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.
The person that I chose to research is John B. Watson. I chose him because I think that he has made a great contribution to behavior modification and what he did has built the way for modern day people to get over there phobias. He is one of the most influential psychologists in the beginning of the twentieth century.
John B. Watson grew up in a not so good environment and was able to escape his home town with the help of one of his teacher. Watson went to college at the University of Chicago and went on to be a professor at Johns Hopkins University. At this University he developed the term called behaviorism, which he used to describe the idea of psychology and behavior. Watson saw psychology as the study of people’s actions and how those actions can be predicted and controlled. This became one of his theories called behaviorists theory. Watson gave a famous lecture called Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It. In this lecture is when he discussed what behaviorism is and why he agreed with it. Watson was mainly concerned with the effects of stimuli which he got from Pavlov’s animals studies, which were based on classical conditioning.
In the beginning of Watson’s research he used animals to see what behaviors they elicited. Watson was one of the first people to experiment with very young children. He wanted to condition and control the emotions of human subject and by doing that he started out his most interesting research. Watson had the idea that all humans were born with three emotions. Those emotions are fear, rage, and love. Watson and his assistant Rosalie Rayner decided to test this on a child that is now known as the Little Albert Experiment. In this experiment Watson picked out a child who didn’t show much fear to anything because in this study he was going to see if he could condition the child to be afraid of a rat. He made the child afraid of the rat by pairing the rat with a loud aversive sound. Watson did succeed in making him afraid of the rat but he also made him afraid of anything white and anything furry like the rat. This is an example of stimulus generalization. The one problem with this study is the fact that the child was never desensitized because his mother withdrew him from the study. This means that the child would probably fear small rodents, furry things, and white things for some time of his life, but unfortunately we will never know because it was later discovered that the child died at age 6.
After working at the University he started working at an advertising business to use his theories of behaviorism, and how he could use the three main emotions to affect advertising. While working at this agency and after he retired be published many books about psychology and behaviorism Everything that Watson did opened up the door for B. F. Skinner who focused on radical or operant behaviorism.
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/watson.htm
http://www.lifecircles-inc.com/Learningtheories/behaviorism/Watson.html
http://education.stateuniversity.com/pages/2543/Watson-John-B-1878-1958.html
John Broadus Watson was born in 1878 in Greenville, South Carolina. He earned his Bachelor's degree at the University of Chicago, and in 1903 he received his doctorate and later became an associate professor of psychology at Johns Hopkins University. He wrote his dissertation about the relation between behavior in the white rat and the growth of the nervous system. The first years of the 20th Century, the field of psychology was in disagreement over the ideas of the nature of consciousness and the methods of studying it. In 1913 at Columbia University, Watson delivered a lecture entitled "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It." He claimed that the problem was the use of archaic methods such as introspection, and inappropriate subject matter. Instead, he proposed the idea of an objective study of behavior called "behaviorism." He saw psychology as the study of people's actions with the ability to predict and control those actions. This new idea became known as the behaviorist theory. His view of behaviorism was considered radical and was known for its extreme anti-mentalist, its radical reduction of thinking to implicit response, and its heavy and somewhat simplistic reliance on conditioned reactions.
In his earlier research Watson used animal subjects and later shifted to the study of human behaviors and emotions at Johns Hopkins University. He wanted to develop techniques to allow him to condition and control the emotions of human subjects. He theorized that children have three basic emotional reactions: fear, rage, and love. He left academia to pursue an interest in advertising. Watson coined the term "Behaviorism" in 1913. Behaviorism assumes that behavior is observable and can be correlated with other observable events. 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). Watson's theory was more concerned with effects of stimuli. He derived much of his thinking from Pavlov's animal studies (classical conditioning). This is also referred to as "learning through stimulus substitution," a reference to the substitution of one stimulus for another. Certain aspects of his theories were that he opposed mentalist concepts, used contiguity to explain learning, and considered emotion to be just another example of classical conditioning. He rejected the notion of individual differences and thought complex behaviors came about through combinations of identifiable reflexes.
Watsons most famous research was the experiment with “Little Albert”. The goal of the experiment was to show how principles of classical conditioning could be applied to conditioning fear of a white rat into "Little Albert", an 11-month-old boy. Watson and Rayner conditioned "Little Albert" by clanging an iron rod when a white rat was presented. First, they presented to the boy a white rat and observed that he was not afraid of it. Second, they presented him with a white rat and then clanged an iron rod. "Little Albert" responded by crying. This second presentation was repeated several times. Finally, Watson and Rayner presented the white rat by itself and the boy showed fear. This study demonstrated how emotions could become conditioned responses.
As the story of "Little Albert" has made the rounds, inaccuracies and inconsistencies have crept in, some of them even due to Watson himself. An ethical problem of this study is that Watson and Rayner did not unconditioned "Little Albert". In 2009, Beck, Levinson, and Irons sought out "Little Albert" to see how Watson's study affected his life. They found that he had died from hydrocephalus at the age of 6. Thus, it cannot be concluded to what extent this study had an effect on "Little Albert's" life. This fact is something I was unfamiliar with. I was not aware of the strain and effects the experiment had on the boy used in this experiment. After having knowledge of this I feel a little taken back on the concept of Watsons theory.
http://www.brynmawr.edu/psychology/rwozniak/watson.html
I chose this website because of the amount of information I could use from it. The website had information from Watson’s child life to his theories and contributions. The information from this site was used in more than half of my blog.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Watson
I chose Wikipedia because of the biography and background of Watson. I learned several new facts about Watson and his experiments.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hBfnXACsOI
I chose to add in this YouTube video to show parts of the Little Albert experiment.
Ivan Pavlov was born in Ryazan Russia on September 14, 1849. He was the oldest of eleven children. He attended the Ryazan Church School, and after graduation he attended the local theological seminary. He didn't attend formal school until age eleven though because of an injury sustained from when he was younger. It was said the he has always had the "instinct for learning." Before graduating the theological seminary, he left and attended Saint Petersburg college where he studied physics and math. His first research project at Saint Petersburg was on the physiology of the nerves in the pancreas, this project won him a very prestigious award at the university. he recieved the degree of Candidate of Natural Sciences and continued his studies at the Academy of Medical Surgery after graduating Saint Petersburg.
After graduating, he studied in Germany with carl Ludwig. Pavlov was elected to the chair of Pharmacology at the University of Warsaw and also at Tomsk University. After leaving those two places he was appointed the role of professor of Pharmacology at the Military Medical Academy and held that position for five years. After leave the Academy he was given the opportunity to direct the Department of Physiology at the Institute of Experimental Medicine. He heldo that position for over forty five years, and it became one of the most important centers for Physiological research.
Pavlov is most widely known for his work int he area of classical conditioning and the conditioned reflex. His most notable study is the dog studies that dealt with classical conditioning. Ivan Pavlov has done some remarkable things in his lifetime. He has contributed an enormous amount to the field of psychology and made some great discoveries. Without his contributions psychology would not be what it is today. Ivan Pavlov died on February 27th, 1937.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Pavlov
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1904/pavlov-bio.html
http://www.simplypsychology.org/pavlov.html#sthash.q36LOMIj.dpbs
After reading chapter 10, I wanted to learn more about Little Albert. Specifically, I wanted to learn who Little Albert was and what his life was like after completing the research with Watson. I quickly found out that I wasn’t the only one wondering this and I found plenty of information regarding Little Albert.
Through the book and outside material, I learned that Little Albert was born to a single mother, working as a nurse in a hospital. Although Albert spent the first months of his life living in a hospital setting, he had normal development. Right before he turned 9 months old, he started the experiments with Watson. Initially, Watson would show Little Albert objects that he liked and was not afraid of. These items included fire (candle), monkeys, dog, rabbit, white rat, Santa Claus mask. After getting acquainted with these items, Watson started the conditioning. Now, when Little Albert would reach for the items of exposure, Watson would stimulate a loud noise by striking a pole. After only a few strikes, Little Albert would cry. Little Albert was particularly fond of the white rat. Interestingly enough, his fear was maximized when exposed to the white rat and he began to become afraid of any objects that resembled the white rat. This is common theme and the term for it is generalization. Once the experiments were over, Little Albert was afraid of all the initial items along with other things such as fur coats and other resembling items.
Then what? What happened to Little Albert? I learned that there has been much controversy over this for quite some time. I found articles saying that Little Albert was found later in life. I also found articles debunking this. The APA did however publish an official article saying that “the mystery has been solved”. Little Albert’s real name was Douglas Merritte, son of Arvilla Merritte. I learned that his mother was paid a mere one dollar for her son’s participation. Watson never de-conditioned Albert, meaning he continued to be afraid of innocent items such as fur coats and rabbits. Sadly, Douglas Meritte died at the age of 6 from an illness. This was a letdown for me (and I’m sure plenty of researchers) for it would have been interesting to see what Douglas’ fears were in adulthood. Interestingly, I learned that one of Arvilla’s grandsons was on the research team that helped solve this great, withstanding mystery.
Now, while it is widely accepted that Douglas Merritte was indeed Little Albert, there are many skeptics. Some of the evidence used to draw this conclusion is a bit weak. Researches used old pictures to show resemblance between Merritte’s face and Little Albert’s face. There is no converging evidence for this part of the claim. The strongest evidence was simply the matchup between the two boys’ age, gender, and race. Some believe that this is just not good enough evidence- in the 1920s, there had to have been plenty of white nurses who gave birth to white sons. Also, there is some (minimal but still present) evidence that suggests that Little Albert was adopted after completing the experiments with Watson. Douglas Merritte was never adopted.
After learning more about Little Albert and the information about who he was, I concur with the APA. It is still fun nonetheless to read alternate explanations.
http://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/01/little-albert.aspx This is APA's article stating that Douglas Merritte was indeed Little Albert- gives information about the research used to draw that conclusion.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hBfnXACsOI
This is a video of real footage from the experiments.
http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail?sid=599bce92-717b-4de7-848c-704fb914763c%40sessionmgr115&vid=1&hid=108&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=psyh&AN=2011-02066-001
This is an article giving the alternate explanations.
chose to do more research on the idea of systematic desensitization. I just think that in today's day and age everyone is scared of something. People have the most random phobias and some of them can be debilitating to everyday life. As silly as some of these fears are, they are real. This technique can be very useful for a wide variety of techniques. I really wanted to see if I could find some studies on the process. I also wanted to see the different techniques used to help people get over these intense fears.
This topic fits in with Watson and the origins of behaviorism. Psychologists in this field felt that environment was a huge factor in the way people live their lives. They thought that by manipulating the environment they could change the way people behaved. Systematic desensitization is a great example of conditioning and manipulating environments. This topic really interests me because it has to do with behaviorism. I think that any technique that can help people live better lives is very interesting. This process is proven to work with great success. It just takes time, effort, and patience.
I learned a lot about the basic ideas about this process. It involves gradually introducing small anxiety invoking stimuli. I think that this is a great way to get people over the intense anxiety accompanied by the fear. I was really interest in the ways it can induce relaxation. The process of clinching and relaxing trains your body and muscles about what is tight and what is relaxed. I think it is crazy how we can teach and trick our brains. I think this is important because a lot of people have stress and a lot of tension. This can lead to back problems and other problems. This simple technique can help cure those pains with no medication involved.
I was really interested to read about how/if systematic desensitization could be done by the person themselves. I think if we educate those people with phobias about the process, we could cure more people of their fears. Self administered sounds good on paper, but I think it would be much harder to perform. It puts the responsibility on you to condition the feelings of relaxation and to induce anxiety. I think it would work a lot better with a professional guiding you and pushing you through that anxiety.
I was interest, also, to see that this process is being studied to help neurosis. I think anytime that you can avoid medication it is a good thing. This process has basically no side effects. It is natural and works in most situations. I hope they continue to research and find ways to use this in opposition to more medication.
http://www.guidetopsychology.com/sysden.htm this link taught me the basic strategies involved in self administered systematic desensitization
http://www.minddisorders.com/Py-Z/Systematic-desensitization.html this link showed me a lot about techniques and the basics about how the process works and a little background
http://journals.lww.com/jonmd/Citation/1961/03000/The_Systematic_Desensitization_Treatment_of.1.aspx this is an article on how the process can help with neurosis and mental issues
Having already learned a lot about Pavlov, Watson, and Classical Conditioning, I decided to look into how classical conditioning is being applied in the modern world.
Classical conditioning is very widely used on animals. One very important application of this is to test what animals are able to learn. For instance, if researchers manipulate the conditioned stimulus they can find out how much the animal is able to recognize things that belong in a category based on whether or not they emit the conditioned response.
Another practical application of classical conditioning is the use of systematic desensitization to help people get over phobias. This is done gradually, by pairing the phobic stimulus with a desirable stimulus, so the person responds desirably when presented with the phobic stimulus in lieu of reacting irrationally.
There are also many suspicions that entities like the media employ classical conditioning to influence (or even brainwash) people into believing in a false reality. One example of this can be seen when the news reports on a country that is less-than-friends with the United States, they tend to use file photos or videos of people from that country engaging in violent behavior or demonstrating their military power. This happens even when the news story has nothing to do with conflict or violence. This is because when we (the American tv viewers) are presented with a neutral stimulus such as a news story from a foreign country, and an unconditioned stimulus such as violent images, we tend to pair the two and get defensive and threatened every time we hear about that country.
It is interesting that there are so many practical applications that we got from a simple experiment where a researcher noticed that his dogs accidentally paired a sound with the expectation of food. We owe it all to Ivan Pavlov.
http://suite101.com/article/the-use-of-classical-conditioning-in-dog-training-a224156
This wesbite gave a very good history of Pavlov's research, as well as many modern applications of classical conditioning to dogs
http://www.netplaces.com/psychology/conditioning-and-learning/applications-of-classical-conditioning.htm
This site talked about all forms of conditioning, and gave an example of using classical conditioning for systematic desensitization
http://hannah-bravenewworld.blogspot.com/
This site may have been somewhat biased, because it compared our current society to the world in Huxley's Brave New World. However, it had some good points and also had sources cited
Terms:
Pavlov, Watson, Classical Conditioning, Manipulate, Conditioned Stimulus, Category, Emit, Conditioned Response, Systematic Desensitization, Phobias, Media, Influence, Neutral Stimulus
After our discussion in class today, I decided that I would like to find out more about what happened to little Albert after the experiment. I’ve learned about the experiment many times and know it well but I would like to put some closure on the case and find out how this affected the child later on in life. If I had to guess I would say he would have a lot of psychological disorders and would be very shy, timid, and afraid of everything this could maybe even lead to obsessive compulsive disorder.
The main idea behind this experiment was to program fear into the baby through classical conditioning. Little Albert’s parents were a wet nurse, and an employee at the John Hopkins clinic and they volunteered their child for this experiment and received $1 in return. Little Albert was chosen because he was mentally stable but also because he didn’t show much emotion to a set of preliminary baseline emotional tests: the infant was exposed, briefly and for the first time, to a white rabbit, a rat, a dog, a monkey, masks with and without hair, cotton wool, burning newspapers, etc.
After this they paired each of these things with the presentation of a loud noise and this scared the baby and later this association with these objects scared the baby even when there was no noise. Though this experiment has a lot of quality information, it has been criticized for its ethicality and for its poorly constructed design; many scientists do not think that relying on one’s own interpretations is a good enough measure.
As far as the ethicality goes, Watson wanted to desensitize these conditioned fears from the baby, but the mother moved away to suddenly and they never were able to do so. Many scientists made hypothesizes similar to mine and thought he would grow up to have terrible fears. However after a seven year long search to uncover the identity of baby Albert, they found out that he was born with hydrocephalus, a buildup of fluid on the brain, and died at the age of six so no one was ever able to observe the after effects of this experiment.
All in all this study is very interesting and raises a lot of controversial questions. Everyone knows that it is unethical to do this experiment and it is unfortunate we couldn’t measure the effects after words for better closure.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Albert_experiment
http://psychology.about.com/od/classicpsychologystudies/a/little-albert-experiment.htm
http://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/01/little-albert.aspx
For this chapter I wanted to learn more about The Institute of Experimental Medicine and the Tower of Science. I wanted to learn how they developed as well as who else did research at the institute. I also wanted to find out what they researched. What I found was interesting to me.
The institute was developed in 1885 by Prince Oldenburgsky when an officer of the guard regiment was bitten by a rabid dog. Paris already had developed the first vaccinations by Louis Pasteur. The Prince had the officer and Dr. Krooglevsky go to Pasteur so the officer could be treated and the doctor could learn how to develop vaccines. The doctor returned to St. Petersburg with two rabbits infected with 115 and 116 generations of viruses. Later they opened a new institute "similar to the Pasteurs institute in Paris" and was connected to the Nurse Community of St. Trinity. In 1890 the institute was consecrated and opened. The point of the Imperial Institute of Experimental Medicine was to figure out the causes of different infectious diseases and come up with new ways to treat them. The institute had six departments, physiology, chemistry, general bacteriology, pathologic anatomy, syphilidology, epizootology, vaccination department, and science library.
Ivan Pavlov as learned in chapter ten worked at the institute. He studied the physiology of circulation. This involved studying blood pressure and heart work on trained dogs. From this he found the heart work regulated with four centrifugal nerves. He also studied the physiology of digestion. He studied the regularities of the system functions of the stomach, liver, and pancreas. This led to his study of Physiology of the Higher Nervous Activity. His method of conditioned reflex was developed during this time.
Today Pavlovs animal experiments would be considered inhumane and torturous. However, when developing his studies he was famous for the compassion he showed to animals. He wanted to get rid of vivisection. His reasoning behind his compassion was ethical and scientific based. He believed that suffering of the animals contaminated the results. He used anesthesia on the animals and did what he could to make them comfortable.
The Tower of Silence was opened to provide Pavlov with little to no outside stimulus for the dogs. It contained eight experimental sound-proof cameras, separated by spiral staircases and passages with noiseless covering. Walls and windows were very thick. Today isolation like this is not used. The dogs became troubled, and wouldn't respond to any conditioned stimuli.
http://iemrams.spb.ru/english/pav-tower.htm
This website gave me information about the humanitarian in Pavlov.
http://russiapedia.rt.com/prominent-russians/science-and-technology/ivan-pavlov/
This website provided me with the majority of my information. I used this website because it is the website for the actual institute. It was very helpful, the easiest to read and understand and the most informative.
While reading chapter 10 in the textbook a lot of things stood out to me, but the most interesting person I read about was John B Watson. We have learned about Watson before, so must of what was in the text was not surprising. Even though we have learned about Watson before, there was still more information to observe and learn about. The topic that I really wanted to learn more about after reading the text was Watson's career in advertising.
The first interesting thing about Watson's advertising career is learning about how he got into advertising, or more importantly how he got out of his teaching career. Watson was having an affair with one of his graduate students, Rosalie Rayner. This was interesting because Watson met his first wife while she was one of his undergraduate students 17 years earlier. Once the affair and divorce were made public, Watson was released from his position at John Hopkins University. He then married Rayner.
Watson then relied on a colleague, E.B. Titchener, that connected him to an advertising specialist, J. Walter Thomson. This was an interesting position that fit Watson well because of his background in psychology and his ability to condition people to a certain stimulus. As seen in the Little Albert Study, Watson was clearly able to condition desired behaviors form people.
Watson started at the bottom of the advertising pyramid as a shoe salesman. As they say you've got to start some where. Watson was able to climb the advertising pyramid all the way to the top within two years, when he was vice-president at Thompson Sales. To no surprise he was making a much larger salary as an advertiser than he had ever made as a teacher. It is obvious that Watson was a good advertiser, but what did he do that stood out from the rest of the advertisers?
John Watson used very simple strategies to promote sales of items to consumers. This process started with the careful selection of a demographic, or target for his sales. Watson would then target the emotions of the designated target consumer. Watson believed that in order for the product to selectively reach the desire of the consumer it must appeal to three basic emotions. The three emotions Watson believed in were love, fear, and rage.
One of Watson's most famous advertisements was for a brand of toothpaste. This advertisement included an attractive woman, a cigarette, and of course the toothpaste. The attractive female would smoke the cigarette, and use the brand of toothpaste to clean her mouth. Watson was pretty much saying he wasn't selling toothpaste, he was selling sex appeal.
Another valued technique Watson relied heavily on was testimonials from famous people. He would have them using or endorsing the item, because it would make the consumers think that if they also used that product they would be just like the famous person using it.
Although Watson was not actually the first advertiser to use these techniques, it does appear that he was more successful then the previous two known for using the same techniques.
The reason this information is so interesting to me is because Watson used techniques that advertisers today still use and have plenty of success with. It is amazing to think how all of these advertisements we see today are just playing off our emotions and making us desire things.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Watson#Advertising
This site was basically a biography of Watson's life. It also contained a lot of information about his advertising career.
http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2011/02/15/the-psychology-of-advertising/
This site explained the concept of behaviorism in advertising and Watson's part in it.
http://suite101.com/article/john-b-watson-salesman-a24107
This site focussed on Watson's ability to advertise. It highlighted his techniques and why he was so successful.
John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner was the topic that interested me. The first site is about the experiments that were conducted with Little Albert. The infant child they called Albert B. was 8-9 months old during the time of the first round of tests. It is believed Albert’s mom was employed as a wet nurse at the Harriet Lane Home a John Hopkins children’s center for “invalid children.” In 2010 psychologist Hall P. Beck and his colleagues at Appalachian State University claimed to have discovered the true identity of Little Albert and his mother. Through rigorous research Beck believes Albert‘s real name was Douglas Merritte, and his mother was Arvilla Merritte. She was a single mom who lived on campus at John Hopkins when she gave birth to Douglas on March 9, 1919, some researchers argue whether or not she even knew about the experiments that Watson performed on her baby. Sense Little Albert was never desensitized it is unknown what the long term affects were. However it is believed that the little boy died on May 10, 1925 at the age of six, because of complications from hydrocephalus, basically he had convulsions and fluid in the brain. Some think he might have developed meningitis in 1922. Some experts believe his mother had the illness at the time of his birth. Although it is unknown what baby Albert’s mental state was, it seems pretty clear that he might not have been as neurologically healthy as Watson claimed he was, especially to be put through such dramatic experimentations. Today it is considered unethical to provoke fear in humans, especially babies.
The second site was about the sex scandal between Watson and Rayner. At the height of his career around the time he was finishing his research with Little Albert, Watson fell in love with his younger graduate student and research assistant Rosalie Rayner. He even wrote her love letters that would later be made public. Their affair caused a scandal and Watson was fired from his position at John Hopkins, some people think his wife’s wealthy family had something to do with the loss of his job. Watson and his first wife Mary Ickes divorced and shortly after Watson married Rayner on December 31, 1920. Rayner was 22 at the time, and together they had two sons. Watson’s academic career was ruined, but there are speculations that it was mainly because he and Rayner were heavily involved with studying sex through their own sexual research. The study was about measuring the physical act of intercourse. Supposedly there were instruments found that were used to measure the sexual response, however there is no real proof of this rumor. Although Watson’s psychology career was over, he was still able to bounce back with a career in advertising. He built himself a new expensive life style with his new family; however it would be shortly lived. In 1935 Rosalie Rayner died at the young age of 35 possibly from pneumonia. Watson was devastated without her. He would become even more distant from his children, and mainly lived in seclusion for the remainder of his life.
According to the third site, Watson did not show very much physical affection towards his own children Mary (Polly) and John from his first marriage to Mary Ickes. This was most likely from the lack of affection from his alcoholic and possibly abusive father. Polly attempted suicide many times during her later years, and was plagued by depression and alcoholism. Little John suffered from headaches, stomach troubles, and died from a bleeding ulcer when he was in his fifties. After his affair and his first marriage ended, Watson married his student Rosalie and together they had two sons William (Billy) and James (Jimmy). Billy ended up rebelling against his father’s behavioral beliefs and instead studied Freud’s psychoanalytical approach and became a psychiatrist. Like Polly, Billy would also attempt suicide, the first time was stopped by his brother, but unfortunately he ended his life when he was 40 years old. And Jimmy suffered from stomach problems just like his oldest brother John. Ironically Watson was author to a bestselling child rearing manual, The Psychological Care of Infant and Child, but when it came to his own children he seemed to be more concerned with strict routines then he was at showing his own emotional response of affection.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Albert_experiment
http://www.vicnapier.com/MyArticles/PsychEssays/WatsonSexScandel.htm
http://robothink.blogspot.com/2005/09/long-dark-night-of-behaviorism.html
The topic of my choosing for this blog is that of Ivan Pavlov and his study with dogs. To be more precise his method under the knife as he modified the dogs with collection tubes. As discussed in class I almost approached a theory/conclusion about his method of procedure in not losing any dogs to the experiment. This being due to his antiseptic environment for his surgical procedures, dramatically reducing infection. It fits into the chapter quite nicely due to the fact that Pavlov showed the existence of the unconditioned and conditioned reflex not just in animals but in humans as well. I’m interested in this topic for a variety of reasons the first being that Pavlov started off living a simple rural life; his father a priest and mother the daughter of a priest along with five siblings, six of whom past during childhood. Showing yet again that back in the day big accomplishments can come from the less fortunate. The next more closely related to his psychological study, and that of working with animals (dogs). The way he was able to follow through in his research with little discomfort or brutality to the dogs. Later his rise to popularity, such to an extent that he was given his own laboratory in the form of a two story building known as the Tower of Silence.
Pavlov, a man of science came to his study of glandular secretions on his way home to Russia after a visit to Germany. Once back he selected dogs as his experimental animal, as we all know, and with his background of surgical techniques it would be made possible to establish tubes to the principal organs of that related to the digestive system. At first glance through the material it seemed as if Pavlov had no ill misfortunes with his dogs and surgeries. After further reading his experiments were a little more difficult to carry out, he had trouble keeping the dogs alive and healthy at the same time. During this process he sacrificed 30 dogs before he was able to perfect the surgical procedure. Where did he get all of these dogs? They were dogs that were “collected” off the street, collar or no collar, by street thieves.
With a supply of dogs in hand and a surgical technique perfected, Pavlov was able to discover what became known as classical conditioning. Something he was able to break down into two types of reflexes: unconditioned and conditioned. An unconditioned reflex is an innate response to a stimuli that occurs naturally, without any connection to being learned. In Pavlov’s case the food was an unconditioned stimulus (UCS) and the unconditioned response (UCR) was the dog salivating. A conditioned reflex is one that is a learned response; in another of Pavlov’s experiments he rang a bell, (natural, NS) at this point, when he brought out food which associated with the unconditional response (salivate). After multiple times he would just ring the bell bringing about the dog to salivate, causing a conditioned stimulus (CS) and response (CR).
http://www.freedomproject.com/latest/articles/424-pavlovs-dogs-and-american-education
http://www.simplypsychology.org/pavlov.html#sthash.hn2mAWgh.GEEJV4Wr.dpbs
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/447349/Ivan-Petrovich-Pavlov
Note:
The first URL helped explain in more detail where the dogs came from and how the dogs were treated, along with reacted to the surgeries.
The second URL I used in explaining the process of classical conditioning and the method Pavlov choose to bring out the results. Along with video examples and dialog.
The third URL was used as an over-all reference to make sure the material from all three didn't conflict with each other.
After reading this week’s chapter I decided to do some more research on the ethics of psychological research. I decided to look more into this subject because of reading about the Little Albert study. It was a very unethical study and so that got me thinking about the ethics in psychological studies today. I was curious about what the procedures and rules are today in psychological studies. This subject fits into the chapter well because we always will do studies in psychology and learn about previous studies and ethics will always be a part of them.
Ethics are the correct rules of conduct necessary when carrying out research. Ethics protect the people that participate in the studies; in order to do that we create a code of ethics. The first one is informed consent. Which means the researcher explains what is going to happen to the participant and gets their permission. Informed consent isn’t required if it is something that can easily happen in everyday life. At the end of the study the participant must be debriefed. The researcher must tell the participant a general idea of what they were investigating and why. The participant must also be asked if they have any questions. The researcher must also ensure that the participants will not come to distress. They must be protected from physical and mental harm. The researcher must do all they can to not deceive the participants. The researchers must also keep data confidential unless full consent is given. The researcher must also inform the participant that at any time they may stop the study.
Sources:
http://www.simplypsychology.org/Ethics.html#sthash.mwx2uwxu.dpbs
http://www.apa.org/ethics/code/index.aspx
http://www.efpa.be/ethics.htm
After reading chapter 10 i knew that I wanted to my topical blog on either Watson or Pavlov, but could not decide which person to go with. I liked the experiments that Pavlov conducted on his dogs, and at the same time I liked Watson's childhood. I reread the section on Watson, and came to the conclusion that the book was leaving out some important information on him. Yes, I got the childhood background, and some research that he conducted with the rat experiment, but the details were missing. I my research I wanted to know about Watson's childhood. I know that the book did a good job of describing this part of his life, but I just wanted to know more. Secondly, I wanted to know about his personal life he had away from the Universities he taught at (or in Watson's case, the personal life at the University). The last thing that I wanted to find in my research was maybe a little more information on the maze experiment that he conducted with Carr. Like all my other topical blogs for the past couple weeks I have tried to find out more information about the person behind the experiment, and the research that I have found over the weeks has been really interesting. I believe that it has helped me to retain the information better because I not only know what the book has taught me, but also through my research I know the guy on a more personal level. Basically, what lead this certain psychologist to research or even go into the field of psychology. Watson is a perfect example of this because of his rough childhood. Rougher than any other psychologist that I have researched up until this point, so I was really curious to see if I could dig up any other information about it. I found an interesting article that kind of touched all the things that I wanted to learn more about.
The first article that I came across was the jack of all trades when talking about the life of Watson. I got a good look as to what his childhood was like, his life at the University, and the accomplishments that he had throughout his life. I found out a lot more information that the book gave, so I was pleased that I had found this article. We had talked in class about how it was cool that Watson came from a rags to riches scenario. That is the American dream, but with the riches came more problems with Watson. I will get to that later, but first I wanted to talk about his early childhood. Watson was born into a family that was weird to begin with. His mother was a religious woman, and his father was the town drunk. I find this relationship weird to begin with, and wonder how it ever got to the point of marriage, but that is a whole other blog. Watson's father would get into fights after a night of drinking, and was arrested on occasion. The book had talked about Watson's deviant behavior himself, but the article linked his behavior to his fathers which I found interesting. I had never thought about this correlation while reading the chapter. Watson looked up to his father and was arrested a couple times early in life. He was also acting out in school, and making fun of the African American students. If it was not for John's mentor Gordon Moore, and introducing Watson to the field of psychology than maybe behaviorism may have never came about. Watson was accepted into Furman University at the tender age of 16. This is the place were he earned his B.A. and his M.A.. This was interesting to me because someone who did not take school seriously in high school all of sudden easily earns his masters in psychology in just five years. The only explanation that I had for this was that John knew that he was to smart for high school, and the only entertainment that he had while at school was to be a trouble maker. Anyways, who knows, after his time at Furman he went to the University of Chicago to get his PHD in psychology. He earned that in three years, and was given the position of associate professor. After only a year of teaching he was dating one of the students and married within that year. They had a girl named Mary, and then years later a boy named John. John did not stop there at all. He was known to have relations with some of the girl students that attended the University. The rumors began to spread around the campus, and Watson decided that it was best or his family and him to pack up and leave. John was given a job at Johns Hopkins as a professor. He conducted many experiments there including one with one of the graduate students. His wife at that time had found a love note from that graduate student, and gave John the ultimatum of choosing the graduate student or his wife. John was in love with graduate student, so he chose the graduate student. They were soon married, and had three kids of their own. Word is still out if they completed their initial study (joke). The University frowned about the marriage between him and the graduate student, Rosalie. Once again John packed up his things and his family, and moved to New York where he became interested in advertisement. I thought that this was interesting because it was a pretty drastic carrer change, but it seemed to work for him. Rosalie died young at the age of 35, and John was devastated. He turned to the bottle and became a workaholic. Just before his death he burned most of his unpublished works. I remember reading about this earlier in the year and wondered why he would do such a thing. Now I know that he was in a terrible emotional state, and probably had good reason for doing that. This also makes me wonder if the things that he burned had important information that could have influenced the field of psychology. I guess we will never know if they did or not. Just before his death, John, was awarded the gold medal from the American Psychology Association for his contributions to the field of psychology. The amount of information that I retained from this article was amazing. Like I had said earlier, this article touched every thing that I was trying to find in my research, and I am glad that I stumbled across it. There are still some things that I wanted to find out, so I continued my research in the hopes that I could find something that the book failed to include. The one thing that I could think of was maybe the rat maze experiment that he conducted with Carr. This article did not explain this at all, so I tried to find the answer in my research.
The next article that I came across in my research was one on his research that he conducted with Carr. The article was like the first one that I read, expect this one included some of his research on the experiment. It was also cool in the sense that it provided quotations throughout Johns life. I do not know if they were pulled from a biography about him, but I found it very helpful in helping me to understand more about John. One example that I came across has nothing to do with the rat maze experiment, but with his first meeting with his first wife Mary. Mary had not turned in a paper on time and John had asked her to turn in what she had. Mary had such a way with words that John was instantly attracted to her, and the relationship blossomed from there. Anyways, that is the stuff that I find to be the most interesting when doing this research because it gives me a real life interaction. In this case I got to see the beginning of a relationship, and then many affairs after that. Cool stuff. Going back to the maze experiment, and what I found out is that the book did a pretty job of explaining this particular experiment. The article mentioned that John and Carr were trying to find out how mice were learning. They did this by making mazed that the mice would go through, and Watson and Carr would remove certain parts of the mice's bodies in order to figure out how they learned. They soon found out that they mice were learning through muscle memory. The mice were counting the steps it took to get to a certain point in the maze. John and Carr discovered this by changing the lengths of the maze, and sure enough the mice were running into walls, or turning to early. This was the just of the article, and I learned a fair amount from it. The book did a really good job of explaining the experiment, so it was difficult to find extra information on the subject, but I believe that I got some good information in my research. For my last article I wanted to see if there was anything that I could find out about Watson. The first article was so unique in itself because it provided me with a bunch of information on all aspects of John's life, so maybe there is a youtube video that I could find of the rat experiment.
Turns out there is no youtube videos on Watson doing the rat maze expriment, but there is one on B.F. Skinner. I continued to try to find something that I could get asa visual. I came across the little Albert experiment. I found a really good video of a guy explaining what was going on, and how Watson conducted the experiment. Watson found out what the baby really liked and tried to see if he could condition fear into the baby. Turns out that the baby really liked the rat that was presented in front of him. Watson then let the baby play with the rat the net day, but this time he would ring a loud bell whenever albert would touch the rat. Albert did not cry at first, but during the second time that albert tried to touch the rat the bell rang, and albert cried. Watson then brought out other things that resembled a rat to see if albert would be afraid of those things as well. Turns out that albert was scared of other things such as a rabbit, santa claus mask. a dog, and even a seal fur coat. The term that is associated with albert being afraid of things that are associated with the white rat is called generalization. I did not know this so this was really interesting to find out. I know that the book talked about it a little bit, but this came me a visual that was really helpful in my understanding. Watson discovered that he could condition a human, and concluded that all phobias were conditioned into us. The one question that I have is how Albert is doing nowadays. I bet he can not be around things that have to do with rabbits or anything that is generalized with rats. This video was cool to watch, and I am glad that I found it because i now have a better understanding of how the experiment was conducted, and I have a better understanding of how behaviorism works.
The research that i found was very useful to me in understanding psychology. I set out to find out more about Watson's life and the experiments that he conducted. I found out information that the book failed to include, so it was really interesting to find more information on Watson. My sources provided information in detail that makes the material more interesting, and easier to retain which I feel is the ultimate goal in this topical blog.
http://faculty.frostburg.edu/mbradley/psyography/johnbroaduswatson.html
this article was very helpful because I got the bulk of my information, and it gave me information that the book could not
http://www.sonoma.edu/users/d/daniels/Watson.html
This site was helpful because I got a good look at the rat maze experiment that Watson and Carr conducted.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hBfnXACsOI
This was a great video because I got a visual on how the little albert experiment, and how the beginning of behaviorism came about.
For this week’s topic, I chose to research the fate of Little Albert. I had not really thought much about the subjects of the research and how their lives were affected by the experiments they engaged in. I was surprised to find that the question of “what happened to Little Albert” had loomed in the minds of psychology scholars for many years.
As it turns out, a team led by Hall P. Beck which also included Sharman Levinson and Gary Irons took it upon themselves to answer this question. It took the team seven years to gather all of the necessary information and put it all together. They started with what they knew about Little Albert, that he was born at Johns Hopkins Hospital between March 2nd and March 16th, 1919 and that his mother was a “wet nurse” working at the Harriet Lane Home. Only three women fit the description of wet nurse at the Harriet Lane Home, and of these three, only one of them was a white woman who gave birth at Johns Hopkins Hospital during the timeline. Her name was Arvilla Merritte
The team used this information to find the relatives of Arvilla Merritte to gather more information. With the help of Arvilla Merritte’s grandson (Gary Irons) they found some pictures of the Arvilla’s son. Facial scientists compared the boy in the pictures to the videos of Little Albert. It seems they have cracked the case, and Little Albert was actually Douglas Merritte.
Unfortunately, Douglas Merritte died at the young age of six years old of acquired hydrocephalus. Because of his early death, no one ever followed up on Douglas’s well-being or phobias. There is no evidence to suggest whether or not he ever got over his fear of white, fluffy things.
This did make me wonder if it was even ethical at all to search for the boy. Most, if not all psychological research now protects the subjects and gives them complete anonymity.
http://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/01/little-albert.aspx
I used this site to learn the facts around what we know about Little Albert
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIc9ijXukho
This video helped me to understand just how difficult it was to trace the subject of Watson's studies.
http://htpprints.yorku.ca/archive/00000198/01/BHARRIS.HTM
This site gave me a more in depth understanding of the research done on Little Albert and psychology's view of him throughout history
Chapter 10
As I mentioned in my last post, someone that I found interesting while reading this chapter and would like to know more about was Dr. John B. Watson. John Watson was the fore runner for the change of psychology to the behaviorist view. This change would eventually lead him to be known as the father of behaviorism. Through his behaviorist approach, Dr. Watson conducted much research and many experiments on things such as child rearing, advertising, and mostly, animal behavior. He is also very famous in the psychological field for this work on the "Little Albert" study, which would turn out to be very controversial.
John B Watson was born in South Carolina to a very religious mother who was firm against the prohibitions and an alcoholic father who left his family to live with two Indian women when John was 13 years old. His mother would soon move their family to Greenville, South Carolina in hopes that John would have a better chance at success. During these times, John would have some delinquency issues and would be arrested twice during his high school career. As soon as Watson was old enough, he moved far from his rural childhood and went to college. At this point Watson understood that college was very important for his future success saying "I know now that I can never among to anything in the educational world unless I have better preparation at a real university."
Although Watson struggled to make the change from rural to urban areas , Watson fought through college at the age of 16 and would eventually work his way through college with significant effort and succeeding in classes that other students tended to fail. Watson would end up with a masters degree by the age of 21, although he still lacked many social skills.
After his graduation, Watson spent a year at a one-room school back in Greenville. Here he worked as the principal, janitor, and handyman. After, once again, becoming bored with Greenville, Watson entered the University of Chicago. It was here that Watson would begin to find his passion for psychology as he studied philosophy under John Dewey. It was Dewey who would lead Watson to have ideas on objective behaviors. It was also at this university that Watson would meet many faculty members that would soon assist in his development into his understanding of behaviorism.
Watson's most astounding article is known as "The Behaviorist Manifesto" written in 1913. This article outlined Watson's new psychological philosophy that he called "behaviorism". He explained that behaviorism was the purely objective experimental branch of natural science. It's goal was only to predict and control behavior with little recognition from introspection.
I liked this page a lot because it had a great display of information
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/watson.htm
This page was sort of difficult to read but it was full of lot of useful and interesting information about Watson's Behaviorist Manifesto.
http://www.brynmawr.edu/psychology/rwozniak/watson.html
This page was interesting because it's information was condensed to things that I was looking for, which was perfect. (Click through the links)
http://eweb.furman.edu/~einstein/watson/watson1.htm
I wanted to learn more about positivism because it became the foundation of psychology, the modern science we know today. I knew a little about the subject from an intro to philosophy class that I took two years ago. Augustine Comte (Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte) was a French philosopher who founded sociology and started the idea of positivism. Comte thought that social life could be a science. He is thought to originally come up with the term “sociology” even though it originally had a different meaning. Comte thought that the study of the social life was as scientific as inorganic sciences, such as astronomy. Comte didn’t only just think of sociology as another science, he thought it was the greatest of all sciences. It was to be the science that involved all other sciences, and I have to say I don’t think he was terribly wrong. The study of the social life involves so much biology, chemistry, and physics just as basic knowledge in the field now known as Psychology.
Positivism is a philosophical science that mainly takes its information from the sensory experiences. This means that the information that we collect is what we see/smell/hear/feel/taste (mainly just see/hear/feel). Positivism states that the social science, just like other sciences holds true to some universal laws. Positivism had some flaws because it thought that the only things that we could speculate on were the things that we could directly observe. So if we couldn’t observe it, it wasn’t worth the speculation. This is the only major downfall that I found but there could be others.
I think that positivism is so incredibly important because it really helped define the practice of psychology as research. I’m especially interested because I currently am doing research for a graduate student and for one of my professors. Without the movement of quantifying data, I probably wouldn’t have some of the opportunities that I have today. I like that the theory of positivism was so old but really came into play in American psychology in the early 1900’s. It’s weird to think that it was established as a way of thinking long before it became “mainstream”.
I also think that it is crazy that positivism is responsible for the way that we think about science today. It isn’t a subject that just affected the social sciences; it accompanied the physical sciences as well. It assisted in the movement of numbers and wanting to create quantifiable data. I am glad that psychology did move on from the idea though. I like that psychology doesn’t just worry about the data that is directly observable otherwise we wouldn’t ever study emotions or thoughts because they are not directly quantifiable. We are now considered to be in a “post-positivism” era of science because we incorporate the ideas of positivism while expanding them and sort of bending some of the rules.
http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/kb/positvsm.php - This website helped me zero in on the idea of positivism and what ideas we took from it. It also explained really well how we have turned to a more post-positivism look into science.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positivism - As always, Wikipedia is very helpful for getting a general understanding of a topic and to find other links about a topic that may have some more information.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auguste_Comte – I learned a lot from this web page because I got a look into where the idea of positivism came from and what it was originally intended for.
I chose to do more research on Watson’s Little Albert Study. This related to the chapter because though classical conditioning, Little Albert because afraid of small, white, furry animals. I am interested in it because I was curious what became of Little Albert.
Watson wanted to take Pavlov's research further to show that emotional reactions could be classically conditioned in people. To do this, Watson experimented on a nine month old baby known as Little Albert. Little Albert didn’t seem to be afraid of the things that many other nine month old would be afraid of. Watson presented Little Albert with a screeching monkey, a rat, a rabbit and even a newspaper that was on fire but Little Albert did not seem bothered. Watson did come to find that loud, crashing noises frightened Little Albert to he used the noise a stimulus. This stimulus began as an unconditioned stimulus. It was a noise that had already naturally frightened Little Albert. The stimulus became conditioned when Watson used the noise to emit a certain response. In Watson’s experiment with Little Albert, Watson made a loud noise everything a while fuzzy animal like a rat or a rabbit was pretested. This cause Little Albert to be afraid of the white fuzzy animal even though there was no noise. Little Albert’s fear of the animals was a conditioned response. The conditioned stimulus was the loud noise. Watson found that humans, along with animals could be conditioned. Little Albert was never unconditioned because soon after the experiment was conducted, Little Albert and his mother moved away. It was later found that Little Albert died at the age of six on May 10, 1925 of hydrocephalus, a build-up of fluid in his brain. Much later in 2012, Beck and Alan J. Fridlund discovered that Little Albert was not as healthy as Watson described in his experiment. They found that Little Albert suffered from hydrocephalus since birth and suggested.
I chose this video because I thought it was beneficial to watch how Little Albert reacted and how he was conditioned.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xt0ucxOrPQE
I liked this site because it provided the most information on what happen to Little Albert after the experiment.
http://psychology.about.com/od/classicpsychologystudies/a/little-albert-experiment.htm
This website had a great overall summary of the Little Albert experiment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Albert_experiment
Terms: Pavlov, Watson, Little Albert, conditioning, conditioned response, unconditioned response, conditioned stimulus, unconditioned stimulus, classical conditioning
RB
The one topic that I wanted to explore more was that of Ivan Pavlov and his life. In going through high school, I heard a lot about Ivan Pavlov and his contributions to psychology. Specifically, I heard about his experiments with dogs and feeding time, which ultimately led to his discovery of classical conditioning. What I wanted to do for this blog is to dive a little deeper into Pavlov’s life, as well as his other contributions to psychology, along with classical conditioning.
Ivan Pavlov was born on September 14th, 1849 in the town of Ryazan, located in western Russia. His early schooling followed that of the career of his father’s, who was a priest in Ryazan. But upon reading Charles Darwin’s On the Origins of Species, Pavlov had a change of heart. He soon left the Ryazan Seminary school and his religious study to pursue the study of science. He thus enrolled himself at the University of St. Petersburg in 1870. It was there that Pavlov enrolled in physics and math, but would become fascinated with the subject of physiology. In 1875, Pavlov received his degree of Candidate of Natural Sciences.
After graduating from the University of St. Petersburg, Pavlov continued his education at the Academy of Medical Surgery. After leaving the Academy of Medical Surgery, Pavlov was appointed as Director of the Physiological Laboratory. Later in his career he was appointed to direct the Department of Physiology at the Institute of Experimental Medicine. It was here that Pavlov conducted his famous experiments on dogs and his discovery of the classical conditioning response phenomenon. Pavlov would go on to hold that position for over 45 years. He died in Leningrad in 1936.
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1904/pavlov-bio.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Pavlov
http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesofmajorthinkers/p/pavlov.htm
After reading Chapter 10, I found a lot of terms and psychologists that I was already familiar with. There were a few, however, that I wanted to learn more about. One was the concept of systematic desensitization.
Systematic Desensitization emerged as a behavioral therapy from Pavlovian Classical Conditioning. It is most commonly used to help patients overcome specific phobias and anxiety disorders. There are three main steps in this process: establishing the anxiety stimulus hierarchy, learning coping mechanisms such as relaxation, and counter-conditioning. Counter conditioning occurs when the individual begins to associate the anxiety-provoking stimulus with the relaxation techniques instead of the usual anxious response.
These fears are tackled from the least anxiety provoking through the most anxiety provoking. By starting with the least anxiety-provoking stimulus, the patient takes steps in overcoming their fears at large, ending with the most anxiety-provoking stimulus.
This technique was much more popular decades ago in helping individuals overcome fears. Systematic desensitization was most popular in the 1970s, with its use steadily declining since the 1980s. The technique has proven to be most effective with specific phobias as they can be targeted directly. Its effectiveness is less consistent the more general the anxiety is. For example, individuals with Generalized Anxiety Disorder have a hard time profiting from this technique, as it's often difficult to identify their fears, let alone rank them. This interferes with the process of establishing the "hierarchy of fear", one of the critical steps in this technique.
Some specific phobias that have been eradicated using systematic desensitization include social phobias like agoraphobia and dating anxiety. In the instance of dating phobias and anxiety, systematic desensitization has been successful. This is likely due to the fact that the technique targets both the conditioned anxiety and the reactive anxiety produced by the phobia. In a study, one experimental group included individuals with conditioned anxiety, and another experimental group included individuals with reactive anxiety. In both cases, systematic desensitization decreased their dating anxiety.
This applies to this chapter because it all branched from Pavlov. Had Pavlov not discovered classical conditioning, this technique would not have become a way to decrease anxiety in patients. I believe that it is very interesting the way that psychologists take findings of the past and incorporate them in their own way to solve for applied problems. In this case, it is of help for clinical and behavioral psychologists.
Overview:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_desensitization
Explanation of steps:
http://www.csulb.edu/~tstevens/Desensit.htm
Effectiveness in dating phobias:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0005796775900546
For this week’s topic I chose to focus on Watson’s behaviorism. I wanted to gain a more developed knowledge of what he did and how he studied behavior. One thing that I found interesting about the chapter is that we stopped studying animals because of all the negative attention it was getting and moved on to humans. The acts for regulating studies for humans passed nearly a decade after the law for animal studies. Watson is an extremely interesting scientist; he took thinks and looked at them from a different perspective than ever before. Unlike many Watson came from a rough background with some obstacles. He was never spoon feed his success, and I adore that about him. He took psychology and used it for an entirely new area of study, behaviorism. His new development was known as “The Behaviorist Manifesto.” The main basis for his area of study was experiment and observation. I found myself more interested in his work, because we can all relate to behavior by humans. It was an experiment with data just like most, but it was more relatable. He focused on behavior based of stimulus, reaction was his main priority. Another thing about Watson that I learned was how often he was a critic of other psychologists. He believed he was the new and improved psychology. However, without the prior knowledge found by others he would have not found the things he did. This related back to chapter one, we thought about history and the importance every step of the way. The quote that was in our text as well as many sights that surprised me about him was, “ Give me a dozen healthy infants…to become any type of specialist I might select..” I think he may have been over confident with this. And I also find it funny that he says any healthy baby can become what he wants, but he chooses an unhealthy baby for his study. His book that he published,” Psychological Care of Infant and Child,” Makes me very curious to what it might all have. I also wonder how many adults at that time read it and raised children based on this. It probably was not one of the worst things they could believe out there. His main objective in this book was the amount of attention and care a child was provided with. He wanted them to raise children with the idea of them as young adults. I as a caregiver at a day care can strongly say that parenting reflects a child’s behavior greatly. Each psychologist in the past takes behavior and tried to understand it. I believe he was the best developed in this area. I also watched a few videos on the Albert study to see if it looked as cruel as it felt in text. I got about half way through and decided I knew enough. The child did not react to things much at all. The dog it seems he enjoyed as well as the rat. They took the thing that he most reacted to and scared him with the bell. This would not fly today, and I think he could have observed the same behavior with a lighter impact. Use a stuffed animal and a small bell. I know times were different then, but it still feels a bit cruel and unusual.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Watson
I always start with wiki because it gives a well overview that helps provoke thought in new areas that I may not have known about before. I also enjoy all the links throughout to understand other components involved to get a better overall understanding.
http://psychology.about.com/od/developmentalpsychology/a/childdevtheory.htm
I chose this site to learn more about the development in children and Watson’s views. It talked about the many stages and some of the ideas he had about raising children. It also gave other historic psychologist views on development. It gave me a better idea of how Watson differed.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hBfnXACsOI
this video helped me understand the albert study and connect information already known from text.
I decided to look further into what happened to Little Albert in the Little Albert Conditioning study that was covered in this week's chapter. It seemed like some people in the class already knew about what happened to him after the study ended, but I hadn't heard anything about this before.
It seems like the psychological community has long wondered what happened to Albert after the study ended. He was not deconditioned to any of the stimuli, so people wondered what effect this had on his personality or the rest of his life. Researchers knew that Albert's mother worked at the pediatric hospital on campus as a wet nurse, so they looked at the women who gave birth around the time Albert would've been born. They also used facial recognition software to determine facial features of those who fit the description. Eventually it was discovered that Albert was Douglas Merritte. His mother had Douglas out of wedlock and was looking for extra money, so she allowed him to participate in this study.
Douglas, it turns out, died at age 6 from convulsions from hydrocephalus. It was thought at first that the hydrocephalus was caused by meningitis Douglas contracted three years earlier. This was hard to believe, however, because if the meningitis was bad enough to cause hydrocephalus, Douglas probably wouldn't have survived the extra three years. It is now believed that Douglas had this cognitive issue since birth. This raises into question the ethics of Watson's study.
If Douglas had cognitive issues it might explain why he was, according to Watson "a solid and unemotional child". These traits might not have been because of his personality, but caused by medical conditions. One of the researchers showed a video of Douglas to a professor of neurology. The professor seemed to think that Douglas might have autism or some other neurological problem. It is also possible that Douglas' hydrocephalus caused vision or hearing impairment.
Given all this information, it does not seem ethical for Watson to have conducted this study on Douglas. As a psychologist, it is hard to believe that Watson did not notice that something was amiss with the child. The child's illness might also have skewed the results, making them unreliable.
http://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/01/little-albert.aspx
This article told me more about the study and informed me of Albert/Douglas' death.
http://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/a-new-twist-in-the-sad-saga-of-little-albert/28423
This article talked about how they found out who Albert was.
http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2012/03/10/history-of-psychology-a-new-twist-in-the-case-of-little-albert/
This article told me more about Douglas' hydrocephalus and the consequences it could have had on the study.
I decided to write about Pavlov. I wrote in my last post that in most classes, Pavlov is brought up for his work with salivating dogs and then passed over. I liked in this chapter that the author actually devoted other information about Pavlov.
Ivan Pavlov was a Russian and considered himself to be more of a physiologist than a psychologist. This is where I think behaviorism sticks out in the field of psychology; behaviorism has to do more with outward behaviors rather than inner unconscious functions. I really liked that Pavlov himself considered psychology to be a pseudo-science and that it would eventually fade away. Now his name is in every Intro to Psychology textbook.
Throughout his career, Pavlov gained recognition for contributions to the field of physiology and later psychology. Even the Soviet government realized the importance of Pavlov’s work. The fact that the Soviets considered him to be important allowed him to be left alone to continue his work without interference from the Communists.
Although Pavlov has come to be known as the “guy with the dogs,” he had other contributions to the field of physiology. Once I learned that he was primarily a physiology and not a psychologist, it helped me to understand why he is not more recognized in psychology textbooks. I started to think that maybe his contributions to psychology were due mainly to mere observations he made as opposed to an actual interest in the subject. I then began to wonder how many other things in psychology were just made by observation or by accident without someone actually planning it or doing a specific study.
Pavlov was the first to treat psychology as an observable, objective science. He paved the way for Watson and Skinner to star up behaviorism.
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1904/pavlov-bio.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Pavlov
http://www.ivanpavlov.com/
In this chapter, I read about Pavlov, as I have done in other classes, but this chapter told about his pioneering work in the study of gastrointestinal functioning, which I had never read about. I decided to read more about his work on the GI system and found that he was quite remarkable in his surgical techniques. While Pavlov was not the only physiologist working on the GI system, he was able to perfect many of the procedures which were being used at that time. His Pavlov pouch was a variation on a pouch created by Rudolph Heidenhan, except Pavlov’s pouch kept the vagus nerves intact. The vagus nerves are essential to the digestive system because they are needed to promote digestive function and without the vagus nerve there is delayed emptying of the stomach which can cause reflux and other GI problems.
Pavlov’s work pioneered the interventions in reflux, digestion, some forms of asthma, cardiac regulation, glucose levels and even respiratory therapy. I have always held the misconception that Pavlov was a psychiatrist and that his major contribution to science was in psychology, I never realized hw was actually a psysiologist and how important he was to the study of medicine. Pavlov is another example of how psychology has hi-jacked a physiologist for its own purposes. What I had really wanted to find out about was Pavlov’s gastric medication concocted from the saliva of dogs, but I could not find anything more than what I learned from the text. I will continue to search for the information but time constraints dictate that I post this without that information.
This site was essential in describing vagus nerve function:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1356483/
This site has the most information about
Pavlov and his life and work:
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1904/pavlov-bio.html
This site provided examples of uncontrolled response and controlled response in relation to Pavlov’s dogs, which was easier for me to understand:
http://www.learning-theories.com/classical-conditioning-pavlov.html
This site provides a wealth of information on Pavlov’s work and illustrations of his gastric bypass:
http://physiologyonline.physiology.org/content/19/6/326.full
BR
While reading chapter ten I became very interested in the maze studies with rats and the Little Albert study done by Watson. Watson was born on January 9, 1878 in South Carolina. He grew up in a dysfunctional family home; his mother was very religious, but his father drank a lot and had affairs and left when James was thirteen years old. James got married and he also ended up having affairs on his wife, which led to divorce; he remarried to one of his graduate students. He had four children in all, two with each wife. His children were his main guinea pigs, because most of his research for behaviorism was on them. He did not have good relationships with his kids just like his father didn’t have a good one with him, in an ironic way James had some behavioral issues of his own. His research though contributed a lot to comparative psychology and how behavior works in animals and humans.
Watson went to the University of Chicago, and this is where he acquired an interest in the field of comparative psychology and studying animals. His dissertation was about the behavior in white rats, the growth in the nervous system and the relation between the two. At Colombia University he gave a lecture where he proposed the idea of an objective psychology of behavior, which he titled “behaviorism”. He explained this as the study of people’s actions with the ability to predict and control those actions. This was James’ big breakthrough and his research he conducted contributed great amounts of information to psychology and in understanding how behavior can be shaped in humans and animals. His studies with rats were to see if they could copy ‘real-life’ learning tasks including navigating complex mazes. One of his first studies was like that of Thorndike’s puzzle-boxes. He trained rats to open a puzzle-box in order to receive a small-food reward. Moving from the boxes he started to study the rats in a maze setting to see how they could get through them and with how much ease. From this research Watson realized that the more the rats did the mazes the more automatic it became for them. James concluded that once started by the stimulus of the maze the rats’ behavior becomes a series of associations between movements, instead of stimuli of the outside world. The rats’ muscles were automatically memorizing how to do the maze and so when Watson but a wall up in a certain part of the maze the rats ran right into it. This was a breakthrough for James because it allowed him to come to the conclusion of “his rejection that some mental traces of stimuli and responses needed to be retrained in an animal’s mind until a reinforcer caused an association between them to be strengthened, which is a rather mentalistic consequence of the law of effect”.
Watson eventually started studying behaviors and emotions in humans. He did a lot of his work at John Hopkins from this point on in his life. His goal was to establish techniques that would allow him to condition and control the emotions of human subjects. Watson’s infamous study of this type of work was that of Little Albert. James believed children had three base emotions: fear, rage and love, and his research was to prove that each of these emotions could be falsely conditioned. He accomplished this by placing a rat in an Albert’s lap, then without Albert knowing he struck a steel bar behind his head resulting in a really loud noise. This startled him, the second time Albert began to tremble, and the third time he was crying. After a week Watson and his assistant repeated the exact same experiment, and Albert showed signs of anxiety and distress when showed the rat without the loud noise. Albert also had this same reaction to other furry objects. This testing was one of the first that allowed psychology to understand how phobias could form and present themselves in one’s life. His studies also allowed for psychology to view behavior in a completely different way. His research is still apparent in today’s fields and has definitely contributed to how one’s behaviors can be conditioned and then desensitized. I have also been really interested in phobias and how one acquires certain ones, so Jame's research definitely interests me and how you can condition someone pretty simply to be afraid or show fear to a certain thing.
http://faculty.coe.uh.edu/smcneil/cuin6373/idhistory/watson2.html
http://www.psychology.sbc.edu/Little%20Albert.htm
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/watson.htm
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.
I decided to do my research on Little Albert, mainly because I’ve always had an interest in finding out what peoples lives are after being part of a study, especially one of these magnitudes. The Little Albert fits into the chapter basically because it’s a behavioral study, which this chapter covers a lot of information on behaviorism.
Although it was unethical, Watson took Pavlovs classical conditioning study one step further and based his study around a human being. The major thing about this study was the fact that an emotional response could be conditioned was something that during that time wasn’t thought or heard of. This study goes beyond emotions begin conditioned and really changed the way psychology was looked at and really how humans looked at each other.
Looking at Little Albert himself, he was a child born to a wet nurse, in which Albert was raised in the hospital environment but was said to have developed normally and was stable. When Albert was 8 months old he was introduced to the loud sound of Watson striking a steel bar, after three trials Albert soon became very afraid of the noise. It wasn’t until 11 months that Watson decided to test if emotional responses could be determined if conditioned with a loud noise (meaning being scared of an object or thing when hearing the loud noise). I have to agree that I think this study has benefited psychology and behaviorism. I also can’t help but have a few questions; one being could Albert’s ages of when the study was conducted have anything to do with the data collected or what about his environment he was in. To me regardless if someone said he was ‘stable’ in a hospital setting, a hospital especially back then just doesn’t seem like it would be a warm and positive environment for a child to grow up in. Also, his was first introduced to the noise at 8 months, then again at 11, that’s a three month difference. Just from personal experience with children at that age, their perceptions on people and things around them tend to change in a short period of time; meaning could that three month difference have matured Albert in a way that he now realized more about his environment then he did at 8 months.
The thing I found interesting about Albert, was that research shows that they might not know exactly who “little albert” is, but rather have done extensive data collection and research to pin point who they thought he was. Which turned out to be a boy named Douglas, who was born to a while mother who was a nurse working in the same hospital, and when compared to pictures of little albert they both shared similar facial features. Sadly, it is said that ‘Douglas’ died at the age of six; therefore there is no way to do a follow-up to see if he still has these same conditioned fears.
An article I stumbled upon claimed that little albert could have had mental and or medical problems, and that Watson may have known about them. Although this may be true, given the videos of little albert and his lack of emotion, it may have made a difference but then again I’m not sure it would have. Looking at children who grow up around dogs from birth and then are bitten as toddlers and become afraid of them for life; could that possibly be the same thing. Also, I think the research that has been done after this study validates the studies findings.
http://www.psychology.sbc.edu/Little%20Albert.htm
http://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/01/little-albert.aspx
http://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/a-new-twist-in-the-sad-saga-of-little-albert/28423
he topic I chose from this chapter is Clark Hull. I was intrigued by his hypothesis that perseverance and hard work are the main factors that can overcome any adversity. He also focused on motivation and drive. After researching him I learned much more on his drive theory, background, and some of the research he performed. The prediction of behavior is his main overall topic of research. He made me think of the idea to question what drives action in humanistic levels. Why do we do things, what motivates us to behave, sometimes I think it is fear that creates drive to have a behavior. During class today we had someone speak out and say they do not agree with putting a formula into human behavior, however, we are discovering more to discover ways to predict behavior. He studied experimental research to associate behaviors with sources. The three basic needs were what he focused in on, including; hunger, sex, and thirst. Hull also participated in hypnosis. He pushed the distinction of sleep and hypnosis through experimental theories. The most surprising thing that I found out about Hull is that he grew up disabled. He had polio, and this put together why he claimed that hard work and perseverance could overcome anything. It also came as a surprise to me that he came from a lower social economic status level. This was a surprise because most historic psychologists come from wealthy families with the correct resources. He was a great example of someone who took other areas of studies and applied them to psychology. His mathematical knowledge helped him apply a formula for behavior. The second website broke down his formula for the global theory of behavior. Within the formula the factors in the following; drive strength, reinforces, deprivation, incentive, stimulus, consecutiveness, and strength. This formula made me think my individual behaviors and why they are done. I think on of the main factors of my behavior involves reinforcers. His theory was also criticized by several other psychologists at the time. He was majorly criticized for his theory not being applicable to real life scenarios. He researched a system for learning that showed great successes in lab, yet struggled in real life areas. Although, his theory conflicted with others he started a progression towards understanding behavior based off his own adversity. I find him as a courageous, intelligent individual who progressed the study of psychology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clark_L._Hull
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/hull.htm
http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Hull/Conflict/
While reading chapter 11 I was very interested in B. F. Skinner's utopia and the book Walden Two.
This book was Skinner's early attempt to apply the principles of learning to create a utopia society. However, this book was controversial because of the subject of free will, and because this book was the first time someone had written a book based on this scientific principles. This is because the principles of alternating behaviors had never been written about before. The book also proposed that human behavior is controlled by a spirit or soul, something that was also controversial. In the book it states that the formation of a utopia is allowed by the belief that behavior is determined by genetic and environmental variables and the change of these variables.
The book describes a experimental community. A community that is self-governed, with happy members. Without a government, the community looks at each situation with an improving eye. Meaning when a change is evident, the change will occur. Making many believe this society enhances social justice and human well-being.
However, there is a "Board of Planners", the only form of government that can be detected. The Board of Planners is formed of six humans, usually 3 women and 3 men. Their job is to "control" the success of the community, make policies, keep an eye on the state, and although not mentioned it is believed they appoint the Managers and Scientists.
The Managers job is to be the "specialists in charge of the divisions and services of the community". This job carries a great deal of responsibility and is a prestigious job in the community.
The scientists of the community conduct experiments pertaining to plants and animals breeding and controlling the infant behavior (something that is viewed as controversial as well).
Walden Two overall is an interesting place, a place I would love to learn even more about; which I feel would be possible by actually reading the whole book.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walden_Two
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/walden2/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2778813/
I found John Watson's early life to be quite interesting, so I decided to find more information than what was provided in the book.
Watson was born in 1878 into a family of a religious mother and an alcoholic father. His religious mother was against all drinking, smoking, and dancing, though his father was a known alcoholic. When Watson was 13 his father left him for two Indian women, an action Watson never accepted or forgot. This later led to Watson to rebel against his mother and teachers, leading to violence and other issues, leading to two arrests during high school. However, after his father left their family, the family moved to a larger city to provide more opportunities for Watson. This move produced an opening eye to more people for Watson, leading to him to learn about different people and soon develop theories about psychology. Although Watson rebelled and was considered a poor student with weak social skills, he still successfully made it to college at age 16, with the help of some of his mother's connections. At this school Watson was taken in by a few professors, turning his life around and benefiting his professional and social life. Under these professors he learned to develop an objective approach that would later lead to his ideas for behaviorism. Five years later Watson graduated with Master's Degree at age 21. After graduation Watson was a principle, handyman, and janitor for a school. Years later Watson went back to school to receive his Ph.D at the University of Chicago. After this time, the rest is known. Watson becomes an American psychologist, establishing the psychological school of behaviorism. Watson promoted change in psychology through a speech given at Columbus University. Watson continued to conduct research on animal behaviors, child rearing, and advertising. Watson may be most famous for his "Little Albert" experiment which lead to a large impact on the psychological world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Watson
I used this site to gain the basis for Watson's early life, gaining information on the major aspects of his life.
http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesofmajorthinkers/p/watson.htm
This site enhanced the information I already had, adding an assurance the information was correct and given some details to the more vague facts from the previous site.
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/watson.htm
This site did the same as the second, providing more details and an assurance.
the topic I chose from this chapter is Clark Hull. I was intrigued by his hypothesis that perseverance and hard work are the main factors that can overcome any adversity. He also focused on motivation and drive. After researching him I learned much more on his drive theory, background, and some of the research he performed. The prediction of behavior is his main overall topic of research. He made me think of the idea to question what drives action in humanistic levels. Why do we do things, what motivates us to behave, sometimes I think it is fear that creates drive to have a behavior. During class today we had someone speak out and say they do not agree with putting a formula into human behavior, however, we are discovering more to discover ways to predict behavior. He studied experimental research to associate behaviors with sources. The three basic needs were what he focused in on, including; hunger, sex, and thirst. Hull also participated in hypnosis. He pushed the distinction of sleep and hypnosis through experimental theories. The most surprising thing that I found out about Hull is that he grew up disabled. He had polio, and this put together why he claimed that hard work and perseverance could overcome anything. It also came as a surprise to me that he came from a lower social economic status level. This was a surprise because most historic psychologists come from wealthy families with the correct resources. He was a great example of someone who took other areas of studies and applied them to psychology. His mathematical knowledge helped him apply a formula for behavior. The second website broke down his formula for the global theory of behavior. Within the formula the factors in the following; drive strength, reinforces, deprivation, incentive, stimulus, consecutiveness, and strength. This formula made me think my individual behaviors and why they are done. I think on of the main factors of my behavior involves reinforcers. His theory was also criticized by several other psychologists at the time. He was majorly criticized for his theory not being applicable to real life scenarios. He researched a system for learning that showed great successes in lab, yet struggled in real life areas. Although, his theory conflicted with others he started a progression towards understanding behavior based off his own adversity. I find him as a courageous, intelligent individual who progressed the study of psychology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clark_L._Hull
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/hull.htm
http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Hull/Conflict/