What I would like you to do is to find a topic or person from this week's chapter that you were interested in and search the internet for material on that topic. You might, for example, find people who are doing research on the topic, you might find web pages that discuss the topic, you might find a video clip that demonstrates something related to the topic, etc. What you find and use is pretty much up to you at this point. Please use at least 3 quality resources.
Once you have completed your search and explorations, a) I would like you to say what your topic is, b) how exactly it fits into the chapter, and c) why you are interested in it. Next, I would like you to take the information you read or viewed related to your topic, integrate/synthesize it, and then write about the topic in a knowledgeable manner. 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.
For this week I am researching more on the topic of what Pavlov did with his dogs, and I am choosing this because I found the experiment very interesting but was also confused on what the point was. I would like to learn more about what his purpose was and maybe answer some of the different questions I have, for example did the dogs ever actually get fed, did the fluid buildup if they kept doing this experiment and never fed them, did the attitudes of the dogs change, and or did they use a certain type of dog? During this chapter we discussed Pavlov and everything he has contributed to the psychology field and that is how it fits into this chapter. With this experiment Pavlov was looking at salvation id dogs in response to being fed, he started this because he noticed dogs would begin to salivate whenever he entered the room, even when he wasn’t bringing them food. Going off the term Pavlovian conditioning, in this case stating that some things dogs do not need to learn, dogs don’t learn to salivate whenever they see food, it’s hard wired into their brains to do so. A behaviorist would say it is an unconditioned response (unconditioned stimulus is the food, unconditioned response is to salivate). Pavlov did discover though that any object or even which the dog associated with food, such as a lab coat, would trigger the same response. Pavlov knew that the dogs in his labs had learned to associate food with his lab assistant, this must have been learned because at one point the dogs did not do it and then they did, so their behavior changed. In behaviorist terms, the lab assistant was originally the neutral stimulus because it produces no response; the lab assistant then became associated with an unconditioned stimulus, which in this case is the food. Pavlov showed the existence of the unconditioned response by presenting a dog with a bowl of food and measuring its salivary secretions. And after watching YouTube videos and reading I did answer some of my previous questions, the dogs were eventually fed and it didn’t matter what breed of dog. Pavlov became very well known for his conditioned reflex because of his experiments he has done with the dogs and the different results he found.
http://www.nobelprize.org/educational/medicine/pavlov/readmore.html - Different reflexes and how we perceive them.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpoLxEN54ho – video clip of actual dogs within the experiment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Pavlov - Step by step process of the experiment and what Pavlov found.
http://www.nobelprize.org/educational/medicine/pavlov/index.html - Game to see the different reflexes and if you can train the dog to drool on command.
For this weeks topical blog I decided to take a closer look at the little albert experiment by Watson. This experiment is highly used as an example of great classical conditioning result and is known by most all students who have taken some sort of Introduction to Psychology course. However there were several mistakes that weren't mentioned by Watson and weren't considered in the analysis of his results.
One of the first things that Watson fails to mention is that Little Albert (Who's real name was actually Douglas) was not a normal, healthy boy as Watson proclaims him to be. Instead unfortunately Douglas was suffering from a severe illness known as hydrocephalus, a build up of fluid in the brain. So when the search was finally over to find little Albert he was found only through his mother because he had reportedly died at the age of six from this terrible disease. Whether or not this disease was something that could have effected the results of Watson's study remains unknown but it certainly sheds a dark light on Watson's operations.
The second thing that was interesting about the study that not many people know is that the reactions of little Albert were almost completely subjectively reported by Watson and his partner Rayner. They wrote down what they saw but there was no objective scale or things to look for when doing the experiment. The fact also that both of the experimenters knew what they were looking for and knew the results that they wanted to accquire also brings into question the possible bias that could have been present in the study and reporting of the results.
Third, there was the question of if the study was ethically done or not and if a committee of today or even one of Watson's time would ethically permit him to put Little Albert though the things that he did. Now there can be no evidence since little Albert died at a young age that this experiment had any lasting effect on his fear of mice or white objects but there is always the possiblity. Since the effects were unknown it is assumed that there was no way that Watson could have properly warned the mother about what was going to happen during the experiment or what the sideeffects could be for her child. This being said, it could be losely argued that there was no way she could have given informed consent and if she had known all of the potential consequences, if she would have subjected her son to that in the first place.
It is mentioned in the book and in other places that the main criticism of Little Albert is that throughout the treatment of the baby through this experiment LIttle Albert may not have been afraid of what the experimenters thought at all. There is a possiblity that eventually after enough prodding Little Albert simply became scared of the experimenters themselves and remained that way throughout the rest of the experiment. If true this would almost squash the legitimacy of Watson's theory and question the reliability of classical conditioning also.
Although I believe that the Little Albert experiment proved to be a pivotal point in the fight for legitimacy of classical conditioning. Since then there have been many better, more well controlled studies that could be studied by students to get the idea of classical conditioning without the questions or subjectivity that Watson's experiment had.
http://psychology.about.com/od/classicpsychologystudies/a/little-albert-experiment.htm
-about.com about little albert experiment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Albert_experiment
-wikipedia about little albert
http://www.integratedsociopsychology.net/little_albert.html
-in depth overview of the little albert experiment
I decided to learn more about Watson. Here is a great quote on why I think he is so interesting “One of the most charismatic pioneers of psychology was John Watson. He was born into poverty and abuse, yet managed to turn psychology into a science and posed questions about who we are as humans that we continue to ponder half a century after his death. He enjoyed a spectacular rise to academic fame and public celebrity, and fall from grace just as spectacular leading to academic obscurity that resounds as a mystery to this day. What led to that spectacular fall? A salacious sex scandal of course!”
I like that he was a rebel when he was younger because I think I sort of was and it makes me feel better about being wild when I was younger. It makes me think I can be successful too. It turns out I learned a lot of him that I was not expecting, there was a lot more scandal than the book shared.
The story of Watson and his first wife was interesting. She was his student first and wrote him a lover letter, I found this to be very silly and strange. Who does that? Well, it worked I guess. It seems one of the reasons Watson married his wife is because she came from a good family and since he did not it helped his career.
In 1920 Watson’s affair with his much younger research assistant became public. This caused a “press frenzy” partially because of his wife’s family’s status and his status at the university. After this mess he could not get a job in academia and moved into advertising- which made him a lot of money. He married his mistress and they had two children.
Here is an interesting observation about the affair and public reaction “Certainly, affairs and divorce did not warrant such reactionary measures as blackballing a famous and promising academic professional who had achieved celebrity status while at Johns Hopkins, not to mention recently ascending to the presidency of the American Psychological Association, and the recipient of a 50% bonus only a few months before his fall from grace. It seems there is more to the story.” The writer goes on to mention some alleged sex studies done by Watson and his wife/assistant that “involved measurements of physical attributes during the act of sexual intercourse.” Some say the university is said to have wanted to cover some things up and fired him to keep the first wife’s family quiet about this strange sex research. It seems that that most think there is very little evidence of this sex research and it was only created to sell books because “sex sells“. Some say it is just a popular myth.
Watson is said to have been a very tough father with scheduled feeding times and no affection. The daughter from his first marriage is said to have tried to kill herself many times. The son from the first marriage has been called a “sponge” off his father and died in his 50s of ulcers. Watson had two sons in his second marriage. One son is said to have rebelled by becoming a Freudian psychiatrist and ended up successfully committing suicide. His granddaughter from his first marriage came out with a book pretty much blaming Watson for all of the dysfunction in her family and wrote “"Grandfather's theories infected my mother's life, my life, and the lives of millions. How do you break a legacy? How do you keep from passing a debilitating inheritance down, generation to generation, like a genetic flaw?"
Watson was recluse at the end of his life and burned all of his papers before his death.
http://www.vicnapier.com/MyArticles/PsychEssays/WatsonSexScandel.htm
About his life and the conspiracy theory of sex research
http://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/10/scandal.aspx
Sex research scandal-is a myth
http://robothink.blogspot.com/2005/09/long-dark-night-of-behaviorism.html
Watson’s children, grandchildren- pretty dark stuff
For my blog on chapter 10, I decided to research the case of Watson and his Little Albert experiment, because I wanted to know what happened to Little Albert after the study. There was really no mention of what happened to the baby afterwards in the book, and I wanted to know if the study that Watson conducted had any repercussions on the baby.
As I was researching Watson I had found a lot of resources criticizing not only the unethical aspects of the study, but Watson’s personality as well. The typical answer to the question of why Watson conducted this study is that he wanted to prove negative condition, and that he could condition a child to be afraid of “furry objects.” It has been said , though, that Watson had other underlying reasons as to why he conducted this particular experiment. It was well-known that Watson was a bit of a promiscuous man, and some of the accusations I found from one source were appalling yet interesting at the same time.
Why would Watson conduct an experiment that was obviously unethical? Because Watson was a promiscuous man and had relationships with his students, he felt that these younger men were a threat to his chances. Women were referred to as “furry objects” for obvious reasons, and Watson wanted to be able to condition boys and men to be afraid of “furry objects” so the female population would be more available to him. Although this accusation is quite bizarre, it was interesting to read about other perspectives of Watson and why he conducted the study.
Other criticisms consisted of attacking the valididty of his experiment and whether Little Albert was really a “normally functioning baby” like Watson had proclaimed. In an effort to find out if there were any repercussions that Little Albert had to face after the experiment, the tragic truth was uncovered about his identity. His real name was Douglas, and he had died at the young age of 6 from a disease called hydrocephalus. It was also found that Little Albert had hydrocephalus since he was born. It took viewings of the video footage taking note on his behaviors, as well as family accounts stating that the boy had problems since birth. The family also said that for the six years that Albert was alive, he was never able to walk or talk.
With this information that has arisen, there are three particular problems that unnerving about this study. First, it’s not only unethical to involve a baby in this kind of research but it’s even more unethical and even revolting that they had used a baby that was neurologically impaired to use as a subject for negative conditioning. Second, the fact that the mother who knew that her baby had problems would agree to have researchers conduct such an experiment on her child. There is one underlying reason that the mother may have been compelled to do so. Albert’s mother was a wet nurse where Watson was working, and her low status and low income put her in a position to be easily manipulated. She may have likely been given the ultimatum of agreeing to let Watson experiment on her baby or being forced to leave her job. The final problem of this study is the validity of the results. If Albert wasn’t a normal functioning baby, than the results wouldn’t be able to be generalized to every baby. This would mean that the results of this study were invalid and a big lie for over 90 years.
http://psychology.about.com/od/classicalconditioning/a/sad-tale-of-little-albert.htm
Information about the invalidity of Watson's study
http://www.generalblogofcrime.com/
Position of the mother and allowing "Albert" to be a subject in the study
http://www.normalbreathing.com/little-albert-experiment-cause.php#.UJHjC8XA8ms
Accusations of the reasons why Watson conducted this study
For my Topical blog I decided to look more into Mary Jones and systematic desensitization. Mary Jones was a young Columbia graduate student and a friend of Rosalie Rayner. At the time, she was working with several children who feared various objects, Jones tried a number of methods but most of them proved to be unsuccessful. Jones was said to be the pioneer of the therapeutic technique called systematic desensitization. Jones successfully reduced a young boy’s fear of rabbits by placing the animal at some distance from the boy while he was eating, then gradually moving the rabbit closer. The pleasurable responses that the boy was feeling with the action of eating replaced his fear response with the rabbit.
Systematic desensitization is considered to be a type of behavior therapy used in the field of psychology to help effectively overcome phobias and other anxiety disorders. A South African psychiatrist named Joseph Wolpe was the one that initially developed this type of therapy. The process of systematic desensitization begins by first learning the relaxation skills needed to extinguish the fear or anxiety responses to the specific phobia. Once he or she has successfully learned these relaxation techniques, they can then use them to react successfully towards situations in an established hierarchy of fears determined by their therapist. The goal of the hierarchy of fears is to help the patient learn to cope with and overcome each step in the hierarchy of fears. By doing this, the end result or hope is that the patient will then be able to overcome the last step in the hierarchy which is essentially the exact thing that the person has a phobia of or has anxiety issues with. The number of sessions required to learn the relaxation techniques, establish the hierarchy of fear, and complete the steps in coping with the phobia usually lasts 4-6 sessions and sometimes 12 if the phobia is extreme. Some of the most common fears or phobias treated with this technique include public speaking, fear of flying, stage fright, elevator phobias, driving phobias, and animal phobias. It is important to note that this therapeutic technique should only be performed by a very well trained professional. The reason for this is that if this technique is not performed well, the potential for extreme panic reactions to the phobia may occur, which in turn could increase the phobia. Furthermore, it is imperative that the patient learn and understand how to use the relaxation responses.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Cover_Jones
-Wikipedia article on Mary Cover Jones
http://www.minddisorders.com/Py-Z/Systematic-desensitization.html
-Information on systematic desensitization.
http://www.simplypsychology.org/Systematic-Desensitisation.html
-More condensed info on systematic desensitization.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_desensitization
-Wikipedia article on systematic desensitization
I decided to do my blog this week on John Watson and his life outside of science. This fits into the chapter because Watson and his research were discussed in some length. I wanted to know more about John Watson because I find it interesting to learn about the person not just the scientist.
John Watson was born into a poor family on January 9th, 1878 in Travelers Rest, South Carolina. His father’s name was Pickens Butler and his mother’s name was Emma K. Watson. His mother was a very religious woman while his father was almost the opposite of that. His mother opposed drinking and smoking but his dad was considered an alcoholic. In 1891 John’s father left the family to live with other women. This clearly left a void in young john’s life and it led him to some childhood trouble. He was arrested twice during his high school years. He was considered a poor student in terms of education but luckily he had his mother’s connection to help him get into college. At the age of 16 he started to attend Furman College in Greenville, South Carolina. Once he enrolled in college he became a much better student and advanced in his educational career by outdoing the rest of the students he attended school with. By the time Watson was 21 he had earned his master’s degree. After a year off he wanted to further educate himself so he contacted the President of the University of Chicago. He eventually got accepted and started studying the field of philosophy. Gordon Moore a professor from Furman University recommended that Watson study under John Dewey. Dewey and his ideas were starting to be acknowledged in the fields of education and social reform. After learning under Dewey for a time Watson learned a new approach. He eventually would call it behaviorism. Behaviorism is the idea that living things and their actions like thinking, acting and feeling are based on the behaviors of that living thing. While studying at Chicago University john meant his future wife, Mary Ickes. They had two children together while they were married. In 1908 Watson was offered a job as a faculty member at Johns Hopkins University. Upon his arrival he was almost immediately promoted to the chair of the psychology department. After working in Baltimore for several years at JHU, John published an article called “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views it” which the book refers to as “The Behaviorist Manifesto.” In the article Watson outlined his new ideas about behaviorism. His main ideas rejected the concept of studying “consciousness” he felt that instead of studying that psychology should focus on the behavior of the individual because it would produce more accurate research. When Watson first started research he used white rats to study his ideas. He showed that rats were conditioned to finish a maze once they became aware of the maze and it was transferred to memory. Once he mixed up the maze he determined that the mice no longer could navigate the maze due to the changing of the course. After doing this for several months Watson was presented the opportunity to do this research on humans. In this research experiment he used an 11 month old infant now known as Little Albert. He showed conditioned responses and believed he could turn his subject into anything. A famous quote by Watson that involved his research and how he could condition infants into anything he desired. The quote states, “Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years.” Watson Continued to work at JHU until 1920 when he was asked to resign due to an extra marital affair with his then graduate assistant Rosalie Rayner. Once the news became public Watson requested a divorce from his current wife. In 1921, once the divorce was final Watson and Rayner married. While together they had two more children together while Watson had two from his previous marriage. The couple stayed together until her death in 1935. After her death Watson slipped further away from having a relationship with his children which was already poor to begin with. Although Watson’s educational career was over he found another career in advertising. He applied his behaviorism beliefs to his advertising campaign and was very successful at it. He made more money doing this than he did teaching. He was quickly rewarded with a promotion to Vice president at Thompson. After doing this for several years he decided to stop writing ads and retire. In 1936 at the age of 65 he walked away from advertising. From here Watson lived on a farm he owned until his death in 1958. In 1957 he was awarded a gold medal from the American Psychological Association for his efforts to the field of psychology. Although Watson played a big part in the advancement of psychology hardly any of his articles, notes, papers and letters were left to science before he died. Watson like numerous others burned his work shortly before his death. After reading about the life of John Watson you can’t help but wonder, was he a model for his own theory? Did he fall into the category of learned behaviorism? After all, his father was a poor role model while John was growing up. Like his father he too had extra marital affairs and left his wife. Even though Watson was the researcher for learned conditioning I feel his life in a way was just a further example of what he studied. It was really interesting to learn about the “non career” aspect of a scientist rather than learn more about what we already knew. This blog helped me get an inside look on one of the biggest contributors in modern psychology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Watson
This gave me thorough background of Watson from birth to death. Helped me piece together his life.
http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesofmajorthinkers/p/watson.htm
This gave me a great biography on his life and accomplishments. Also gave me a timeline of achievements.
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/watson.htm
This source just added bits and pieces of info that filled in the rest of his life story.
I decided to look into more recent areas that behaviorism has had a hand in changing. As I talked about in my entry on Tuesday, Mary Cover Jones pioneered research in the treatment of fears and phobias. In addition, there have advances in treatment for addiction and addiction as well as more modern applications to behavioral analysis. Fields ranging from IO psychology, research on developmental disabilities, cultural psychology and clinical psychology have also changed and evolved with behaviorism.
While looking through some 21st century applications of behaviorism, I found a site about the use and practice of behaviorist theories in the classroom. Some of it is by intrinsically motivating students with progress, completion of a program, better grades, etc.
Another field that behaviorism has influenced is the workforce through Organizational behavior management (OBM). Many Fortune 500 companies have adopted principals from the assistance of this subfield because it focuses on improving performance and safety not only on a group level, but also an individual level. This field is very much experimental, but does most of it’s research out in the field versus a controlled lab.
About modern behaviorism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behaviorism#21st-century_behavior_analysis
Behaviorism in the classroom
http://blogrob.edublogs.org/2011/11/10/behaviorism-in-the-21st-century-classroom/
About OBM's
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organizational_Behavior_Management
This week I decided to look more into Watson’s Little Albert Study. I choose this topic because after reading it, I was absolutely appalled that they would do such a thing to an infant.
In 1913, Watson published the article "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It" — sometimes called "The Behaviorist Manifesto". In this article, Watson outlined the major features of his new philosophy of psychology, called "behaviorism". Watson’s behaviorist manifesto was a powerful statement, sometimes seen as the starting point for a behaviorist revolution in psychology and as the vehicle that catapulted Watson to the presidency of the APA in 1915.
The reason behind Watson’s doing this was he was interested in finding support for his notion that the reaction of children, whenever they heard loud noises, was prompted by fear. Furthermore, he reasoned that this fear was innate or due to an unconditioned response. He felt that following the principles of classical conditioning he could condition a child to fear another distinctive stimulus which normally would not be feared by a child. The participant in the experiment was a child that Watson and Rayner (his partner) called "Albert B.", but is known popularly today as Little Albert. Around the age of nine months, Watson and Rayner exposed the child to a series of stimuli including a white rat, a rabbit, a monkey, masks and burning newspapers and observed the boy's reactions. The boy initially showed no fear of any of the objects he was shown.
The next time Albert was exposed the rat, Watson made a loud noise by hitting a metal pipe with a hammer. Naturally, the child began to cry after hearing the loud noise. After repeatedly pairing the white rat with the loud noise, Albert began to cry simply after seeing the rat. I believe Watson and Rayner could have done this experiment and seen the results they wanted with an animal and it would have been less unethical.
Watson and Rayner were unable to attempt to eliminate the boy's conditioned fear because he moved with his mother shortly after the experiment ended. Some envisioned the boy growing into a man with a strange phobia of white, furry objects. Recently, however, the true identity and fate of the boy known as Little Albert was discovered. As reported in American Psychologist, a seven-year search led by psychologist Hall P. Beck led to the discovery. After tracking down the location of the original experiments and the real identity of the boy's mother, it was discovered that Little Albert was actually a boy named Douglas Merritte. The story does not have a happy ending, however. Douglas died at the age of six on May 10, 1925 of hydrocephalus, a build-up of fluid in his brain. "Our search of seven years was longer than the little boy’s life," Beck wrote of the discovery.
By present-day standards, Watson's experiment was unethical for numerous reasons. It is now measured immoral to evoke reactions of fear in humans under laboratory circumstances, except if the participant has given an informed approval to being purposely horrified as part of the experiment. Experiments should not cause the human participants to suffer unnecessary distress or to be in any way physically harmed. The welfare of the human participants must always be the paramount consideration in any form of research, and this is especially true with specially protected groups such as children.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Albert_experiment
Information on the experiment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Watson
Information on John B. Watson
http://psychology.about.com/od/classicpsychologystudies/a/little-albert-experiment.htm
More information about the experiment
After reading chapter 3, I wanted to look more in depth to why John Watson was dismissed from his position at John Hopkins. His dismissal greatly affected Watson’s life, and lead to his new life in advertising that the book touched upon. I’m interested in this subject, because the book made me curious about what actually had happened with the situation. Chapter 11 said that he fell he love with one of his graduate students while he was married, but I wanted to know more about what happened.
Even though John Watson’s Little Albert study has raised question about its ethicality throughout the years, there’s a racy scandal to add to the story. Shortly after John B. Watson published his research on Little Albert in January of 1920, Johns Hopkins University gave him a 50 percent salary raise to ensure he stayed at the university, because he was being wooed by other top universities like Harvard. What is ironic is that he was fighting to keep his job there by the end of 1920. Watson went through a scandalous divorce that involved the uncovering of secretive love letters to another woman. This other woman was Rosalie Rayner, a 21-year-old graduate student at John Hopkins who was Watson’s research assistant for his controversial Little Albert work. Watson's divorce became front-page news, because his wife, Mary Ickes Watson, was part of a prominent Baltimore political family. Johns Hopkins fired Watson for the public indiscretion. Some think it was because the school had recently let go another professor linked to a prostitution raid. Decades later, a spicy rumor spread, offering a different reason for Watson's academic dismissal—that Johns Hopkins discovered he had been conducting sex research. One of Watson’s theories was that genital stimulation produced feelings of love. The story became popular and was published in psychology textbooks between the years of 1974 and 1994. This rumor came from psychologist James Vernon McConnell, because he didn’t believe that such an influential psychologist could be fired on the grounds of a divorce. McConnell began researching this scandal and uncovered important information in the late 1950s. He interviewed Watson’s colleague, Deke Coleman. Coleman informed McConnell of how Watson was fired not only for the divorce, but because he and his research assistant, Rayner, were measuring their physiological responses during sex in Watson's lab at Johns Hopkins. Watson wanted to know what kinds of biological changes occurred in humans during the stress of intercourse, and connected his own and Rayner’s body to various scientific instruments while they had sex.
http://www.jhu.edu/jhumag/0400web/35.html
-Watson’s life and divorce
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/watson.htm
-Biography
http://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/10/scandal.aspx
-Watson’s scandals
I chose to research John B. Watson and find out more about his study of the emotional development of children. Emotions make up a large part of the study of psychology and also tell a lot about how humans respond to their environments. I find emotions one of the most interesting things to study in psychology and I find myself bringing the topic up for every blog. What I enjoyed finding out about Watson was his theories on nature versus nurture because this is always a controversial topic that I am never really sure about. I don’t think it is necessarily one or the other and I found that I wasn’t the only one. Watson was viewed as more radical than he really was. He believed that organisms such as man and animal do adjust themselves to their environment be means of heredity and habit, but he also believed that nurture was just as important and even went as far to say that he could train any child to be any specialty of his choice such as a doctor or lawyer. This belief led to his book that expressed the need for nurture through psychological care of infants and children. This is something I can find interest in because I often think about the kids I have cared for and blamed certain parenting styles for the ‘naughty’ ones. I do believe the way we are raised plays a large part in the person we are today, but then there is also part of me that believes it is just nature. The overall views of John Watson fall under the term behaviorism and the ability to predict and control the actions of others. What is different from learning about this now is that back in the beginning it was viewed as radical for even bringing up the subject. When reading about Watson, nothing really sticks out as radical, in fact it seems common. He suggested what today we know as practice makes perfect and the repetition needed in order to learn. His concept of emotional conditioning is used today as the basis of modern therapies for anxiety disorders. Watson was known as a progressive because of his belief in applying scientific findings to social problems. An interesting example of this was the emotional attachment of children to their parents could lead to overdependency. It is crazy to think about the endless theories about emotion, because they affect so much of how we behave and who we are. It would be impossible to know everything about emotion when studying psychology, so hearing all the different theories and researching the studies done can be very interesting.
http://www.lifecircles-inc.com/Learningtheories/behaviorism/Watson.html
psychological care of infants, need for nurture
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Watson#.22Twelve_infants.22_quotation
nature vs. nurture, training children to be doctors or lawyers
http://www.faqs.org/childhood/Th-W/Watson-John-B-1878-1958.html
behaviorism, modern views, scientific findings applied to social problems
I decided to learn more about Ivan Pavlov and his work with dogs. Psychology owes a lot to Pavlov and his experiments dedicated to behaviorism and classic conditioning. He also accomplished other things in his life which interested me in which I did more research on. I learned that Pavlov did work with pancreatic nerves that allowed him to receive a gold medal after he devoted his life to since in the 1870’s. I didn’t know that he was also a master surgeon and did a lot of research with physiology and received many awards and excelled as a doctor after grad school. He did a lot of work with how different organs affect each other at one time and this concept helped to spark the idea of conditioned responses. The idea of reflexes came about when Pavlov did an experiment with dogs. He noticed that when he put food in front of a dog that it salivated. After this he associated a bell to the food which signaled the food coming out to the dog. This caused the dog to eventually salivate at the sound of the bell even before the food to come out. This breakthrough research of its time landed Pavlov with a Nobel Prize and much fame in the psychology and physiology world. Pavlov used this research to cure things such as phobias and undesirable reflexes or conditioning through a training technique called extinction. Pavlov’s work is seen in advertising and in everything we do nowadays. This topic interested me a lot after taking behavior modifications and seeing how any response we have both has consequences and repercussions.
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1904/pavlov-bio.html - Explains work as being a surgeon and head of pharmacology.
http://www.nobelprize.org/educational/medicine/pavlov/readmore.html - Pavlov’s dog research.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpoLxEN54ho - Video clips of dogs being tested by Pavlov.
The topic I chose to write about is the Watson/Carr maze studies. I chose this topic because the type of research they did really interests me, and I wanted to learn more about the details of the study. This relates to what we are reading about because it is about manipulating certain stimuli to see how it affects the subjects. This is what a lot of the research was about in this time period, and it was emerging very rapidly.
The Watson/Carr maze studies, also known as the “Kerplunk experiment” occurred in 1906-1907, and was done to determine which senses a rat uses to learn a maze, or which ones are affected more than others. Watson worked with Harvey Carr to manipulate each of a rat’s senses to determine how it would affect their ability to complete a maze. They made one group blind, one group deaf, removed olfactory bulbs from one group, and snipped the whiskers of another group. Watson noted that it did not matter which sense the rats lost, they still seemed capable of completing the maze. He thought that these rats were learning by kinesthetic sense. Once these rats were trained to retrieve food at the end of a long arm in the maze, they shortened the maze by putting a barrier halfway through. The rats would then run right into this barrier, hence the “kerplunk” noise, and would simply ignore the food located in there. I would have really loved to be involved in this experiment! Although I am not sure I could have manipulated the rat’s senses myself, because I do find it rather cruel even if they are just rats! I like hands on experiments where I can see the results right in front of me. I also like manipulating certain things that I can see the results instantly, as well. This study did not seem too complicated, but I would have loved to be a part of it. Very interesting!
http://www.igs.net/~pballan/kerplunk.htm Useful to understand what the “kerplunk” experiment was about
http://www.sonoma.edu/users/d/daniels/Watson.html Gave a timeline of events in Watson’s life, including details on this study
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2741879/ Very informative article on this experiment!
After reading chapter 10, I was astonished to hear that there could have been some known flaws with the Little Albert study. I was hard form me to beleive that I study that can be found as prime example for classical conditioning could be flawed and still be seen as scientifically viable. With that in mind I decided to do a little more research on the study and iff there were any other facts about the study that are not as well known and that may have had an impact on the conclusions.
Many years before the Little Albert study Ivan Pavlov a psychologyist from the Soviet Union used his dogs and their salivation response to study classical conditioning. A couple decades later psychologist by the name of John Watson wanted to take the study of classical conditioning to the next step, so he decided that the logical next step would be to conduct a test on infants. More particularly he would use his theory of three disinct emotions in infants to use as the basis for the study. Watson wanted to show that emotion was a conditioned respone through actual scientific evidence, so he began to conduct the Little Albert study.
Little Albert aka Douglas Merritte was the son of a wet nurse at the hospital were the study took place. It was said that the child was choosen, because it was a healthy child that was emotionally stable. However, in later years it would be discovered that was not the case. Douglas was not a healthy baby, in fact, he had a hydrocephalus. This disease made it son that the brain fluid on his head would not drain of correctly and completly causing excess pressure on the brain of Little Albert. It remains unknown of this condition may have had an effect on the study, but it could have been a factor.
During the course of this study Douglas was shown many different stimulus and he showed no initial disatisfaction with any of them, in fact, as the video I have provided shows he reaches for many of them and want to play with the animals. With that in mind Watson and his assistant Rayner use a hammer to bang on a metal bar that is positioned behind the child and when the child reached for the stimulus they stuck the bar creating a loud noise, which scared Little Albert. When the stimulus were brought back to him he was scared of them, which shows that his emotions had been conditioned. Watson wanted to test the durability of the conditioning, so he sent Douglas home and had him back one month later to test if he was still afraid of the stimulus and he was for the most part.
For him this proved that emotion could be conditioned, which is another part of the credibility of the study. Only one study was done and a conlusion was made from that which to this day exisits is very interesting to me. Perhaps the reason that it has not been redone has to do with the ethical factors that surroundede the study. Could it have had a lasting negative impact on the individual? This is one question that I had and after my research is something that I have found I will not be able to answer. That is because at the age of six Little Albert died because of his condition that he had at birth.
Despite its problems, the study is still used as a viable and good example of classical conditioning among humans. To this day counter-conditioning techniques are used to decencitize individuals with phobias.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hBfnXACsOI
-Video of the Little Albert Study
http://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/01/little-albert.aspx
-What happened to Little Albert?
http://www.psychology.sbc.edu/Little%20Albert.htm
-Great desription of the study
http://psychology.about.com/od/classicpsychologystudies/a/little-albert-experiment.htm
-General Overview of the study
Although I had heard many times about the Little Albert study I had really only heard a small part of it each time. As I was reading about Watson in the chapter I wondered if there was more to this story. I agree with him that people can become conditioned to be afraid of things. We see conditioning in lots of things all around us. Most of us have met someone who used to love dogs, for instance, but at some point in their childhood was bit or otherwise frightened by a dog. They will then say that after that point in time that they became at some level, fearful of dogs. On a deeper level the child who has been a victim of abuse learns to cringe whenever someone raises a hand, regardless of who is raising the hand. Classical conditioning has also been shown in various other studies, like Pavlov’s dogs which we also read about in this chapter.
John Watson felt that classical conditioning could explain everything to do with psychology. I am always a little wary of someone who claims to have the one and only answer. While as I previously stated I feel like Watson was correct in his prediction on classical conditioning, I was very disappointed as I read how very unscientifically his experiment was conducted.
One site stated that the baby had suffered from hydrocephalus since birth, so he was not the healthy child Watson proclaimed. He also didn’t use a lot of subjects for test. I also read that he paid the mother of the Albert $1 for her cooperation. I realize that this was a different time, but it seems rather disturbing that they seemed to have no qualms about performing these rather cruel tests on a baby. There is a video of the test on Youtube, and it is very clear that little Albert was very afraid after the conditioning. I was very thankful that there was no sound, the site was pathetic enough.
I found that there wasn’t a lot more about the experiment, which was also rather disappointing. It really wasn’t much of an experiment in that one subject was used and he was not chosen randomly. Most of the sites that I found discussing Watson’s experiment had at least a small portion devoted to criticism concerning the way in which the experiment was handled.
Finally, I did find that Little Albert died at the age of hydrocephalus. The book and all of the sites point out that Watson never attempted to de-sensitize Little Albert. It’s really a sad story all around, not at all what I had hoped or expected when I set out to research it.
http://www.simplypsychology.org/classical-conditioning.html
This site had some information about classical conditioning and also of how Watson’s experiment was carried out.
http://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/a-new-twist-in-the-sad-saga-of-little-albert/28423
This site critiques some of the shortcomings had by Watson in his studies.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMnhyGozLyE&feature=related
A pretty good video of the experiment
. http://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/01/little-albert.aspx
This page talked about the experiment and also how short the life of “Albert” was, as he died at age 6 years.
For this topical blog I decided to research more about Watson’s life after his dismissal from Johns Hopkins. Watson was forced to resign from Johns Hopkins after a sex scandal involving an affair with one of his graduate students. The dismissal from Johns Hopkins proved to be a devastating blow. The publicity of his sex scandal virtually ruined any chance he had at securing another academic position. Instead, he joined the business world. He started working for J. Walter Thompson advertising in New York City and within four years rose to the position of vice-president.
During his years as an advertising executive Watson had the opportunity to apply his knowledge of behaviorism in a real world setting, which is how this topic relates to this chapter. Watson developed advertising campaigns by applying his research on three basic emotions: fear, rage, and love. Watson suggested that to sell a product to a consumer one must “tell him something that will tie him up with fear, something that will stir up a mild rage that will call out an affectionate or love response, or strike at a deep psychological or habit need”. A prime example of this is Watson’s ad campaign for Johnson & Johnson baby powder. He scared young parents into buying the product by instilling fear in them, claiming if they failed to use the baby powder they would risk exposing their baby to serious infection. Watson is also well-known for using testimonials from well-known personalities (e.g. athletes) or experts (e.g. doctors) to make products more appealing to consumers. Theses advertising strategies are still applied today.
Although his best-known applied work was in advertising; Watson also saw accomplishments in personnel selection and management. His contributions to industrial organization psychology (I/O) are often overlooked. However, Watson’s largely unknown contributions to I/O psychology, especially in personnel selection, still remain relevant today. All in all, John Watson is great example of how dynamic psychology is. His success in advertising shows how psychological research can be applied to real life situations.
http://www.siop.org/tip/backissues/tipapril00/7Diclemente.aspx
- Detailed report on Watson’s life and success in advertising, also spoke of his contributions to I/O psychology
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Watson
- Provided a brief overview of Watson’s advertising career
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/watson.htm
- Provided examples of how Watson applied his research during his years in academia to real life situations in ad campaigns
After reading chapter 10, I wanted to explore more into behaviorism principles of operant behaviorism. Pavlov and Watson’s animal behaviorism used a certain skill to make an animal do what you want them too.
The below 3 resources show how behaviorism plays in with animal training and human behavior training, by reinforcements. I found a funny episode of the big bang theory that explains an “everyday life” situation of operant conditioning.
1. In behaviorism, techniques and principles are used to make humans or animals do something, and in this part of the episode Sheldon gives Penny, chocolates when she does something “good.” Or when he wants her to be quiet, he gives it to her , she stops talking. This example is a way to show the general basis of behaviorism, and how the studies/research in history, plays a role in today’s lifestyles.
2. The wikipedia website of behaviorism explains how classical/operant conditioning plays the largest role in behavior mechanisms. Pavlov’s study of the dogs was one of the most important discoveries to behaviorism, and proposed modern procedures. However, reinforcements are one of the main facilitator to behaviorists research.
3. The final resource I found was a website on training animals with operant (Pavlovian) conditioning. The examples to increases a behavior would be to reinforce starting something good and ending something bad, to pursue the behavior. The example to decrease a behavior would be to end something good or start something bad, which the person or animal would want to avoid. The diagrams on the website and technical terms, helped me understand Pavlov’s dog experiment more. Chapter 10, was one of my favorite chapters so far, because I love learning about behaviorism. Operant conditioning and other principles are used to motivate an animal or human to pursue a wanted behavior.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euINCrDbbD4&feature=related
- Big Bang Theory- Conditioning
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behaviorism
- definition of behaviorism and how to use it
http://www.wagntrain.com/OC/#Operant
-examples and charts on the details of operant behavior/conditioning
The topic I chose to do further research on was systematic desensitization. It fits in the chapter with Watson and his “Little Albert” Study. I am interested in the topic because I have heard about it being used with abnormal psychology patients, usually dealing with phobias, and so it seems to be a useful behavioral technique.
Systematic desensitization also known as Pavlovian therapy and graduated exposure therapy is a treatment used on phobia and anxiety disorders and was developed by Joseph Wolpe. Usually the therapy is conducted by a psychologist. It involves the patient to imagine and be lightly exposed to stimuli that cause either the phobia or the anxiety. When the patient is exposed to the adverse stimulus they are then helped through relaxation techniques. This pattern continues over and over again to try and reduce the amount of stress and anxiety that occurs in response the adverse stimulus. Once the patient has good control over their phobia or anxiety they are slowly allowed to experience their adverse stimuli in the real world. Here they again perform relaxation techniques until their phobia or anxiety is under control and no longer so frightening.
Usually systematic desensitization is done with a psychology therapist, but it can also be effective through self-administration. It is a much less invasive therapy for phobia and anxiety than techniques like flooding which expose the patient to a high level of adverse stimulus in hopes that they are forced to overcome their fears. I like the idea of systematic desensitization and the fact that it proves to be effective in the real world is great news.
http://www.guidetopsychology.com/sysden.htm
-This is where I learned about the method of systematic desensitization.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_desensitization
-This is where I learned the history and other names for systematic desensitization.
http://www.simplypsychology.org/Systematic-Desensitisation.html
-This is where I learned about relaxation in systematic desensitization.
So I decided to be boring and look into the Little Albert study. It was quite the study; involving a human subject that had no choice in the matter. Many have questioned how ethical this experiment was. Is it right to expose an infant to stressors at such a young age just to record reaction? What happened to Little Albert?
According to the American Psychological Association, Little Albert was actually a boy named Douglass Merritte. This little boy died at the age of 6 from a condition known as hydrocephalus which is caused by a build up of fluid around the brain causing convulsions and mental disability. This condition was apparently induced by meningitis that he contracted three years prior.
If the boy truly contracted meningitis and hydrocephalus, how was he able to stay alive for so long? He was alive for 3 years after contracting meningitis? This led some to believe that Albert may have had problems since birth. Watson and Rayner claimed that Albert was this "wonder" child that was perfectly healthy and very mentally stable. They claimed he was extra-resistant to stress; very resilient. But according to new research, its possible that Albert or Douglass had a mental impairment that caused his reaction times to be slower. This disability might have thrown the entire data set off. It's possible that this child could be very different from your average infant.
The real injustice of the whole study is that Albert left the area before he could be de-conditioned. Although he did end up dead at the age of 6, would he have been afraid of rats his whole life? Noone knows. Some people who have a bad interaction with an animal when very young never get over the fear and it really effects their lives. I don't think there is any cause worthy of putting somones long-term psychological health at risk in order to solve. Just speculate and hypothesize. It's all we can really do anyway.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Albert_experiment
always good starter website
http://psychology.about.com/od/classicalconditioning/a/sad-tale-of-little-albert.htm
more info on the albert case
http://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/01/little-albert.aspx
what happened to the poor little guy
http://www.normalbreathing.com/little-albert-experiment-effects.php#.UJMko8XR5uY
interesting opinion piece
The topic I chose to find more information on was Watson and his work with rat mazes. I chose this because I thought about myself being trapped in a maze without one or two my senses and I kept thinking about how hard it would be to find my way out.
One of John Watson’s first jobs was as a caretaker of lab rats used to study real-life learning situations such as finding their way through difficult mazes. Like Thorndike, Watson used food to control the rats in mazes, as opposed to puzzle boxes. He started with using a long straight alley with food at the end. Once rats learned how to run the ‘maze’, they did it easily. Watson then shorted the alleyway which resulted in the rats running into the wall at the end. That experiment was known as the kerplunk experiment.
After the kerplunk experiment, Watson explored sensory abilities in animals as well. He became to put rats through the maze without specific senses. Some were blinded, others were deafened, and others had their whiskers plucked or their paws covered over. He did move to using a circular maze he designed himself and it was lighted by lamps to track the paths of the rats. He developed a theory of behavior which identified no dividing line between humans and animals. He thought anything you wanted to learn about human psychology, you could learn from behaviors of rats.
http://faculty.coe.uh.edu/smcneil/cuin6373/idhistory/watson2.html#lab_rat
-this site showed Watson’s contributions not only with lab rats, but human behavior.
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_mouse_trap/2011/11/rat_mazes_and_mouse_mazes_a_history_.html
-this source talked about rat mazes and how Watson’s work contributed to other work done with mazes
http://www.articlesbase.com/history-articles/watson-skinner-tolman-their-contributions-to-psychology-2345545.html
-this source gave a lot of background information on Watson and his research with rats and Little Albert
I want to talk about John B. Watson’s life and some of his studies. I am interested in him, because in the chapter it talked about his and Carr’s maze study, and the Little Albert study. I thought both of these studies were interesting and it made me want to learn more about his life and some of the other studies he did.
John B. Watson was an American psychologist. He made the psychological school of behaviorism. John Watson did research on animal behavior, child rearing, and advertising, along with the little Albert experiment. His mother was a very religious woman, but his father was the opposite of his mother. He drank a lot, had extra-marital affairs, and left his family in 1891.
John married a woman named Mary who he met at college. They also had two kids. John was like his father and had affairs with numerous women, he and his wife divorced and he ended up getting married to one of his graduate students and they had two children together.
John’s father not being around took a toll on him. He went against his mother and his teachers and became violent. While in high school he was arrested twice and had poor academics. He was able to get into college because his mother had connections. Watson started college when he was 16 years old, and one of his teachers there helped him turn his life around. By the time he was 21 he had his master’s degree. Unlike his high school academics, Watson excelled in classes that other students were failing in college. After he graduated college he went to Batesburg Institute for a year and worked as the principal, janitor, and handyman for the whole school. After that he went back to college to study philosophy, this is what led him to develop what is now called “behaviorism.” He eventually earned his Ph.D. Watson was also a psychology teacher at John Hopkins University. When he worked at John Hopkins he had an affair with a student, and was asked to resign from his position.
Watson wrote “Animal Education: An Experimental Study on the Psychical Development of the White Rat, Correlated with the Growth of its Nervous System.” This writing told about the “relationship between brain myelinization and learning ability in rats at different ages.” He found that “kinesthetic sense controlled the behavior of rats running in mazes.”
John had poor relationships with his children especially after his latest wife died. His relationships with his children got worse. He lived on a farm in Connecticut the last years of his life. A little before he died, John burned a lot of his unpublished papers and letters, and died in 1958.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Watson
Told about his schooling both high school and college along with his white rat study, and behaviorism.
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/watson.htm
Told about his family life.
http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesofmajorthinkers/p/watson.htm
Told about the time he worked at John Hopkins and was asked to resign because of his affair with a student of his.
I decided to do my blog this week on John Watson’s ideas on marketing and advertising. After he lost his job at John Hopkins University, he worked for an advertising company, J. Walter Thompson. It became one of the largest advertising companies in the United States.
I think this was a great transition because advertising correlates with psychology. But at that time advertising agencies were not as we think of them today. In fact, Watson helped to make advertising the way we think of it today. He introduced many innovations. First, Watson believed for success in advertising you had to target three emotions: love, fear and rage. These were basic to his theories of psychology and he thought they were basic to any human being. So if you were to appeal to humans, one of these emotions would be involved.
Watson also wanted to have a major focus on market research to better understand the customer and what they are looking for and what gets their attention. He actually went out into the field and talked to people. He found out what they liked and didn’t like about a product, like boots for example. Watson also did testing. For example, he blind folded subjects so that they could not see what brand they were smoking. He asked them to rate the cigarettes. Here he is bringing in the psychological techniques of survey and controlled conditions.
Watson made use of testimonials in advertising. He thought this was an effective way to persuade people and that it would influence them to buy the product.
Watson also used ideas from classical conditioning. He thought that a product should be paired with a basic reward such as sex or food, or good times with friends.
In many ways John Watson created the modern advertising world of the "Mad Men". And given the circumstances of his having to leave John Hopkins, he seems to have fit in well with the world of the ad men.
http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2011/02/15/the-psychology-of-advertising/
-excerpt of general blog re: the psychology of advertising
http://www.siop.org/tip/backissues/tipapril00/7diclemente.aspx
-a discussion of John Watson’s work as it relates to organization psychology
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Watson
-a brief biography of John Watson
For this week’s chapter I decided I wanted to learn a little more about john Watson and his because all I had known about him previously was his work with little Albert and the experiment with the rat. I have learned about this experiment multiple times in different psychology courses and with all different teachers. It is clearly a very important part in the history of psychology and so I decided to learn a little more about the man behind such an important study.
John Watson was born in 1878 and despite having difficulty in high school he actually was able to use connections to gain admissions to college. He entered at the age of sixteen and graduated with a masters degree by the age of 21. I find this extremely frustrating that so many psychologists obtained so many degrees without having to go through everything that students do in our era. He petitioned the president of the University of Chicago and was granted admission where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1903. He became extremely interested in behaviorism and passed many classes that a lot of other students would fail at. After he graduated from the University of Chicago he was offered a job at Johns Hopkins University and became chair of the psychology department. As we know, there was a largely publicized affair that Watson had with one of his graduate students, Rosalie Rayner. His wife, Mary Ickes Watson, faked an illness at a dinner party so that she could raid Rosalie’s bedroom, where she found many love letters from Watson to Rosalie. She had hoped that in her discovery and confronting Watson that he would leave Rosalie. Instead, Watson divorced Mary and married Rosalie.
After the affair became front page news Watson was asked to step down from his position at Johns Hopkins. Once again using connections, Watson was able to secure a job at an advertising agency thanks to his friend and colleague, Titchener. He became extremely successful in this new career and managed to work his way to vice president in just a short amount of time. He helped in many famous ad campaigns including one for Pond’s cold cream, and coining “coffee break” for a Maxwell House ad. Rosalie Rayner died at age 36, while Watson lived to be 80. He was credited with a Gold Medal from the APA shortly before he died for his contributions to the field of psychology.
I think that after learning more about Watson’s life it almost makes me sad for him that he had to leave a career he was so passionate about because of his personal life. He married someone that died very young and still never remarried. I feel like he would have had so much more to offer to psychology and that his time was cut too short. I am thankful that the APA acknowledged his contributions and that he could live to see that he really made an impact in the field.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Watson#Affair_and_marriage_with_Rosalie_Rayner
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/watson.htm
http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesofmajorthinkers/p/watson.htm
The thing I wanted to look into more was the Little Albert Experiment. It was created by John B. Watson with some help from Rosalie Raynor. They got the idea by branching off the experiment conducted by Ivan Pavlov which demonstrated the conditioning process in dogs. Watson wanted to show that emotional reactions could be conditioned in people. They used a child, which is now known as Little Albert, and he was about nine months old. They wanted to test the child to see what brought out fear. They exposed the child to a white rat, a rabbit, a monkey, masks, and burning newspapers. None of these brought out any fear in the boy. Then, Watson made a loud noise when the boy was exposed to the rat by hitting a metal pipe with a hammer. The loud noise made the child cry. He repeatedly paired the white rat with the loud noise. Then, he quit making the loud noise, but the child would still cry just seeing the rat. This is a prime example that classical conditioning can be used to cause an emotional response. They also observed that a stimulus generalization had occurred as well. The child became afraid of similar white objects and other furry objects as Raynor’s fur coat scared the child along with Watson while he was wearing a Santa Clause beard.
This study has been widely criticized for various reasons. Many criticize Watson for not carefully coming up with the experimental design and process. They didn’t come up with a way to evaluate the child’s reactions. They jotted down his reactions based off of their own interpretations. The experiment is also criticized for being unethical. People don’t like how the study was based solely on trying to scare the child. In today’s world, a study like this could never be conducted. Many people wonder what ever happened to Little Albert as he moved with his mother before they could ever attempt to eliminate the child’s conditioned fear. Many wonder if the boy grew into a man with a weird fear of white and furry objects. After a long search looking for him, researchers were very disappointed to learn that the boy died when he was just six years old. This is all very interesting, because an experiment like this could never occur in today’s world. An experiment solely trying to scare a child is questionable, but the results were somewhat shocking, and I enjoyed learning about the study as a whole.
http://psychology.about.com/od/classicpsychologystudies/a/little-albert-experiment.htm
-Info on Little Albert experiment
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xt0ucxOrPQE
-Video showing the experiment
http://www.highestfive.com/mind/5-unethical-psych-experiments/
-Article stating it’s a highly criticized experiment
The topic I chose to do more research on this week was Ivan Pavlov and his life.
Ivan Pavlov is credited for much, but most recognized for the creation of the concept of classical conditioning. After I did my research, I discovered a lot of new information about Pavlov that I previously thought to be true, but was actually false. Firstly, I thought he was a psychologist. Turns out, he wasn’t. Pavlov was, to the core, a physiologist. One site actually said that he hated the idea of psychology. Who would’ve thought he would end up being such a pivotal part of the field, contributing to the start of behaviorism greatly. Secondly, I didn’t know that Pavlov wasn’t trying to discover conditioning, but simply stumbled upon it while observing digestion in dogs. After he discovered that dogs salivate when presented with a stimulus, it intrigued him. Pavlov then delved deeper and deeper and created, like I mentioned earlier, classical conditioning.
Ivan was greatly inspired by Darwin and his origins book. Pavlov, in turn, had a huge influence on John Watson who made many contributions to behaviorism. Like many young scientist of the time, Pavlov was involved in the church setting at first. Pavlov found out that a religious life wasn’t for him, even though his father was a priest. Then he set out, set out and dedicated his life to physiology.
Ivan won many medals throughout his career and was easily considered a hero by the Soviet Union.
http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesofmajorthinkers/p/pavlov.htm
-Brief biography on Ivan
http://www.ivanpavlov.com/default.htm
-Site dedicated to Pavlov and his work, theories, etc… very informative on many different aspects
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1904/pavlov-bio.html
-Nobel Prize website giving a bibliography on Pavlov and his major contributions
i searched the topic of john b watson and his little albert study more. He argues that the way you are is learned and not instict or not from nature. He takes the side of nurture over nature. He says that babies are born a blank slate and that everything we learned are things around us. His main example was fear. Little albert was a baby who was shown a white rat and then when he went to touch it, there was a loud noise and he started crying. they then made it to where it didnt matter the fuzzy animal, the baby was still afraid of what would occur after. A youtube video showed the actual film and the response of the little albert.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xt0ucxOrPQE
This the video of the actual little albert study and people talking about it.
http://www.highestfive.com/mind/5-unethical-psych-experiments/
this was just a summary of the study.
http://psychology.about.com/od/classicpsychologystudies/a/little-albert-experiment.htm
talking about the study.
Unlike the rest of the class, I could really give a crap about Watson. I noticed that almost everyone was interested in Little Albert and Watson’s Little Albert studies. However, I’ve heard about Watson and Little Albert so much over the past several years that I am more interested in new subject matter. I would like to learn more about experimental neurosis and generalization. I don’t know or really understand these topics yet and I’m excited to explore information about these two topics and Pavlov.
Experimental neurosis and generalization were discussed in these previous chapter and they fit with the section that provided information on behaviorism and Pavlov. Most specifically, I did more research on experimental neurosis. Experimental neurosis fits in this chapter as it can be a result of classic conditioning. I would view it as a negative “side effect” as it deals with something becoming neurotic. Experimental neurosis is a phenomenon that Pavlov named. He discovered it through an experiment with his dogs where he conditioned them to salivate to various shapes. As shapes become more difficult to differentiate/less predictable, the dogs become more neurotic. Essentially conditioning an animal by exposing it to a prolonged state of uncertainty will cause it to experience high levels of stress and neurotic behavior changes.
Perhaps the most interesting part of Pavlov’s discovery of experimental neurosis was that it related to his hypothesis and discoveries related to temperament. The experimental neurosis findings contributed to Pavlov’s belief that different temperaments lead to different reactions. This is interesting because he was able to observe previously that some dogs were more easily conditioned. Additionally, some dogs had neurotic, high anxiety reactions while others were barely affected. I enjoyed researching more about this topic because I am incredibly interested in personality and I love that classic conditioning experiments lead to the explorations of how people learn and behave in accordance to potential predispositions that are inherited.
According to Wolpe, I learned that experimental neurosis is, by definition, an unadaptive response that consists of prolonged anxiety that is caused by experimental behaviors. The inverse of this would be and adaptive response. As much as I don’t want to talk about Watson and Little Albert, I believe that this information helped me to think back to Little Albert. I believe that if Little Albert had a more adaptive response, he would not have been so traumatized…or seemly traumatized (We can’t know what the results were for sure as he never was unconditioned). I would assume that Albert experience what Pavlov would call experimental neurosis.
I learned a great deal about experimental neurosis as I explored outside sources from our text. I was also able to better form connections between Watson and Pavlov in terms of how they are connected through what seems more like a web of chain reactions in their findings. I have discovered more and more that Pavlov’s work all seems to build on itself as he discovers one thing from within a previous experiment which he then proceeds to build upon.
Interestingly enough, my research came full circle as I ended by looking more closely at generalization. I found that generalization may be a major contributor to the anxiety that is a part of experimental neurosis. When an animal sees something that is generally similar to something that it believes to result in reward or a positive outcome, however, that thing is only similar and not the same, thus no reward occurs-this is a generalization. Generalizations would then be frustrating as the animal has been conditioned to learn that something should happen, and when that something doesn’t happen, the animal becomes frustrated.
After reading more about generalization, I learned that it is a subject that is more difficult to describe than it actually is. In all reality, generalization really is exactly what it sounds like. It makes sense to me that less focus has been given to the concept of generalization. In looking at more information about experimental neurosis and generalization, I discovered that I’m not very interested in generalization. I am however incredibly interested in experimental neurosis-specifically because it looks personality and temperament as they relate to learning.
Even though Pavlov has been just as present as Watson in the conditioning studies, I find that I like to read about him better. I think I learn better when talking about dogs. I also think that Pavlov’s experiments are more simple and easy to follow. Also, I think that I may dislike Watson because his experiment was mean to a baby, but that is more of a personal bias. I found many scholarly sources for this subject matter and I was able to explore other texts and articles through google scholar. This week’s Topical Blog has been very productive for my learning.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.2044-8295.1952.tb00347.x/abstract -Talks about how experimental neuroses is a learned behavior and not inherent. Research performed by Joseph Wolpe.
http://books.google.com/books?id=WkF8B-Ovl50C&pg=PA136&lpg=PA136&dq=experimental+neurosis+and+generalization&source=bl&ots=jSwrMzGoai&sig=_hEvuaUKrVUH7svWUPpowJHPyps&hl=en&sa=X&ei=rUyTUO-wJ8ibyAHqtoGIBg&ved=0CDYQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=experimental%20neurosis%20and%20generalization&f=false –Defined Experiment Neurosis from a online textbook. It was page 136 of “Introduction to Learning and Behavior by Powell, Symbaluk, and Honey. Chapter 4 of the text was about classic conditioning (but thank goodness it didn’t talk about Little Albert for once! Discussed Pavlov, generalization, overgeneralization, and experimental neurosis in greater, clearer detail.
http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/rev/94/1/61.html -Looks specifically on the effects of generalization on Pavlov’s methods of Conditioning.
One of the topics from this chapter that I really enjoyed reading about was systematic desensitization. I learned a little bit about this in an abnormal psychology class I took last spring. I have added a link to my URLs list to a video I watched in that class about desensitization of phobias. In this particular video the woman has a very weird phobia; she is afraid of feathers. This video really stuck with me and fascinated me because it isn’t the type of thing you think of as an item to have a phobia towards. Systematic desensitization is used to overcome phobias, but also some anxiety disorders. We want to take away the aversive effect their phobia gives them. It isn’t really the treatment most professionals like to use for anxiety disorders though. This is sometimes also called graduated exposure therapy. The goal is get an individual to cope with and overcome the fear that they have. They need to be able to learn to be relaxed about their phobia. Stop avoiding it and start tolerating it. There are three steps that need to be done in order to successfully desensitize someone. They are: anxiety hierarchy, relaxation training, and desensitization sessions. An anxiety hierarchy is a list of scenarios that involve your phobia. They all give you different levels of anxiety. You put them in order from least to most anxiety they give you. This lets you analyze and verbalize your problem. We need to get away from generalizing a phobia to cover lots of things and be down to what is specifically the problem. By imagining these situations the idea is that it will have to easier to deal with them in real life situations. Next, we must learn to work of relaxation. There must be no interruptions. Basically you need to keep doing this until you can think about your phobia and your muscles are relaxed and not tense. Most people only need two sessions of this, but a patient should be as many as they need in order to move on. Next we start desensitization sessions. This is basically the idea of putting steps one and two together. You learn to become completely relaxed while imagining a very vivid and detailed situation involved your phobia. It is important to make sure you keep doing this until you feel no nerves what so ever. These sessions should be on a regular basis and you should not do more than one-two sessions a day. Different people need different amounts of time in order to be classically conditioned. Role playing can be very helpful too. It is important to do these spread out because you do not want to flood a person with stress. We must follow literature and research in order to do this correctly and it is crucial to do so. Most importantly, the patient really needs to want to get over this problem and to want have a different response elicited!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMZ5o2uruXY –video of feather phobia
http://www.drrobertlondon.com/publishedarticles/systematic-desensitization-in-10-steps.html - showed steps needed in order to be desensitized.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_desensitization - gave a general overview of what systematic desensitization is.
http://www.csulb.edu/~tstevens/Desensit.htm - This website the importance of being careful and critical when performing this technique.
John Watson grew up in a very poor, religious family. However, John Watson’s father was not religious and drank excessively as well as had affairs. Eventually, John Watson’s father left the family behind. John Watson would later follow in his father’s footsteps while married to Mary Ikes. He had two children with her, Mary and John. (Weird that they named their children after mom and dad). John Watson had numerous sexual extramarital affairs, just as his father did. Eventually, he decided to leave Mary Ilkes and marry one of his graduate students, Rosalie Rayner. Rosalie and Watson had two children together and he used to children to help with his studies in behaviorism.
John Watson did not have a healthy relationship with any of his children. I believe this to be the consequence of his own poor relationship with his own father. With the absence of a father, Watson did not get along with his mother and turned to violence. Gordon Moore, a teacher at Furman University help him turn his life around and he ended up studying at University of Chicago. He was interested in studying animals, and wrote a dissertation over rats and the growing of the nervous system. He also did not have a healthy marriage at first. Although his second marriage was better than his first, as soon as she died, he cut off all ties with his children. He died alone on a farm in Connecticut in 1958.
There was a disagreement in the psychological community on the issue of consciousness and how to study it before Watson. John Watson is the founder of the field of psychology known as “behaviorism”. The “behaviorist theory” sees the study of psychology in a way that we can predict and control people’s actions. John Watson’s studies in psychology began with animals, but later he started researching human behavior and emotions. One of his more famous studies was with “Baby Albert”, in which he studied the emotions fear, rage, and love. He showed the world that these three emotions can be artificially conditioned in children. I was interested in finding out what exactly happened to baby albert, and whether or not he was still afriad of white rabits. Unfortunately, baby albert died at a very young age, so it is unknown if his fear of white animals persisted later in life. I did however also find out that baby albert’s mother was only paid $1 for his participation. I’m sure this was a lot more at that time period, but it still seems a little low.
John Watson saw conditioning as a way of adapting to the environment. He also viewed psychology as very subjective science. He stated that it is important in behavioral psychology to have the ability to differentiate behaviors in humans that have been preconditioned from behaviors that have been inherited from different generations. He is the father of behaviorism and many of his theories are still prevalent today. I learned a great deal about Watson in a behavior modification class.
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/watson.htm
This webstite gave me a general knowledge of his personal life, which I believe had a huge influence on his professional life, considering he was fired from John Hopkins after his affair.
http://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/01/little-albert.aspx
This discussed the baby albert experiment as well as told me that baby albert died at a young age.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hBfnXACsOI
This was a video of the baby albert experiment. Awesome to see it in action.