albert.htm
This website had a lot about Watson and his infant studies along with detail about some of the other studies not just Little Albert
http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Watson/emotion.htm
This website had journals from Watson and Raynors notes during the experiment. Found it to be very interesting and highly informative.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hBfnXACsOI&feature=related
This video had a lot of the footage that Watson taped when he was using Little Albert.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIc9ijXukho&feature=related
This had information on Little Albert and his past life, and I found it really interesting about the information that they found about who Little Albert really was and some of the misconceptions of the experiment.
I choose to research on the topic of systematic desensitization. The chapter briefly discussed this topic and I found it very interesting because everyone fears something. For someone to find a way through psychology to rid someone of a debilitating fear is very interesting to me. The chapter deal with behaviorism and fear is a big part of someone’s behavior.
Systematic desensitization is a type of therapy for people whose behavior seriously affected by a fear of something. This type of therapy can be traced back to Pavlovian psychology and Mary Cover Jones. The basis of this theory is that anything that has been learned such as a fear can be unlearned through proper therapy.
From the outside looking in a perspective on the concept of systematic desensitization may seem relatively simple. If someone has what seems to be an irrational phobia like the fear of a worm all a psychologist would have to do is combine this fear with a positive stimulus. Say the person with the fear really likes chocolate. In theory the psychologist would just have to do is feed the person chocolate and bring the worm relatively closer until the person tolerates the worm while they eat chocolate.
Unfortunately this concept is not as simple as it may seem and there are various steps in order for a person to achieve a sense of tolerance for something they deeply fear no matter how irrational. There are three steps in the process to reduce the anxiety from an irrational fear. The three steps are relaxation, constructing an anxiety hierarchy, and paring situations described in your anxiety hierarchy with relaxation. The anxiety hierarchy is the steps in a process such as flight that eventually build up your anxiety into fear. With the right steps and correct relaxation technique anyone can master their fear if they want to overcome it.
The first two links I used to gather background information on the topic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_desensitization
http://panicdisorder.about.com/od/treatments/a/SystemDesen.htm
This link I used to help uncover the process of systematic desensitization.
http://www.guidetopsychology.com/sysden.htm
This week I decided to look into a concept instead of a person for once. I was interested in the Little Albert experiment buy John Watson and wanted to learn more about it. The study was a lesson in classical conditioning and responses to various stimuli. In the experiment the doctors would make a loud sound next to a baby to get them upset, and then they would bring in a mouse next to the baby and make the same sound again. Eventually the baby would make an association between the mouse being around him and the sound. Even farther down the road the baby would become frightened of the mouse simply by seeing it and would not need the noise to become upset. The first thing that struck me about this experiment was just how morally ambiguous it seemed to be. At the time I’m sure that this was not thought of as a problem, but we are much more sensitive today and are much more aware of how important a safe youth can be and the impacts of deterrents can be on an infant. Even if it was not an infant it would still be unwise to willingly make a person fearful of anything simply for a study. There is absolutely no way that this kind of experiment would be allowed to happen today, and my first source proves that. It says that if this were to be conducted today that it would be in violation of the Ethics section of American Psychological Associations code on ethics.
I was lucky enough to find a video of what seemed to be the actual experiment going on and was conflicted by what I saw. On one hand it was great to see the actual experiment and what was going on, also it is amusing to look at the baby’s fearless face at the beginning when they are all trying so hard to scare him. But on the other hand it was alarming to see just how physical the actual process was. Both the doctor and what appeared to be his mother were pushing those animals very close to the 8 month old child and rarely let up. Now I am sure that they would never let any harm come to the child but it was still disconcerting to see a baby around a rather large dog and a monkey.
The last source I found dealt more with Watson’s doings and the aftermath rather than the experiment itself. In this article we can see his entire though process about Phobias and there relation to conditioning and his intention to try and rehabilitate Albert after the process was done. However, Albert was moved to a hospital too quickly and Watson was not given proper time to desensitize him to the sound/mouse scenario. This was where I was the most let down, because its obvious that Watson knew he needed to fix certain flaws in his process but either didn’t have the time to change or didn’t give enough effort to help Little Albert.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Albert_experiment: This first source was a basic template for the information and provided me with great ideas for moral and ethical objections to the case while also providing unbiased information.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FKZAYt77ZM: This was a great video that provided a consistant video of the process before scaring the child and then also his apparent discomforted reaction when it was intended for him.
http://www.psychology.sbc.edu/Little%20Albert.htm: This website was written like an essay and provided more on Watson’s actual ideas rather than the experiment itself. It was an important read because it helps show what exactly his intention was rather than leaving it up to the readers mind to twist and mold on their own.
The person I have chosen to do further research on is Ivan Pavlov. He fits into this chapter because it is a chapter on behaviorism and he is one of the first to do research on classical conditioning. I chose him because I am taking a class on behavior right now and it is incredibly interesting, and Ivan Pavlov has been one of my favorite researchers thus far.
Ivan Pavlov was born on September 14, 1849 in Ryazan, where his father, Peter Dmitrievich Pavlov, was a village priest. He was first educated in the church school and moved on to the theological seminary. Pavlov became intrigued with science and abandoned his future in religion and took up physics and mathematics, physiology being his main interest. He received the degree of Candidate of Natural Sciences and continued his education at the Academy of Medical Surgery, receiving a gold medal there. After much research, he settled at the Institute of Experimental Medicine where he began his research on digestion.
Pavlov first came up with his theory on classical conditioning when he was doing research on digestive processes, using dogs as his subjects. He built a small structure which would collect the dog’s saliva so that he could measure and study this based on different stimuli. Each time the dogs would be given food, a bell would be rung. Prior to Pavlov’s research, it was thought that salivation did not occur until the food had actually been put into the mouth. But Pavlov found that once the dogs had learned that the bell meant food, the dogs would start salivating before they had even seen the food. The dogs had been conditioned to start salivating once the bell was rung, the bell being the conditioned stimulus and the salivating, the conditioned response.
This led Pavlov into further studies of the brain and taught the dogs to discriminate between geometric shapes. One shape meant that food would be presented and the other that they were not getting any at that moment. Once the dogs had fully learned the shape, Pavlov would slightly alter it each time, making it to look more and more like the other one until the dogs could not discriminate. This caused the dogs to not know whether or not they should anticipate the arrival of food.
http://www.uni.edu/~maclino/bm/book/sec3.2.pdf
I used this site to learn more about Pavlov’s research with dogs and the conditioned reflex.
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1904/pavlov-bio.html
I used this site to learn more about Pavlov’s Biography and all the events which led up to his research on classical conditioning.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpoLxEN54ho
This video demonstrates well, Pavlov’s research on classical conditioning using dogs.
I decided to look more into Watson’s theory of behaviorism because he was a main part of this chapter and to the future of psychology, especially the study of human conditioning. He built his theory off of Pavolv’s study on conditioning, believing that humans could be conditioned the same way in which dogs were and “later to emphasize, that humans react to stimuli in the same way” (www.forerunner.com). Watson said that “Behaviorism assumes that behavior is observable and can be correlated with other observable events. Thus, there are events that precede and follow behavior. Behaviorism's goal is to explain relationships between antecedent conditions (stimuli), behavior (responses), and consequences (reward, punishment, or neutral effect)” (www.lifecircles-inc.com). Watson did further studies on a baby named “Little Albert” to prove his theory, proving that “emotional responses could be conditioned, or learned” (www.psychology.sbc.edu), stressing the affects the environment has our behavior.
The research done on Little Albert started when he was eight months old. To test to see if a loud noise would condition fear in him, Watson struck a hammer on a steel bar, after three times Albert started to cry. A variety of items were placed in front of him, including a white rat, to see if this would also invoke fear in him but it did not. Watson then wanted to see if fear could be transferred from one object to another. Now when Albert was presented with the white rat the hammer was struck against the steel bar, Little Albert was now afraid of it. The fear of the rat was also transferred to any other furry thing. Even after a month away from the stimulus he was very upset when it was brought back. (www.psychology.sbc.edu)
After realizing the effects that conditioning of a fear could have on Little Albert, he wanted to see if it could be reversed. This is essential for the future of psychology. Many people have phobias that inhibit their daily lives and if there are ways it can be reduced it could greatly improve their lives. He proposed two ways of doing this, “One path to take could have been to habituate Albert to the animals until he the fear response extinguished. Another possible solution could have been to recondition Albert’s responses” (www.psychology.sbc.edu). Unfortunately he could never test these on Little Albert because he wasn’t brought back to the lab after the last study was done. Watson concluded that “phobias were most likely conditioned responses. He stated that phobias were probably either a fear of the original stimulus or that they had been transferred to other stimuli, as the person grew older” (www.psychology.sbc.edu). This research is still helping psychologists today to help condition people to be unafraid of their phobias.
http://www.psychology.sbc.edu/Little%20Albert.htm: It’s reference list was directly from Watson’s own work, it also gave a detailed breakdown of his study on Little Albert.
http://www.forerunner.com/forerunner/X0497_DeMar_-_Behaviorism.html: It gave information about the development of behaviorism over time and Watson’s contribution to it.
http://www.lifecircles-inc.com/Learningtheories/behaviorism/Watson.html: gave a detailed definition of what Watson defined behaviorism as.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hBfnXACsOI: was a video of the actual experiment that Watson conducted on Little Albert. It was helpful to be able to see his actual response.
I chose the Little Albert experiments, and the experiments fit into the chapter because they were some of the more famous behaviorism experiments that Watson performed. I find the Little Albert experiments to be interesting because when I was young for some reason I had a fear of dogs that made me think I must have had a traumatic experience that I didn’t remember, but made me afraid of dogs so I have always felt a small connection to the experiments because I used to think I knew how Little Albert felt. Also, luckily, I am no longer afraid of dogs after growing up!
In the Little Albert experiments Watson and his assistant placed a small fire in front of Albert to start because supposedly he had never seen an animal or fire. Secondly they placed a monkey around Albert to see if he was scared which he wasn’t. Next they brought a dog, and Watson even had Albert play with dogs paw; Albert was not scared at all again. Next they brought the white rat and had it run around Albert and in between his legs. He again was still not afraid. They brought a rabbit next and had the rabbit just kind of move around him. The goal was to make Albert fear the rat so the next time they brought the rat they struck a steel bar with a hammer whenever Albert reached for the rat. The noise apparently greatly upset and frightened Albert. After six pairings of the loud noise and the rat it was believed Albert had been conditioned to fear the white rat, and they expected him to fear the rat whether or not the loud noise was made. When the rat was brought by Albert he attempted to crawl away and began to cry after a few moments. Watson thought Albert would also be afraid of similar animals and when a rabbit was brought out, Albert acted similarly to the rat being placed in front of him. They tried using a dog and a stuffed animal, in which both times Albert had a look of fear and attempted to crawl away, but did not cry. After the experiments were performed, Albert was taken from the hospital; therefore, all testing was stopped for 31 days. Watson wanted to desensitize Albert to see if his fear could be removed, but knew from the beginning of the study that there would not be time. Albert left the hospital on the day the last tests were made so Watson had no opportunity to desensitize Little Albert. Seventeen days after the original experiment, Watson sent a rabbit into the room with Albert and he became distressed. He showed similar reactions when presented with a furry dog, a seal-skin coat, and also when Watson appeared in front of him wearing a Santa Claus mask.
A detailed review of the original study and its subsequent interpretations by Ben Harris of Vassar College (1979) found that: “Critical reading of Watson’s 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.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FKZAYt77ZM – This video shows actual footage of Watson and his assistant with Little Albert performing their experiment. The narrator stated that they did not film the part where Watson hit the steel bar with a hammer to frighten Albert.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Albert_experiment - Wikipedia included critical review of the study because any accounts of the Little Albert experiment I have heard never (until our current textbook for this class) question the results or procedure of the experiment.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hBfnXACsOI&feature=related – This video also includes actual footage of the Watson experiment on Little Albert while also providing some additional details.
I chose to look into the life and works of John Watson. He fits into chapter 10 as being the founder of behaviorism. I am interested in learning more about Watson because of my personal interests in behaviorism and human emotions.
John Watson was born in South Carolina to a poor family in 1878. His father often had extra-marital affairs which later affected Watson’s own love life. Watson’s father left his family in 1891. He responded negatively to this event, turning to rebelliousness and violence. A teacher, Gordon Moore, from Furman University helped to turn around his life, and assisted in his attendance of the University of Chicago.
At the University, Watson met Mary Ikes. They were married and had two children. He followed in his father’s footsteps and also participated in extra-marital affairs. The two later divorced.
While at the University of Chicago, Watson found interest in psychology and the study of animals. He wrote his dissertation on the relation of the growth of the nervous system and the behavior of a rat. He received his doctorate in 1903 and became an associate professor at Johns Hopkins. He conducted many studies on the behaviors of animals.
In 1913, Watson delivered a speech at Columbia University. Here he proposed the idea of behaviorism. He turned his research to the study of human behavior. He attempted to develop techniques that would allow him to control emotions of humans. He believed that humans were more complicated than animals but operated on the same principles. He conducted what is known as the “Little Albert” study.
In the “Little Albert” study, he tried to prove that everything we know is learned. He believed that environment was more influential than genetics on human behavior. H theorized that children have three basic emotional reactions. These included fear, rage, and love. Little Albert had shown being upset by loud noises, but showed no fear for animals. By accompanying the loud noise with animals, Albert learned to fear animals, regardless of if the noise occurred.
He was asked to resign from Johns Hopkins after a love affair with one of his graduate students, Rosalie Rayner. They later married and had two children. John used his studies of behaviorism on his own children! After his time at Johns Hopkins, he continued to publish books on behaviorism. His interests turned to advertising. He wanted to use his scientific theories of behaviorism to improve the effects of advertising. He worked for the William Esty Agency until he retired in 1945. He lived in Connecticut on a farm in he died in 1958.
I enjoyed learning about the life of John Watson. It was very interesting to learn about all of his life struggles and accomplishments.
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/watson.htm This site provided a biographical overview of his life, as well as a time line or events.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/bhwats.html This site was just used to check some basic facts
http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Watson/emotion.htm I used this site for personal use on learning more about the Little Albert experiments.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xt0ucxOrPQE This video provided a nice visual overview of the Little Albert study.
The person that I am interested in learning more about from chapter ten is John B. Watson. I am interested in Watson because I really like knowing about the behavior of animals and where their instinctive behavior comes from. Watson fits into this chapter because much of this chapter covers the topic of behaviorism and its founder.
Watson was born January 9 of 1878. He is a psychologist from America who fist established the school of psychological behaviorism. Watson grew up in South Carolina. He was so smart, he attended college at the young age of 16 and he received his master’s degree at the age of 21. After this, he attended the University of Chicago to study philosophy. Watson graduated from the University of Chicago in 1903. His dissertation, which sets the course for his studies with animals, was called "Animal Education: An Experimental Study on the Physical Development of the White Rat, Correlated with the Growth of its Nervous System." This dissertation included and described the relationship of learning abilities in rats at different ages, and brain mylenization. His dissertation suggested that these two subjects in fact did not have anything in common and were largely unrelated to each other. Watson also did various studies on bird behavior while he was at the University of Chicago.
Watson's dissertation led him into his famous studies of his rats. During his time at the University of Chicago, his research involved rats in mazes. His research was aided by his student Harvey Carr, which was a graduate student at that time. Later on Carr became a leader in the functionalist movement, and the chair of Chicago's psychology department. This experiment that was being conducted was primarily to determine which senses these rats needed to use in order to complete a maze. In the first rat study, Watson and Carr decided to completely eliminate the ability for these animals to use their instinctive senses while trying to find their way through the maze. While somewhat sad and interesting, Watson and Carr decided to remove the eyes from some of the rats, a part of the ear from the other rats, and the olfactory bulb, which is a structure of the vertebrate that is involved in olfaction. Olfaction is the perception of odors. Even though these rats were deprived of these senses, they learned the maze with no problems. Their ability to learn the maze also wasn't harmed by the removal of their whiskers, or even anesthetizing the rats' feet. The rats also learned the maze from their ability to be able to take a various number of steps and remember this through muscle movement. Watson and Carr found out that when making the mazes shorter or longer, the rats were unable to complete them.
Although Watson was very intelligent and passionate about his work, it can easily be assumed that Watson did not spend much time with his family due to his studies. Watson's son recalled in a painful manner, his father "preferred the company of animals to people most of the time."
In 1913, Watson was invited to speak at Columbia University, where he delivered his famous speech know as the Behaviorist Manifesto. This lecture was published later that year and was known as "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It." This was Watson's perfect opportunity to talk about what he had strongly believed in for years. Watson would then talk about his new philosophy of psychology- behaviorism. Watson delivered during his lecture one of the most quoted passages that psychology has ever known. "Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior. Introspection forms no essential part of its methods, nor is the scientific value of its data dependent upon the readiness with which they lend themselves to interpretation in terms of consciousness. The behaviorist, in his efforts to get a unitary scheme of animal response, recognizes no dividing line between man and brute..." According to Watson, it was that time when "psychology must discard all reference to consciousness."
Watson eventually moved into studying emotional development. This leads us to his famous Little Albert study. Watson stated that very few stimuli would elicit a person’s instinctive emotions. These are fear, rage, and love. Watson concluded that conditioning is why children show these emotions with an even wider range of stimuli than adults. It was the belief that emotional reactions are developed through conditioning. The child which was know as Albert B. was chosen for this study because he was completely neutral when it came to emotions. Most commonly known in the experiment, Little Albert was given a white rat. When he touched the rat, a bar would be struck immediately behind his head leaving him startled. This happened continuously until the tests were held off for a week. When the tests were to be administered again, Little Albert began to show signs of fear and began to whimper once the rat was presented to him. After this experiment, it was concluded that "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. Our view is that they persist and modify personality throughout life."
The productivity of his studies, as well as an advertising job which led him to high status as a vice-president under J. Walter Thompson, declined in 1935 due to the death of his wife Rosalie. A year before his death in 1957 he was to be honored by the American Psychological Association. He decided not to go and sent his son in place of him afraid that he would be overcome by strong emotions. Watson died in 1958 at the age of 80.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Watson
Information about the life of Watson and experiments that he conducted.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olfactory_bulb
Information about the olfactory bulb, which I had no clue as to what this was.
http://faculty.frostburg.edu/mbradley/psyography/johnbroaduswatson.html
Very in depth biography of Watson.
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/watson.htm
Information about behaviorism
The person I picked to research more about from chapter 10 was Mary Cover Jones. She wasn’t talked about much in the chapter, as Pavlov and Watson pretty much took care of the whole thing. I was interested in her idea of systematic desensitization, and I wanted to know more about her life’s story.
Mary Cover was born on September 1, 1897, in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. She attended Vassar College in 1915 and graduated in 1919. After graduation, she attended a weekend lecture given by J. B. Watson in New York City. In the lecture, Watson described the Little Albert study he was completing with Rosalie Rayner, a fellow Vassar graduate and a friend of Mary’s. This lecture fueled her desire to pursue graduate work in psychology.
She attended Columbia University for her graduate work, and was done by the summer of 1920! She also married another graduate student that summer, Harold E. Jones. He later became a professor of psychology and the director of the Institute of Human Development at the University of California at Berkeley, so he did pretty well for himself too.
Her career continued when she was appointed Associate in Psychological Research at the Institute of Educational Research, Columbia University Teachers' College. During this time, she conducted her study of Peter. Peter was a 3-year-old who was afraid of small animals. In the experiment, Peter was given some of his favorite foods to eat in a playroom. The experimenters hypothesized that if Peter was having a pleasurable experience eating his food, these feelings would suppress the fear he may have when seeing a small animal (rabbit in this study While Peter was eating, the rabbit was brought into the room for a brief period. The rabbit was placed closer and closer to Peter, for longer and longer periods of time, so that they were gradually increasing the intensity of the feared stimulus, but without disturbing his eating. Eventually, Peter was able to touch and hold the rabbit without being afraid. In a follow-up observation of Peter, Jones reported that he had continued to show a genuine fondness for rabbits and no longer feared small animals.
This work has been called “counterconditioning,” “unconditioning,” and as the book calls it, “systematic desensitization.” It is her most well known research, but not her only research. After completing her work at Columbia, she and her family headed to California where she became the research assistant at the University of California, Berkeley. There she became involved in one of three longitudinal studies that were being conducted through the Institute, called the Oakland Growth Study (OGS). This study was designed to follow a group of approximately 200 fifth- and sixth-grade students from puberty through adolescence. She held this longitudinal study together by establishing caring personal relationships with the participants in the study, whom she called “partners in the study of human lives.” She went on to publish over 100 studies from the data she collected for the OGS. Some studies included long-term psychological and behavioral effects of early and late physical maturing in adolescence and developmental qualifications of problem drinking.
She and her husband also produced the first educational television course in child psychology. She continued work long after she retired and her husband passed away, until she passed away in Santa Barbara, California on July 22, 1987. She was almost ninety-one years old.
http://www.psych.yorku.ca/femhop/Cover%20Jones.htm - This website gives a good biography and an insight into work that she is not as well known for.
http://texts.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb0h4n99rb&doc.view=frames&chunk.id=div00036&toc.depth=1&toc.id - This resource talks about Mary’s life and her works.
http://www.feministvoices.com/mary-cover-jones/ - This site also gives a good background of Mary’s life and her contributions to psychology.
http://www.hypnotherapyarticles.com/ArtP/articlep00015.htm - This goes into more detail about the Peter study.
I chose to do some more research on Pavlov. Like I stated before, I don’t think I knew that he won the nobel peace prize, so I looked for some more info on this. I found that he won The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1904 "in recognition of his work on the physiology of digestion, through which knowledge on vital aspects of the subject has been transformed and enlarged".
I wanted to find out some things that I didn’t already know about him and so I looked for some interesting facts about his early life. I found out the he was born to a Russian minister on September 14, 1849, and grew up in the town of Ryazan. Due to a childhood accident, Ivan was unable to attend school as early as other children, but did get started at age 11. After finishing school he was sent to theological seminary to follow in his father's footsteps, but dropped out in 1870 to enroll at the University of St. Petersburg. It was there that Pavlov became interested in and started his career in physiology. In reading about some of his earlier work I found that Pavlov's first independent work focused on the physiology of the circulation of the blood. He studied the influence of variations in blood volume on blood pressure. He also investigated the nervous control of the heart, and argued that rhythm and strength of cardiac contractions are controlled by four types of nerves. It was after this that he started to study dogs and their digestion.
http://www.vivo.colostate.edu/hbooks/pathphys/misc_topics/pavlov.html
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1904/
This gives a great example of how he came to his discovery and what he was really studying at the time.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpoLxEN54ho
I thought this blogpost gave a good picture of classical conditioning for anyone.
http://jbrezeduclf10.blogspot.com/2010/12/pavlovs-theory.html
I chose to research John B. Watson. I was interested in him because he is such a "big" name in the psychology world, and the only things I really know about him is that of the few details learned in intro. psychology class. He fits well into this chapter because he is indeed the founder of behavioral psychology.
Behavioral Psychology is said to be what made psychology truely a science. It was one of the first things that could be tested and studied.
John B. Watson's life was an interesting one. He hadn't a good family life growing up, and maybe this is why his love life wasn't that great either. Watson was known firstly for his animal studies. Before he worked on animals he worked on his kids, which didn't leave a good lasting relationship with them, as you can imagine.
As I was reading about him, I got really interested in his personal life. John got his PhD. at the University of Chicago and they ended up hiring him as a professor. In one of his classes there was a girl named Mary. She didn't learn much in his classes because she was so taken by him. She went to take his test one day and ended up writing a love poem on the test instead of answering a single question. He went to pick up the test from her and one thing lead to another but they ended up getting married. They had to keep the marriage a secret at first because obviously a professor shouldn't be married to his student. They ended up having kids and then later on, funny enough, Watson had an affair with yet another student of his. Mary and John divorced and he ended up re-marrying this girl, Rosalie Rayner.
Along with all of his great accomplishments, he seemed to be quite the "ladies-man". I guess, if you can call it that. Or maybe just a pimp.
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/watson.htm
--This gives a good back round of his information.
http://www.sonoma.edu/users/d/daniels/watson.html
--This is where I got the detailed information on his love life.
http://faculty.frostburg.edu/mbradley/psyography/johnbroaduswatson.html
--This has more information about literature he wrote.
My exploration topic is fear. Fear can be conditioned, real, and imagined. I have a cell phone because I am afraid, afraid I will be stranded or something. So I want to overcome that because I am also afraid of being tracked and bugged by my cell phone. Fear is a motivator that I would like to begin to identify and not avoid. I also would like to assist others in overcoming their fears if applicable in my real life application. I’m not scared.
http://www.phobia-fear-release.com/phobia-list-definitions.html
interesting list of phobia’s and their definitions
http://denisefath.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/fear.jpg
image of fear
http://www.joebucsfan.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/scaredy-cat.jpg
phobia of scaredy cats
The topic that I chose to research this week was systematic desensitization. Systematic desensitization is a behavior therapy that is used to help individual overcome fears or phobias. Dealing with behaviors is what this chapter was all about. The first reason I chose to research systematic desensitization is because I wanted to learn more about helping people get over fears. I also chose to research it because it is a behavior therapy, and behavior therapies emerged from these researchers wanting to study behavior.
Being afraid of something can be a debilitating thing. There are a variety of things that people may be afraid of. Some examples of things may cause serious fear include snakes, spiders, heights, wars, and natural disasters. The fears cause panic attacks and this is what hinders people’s lives. It has been estimated that about 19 million people in America suffer from inappropriate fear responses. Although this may sound like a pretty terrible statistic there are things that are being done to try and combat this. It has been found that for some fears or phobias 90 percent of people are can be cure through an exposure therapy like systematic desensitization.
The first key to using systematic desensitization effectively is to first help the patient relax. Coping strategies like meditation, deep breathing, or muscle relaxation are implemented. Another way for a patient to cope and relax is to visualize whatever that they fear. Once a patient is able to maintain a relaxed frame of mind then the therapist will begin to engage in progressive exposure. The goal of progressive exposure is to start at a minimal stimulus of the phobia or fear and then increase the stimulus more and more. For example if the patient had a fear of snakes the therapist may start by showing the patient a picture of a snake. Once the patient has become accustomed to the small stimulus it will continue to be increased until the phobia has been extinguished.
Fear is something that has to be managed in all phases of ones life. It will never completely go away. The object in managing this fear is to not let yourself be consumed by it. When an individual becomes consumed by his or her fear then they are unable to fully enjoy their lives. Behavioral therapies like systematic desensitization make it possible for people to over come these fears. This has and will continue to improve many lives.
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-112943646.html - Science new about Phobias in America. Also talked about how therapy helps individuals
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_desensitization - overview of the concept. Include coping strategies and exposure.
http://panicdisorder.about.com/od/treatments/a/SystemDesen.htm - overview of systematic desensitization.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcojyGx8q9U – Talked about what systematic desensitization entails.
I really wasn’t interested in learning more about anyone in this chapter. But in the end, I decided to read about James Mark Baldwin’s dismissal from Johns Hopkins. That thing about him being arrested in a brothel and trying to claim that he was doing ‘research’ (HMP, 341) just makes me laugh.
I couldn’t find much information on that, though. Wikipedia only says, “In Baltimore also Baldwin was arrested in a raid on a brothel (1908), a scandal that put an end to his American career.” Blocher adds that Baldwin gave a fake name to the police and was apparently able to keep the lid on his arrest - that is, until he decided to run for the Baltimore School Board (p184). The one thing I liked most in my reading was this quote from the New World Encyclopedia entry, however: “Baldwin failed to recognize that human beings, through self-centeredness, have deviated from a nature that would establish a society in which each person could achieve their full potential.” It suggests such a dark view of human nature (and subtly highlights an interesting point about Baldwin’s own nature).*
Baldwin’s dismissal allowed Watson to succeed him as head of psychology at Johns Hopkins. Considering this, it was interesting to me that --whereas Baldwin recognized that children learn behaviors in stages (New World Encyclopedia, Step-wise theory)-- Watson would later say that children should be treated “as though they were young adults” (HMP, 353). (Though as McCarty pointed out, “Watson benefitted from Baldwin's misfortune, but he apparently didn't learn any lesson from it, judging from later events…”)
I really was interested in finding out what, exactly, Baldwin meant by his claim of doing ‘research’ - unfortunately, this was all I could find.
*Another interesting tidbit about human nature and self-centeredness is the fact that Titchener --whose work was supplanted by Watson’s behaviorism-- actually wrote a letter of recommendation for Watson to get his new job in advertising (and not in support of Watson keeping his position at Johns Hopkins) (McCarty).
Wikipedia: James Mark Baldwin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Mark_Baldwin
Biographical info on Baldwin.
New World Encyclopedia: Baldwin, James Mark
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/James_Mark_Baldwin
Biographical info on Baldwin.
“The story of John Watson, Founder of Behaviorism: supermarket tabloid version”, Donna Wood McCarty, Professor of Psychology and Head, Department of Psychology, Clayton State University, GA
http://a-s.clayton.edu/mccarty/PSYC3540/Web%20links/watson.html
I used this simply because of its subtitle, but it really is an interesting read.
The Evolution of counseling psychology, Donald H. Blocher
http://books.google.com/books?id=ePSs3DFPBKcC&printsec=frontcover&dq=The+evolution+of+counseling+psychology++By+Donald+H.+Blocher&hl=en&ei=RkOzTqCJAcjftgfd4aTUAw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CDgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=The%20evolution%20of%20counseling%20psychology%20%20By%20Donald%20H.%20Blocher&f=false
The juicy bits.
Daily Mail: “Murder of missing prostitute captured on CCTV: Police quiz 'criminology PhD student' over three killings”. (Last updated at 6:56 AM on 27th December 2010). Chris Brooke, Jaya Narain and James Tozer.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1281514/Criminology-PhD-student-Stephen-Griffiths-quizzed-Yorkshire-prostitute-murders.html
Story about someone else who claimed he was doing ‘research’. Not really relevant.
Systematic desensitization is a method used for helping individuals overcome their phobias by desensitizing individuals to their fears. I find this interesting because when I was younger I had a phobia of dogs. I had been bitten by a dog at the age of 3 and after that I was incredibly terrified of dogs. If I saw one (no matter what the size) I would scream and cry and be overwhelmed with anxiety. I eventually overcame this phobia with age, and not this method, but I know how inconvenient a phobia can be in someones life.
This method comes from the behavioral field of psychology and is based off classical conditioning, which is why it fits into this chapter. This therapy begins with strategies to overcome anxiety. This is because a phobia is an anxiety disorder and it is an extreme irrational fear that creates a disruption in ones life. Some phobias include Xenophobia, fear of strangers, chemo-phobia, fear of artificial substances, arachnophobia, fear of spiders, and many more. The individual tries to overcome the anxiety which helps them rationalize and not be overwhelmed with anxiety. The patient usually first learns ways to physically reduce anxiety. This usually occurs through learning breathing techniques, meditation.
The next step is to establish a hierarchy of fear. For example if an individual has a fear of spiders they may be least scared of a tiny spider and most scared of a tranchula. The tranchula would cause the highest amount of anxiety in an individual, so overcoming that fear would be the biggest accomplishment. Next, the therapist would ask the patient what they are afraid will happen if they encounter this, and then they try to rationalize the likelihood of that occurring, and since this is categorized as irrational, the chances are typically very slim. Then pictures may be introduced to try and reduce the anxiety in a non-threatening way. Some therapies eventually expose the individual to their fear by taking small steps. The hopes are that by then end of this process and individual will no longer have that phobia and be able to live life normally.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_desensitization this gave a good overview of systematic desensitization which was a good basis for the concept
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phobia this is where I got my information about phobias, and different types of phobias.
http://phobialist.com/treat.html this gave me a step by step process of systematic desensitization.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Cover_Jones
This website gave a brief overview of Mary Cover Jones work with the science of psychology.
http://www.psych.yorku.ca/femhop/Cover%20Jones.htm
On this site was a more detailed biography of Jones’ beginning into psychology.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/17615966/A-Biography-of-Mary-Cover-Jones
This URL was very helpful as it was an extremely detailed passage of the life of Mary Cover Jones.
A) Mary Cover Jones
B) She did work with fears and conditioning.
C) I’m interested in all female psychologists.
When you think of the Little Albert experiment you almost always only think of Watson. However, Mary Cover Jones also played a part in this type of research. I love a good, strong female, so I chose to do this week’s topical blog on her and how she became the strong psychologist she is known to be. Jones started her psychology career by attending Vassar. I discovered in one of my websites that she took every single psychology course offered at the university. I loved reading that because that’s how I am as well. I have taken so many psychology classes and plan on taking so many more that by the time I graduate I will be very close to taking all of the psychology courses offered at UNI. Right around the time she graduated she also started attending lectures by John B. Watson. In these lectures Watson discussed how a Vassar grad student had helped him in his Little Albert experiment, which inspired Jones to obtain her masters. So Mary went on to attend Columbia University for her graduate work. Here she got married and conducted one of her more famous experiments, her work with Peter. Here she was concerned with reducing his fears of a white rabbit. Her most successful approach was direct conditioning. She presented a positive stimulus with the rabbit until she conditioned Peter to not fear the small animal. After she completed her Masters degree, she moved out west and started to work with her husband at a research institute. Here she worked on the Oakland Growth Study which catapulted the rest of her career.
I really loved this because it helped me see the importance of graduate school, even way back then. I do NOT want to go to grad school (glad I’m a psychology major) but the more and more I think about it I realize I do not have much of a choice, and it’d benefit my career in ways unimaginable. I don’t think I could amount to half of what Mary Cover Jones became, but it is reinforcing for me to read success stories like her own.
I chose to do Mary Cover Jones. She was only talked about for a little bit in chapter 10, and I wanted to look further into her studies. I found Mary to be very interesting with her study on the "Little Albert" experiment and other experiments with getting over a fear of something.
Mary Cover Jones was born in Johnstown, PA in 1897, her nickname was "mother of behavior therapy." Mary attended Vassar College, and took every single psychology course that was offered. The only course she did not take was a Senior Seminar by Margaret Washborn because she had a medium grade when she was a sophomore. Mary graduated Vassar College in 1919, and went to New York to hear a presentation of John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner. Rayner was a Mary's friend.
Mary's most successful experiment of behavior therapy happened with Peter. Peter was a three year old boy, who was afraid of rabbits. Mary used direct conditioning, which means a direct stimulus food was put with the rabbit. As the rabbit came closer to Peter with a different food that Peter liked, he became to tolerate the rabbit. Eventually Peter had no fear of the rabbit anymore, and would touch and pet the rabbit. Mary took notes over Peter's progress with each new step with how the rabbit kept getting closer presented with food, with unconditioning and this was the most successful therapy session that involved fear.
Jones, and Watson's experiments with children would not be ethical today because of all the different rules about using humans for testing out psychology experiments. After researching Mary, I found her interesting that no one has been able to determine why her use of this behavior therapy of Peter was so successful. Mary Cover Jones died in 1987. Mary was an excellent psychologist to come up with an experiment to get over fears, but her method wouldn't be used today.
http://www.psych.yorku.ca/femhop/Cover%20Jones.htm- this site gave a lot of background information about her going to Vassar College, and the big acomplishment of Peter.
http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Jones/- this site gave a lot of detail of the experiment of Peter.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Cover_Jones- this site gave an overview of Mary Cover Jones's life, and briefly talked about Peter.
I was hesitant to use Pavlov as my subject until I came across some very fascinating information. I didn’t believe it at first, but found several sites to corroborate that Pavlov did, indeed, use children in his experiments (including surgically implanted saliva catchers).
I chose this video as a source because it showed the emotions on the faces of the children and gives visual evidence of the devices Pavlov used in his experiments: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSOj7XaWqFs&feature=player_embedded
Through all the years that I’ve studied psychology, not once was it mentioned that he experimented on children. Interesting to see what people could get away with in the name of science in that era.
It seems like the ringing of the bell with the bringing of food is always mentioned, also, but people neglect to disclose that he also shocked the crap out of the dogs to condition them to expect the shock every time a metronome began. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Pavlov
It was hard to find information I didn’t already know about Pavlov, but I found it interesting that I’d never heard of the phrase “Pavlov’s dog” to refer to someone who goes along with something out of instinct rather than question it. I don’t remember it, but a short internet search brought up usages of it! http://www.military.com/opinion/0,15202,166698_1,00.html
While not really relevant, I also thought it was neat to see he lived to the age of 87, which was not all that common in the early 20th century. http://www3.niu.edu/acad/psych/Millis/History/2003/con_Pavlov.htm
My favorite thing to learn, though, was that Pavlov was a bit of a political activist at the end of his life but was allowed to get away with it since Moscow respected him.
I did research on Ivan Pavlov.Pavislov was one of the founders of behaviourism which makes this topic relevant to the chapter.Ivan Pavlov was a russian national.Although his family wanted him to become a priest for which he intially went to college for,Pavlov had more interest in physiology. In order to obtain a higher education in the field of psysiology ,he went to the University of Petersburg in Russia.Pavlov was offered the job of a professor at the Imperial Academy beacuse of the reseach he had done on the digestion and blood circulation.
In one such psysiologocal reaserch experiments in whoich he was studying the digestive processes in dogs,Pavlov discovered a rather consistenet pattern of salivation by the dogs in the presence of an external stimuli.It was not the actual food that caused the dogs to salivate but a stimuls connected or somehow associated with the food that was enough to produce salivation in dogs.He called this phenomena a conditioned reflex.
This phenomena was psychological in nature and this caused Ivan Pavlov to become a household name in psychology.Even today the topic of behaviourism in psychology is imcomplete without studying the classical conditioning discovered by Pavlov.
This website has good information about Pavlov's early life.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Pavlov
Information about the experiment in detail
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/bhpavl.html
Information about Pavlovs importance in the field of Psychology
http://www.psyonline.nl/hof/en-pavlov.htm
While reading chapter ten I was able to gain knowledge about Mart Cover Jones. This allowed me to want to know more about what she did for and with the Study of Peter. The section on Mary Cover Jones also was a refresher from Behavior Modification last semester. This section allowed me to think about previous things that I had learned about her and allowed me to see what I had forgotten. Mary Cover Jones was a christened “the mother of behavior therapy” as said by a colleague. Mary was seen as a pioneer of behavior therapy due to her work on the unconditioning of the fear reaction in infants.
Mary Cover Jones study with the three year old Peter is a study that is cited all over psychology. Her work is well noted and made a large change for the aspects and views on psychology. Her study on Peter is one study that is cited more than any of her other work. However of someone would look at her career, it would show that she had a rich and persononlogically- oriented approach to the study of personality across the lifespan that is overshadowed by the study of Peter.
Mary Cover Jones was born in Johnstown, Pennsylvania in 1897. She was able to pursue her love of learning and gain much knowledge at Vassar College. There is was an undergraduate, and took every psychology course available except one. To me this was very interesting because, from the start she knew what her interest was. She then struggled to attend Margaret Floy Washburn’s senior seminar in psychology due to her not above average grade in a laboratory course. This however did not stop Mary Cover from doing what she wanted. She continued to press Washburn, and was told that she would not enjoy it, just like another class that she did not like. Even thought she was rejected, she graduated from Vassar in 1919. Also that year she was able to attend a lecture that talked about the Little Albert study, this increased her desire to pursue graduate school in psychology.
Mary did her graduate work at Columbia University in 1919 and completed her master’s by the summer of 1920. That same summer she married a fellow graduate. This man’s name was Harold Jones. She was then appointed as an Associate in Psychology Research at the Institute of Educational Research, Columbia University Teacher’s College. From there she was able to conduct her study about Peter.
Before the study, a number of children were observed in order to determine the most effective method of removing fear responses. In the case of Peter, it shows how we are able to remove fear under laboratory conditions. Peter’s case was selected for a number of reasons. The reasons are that progress in combating the fear reactions was so marked that many of the details of the process could be observed easily. It was also possible to continue the study over a period of more than three months. The running diary shows the characteristics of a healthy, normal, interested child, well adjusted, expect for his exaggerated fear reactions. This also was a study that was bounced off of the study of Little Albert done by Dr. Watson.
When they studied Peter, he was 2 years and 10 month and was afraid of a white rat. This however extended to a rabbit, fur coat, feather, cotton wool, and many other things. In the study it showed that when Peter was introduced to the white rat he screamed and fell flat on his back in a paroxysm of fear. I think that it was very interesting to read about the study and in courage everyone to read about it. Mary Cover Jones was able to publish her results and completed her dissertation work on the development of early patterns in young children. Mary was able to have a wonderful life and fulfilled some many aspects in psychology that never would have happened if it was not for her. However in 1960 her husband died of a fatal heart attack. She continued to productively work and received the G.Stanley Hall award in 1968. She passed away in 1987, and before she passed away she stated to her sisters that she still was learning about what was important in life.
http://www.psych.yorku.ca/femhop/Cover%20Jones.htm
This website allowed me to have an oversite of Mary Cover Jones life.
http://syxlx.snnu.edu.cn/ch/ewebcenter/UploadFiles/2009/05/200905181803152237.pdf
This website gave me a small portion of information that was more of a refresher.
http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Jones/
I loved this website, this was a detailed documentation about the study of Peter!!!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVJMhk4oANM
This video was able to start with little albert study and then talked about Mary Cover Jones and what she did. However she study did not help many of the studies that Watson had. I stopped the video after it talked about Mary Cover Jones. I found this video informal but not very helpful.
I saw this on "The Office" last night and thought it was hilarious.
"The Pavlov Altoid Theory", uploaded by dark paradise 03-Feb-08
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/1079423/the_pavlov_altoid_theory/
While reading Chapter 10, I was happy learn that it went into some detail about Pavlov and classic conditioning. This, of course, is something that I have learned about in many of my psychology classes and has become a staple in the history of psychology. I decided to take this opportunity to learn a little bit more about classic conditioning. From the defintion I read on the internet, classic conditioning is defined as the presentation of a significant stimulus evoking a natural response. In the case of Pavlov's dogs, the dogs salivated when the bell rang, signifying that the dogs knew their food was coming. Pavlov realized this in his experiment comparing salivation to moist versus dry foods. This outcome was almost annoying to Pavlov in the beginning, then started studying the classic conditioning further. Pavlov called these the unconditional stimulus and unconditional response, respectively. I started thinking about how Pavlov's experiement applied to some of my classes. In my Drugs and Individual Behavior class, we just got done learning about analgesic narcotics and those who abuse them. In doing some more research on the internet about this matter and how it applied to classic conditioning, I found some interesting information. In cases of those that abuse analgesic narcotics and even Schedule I drugs such as heroin, the addicts responses closesly resemble the responses in Pavlov's experiment. Heroin addicts actually experience a high before shooting up, often when they simply buy the drug. They know that they will soon experience a "rush" from using the drug interveniously, and can feel a miny rush from the expectation. Much like Pavlov's dogs, heroin addicts are conditioned to feel relief from their drug. I really enjoyed reading this chapter, and finding out more about classic conditioning.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_conditioning#Pavlov.27s_experiment
(I started with site for some basic definitions of classical conditioning)
http://www.csun.edu/~vcpsy00h/students/drugs.htm
(this site had great information about conditioning and how it applies to drug addiction)
http://www.uni.edu/walsh/Narcotics.pdf
(these are my notes for my Drugs and Individual Behavior class that sparked my idea to apply classical conditioning to drug addiction)
I chose to write this blog about John Watson and classical conditioning. Watson was featured very prominently in this chapter, since he is the father of behaviorism. Specifically, I want to talk about classical conditioning and the Little Albert experiments, and how classical conditioning relates to operant conditioning, which was later discovered by Skinner.
Classical conditioning is the process by which a subject grows to associate a stimulus with a novel response. It involves an unconditioned stimulus, which elicits the desired response, and a conditioned stimulus, which will eventually trigger a conditioned response. The classic example is Pavlov and his dogs. Meat triggers a salivation response in dogs. This is an unconditioned stimulus and response. Pavlov eventually discovered that the salivation occurred when the dogs anticipated being fed, and that he could trigger this anticipation with another stimulus (a bell). When the two stimuli are paired together enough times, the subject (in this case the dog) begins to associate the conditioned stimulus (the bell) with the meat, and so will salivate when it hears the bell.
The Little Albert experiment was similar: Watson found a very brave baby named Albert, and conditioned a fear response in him. Watson initially presented various furry animals to Albert, and he was not afraid of any of them. When the animal was presented, and a loud banging sound was made, Albert became very afraid. Eventually he grew to associate furry animals with loud noises, and so became afraid of just about anything fuzzy and cuddly.
Classical and operant conditioning are very much two sides of the same coin. Conditioning, broadly stated, is the creation of associations with a given event. Usually, especially in operant conditioning, we use these associations to create positive or negative valences with a behavior (reinforcement and punishment, respectively). If the event for which we are creating new associations is environmental, we call it classical conditioning. If the event is a behavior, we call it operant conditioning, which we discuss in the next chapter.
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/watson.htm
I used this site to get more biographical information about Watson.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xt0ucxOrPQE
This video has some pretty neat footage of the Little Albert experiment.
http://psychology.about.com/od/behavioralpsychology/a/classcond.htm
This is a pretty informative page about classical conditioning.