Topical Blog Week #11 (Due Wednesday)

1a) State what your topic is.
John B. Watson
1b) Discuss how the topic relates to the chapter.
Watson and his research is discussed within the chapter because Watson is one of the most noted behavioral psychologists in the last 100 years.
1c) Discuss why you are interested in it.
I decided to do a little bit more research on John B. Watson. I wanted to learn more about his work with little Albert and his educational history, that led him to make such big leaps and advancements in the field of behaviorism.
2)
John B. Watson was born January 9, 1878 in South Carolina and died September 25, 1958. He was an American psychologist who established the psychological school of behaviorism. Watson encouraged a change in psychology through his behaviorist approach. Throughout his career Watson conducted research on animal behavior, child education, and advertising, but one of his most noted and controversial experiments had to do with a child named Little Albert.
Growing up Watson was not considered a good student and was somewhat of a bad apple, getting into fights and arrested a couple times. Although most saw him as a lazy student and anti-social, Watson entered college at the age of 16 and left with a master's degree at age 21. After graduating Watson went to study under John Dewey at the University of Chicago, in his college experience he met professors and colleagues that would help him become a well-known psychologist. Many of these people played a crucial role in his success developing psychology into a reliable field of study and his understanding of behaviorism. Watson believed it was based on the idea that a procedure could transform psychology into a science. He wanted to make psychology more scientifically acceptable. After earning his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1903 his dissertation on animal education described the relationship between brain myelination and learning ability in rats at different ages. A few years later in 1908, Watson was given a faculty position at Johns Hopkins University and was promoted to chair of the psychology department.
In probably his most well-known and controversial experiment, Watson and a graduate assistant named Rosalie Rayner, who he was also having an affair with, conditioned a small child to fear a white rat. The experiment is known today as, the Little Albert experiment. Watson and Rayner were able to achieve this by repeatedly pairing the white rat with a loud frightening noise, much like Pavlov’s experiments with dogs and salivating. The study demonstrated how emotions could become conditioned responses. The ethics of the experiment are often criticized today, especially because the child's fear was never deconditioned. In 2009 researchers began a search for baby Albert because many were curious to find out how the little boy had turned out, tragically Little Albert died of hydrocephalus at the age of 6.
John B. Watson set the stage for behaviorism, which soon after came to rule psychology. While behaviorism began to lose speed after 1950, many of the concepts and philosophies are still used today. Conditioning and behavior modification are still widely used in therapy and psychology to help patients change problematic behaviors and develop new skills and habits.
http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesofmajorthinkers/p/watson.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Watson
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xt0ucxOrPQE

I chose to write about Pavlov and his findings on what has been called classical conditioning. I enjoy reading about experiments, and his use of dogs to learn more about the digestive system was very interesting to read in this chapter. Pavlov's findings led to the understanding that we can learn to associate previously neutral stimuli with an outcome, helping to launch behaviorism.

Pavlov was born in Russia in 1849. He was the son of a priest and he initially strove to follow in his father's footsteps. This changed when Pavlov was introduced to the theories of Charles Darwin. After attending the University of St. Petersburg, Pavlov became an assistant laboratory physiologist. This is where he learned how to experiment inside a laboratory.

Initially, Pavlov simply wanted to study the digestive system by looking at salivation, using dogs. However, he noticed that after a time, the dogs would salivate more when he entered the room, even without food. He determined that salivation is hard-wired into the dog's brain, as a reflex, when a dog sees food or sees something associated with food. After discovering this, Pavlov decided to experiment and find out what it took for dog's to "learn" to salivate from seeing a previously neutral stimulus. His theory later came to be known as classical conditioning.

Classical conditioning occurs when a neutral stimulus becomes a conditioned stimulus (CS) eliciting the same response from a typical, natural unconditioned stimulus (UCS). Normally, a UCS such as the sight or smell of food causes the unconditioned response (UCR) of salivation in a dog. Pavlov decided to start ringing a bell before bringing out the food to see if the dogs would have the same response to the bell as the food itself. Sure enough, he found that dogs would salivate, the conditioned response, after hearing the ringing a bell, the CS. Because of his findings, many more studies in shaping behavior have taken place, both of humans and animals.

As stated earlier, Pavlov was mainly interested in why dogs salivate. When a dog senses food is on the way, saliva is produced from glands in the oral cavity. Saliva makes the food easier to swallow, and also contains enzymes that help break down the food for digestion. This secretion of slobber is an automatic reflex any time a dog thinks food is on the way. This is just as automatic as squinting the eyes in the sunlight, which helps aid the pupils as they shrink. However, Pavlov's discovery showed that we can manipulate behavior, which paved the way for advances in getting rid of phobias. For his work, Pavlov received a Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1904, but the results of his work reached far beyond this in the realm of behaviorism.

http://www.nobelprize.org/educational/medicine/pavlov/readmore.html
This site provides information about the digestive system and reflexes, explaining why our bodies react the way they do.

http://www.simplypsychology.org/pavlov.html
This link talks more about the classical conditioning involved with Pavlov's experiments with dogs.

http://muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/pavlov.htm
I used this site for some background information on Pavlov. It also contains some classical conditioning information.

1. Something that I would like to do research on is what other contributions were brought to the world of psychology following Ivan Pavlov and which contributions are ideas based off of operant conditioning. In the chapter it stated that Pavlov’s operant conditioning theory spark other ideas and pushed psychologists in America to expand on it or create new ideas. I would like to know which psychologists used his idea to base their ideas off of, or which psychologists wanted to expand the idea of operant conditioning

2. In the first article it explained how Ivan Pavlov’s experiment to continue work on classical conditioning. In result of Skinner continuing research on operant conditioning, teachers and parents now had a different way and different ideas of how to treat children to get them to learn better. Match the actions of the student with a positive or negative stimuli in order to condition to get them to act a certain way. Since I am going to become a teacher this applies to what I would choose to do if children were misbehaving or not wanting to try hard in my class. I would apply positive reinforcement for certain grades encouraging them to try harder and give them detention or something around those lines for negative behavior. It is weird to know that I can be using techniques of teaching that began and expanded from an experiment to do with conditioning of dogs, but it just shows how ideas bounce off of each other to get a end result.

In the second article, it explains how he expanded the ideas of behaviorism and how John B. Watson used his ideas of classical conditioning for his writings. Behaviorism, a term to show how behaviors are measured or altered, was expanded because of just studying behavior altering events to see how behavior changes is being used. Dogs had their normal actions for certain stimuli, but when altered like ringing a bell and serving a meal conditions them to believe they will get a meal every time there is a bell. He chose a field that stated that actions are always performed when a certain event occurs, but experimenting with a certain event he knew that there was a way to alter the way the brain thinks. This expanded the field, before actions were thought to always happen when an event occurs, now we know that we are able to condition actions so the thought process of events become altered.

The final article talked about how all of the research that Ivan did with classical conditioning resulted in America spreading behaviorism through the sense of conditioning. I think that this had to do with America being behind with psychology compared to other countries. It also contributes to what I have been realizing in the last few chapters, it seems that nothing contributing to America has originated in America. I keep reading about ideas coming from Germany and Russia, then they expand in America and the western world after that. The article did state that behaviorism spreading to American psychology was due to Ivan Pavlov, which then resulting in America changing the field of psychology so it was a huge contribution, but it also created a realization of how America was behind the rest of the psychology world and they were just bouncing off ideas that were spread to America and not originate in America. It showed the importance of Ivan Pavlov but also showed how America needed to catch up in psychology in order to compete with the rest of the world.

3. http://christophernesbitt.wordpress.com/2013/01/14/how-the-work-of-pavlov-influenced-education/
I chose to go with this article because it showed that classical conditioning is a way that teachers thought they could use to have their students learn better. It also went into how B. F. Skinner used some of Ivan Pavlov’s ideas for operant conditioning to do his research.
http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesofmajorthinkers/p/pavlov.htm
This article states that he contributed to making the field of behaviorism into what it is today. Also, he influenced the writings of John B. Watson and others that used classical conditioning or any other type of conditioning in the educational field.
http://www.vivo.colostate.edu/hbooks/pathphys/misc_topics/pavlov.html
I chose this article due to it also stating that the spread of behavioral psychology in the west was due to Ivan Pavlov. It also stated that he contributed to influencing other psychologists to use observational science because of how pure he was with it in all of his experiments.

1a) State what your topic is.
John B. Watson

1b) Discuss how the topic relates to the chapter.

This topic relates to the chapter because his studies were discussed throughout the chapter and he was important to the founding of behaviorism.
1c) Discuss why you are interested in it.
I was interested in him because of his studies on animal behavior, I find said subject to be incredibly intriguing so I wanted to learn more about Watson.

John B. Watson was born on January 9th, 1878 in Travelers Rest South Carolina where he grew up. Even though Watson had poor grades and got arrested twice e got into Furman University at the young age of 16 and graduated only 5 years later with his master’s degree. He then started studying psychology at the University of Chicago in 1903 and got his PH.D.

Watson said "Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior. Introspection forms no essential part of its methods, nor is the scientific value of its data dependent upon the readiness with which they lend themselves to interpretation in terms of consciousness," he believed that psychology should be a science that can be observed by behaviors.

Watsons most interesting and controversial experiment is his “little Albert” experiment. In this experiment they trained a young child to be afraid of white rats, they accomplished this by pairing the presence of the rat with loud and frightening noises. When little Albert would reach for the white rat they would administer the loud noise, and since the little boy was already afraid of loud noises he paired that noise with the rat and felt the same type of fear. It is obvious why this is so controversial; when people are used in experiments they shouldn’t be mentally or physically harmed in anyway. The thing that makes this experiment even more controversial is that Albert was not unconditioned so that he would no longer be afraid of white rats. It made me curious as to if there were any long term effects on Albert, and if his parents knew the extent of the experiment.

http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesofmajorthinkers/p/watson.htm

I chose this link because it was information dense without being too lengthy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Watson

Had a lot of information on his life.

http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/watson.htm

This had a lot of good information pertaining to his personal and academic life.

1) I did my topical blog post on the Little Albert study and John B. Watson along with a little bit of his partner Rosalie Raynor. This topic related to the chapter because it is discussing the behavioral conditioning of a young child. Like Pavlov did with the dogs and conditioning them to salivate whenever they heard a certain noise to go along with the idea that there was food placed in front of them; Watson and Raynor took it to the next level and tried it out with a young child, about the age of 9 months.

After doing some reading on this topic during our weekly blog due on Monday’s I got quite interested when I came upon this topic just because I had a few questions floating in my mind about the stability of the child at such a young age and whether or not he had any issue later in life after this study had been done. So I wanted to do some more research so I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to look into his later years as well as when the experiment was conducted.

2) John B. Watson was born on January 9th, 1878 in Travelers Rest, North Carolina. To his parents he was the fourth out of six children. He became a well-known behaviorist in his time and came along to create a study that would be well-known throughout the world of psychology. He and his partner Rosalie Raynor figured out a study that would somehow replicate the study that Pavlov conducted with conditioning dogs to salivate on command. Watson wanted to up his findings and try this so called conditioning thing with human beings but who would be unconditioned all ready? He set out to find a child to do his research on so he came up with the idea to do it on a little 9 month old which whom he had called Albert B.

Albert B was the subject that Watson used to figure out if a human could be conditioned just like a dog could be. During the study Watson found out that Albert B had no fear of certain stimuli such as a rat, burning newspaper, a monkey, or even a mask. After being shown a small rat Albert was still not scared but Watson did this again and when he did he would make a loud noise and then Albert would be afraid of this and start to cry. After Watson had done this for a while Albert was then conditioned to be afraid whenever he saw a small rat.

To this day there are still some questions whether or not this study was ethical or not. Some people believe this was not due to the results of the little boy. This little boy ended up going with his mother before Watson could end the conditioned response and get him back to “normal”. Albert B was actually known as a little boy named Douglas Merritte, who ended up dying at the age of six due to hydrocephalus, a build-up of fluid in his brain. People had the idea that Little Albert might be afraid of things that were white and furry for the rest of his life after this experiment because he never got the chance to be reconditioned to be normal.

3) http://psychology.about.com/od/classicpsychologystudies/a/little-albert-experiment.htm

I picked this website just because it had some great information on the aftermath of the study that Watson and Raynor had been conducting for over seven years.

http://eweb.furman.edu/~einstein/watson/watson1.htm

This website gave me more information about Watson and his life before the study, which I used a little bit of this for my blog.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hBfnXACsOI

This youtube video just gave me a better idea of what the study was like, even though I have read plenty of times about the study it actually showed clips from the study and how Little Albert reacted to the objects.

1a) State what your topic is.
John B. Watson

1b) Discuss how the topic relates to the chapter.
This chapter discusses the origins of behaviorism. John B Watson was discussed highly in this chapter because he is known as the founder of behaviorism. It discusses his background and his experiments he developed (mainly dealing with infants). His most famous experiment was Little Albert. Watson was interested in demonstrating emotional responses.

1c) Discuss why you are interested in it.
I am interested in learning more about his background because the textbook insisted that Watson had a “dysfunctional” family. Also I am interested in learning more about his studies in emotional development. His most famous study is Little Albert. I have discussed this study in plenty of my classes. However I am always interested in learning more about studies dealing with children.

John B. Watson was an American Psychologist who established behaviorism. He is known for his intense studies with animals and infants. Watson believed he could take a child and “create” them into whatever kind of person he desired. His most famous study is known as Little Albert. Watson’s work has had a great significance for the field of psychology.

John. B Watson was born on 1878 in Greenville, South Caroline. His parents were known as Emma and Pickens Watson. Watson’s family was very religious and struggled with poverty. Watson grew up in a dysfunctional family. His rather was known to be unpleasant and had a drinking problem. He also wasn’t faithful to his wife. In 1891 Watson’s family left his family. This affected Watson greatly, and caused him to turn into an unpleasant child. He rebelled against his mother and was involved with violence. Watson was able to turn his life around with the help of his teachers. With the help of his teacher Gordon Moore, Watson was accepted into the University of Chicago to study philosophy.

While attending the University of Chicago, Watson studied philosophy with John Dewey. However Watson did not understand his teachings and decided to go a different academic path. Watson began to show interest in comparative psychology. He also became interested in animal studies. He later decided to write about the relation between the behavior in a white rat and the growth of the nervous system. Watson’s teachers were highly impressed with his findings and his development of behaviorism. This became known as a “descriptive, objective approach to analysis of behavior”. In 1901 Watson married Mary Ickes whom he met at the University of Chicago. They had two children together. In 1903 Watson graduated with his doctorate and decided to stay to do more research. Watson did research of the relationship between the sensory input and learning. Later on Watson left to be an assistant professor at John Hopkins. In 1907 Watson was awarded top researcher in animal behavior and earned him the position of the professor of psychology.

Watson continued with his interest of developing behaviorism.In 1913 Watson delivered a lecture on behaviorism and the University of Columbia. Watson saw psychology as “the study of people’s actions and the ability to predict and control their actions”. This new idea became known as the behaviorists’ theory. During the next few years different ideas of behaviorism were studied. Watson still continued to be a professor at John Hopkins until they realized he was having an affair with a graduate student. In 1920 Watson was given a choice to end his relationship with Rosalie Rayner or resign. Watson decided to leave John Hopkins and continue his relationship with Rosalie. Watson was continually divorced and remarried Rosaline within a couple years. They also had two children together; a boy and a girl.

Watson continued his interest in behaviorism and decided he wanted to do a study with humans. He was interested in developing certain techniques to allow him to condition and control their emotions. Watson was able to identify children’s’ three emotional reactions known as fear, rage, and love. His most famous study dealing with children’s emotional reactions is known as “Little Albert”. Watson and his new wife, Rosalie construct an experiment to influence Albert’s reactions. First, Watson presented a white rat to Albert who showed no fear. Watson then presented the white rat again but created loud noises. Little Albert gave to cry and showed fear towards the rat and also other animals. After this experiment became known, other researchers wanted to know what happened with little Albert. Researchers later found out that Little Albert had passed away at the age of six due to hydrocephalus.

http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/watson.htm
I chose this website because it provided information on Watson’s background and explained his dysfunctional family. It also provided information on Watson’s interest in behaviorism

http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/John_B._Watson
I choose this website because it provided information on Watson’s childhood and relationships. This was the only website that provided information on Watson’s affair.

http://psychology.about.com/od/classicalconditioning/a/sad-tale-of-little-albert.htm
I choose this website because it provided information on Watson’s Little Albert experiment and discussed how other researchers wanted to know what happened with little Albert after the experiment.

1a) Systematic desensitization
1b) One of the predecessors of systematic desensitization was a study done by Watson and Raynor, but it was not until the 19050s that Dr. Joseph Wolpe developed it into one of the most successful counseling strategies.
1c) I work with children with emotional and behavioral disorders where I constantly experience the relationship between behavior and cognition. We can explain to a child the negative impacts of some of their behaviors and they knowingly agree, but if they lack the behavioral aspect (i.e. practicing coping strategies) then the cognitive portion is worthless and vice versa. Systematic desensitization has some cognitive components with a strong foothold in behaviorism.

Systematic desensitization is a technique to help psychological patients overcome anxieties, most often specific phobias. The gradual exposure to the item that causes them anxiety, the target, slowly makes them more comfortable with the target. Systematic desensitization is considered one of the most successful clinical techniques of ridding someone of anxiety. Unfortunately, it is one a steady decline because more modern techniques are beginning to supplant it. Any psychologist that uses this technique on a regular basis was trained prior to 1986. That does not mean that systematic desensitization will die with the last psychologist trained in 1985. It is still used by current psychologists, but is losing its popularity. It is like any Henry Winkler character post-Happy Days. Systematic desensitization is conspicuously rooted in behaviorism. In its simplest explanation systematic desensitization slowly exposes the patient to their fear so they learn that their fear poses no real harm. Somewhere is a person’s life they acquired a fear response to a certain stimuli, for instance spiders. This response becomes “adaptive” because it keeps the person safe from their fear. Systematic desensitization replaces the fear response to a more appropriate response. It is the simultaneous extinction of one response and the fostering of a new one.
There are three main steps in systematic desensitization: anxiety hierarchy, relaxation training, and desensitization sessions. Each of these steps has smaller sub-steps. When creating the anxiety hierarchy the target becomes established followed by a breakdown of the target. Back to the spider example the psychologist and patient would try to find out what about spiders induce anxiety. It could be the way they move, their hairy legs, that they could be poisonous, or all of these reasons among others. Brainstorming and analyzing the patient’s fear can be therapeutic itself, and the baby steps of systematic desensitization have been taken. Then goal setting takes place. This means the therapist and patient determine how many steps they are taking and what each step is comprised of. This is the hierarchical portion. Each step is what the patient is exposing themselves to. For our spider patient, we might start with a picture of a spider, then have a caged spider, to having her hold the spider in her hand. This is a very short example of the hierarchy. They are usually 10-30 steps and a step is not completed until the patient feels no anxiety when exposed to it.
The second step is relaxation techniques. There are many techniques that could be used in the second step of systematic desensitization, but deep muscle relaxation seems to be the most common. The patient learns to completely relax while still thinking about their hierarchy. The goal is to have a patient instinctively resort to relaxation techniques when feeling anxiety because they are exposed to their target. This is all done before their first exposure. Afterwards the patient is to complete each item on their hierarchy. For our running example the patient would be exposed to a picture of a spider. She would practice her relaxation techniques whilst being coached by her therapist. She would be exposed to this item until she was able to feel the same amount of relaxation as she does when practicing relaxation techniques without the target. This type of therapy can take weeks or months long depending on how many items the patient has and how quickly they are able to subdue their anxiety, but systematic desensitization is one of the greatest clinical contributions to come from behaviorism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_desensitization
Wikipedia, as always, had a good overview and history of systematic desensitization. While no source directly attributed the behaviorism movement to play a role in its development, it is obvious it has a major behavioral influence.

http://www.simplypsychology.org/Systematic-Desensitisation.html
This source did not have as much content as I would have liked, but I still used it because the content it did have was not covered by the other two sources. It had some fun facts and ideas the other two did not address or address in the same amount of detail.

http://www.csulb.edu/~tstevens/Desensit.htm
Easily the best source I found. It had many examples of hierarchical lists of common fears. It also was very detailed in every step of systematic desensitization. I think it was supposed to be an online self help page.

1a) State what your topic is.
Mary Cover Jones
1b) Discuss how the topic relates to the chapter.
She discovered how to desensitize people from their fears, called systematic desensitization which is now commonly used for phobias.
1c) Discuss why you are interested in it.
I think it is neat that she was the one to try and find a solution to Little Albert’s fears. She did make an important contribution because her method is still used even today.
2) Next, we 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.

Well Mary Cover Jones is considered to be the “mother of behavioral psychology”. She seemed to be a very gifted and talented women. She attended Vasser College where she received her Undergraduate degree, and took every psychology course offered except or one. So she was a very committed women. Then she heard John B. Watson and one of her friends Rosalie speak about the “Little Albert” study. She learned more about it and was very interested in it. She went on get her Master’s and Ph. D from Columbia university. There she worked on her graduate work which was to study how to unlearn fear. For this she studied a young boy Peter. She helped him to unlearn his fear of white fluffy things using “direct conditioning”. To do this she use food or something that would create a pleasurable experience. The white rabbit was the conditioned stimulus because peter had learned to fear the rabbit and the food was the unconditioned stimulus. Through exposing Peter repeatedly to the bunny with the food and with each exposure having the bunny get closer to him she was able to help Peter with his fear. At the end Peter was even able to touch the bunny without fear. This overall was her biggest contribution to the behavioral field of psychology, she later went on to be important in the developmental part of psychology.
She became a research associate then at the University of California, Berkeley where her husband worked in the Psychology Department. They did many longitudinal studies with the Oakland Growth Study. One thing they studied was the behaviors of children room 5th grade until adolescence. They also studied problem drinking and what causes that behavior. Her and her husband also created and educational TV course on child psychology. A year before she retired, she finally gained a full professorship position in the Psychology department. Then the following year she became the head of the developmental psychology part of APA, and that same year her husband past away. She continued to receive many awards after her husband’s death for her life achievements.
I believe that she should’ve gotten recognized more or her contributions, I don’t know of anything her husband did for the field of psychology, so why was he a professor of psychology and she was only and research associate. She made a major contribution and should have been rewarded for that. She’s still included in text books today, but her husband’s works are not. I just noticed that in reality she made a bigger contribution, but because she was a female, so was not rewarded or it.

http://www.feministvoices.com/mary-cover-jones/

This website gave an in-depth look at her career and life in general

http://texts.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb0h4n99rb&doc.view=frames&chunk.id=div00036&toc.depth=1&toc.id

This website just gave an overview of her accomplishments

http://blog.neverthesameriver.com/killing-3-birds/

This video clearly describes direct conditioning and the little Peter study that was conducted.

B.H.
I decided to write my topic on John Watson. This topic relates to the chapter because Watson launched the behaviorist school of psychology. It was interesting to me because I came to find out that our behavior determines our behavior. I was also interested on the studies that allowed studies on animals as well as humans.

John Watson studied the behavior of animals as a doctoral student and professor of psychology. He especially took interest in stimulus response reactions to numerous circumstances, such as rats going through a maze. He took the notion of conditioned impulses developed by Ivan Pavlov and applied it to the study of behavior. Watson first offered his philosophies at psychological assemblies between 1908 and 1912, and by 1912 was using the word "behaviorist." The next year he published an article, "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It," that presented this diverse new branch of psychology. It has often been called "the behaviorist manifesto."

"Psychology as the behaviorist views it," Watson wrote, "is a morally objective experimental branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior. Introspection forms no essential part of its methods, nor is the scientific value of its data dependent on the readiness with which they lend themselves to interpretation in terms of consciousness."

These thoughts may not have been shockingly original, but they were stated with astonishing skill. At a time when science and anything methodical seemed to win mindless approval, Watson's replacement of intangibles like consciousness and intellectual conditions with objectivity and hard data fascinated many. He was selected president of the American Psychological Association in 1915.

In 1916, he began observing infant humans. Until then he had drawn comparisons between creatures and individuals, but hadn't tested with them. World War I interrupted his work but by 1918 he was able to continue. His most well-known experiment was piloted in the winter of 1919 and 1920 with a baby known as Albert B. Watson and his assistant gave Albert a white lab rat, he was fearless and tried to touch the rat. He was scared, however, when they clinked metal with a hammer just behind his head, and he bawled. A few months later, when Albert was 11 months old, they again gave him the rat, but this time just as he touched it, the metal clang signaled behind his head, which made him cry. This was repeated numerous times over a few weeks. After the tests, just the sight of the rat made Albert cry and attempt to crawl away. In fact, any furry item like a stuffed toy, a fur coat, even a Santa Claus mask made Albert cry and be frightened. The experiment positively showed the behaviorist idea of association in an advanced order animal. Such a test would not be allowable with present moral standards, especially since the researchers never "deconditioned" Albert.

Behaviorism came to be commonly accepted among psychologists and the public, becoming the dominant view from the 1920s through the 1960s. It was an especially robust rebuttal to the opinions pressed by the eugenics effort, which claimed that inheritance was the main strength influencing a person's potential and behavior. Behaviorism, with its potential of the option of change, and even improvement, fit in good with the American Dream. It was egalitarian and its values worked for everybody. Watson’s own somewhat risky form of behaviorism has been polished over the years. In the 1950s and 1960s, B.F. Skinner shadowed behaviorism with the vision of enlightening the human state, for example, and others since have applied behaviorism as a apparatus in an collection of psychological methods.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Watson
This website provided me with a biographical insight on Watson’s life, ideas, and experiments.

http://psychology.about.com/od/behavioralpsychology/f/behaviorism.htm
This website provided me with information on what behaviorism really is.

http://psychology.about.com/od/classicpsychologystudies/a/little-albert-experiment.htm
This website provided me with information about Watson’s most famous work with “Little Albert”

1a) My topic from this week is focusing on John B. Watson and his contributions to the behaviorist thinking in psychology.

1b) The topic relates to the chapter for several reasons. First, most of chapter 10 in the book was on Watson in some form or another. Second, the topic of behaviorism has ties in many of the topics that we discuss in this class.

1c) I am interested in the topic and more specifically the Behaviorist Manifesto that was written by Watson. I guess I am interested in this topic because I feel that so much of our social interactions involve concepts from behaviorism. The more I learn about positive reinforcement, learned behavior etc, the more I see how it plays out in our everyday lives. I also believe that most people do not consciously realize how much they are controlled by such ideas.

2) Watson’s growing up years did not seem to be easy. He was born into a poor family. His mother promoted a religious experience for young Watson but he did not show much interest in religion. To top things off, his father was a wondering soul and left the family. This greatly influenced how Watson viewed and interacted with those around him. He seemed to have a temper and was one to use his anger in negative ways. It even got to the point where he had several run ins with the law. Despite these shortcomings, he managed to get life turned around and pursued an education to the point of getting his Ph.D. in psychology.

When Watson wrote the Behaviorist Manifesto, he was offering a completely radical change to the popular thought in psychology of his day. It is not that his behaviorist line of thinking wasn’t already out there, however, the way he wrote about it finally gave a detailed approach to how someone who thinks on behaviorist terms views the world around them.
Instead of making observations and drawing conclusions about a the ideas that a subject may be thinking about from these observations, behaviorism sought to understand the learning and memory process. Observing these objectives included behavioral data which often involved the manipulation of a stimulus’ condition.

Watson first started his behaviorist approach by conducting studies on animals. He used the idea of conditioned reflexes that had been developed by Pavlov and applied them to his unique area of study, behavior. Later, he began to carry-over his ideas of behaviorism from the study of animals to human subjects. As seen in his study with Little Albert, the ethical standards were far different from what they are today. He would have had to conduct his study in a far different manner had he been conducting his research in today’s world of psychology. However, there is something to not having all the regulations that we do today. He was able to conduct his study however he chose and ended up with a finding that has been hailed for decades.
I thought it was interesting how quickly this view gained popularity in the public’s eye. It quickly took over the idea of eugenics that we have previously talked about in this class. One website talked about how the ideas of behaviorism fit really well with the American Dream idea that was being pushed at the time. I just see this era of psychology as being easily swayed by whatever new science came out at the time. I am not sure to what level people were willing to go to seek out answers for themselves. I think that is one benefit of today’s society. People are not quite as ready to accept something as truth just because it has been shown to influence behavior or what have you on a limited scale. People are quick to look for alternate explanations before they accept information even if it has come from scientific research.

http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/watson.htm

This website provided a lot of background information on Watson especially as it related to his early life and his interactions with his family.

http://suite101.com/a/the-behaviorist-manifesto-a185568

This website really helped me understand what Watson’s mindset was behind the whole behaviorism idea. They gave good references to how his concepts were applied. They also do a good job of showing where behaviorism stands in today’s modern psychology.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/dh13wa.html

This website gave me insight into some of the factors influenced Watson to promote his ideas and also why they were accepted to the level that they were. It gave a good historical approach to the rise of behaviorism in the modern area of psychology.

1a) State what your topic is.
John B. Watson
1b) Discuss how the topic relates to the chapter.
Watson is one of the biggest names in behaviorism and his work was talked about in the chapter.
1c) Discuss why you are interested in it.
I wanted to learn more about Watson and his works in the field of behaviorism. He was an interesting person and I always enjoy learning about the men and women who have been able to make any leap big or small for the field of psychology.
2)
Watson lived from 1878 till 1958 and he was an American psychologist who established the psychological school of behaviorism. Watsons most famous research was done with “little Albert” a child. However he performed a majority of his works in the areas of education and behaviors of animals.
Watson’s school history was interesting to me because a man who we all see as an outstanding psychologist who actually a deviant student and a deviant young man. Watson was even arrested a few times and involved in fights here and there. Even who this and his poor track record he was able to attend school graduate and go to college then obtain his masters all by the age of 21, kind of odd to think because I am 22 and don’t even have my undergrad. Watson studied under Dewey at the University of Chicago where he meets some people who would have major influence on his works to come. Watson went on to work with the idea behaviorism which he hoped would compel psychology into a “real” science. Watson worked with the learning style of animal for his dissertation as he went on to obtain his PhD, after he was granted a professor job at John Hopkins and went to be the psychology department head.
Watson preformed the Little Albert study that has today been criticized by members of review boards but was able to show us the emotions are able to be conditioned. Watson was able to associate a white rabbit with a loud freighting noise, the young Albert become scared just like the work Pavlov did with conditioning his dogs with the bell. Albert was forever scared by this was a long term look at the results were never able to be viewed because he passed away. Watson was able to in his time set a new level for psychology and opened new doors for future students and researchers to study to cover new grounds.

http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesofmajorthinkers/p/watson.htm
This was a great site to learn about Watson’s childhood and background.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Watson
Wiki was a great place to learn more insight about Watson’s studies like the Little Albert study.
http://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/01/little-albert.aspx
This site talked about what happen to Little Albert and the story around the study with him.

1a) State what your topic is.
I chose to do further research on John Watson
1b) Discuss how the topic relates to the chapter.
About half of this chapter was about him and his contributions to Psychology. This chapter also focused on his experiment with Little Albert.
1c) Discuss why you are interested in it.
I am interested in him because I think the Little Albert sparks a controversy and I think that is interesting.
John Watson was born in 1878. His family life was quite sad. His mother was religious but his father was different and had numerous affairs and left in 1891. John ended up marrying a girl he met at the University of Chicago, Mary Ikes. John and Mary had 2 children, who they named John and Mary as well. John was like his father and had numerous affairs and Mary and him eventually got divorced. Watson had 2 more children, James and William, with Rosalie Rayner, a graduate student of his. During his lifetime, he focused most of his study of behaviorism on his children. After Rosalie died, his relationship with his children got worse than it already was and he became a loner. He lived on a farm in Connecticut up to his death in 1958.
Watson first attended Furman university where he got his M.A. He then became a principle of a private school and after that he went to the University of Chicago. Chicago was the center for American Psychology at the time. At Chicago, Watson took Philosophy with John Dewey, Addison Moore, etc. and he worked with James Angell in his lab. He also spent Sundays in the lab with Mead observing monkeys and rats. Watson stayed in Chicago for a while. He remained an assistant and then became a professor. Watson had numerous experiments focusing on behaviorism. The most famous experiment by Watson is his Little Albert experiment.
Watson took Little Albert, a baby, and used classical conditioning on him. Watson wanted to prove that environment was more powerful than genetics. A baby was the subject for the experiment and Watson gave him the name, Little Albert. Watson thinks we arrive in the world a blank state and we learn everything, even fear. He places a burning newspaper in front of Baby Albert and Baby Albert showed no fear. Albert was also not afraid when he saw a white rat but he did not like the rat when there was a loud clanging noise when he saw the rat. Albert eventually learns to fear not only rats, but all furry things even without the loud noise. According to Watson, the Little Albert experiment was a success because it proves that fears are learned and not inherited. Watson called his theory behaviorism. He urged parents to take control of their child’s upbringing by shaping their environment. He also urged parents to think of their home as a scientific laboratory.
3) At the end of your post, please include working URLs for the three websites. For each URL you have listed indicate hy you chose the site and the extent to which it contributed to your post.

http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/watson.htm
This website was helpful because it gave great background information and explained a little bit about why may have grown up to be the way he was.

http://www.brynmawr.edu/psychology/rwozniak/watson.htm
This website was useful because it helped me learn about Watson’s schooling

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xt0ucxOrPQE
This source was the best because it talked about what made John Watson as famous he became. It was great to hear somebody talking about the Little Albert study and not just reading about it. I found it much easier to follow what the speaker was saying and after learning about Little Albert numerous times in the past, I think this is the first time that I have learned this much about it.

For this week’s topical blog I decided that I wanted to research John Watson and his experiment of Little Albert. This directly relates to this week’s chapter because it was talked about, even though I feel like it was talked about in a minimal manner, hence why I’m wanting to research more in depth about it. His research seems so interesting, but it just wasn’t explained in detail in this chapter.
John Watson is known for the well-known experiment of Little Albert and for being involved in the explanation of emotional development. Watson thought that there were 3 basic emotions that humans posed. Love, rage, and fear are the 3 basic emotions and he wanted to prove his theory of this by doing the experiment of “Little Albert.” Watson thought that these emotions could be conditioned, especially in children. In his experiment he made a correlation with a loud noise and a white furry object to see if he could condition “Little Albert” to fear white furry objects when a loud noise was present. This worked because Albert became afraid when a white furry object was present. By proving this experiment to be factual, Watson brought emotional development to a whole new meaning. He realized that children can be conditioned in regards to the 3 basic emotions. In addition to this famous experiment and great finding, Watson soon incorporated this theory in daily advertisements. This theory is even today in our societies advertisements. Although this study is in just about every psychology book and it widely known to many, this experiment was deemed not ethical. This study would never take place like it did back in the day but that’s because it was a different time and day. It was very interesting to me that “Little Albert” actually died at the age of 6. People always wondered if the boy grew up to be afraid of white furry objects because of the conditioned response, but they never were able to get that information because of his young death.

Websites:
1. http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/watson.htm This sources talked about John Watson and background on his career. It also went in detail about his theory and conclusions. It also gave me a timeline of his life and that was pretty interesting in itself although not really beneficial to this blog.
2. http://psychology.about.com/od/classicpsychologystudies/a/little-albert-experiment.htm I really liked this website because it talked all about Little Albert and the findings. It also dug deeper about what actually happened to “Little Albert” and criticisms about the experiment in general.
3. http://www.lifecircles-inc.com/Learningtheories/behaviorism/Watson.html This was a good source because it talked about John Watson and what he was and what he did in regards to behaviorism. It talked about his theory of the 3 basic emotions and his findings.

A.S

1a) State what your topic is.
John B. Watson
1b) Discuss how the topic relates to the chapter.
Chapter 10 discusses the beginning of behaviorism and how it impacted psychology and people. Psychologists began to start studying animals. They wanted to understand the development of their behavior. Many psychologists became interested in more objective measures of psychological phenomena because many were becoming critical of introspection. This is the time when Pavlov experimented classical conditioning with his dog and this is also the time when John B. Watson experimented on "Little Albert"
1c) Discuss why you are interested in it.
I am interested in Watson and his research on "Little Albert" because of how outrageous the experiment was. The long-term effects on "Little Albert" were not positive and I wonder about what psychologists would do now. Since psychologists were allowed to do many experiments that are not allowed now, I wonder if psychologists now will be hindered by morale.

2) Next, we would like you to take the information you read or viewed related to your topic, integrate/synthesize it.
During the 20th century, psychologists had concluded that the human mind could not be adequately studied through introspective methods and were advocating a switch to the study of the mind through evidence of behavior in controlled experiments. Watson is one of the most controversial psychologists during this period and it was mainly because of his research on "Little Albert". Watson wanted to study the stimulus-response model of classical conditioning and how it applied to the prediction and control of human behavior. His belief was that people had three fundamental emotions; fear, rage and love. The Little Albert experiments began when the baby was just nine-months-old. He tested the "fear" emotion by presenting an animal and produced loud noises at the same time. Watson used a dog, rabbit, white rate, and a monkey and Albert didn't show many signs of fear when just around the animals alone. His unconditioned stimulus was a loud noise he mad and the conditioned stimulus would be the sight of the animal causing fear. His new finding suggested that not only can human behavior be predicted, but it can also be controlled and modified. Watson eventually had to stop the experiments and eventually lost his professorship because of an affair, but his research impacted behaviorism in a whole other level. His methods today would be considered unethical and even cruel, but during this time they were seen as a logical and natural progression.

http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Watson/emotion.htm
This article was Watson and his colleagues published journal over the research on "Little Albert". It shows the different time periods and everything they did during the experiment.

http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/watson.htm
This website talked about Watson's life and some of his theories about behaviorism.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/637615/John-B-Watson
This website also gave a brief insight on Watson's life and schooling.

1a) John B. Watson

1b) He relates to the chapter because he was a big figure in the behaviorist movement

1c) I wanted to learn more about his life and the little Albert study, as well as other studies he did.

2) John B. Watson had a very interesting life, good and bad, in the beginning his life was what most would call a bad interesting. He had a father who had many extra-marital affairs with many different women, and then his dad left when he was only 13. What the affects were of this up brining was much of the same for his adult life, he married Mary Ikes, whom he met at the University of Chicago as an undergrad, and they had 2 children during their marriage. He, just like his father had many affairs with different women, and they eventually got a divorce. John then married a woman who he had an affair with by the name of Rosalie Rayner, they also had 2 kids of their own. Watson was a very successful psychologist throughout the years, but it was not at all handed to him, he had to work very hard to turn around the damage his father did to him by leaving. He was at one point a very violent kid, but slowly figured out how to turn his interests into school work and started to help out his teacher, which in turn got him to the for mentioned University of Chicago where he first had an interest in comparative psychology.

In Watson’s most famous experiment, the “little Albert” experiment he and his second wife Rosalie, conditioned a young boy to be frightened of a white rat. At first when Little Albert saw the rat he was not scared, it was like this for most of the “scary” objects they presented. After a while they decided to try and condition the response to make Little Albert scared of the rat, they did this by having a very loud noise coupled with the sight of the rat. After a while the child would become very scared at the sight of the rat, it didn’t stop there, little Albert actually would be terrified of any white furry thing that was presented to him. Even though this experiment showed how behavior could be conditioned in humans, not just limited to other animals, there was and is still some big controversy surrounding the experiments. The most relevant controversy is the ethical standards, or lack thereof, that were a part of this, and this experiment would not be allowed in today’s ethical realm. Another controversy is that there was no way for either Watson or Rayner to objectively rate the actions, everything they were observing was falling victim to subjectivity.

Watson then went into the business world, in particular advertising. He wanted to change the way the world looked at how to approach the basics on how to advertise. He wanted to tap into 3 certain types of emotions, fear, rage, and love. An interesting experiment that Watson did while being in advertising was to discover brand loyalty, he did this by having many different kinds of cigarettes in the box behind a cardboard screen. The subjects would smoke the various kinds and he found that they never change their expressions, and this is because they couldn’t tell the difference between the brands. They could only tell the differences in the brands when seeing the logo and then that would sway their decisions on what is better. This was one of the first instances in researching the issue of brand loyalty, and this is still studied today. Watson’s imprint is all over advertising still to this day, he was the first to have celebrities be the model for the product and have attractive women do the same. He looked at every aspect of the human psyche that would help him sell more product, and it worked and still works to this day.

http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/watson.htm
This was a good website showing what he went through when he was younger, and how he got his interest in psychology.

http://psychology.about.com/od/classicpsychologystudies/a/little-albert-experiment.htm
This was a good website showing what the Little Albert experiment was and what the controversy around it was.

http://www.siop.org/tip/backissues/tipapril00/7diclemente.aspx
This website showed what he did in the advertising industry and his lasting impact.

a) This week I am doing my topical blog on Ivan Pavlov.

b) This chapter was on the origins of behaviorism. It talked a lot about Pavlov’s life and work, especially concerning classical conditioning and his influence on the field of psychology.

c) We hear about Pavlov in so many of our courses so looking more into his life seemed very interesting to me. He had such a great influence within the field and I always love digging deeper and reading about all of their unique lives.

2) Ivan Pavlov was born on September 26 of 1849 in Ryazan, Russia. He was the oldest of eleven children. His father, Peter, was a village priest and his mother, Varvara was a homemaker.
As a kid Pavlov was always willing to perform household duties and watch his siblings. He loved being outside swimming, riding his bike and gardening and spend all summer doing such activities. When he was seven he was injured after falling from a high wall onto the pavement and did not return to school until the age of eleven. Even from a young age he showed great intelligence and was said to have an unusual energy that he called, “the instinct for research.”Pavlov attended and graduated from the Ryazan Church School.
Pavlov later left his religious career behind and devoted himself to the world of science, enrolling at the University of Saint Petersburg in 1870 to take classes in natural science. His first research project was on the physiologic of the nerves of the pancreas which won him an impressive university award. During his time at Saint Petersburg he met Seraphima Karchevskaya who he married in 1881. The first decade of their marriage was marked by financial problems. His wife’s first pregnancy resulted in miscarriage. After conceiving again the two finally had a boy, Mirchik but he had a sudden death during his childhood. The couple went on to have four more children.
He then proceeded into the Academy of Medical Surgery but left when his teacher was replaced by another. Pavlov was a lab assistant at the physiological department of the Veterinary Institute where he investigated the circulatory system. This position led to a famous Russian clinician asking him to work in the lab as the Clinic’s chief.
He graduated from the Medical Military Academy with a gold medal for his research work. From here Pavlov got a fellowship and position as director of the physiological lab at the clinic of the famous Russian clinician S.P. Botkin. His collaboration at the clinic produced evidence of a basic pattern in the regulation of reflexes in the activity of circulatory organs. After his doctorate he traveled to Germany and studied with Carl Ludwig.
Eventually Pavlov applied for the chair of physiology at the University of St. Petersburg got rejected. However during 1890 he was granted the role of professor of pharmacology at the Military Medical Academy. He held this position for five years. He was then invited to the Institute of Experimental Medicine the following year in order to organize and direct the Department of Physiology. For the following 45 years it became one of the most important centers of physiological research. At the Institute of Experimental Medicine he investigated the gastric functions of dogs and later children. Some children even underwent surgical procedures like the dogs in order for collection of saliva.
During 1921 Pavlov began holding lab meetings which were known as “wednesday meetings”. At the meetings he would speak bluntly on several issues and discuss his views on psychology. They lasted up until his death in 1936.
During his final moments he asked one of his students to sit beside his bed and record the circumstances of his dying. Pavlov wanted to create unique evidence of the subjective experiences of this terminal phase of his life. He died of double pnumenonia at the age of 86.
Today Pavlov is known as the Russian physiologist known for his work with classical conditioning. Some of his major influences include D.I. Pisarev and I.M. Sechenov, the father of Russian physiology. Throughout his life he made several astounding discoveries and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in physiology in 1901 and the following four years, winning one in 1904. His former home is now the Pavlov Memorial Museum. One of his dogs is even preserved at the Pavlov Museum in Ryazan. His research regarding conditional reflexes not only influenced the world of science for pop culture as well as it was a major theme in the novel Brave New World.

3)

1.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Pavlov

This website had quite a bit of information. It included a table of contents, a summary to start off the website, a section discussing his early life and schooling, career, a section on marriage and his family, specific research done by Pavlov and ended with his legacy.

2.http://www.biography.com/people/ivan-petrovich-pavlov-9435332#synopsis

This website didn’t have a ton of information but it was all very informative. Like the previous site this one started off with a brief synopsis. It as well included a section on his early life and education, groundbreaking discoveries, awards and achievements and his later years. It ended with a little section on some personal matters.

3.http://faculty.frostburg.edu/mbradley/psyography/ivanpavlov.html

This site had a good amount of information. It was a biography written by Ed Peterson. It discussed a lot about Pavlov’s early life, personal life, positions he held, research he worked on, contributions he made and his impact on the field.

The topic I am writing about is over Pavlov and a little biography over him. I writing about him because I like to learn about the background of people that books mentions because it gives you more of an idea of who they are and where they came from and what influenced them. He relates to this chapter because he had experiments that dealt with research over behaviorism.
Pavlov was born in 1849 in Russia. He is mostly known for his work with classical conditioning. Pavlov had 11 younger siblings, with 6 of them dying at a young age. His mom was a stay at home mom and his dad was a priest. Pavlov mostly stayed at home to help his mom with chores and do other housework. He did not attend formal school until he was 11 years old because he injured himself pretty badly falling off of a high wall onto the pavement when he was only 7 years old. Eventually though he went on to school and attended Ryanzan Church school, then went to theological seminary. He left the seminary before graduating and went to study physics, math, and natural science courses at University of St. Petersburg. He want an award from the university his senior year for doing extensive research over the nerves of the pancreas. He then went on to the academy of medical surgery. After many more research assistant and job opportunities he succeeded very well with his work and had a doctor these over “The centrifugal nerves of the heart.”
Most people know of Pavlov because of his work with classical condition. Pavlov worked with a dog and had a bell as a neutral stimulus. Every time he gave the dog its food the dog would drool and Pavlov would ring a bell at the same time. Eventually all he would have to do is ring the bell and the dog would drool because the dog associated the ringing of the bell with its food. Pavlov “conditioned” the dogs stimuli to respond to something in other words. Because of this experiment classical conditioning is used in a lot of things today. I think it is used for dog training. I have a dog and every I would call her to the door I would give her a treat, that way she would come to the door when I want her to. I don’t have to give her a treat anymore but she still comes when I call. Before I gave her treats she would never come to me. Instead she would run the opposite way and be naughty!
Pavlov worked with dogs because he started out studying the digestive process in dogs. That’s when he made the connection of the reflexes with the nervous system. He knew that without h any saliva the dogs stomach wouldn’t know to start digesting. That’s when he started to look into the classical conditioning. I think it is pretty cool how he came about this study. I always knew about the classical conditioning experiment with the dog but I never knew about all of Pavlov’s previous work. This is why I like to learn about them a little more.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Pavlov
I used this site because it had a lot of information on his early life and schooling.
http://www.simplypsychology.org/pavlov.html
I used this site because it talked about the classical conditioning experiment.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/bhpavl.html
I chose this site because it explained what led Pavlov to his research on classical conditioning.

1a) John B. Watson’s work with animal behavior and psychology.
1b)How does it relate to the chapter? Most of chapter 10 was either Watson or Pavlov-centric, but besides the obvious I think his work with animals is worth mentioning. Most of his research in animal behavior took place early in Watson’s career and I feel that this was an important step in the progression of his interests from animal to comparative to eventually human behavior alone.
1c)Why interested? As I mentioned in my Monday post, I already have a bit of background knowledge about Pavlov and his research, so I was interested in how Watson’s work with animal behavior and psychology compared. I found his section in the book to be a lot more in-depth biography than research-focused, so I set out on this assignment to give attention to his research. I was interested specifically in his work with animals because it is an area of psychology that is not often explored in research today and I haven’t learned a lot about it from my previous classes.
2) Synthesis: John B. Watson is widely regarded as one of the most influential psychologists in recent history and considered the father of the school of thought of behaviorism. His early work when he was attending the University of Chicago for his Ph.D. primarily centered on the study of the behavior and biology of animals. Watson believed that the study of psychology was important in all living things ranging from humans to animals and even plants, and to this effect that every psychology lab should include a collection of animals. While he is probably best known for his work with rats, Watson also worked with and studied a variety of animals like monkeys and wild birds. One of the most influential of his comparative studies involved the study of two different breeds of terns; this study involved the comparison of the bird’s mating, migratory, eating, and nesting behaviors. Another of Watson’s studies that garnered him a reputation as a substantial contributor in the field of comparative psychology was the research he did on a group of monkeys and their behavior in a lab setting as opposed to when outside in a tropical climate. He was at the time a firm advocate of the concept of instincts and believed that every vertebrate held instincts of some kind, however simple these vertebrates might seem.

While Watson was a vocal supporter of the importance of animal behavior and comparative psychology within the discipline of psychology as a whole, many during his time held a different belief. Students of psychology at the time were actually reluctant to do thesis on subjects in the area for fear that they would be labeled as comparative psychologists. While some psychologists at the time were more accepting of comparative psychology, there was a general consensus at if the animal behavior was not being studied to be eventually applied to humans that it was of no real use to the field. Watson helped lift this negative stigma in a way with his “Behaviorist Manifesto” and in the subsequent decades of the 20’s, 30’s, and 40’s the study of animal behavior in terms of psychology became a more legitimized field. Overall, Watson was dedicated to the discipline of psychology and believed that it could benefit greatly from the systematic study of animal processes. It is my opinion that he was correct because his work that stemmed from the research he did with animals and in comparative psychology was some of the most influential of the entire discipline.

http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Watson/Animals/
I used this source because it is an actual article that Watson wrote about animal psychology and I found it helpful in understanding his research and perspective.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Watson
This source provided a lot of background information on Watson and about his work with behavior.
http://rmac-mx.org/john-b-watsons-early-work-and-comparative-psychology/
The article that I found to be most interesting of the three; this source held a lot of information about Watson’s early work and his thoughts on the disciplines of animal behavior and animal psychology.

1a) State what your topic is.
Experimental Neurosis

1b) Discuss how the topic relates to the chapter.
It is a phenomenon that occurred during Pavlov's conditioning research.

1c) Discuss why you are interested in it.
It is a topic that was left out when I had originally learned about Pavlov in AP Psychology (equivalent to college intro to psych)

2)
While neurosis as a mental disorder typically involves high amounts of stress and anxiety attacks, it is not too far from experimental neurosis. Habituation is the gradual impediment of conditioned responses to a condition stimulus due to excessive repetition. The technique of "release from habituation" is incorporated as a form of discrimination in hopes of renewing and revamping the conditioned responses. Experimental neurosis occurs usually in the event where an attempt to release from habituation fails, rendering the subject incapable of discriminating between different stimuli, and with consistent failure to the stimuli, the subject then experiences possible stress and frantic anxiety.

Experimental neurosis falls into the category of learned helplessness as subjects learn to behave in a helpless way or give up in response to the stimuli. Pavlov had first come across this phenomenon in a discrimination experiment, believing that he can produce experimental neurosis by creating overly-complex discriminations that was over the dog's capacity to produce. Pavlov had the dog differentiate between circles and ovals, and as the dog began to perform the conditioned response of touching the circles with its nose (and no response for ovals), Pavlov increased the roundness of the oval, making it gradually harder to distinguish. A few revisions later, the dog had been unable to differentiate between the ovals and circles and had become frustrated and helpless, and began exhibiting symptoms of neurosis (in dog form) by becoming restless and uncontrollable in an experimental setting, however relatively normal at ease and not being used as a test subject.

3) At the end of your post, please include working URLs for the three websites. For each URL you have listed indicate why you chose the site and the extent to which it contributed to your post.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QTA8qcKEiE
Here is a recreation of a Pavlonian dog experiment where the experimenters have the dog discriminate different frequencies.

http://www.heretical.com/pavlov/chap-50.html
Another account of a Pavlonian dog experiment, this time using different conditioned stimuli

http://www.intropsych.com/ch05_conditioning/release_from_habituation.html
Provides information about habituation, discrimination, and experimental neurosis with the original Pavlov experiment as an example.

My topic is behaviorisms effect on advertising. This week’s chapter discussed the beginnings of behaviorism in psychology and the people who played important parts in its success. One of these important people was John B. Watson, who worked in advertising for the latter half of his career. I have always had bitter feelings toward advertising, marketing, and several other ways psychology is used in the business world. Whenever I have an opportunity to study these subjects closer I find myself interested. It is just as important to understand things that you do not agree with. Perhaps I will come to terms with what I learn or at very least be able to take a more informed choice.
Advertising was around long before psychology was consciously used to aid it. Yet, psychology has had an undeniable impact on the advertising world sense the two have cooperated. An early example of psychology, especially behaviorism, blossoming in this business setting is John B. Watson’s turn to advertising. Watson is credited heavily with the behaviorisms rise in psychology. In addition to writing the behaviorist manifesto he also created the classic Little Albert study, among other significant behaviorist studies. More interesting though is his almost instant rise to success in the business world. His psychological principles quickly earned merit in an advertisement setting. He emphasized that consumers based their decisions on three emotions; rage, love, and fear. While his exact model is not replicated today, they have been expanded into more current working models. Currently there are many models with numerous techniques aimed at consumers emotions, much like Watson’s approach. Perhaps a more significant contribution was his emphasis on supporting advertising strategies with research, which also is were behaviorism is rooted. The pragmatic nature of behaviorism is a considerable factor for it’s Segway into big business. While it took a few decades for business to fully appreciate Watson’s example, psychology took advertising by storm in the 50’s and 60’s. Soon there wasn’t a single marketing team that wasn’t driven by psychological research. While the zeitgeist suggests that this was the direction advertising was headed, it certainly wasn’t slowed by behaviorism’s contributions.
Cites
http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2011/02/15/the-psychology-of-advertising/
This article explained how psychology entered the advertising scene. It gave a good contribution to John Watson’s participation.
http://www.apa.org/monitor/oct02/advertising.aspx
This article gave thorough description of psychology’s influence on advertising throughout the 20th century.
http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/psychology-marketers-revealing-principles-human-behavior
This article gave a thorough example of a current marketing model. It was rich with techniques that displayed emotion driven pricinples.

1. jsd
a. This week I chose to write about John. B Watson and Little Albert.
b. This topic relates to the chapter, because this experiment had a huge impact on the concept of behaviorism and how people can basically be trained by manipulating their environment, which is the basis of this chapter.
c. I found this interesting because I wanted to know more about where this theory of Watson’s and conditioned/unconditioned responses came from and how was so confident to pursue such a study, especially with infants, which I would assume to be a very risky territory to experiment with.
d. One of the most famous and controversial experiments in the behaviorist world and conducted by one who coined the name of the father of behaviorism has yet to be proved faulty: The Little Albert Experiment. In the early 1900’s, a psychologist by the name of John B. Watson, conducted an experiment that would spark the beginning of the nature nurture debate. Watson and an assistant by the name of Rosalie Rayner sought out to prove their theory that when startled, children reacted with fear, and through that could learn to be afraid of something paired with the loud noise. Through classical conditioning (an idea introduced by Ivan Pavlov) anything within human behavior could be explained. Before Watson, it was believed that only animals could be influenced by classical conditioning. By pairing the appearance of a white rate and a loud noise, Watson believed he could condition a 9-month-old infant to fear that rat. After multiple pairings, it was proved that they were able to create a phobia. This was a major breakthrough in the world of behaviorism, because the idea of nurture nature came into huge debate, and upon whether a human being learns to be who they are or is it a predestined genetic make up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Albert_experiment
This website provided the information I needed on the basic idea of the little albert experiment and it’s impact on behaviorism.
http://www.simplypsychology.org/classical-conditioning.html
This website came me the basic idea of classical conditioning from where it originated to where it went in the minds of more recent psychologists.

http://psychology.about.com/od/classicpsychologystudies/a/little-albert-experiment.htm
This website gave me more detail and insight to the little albert experiment.

This week I am going to write about John B. Watson. However, since this chapter of the textbook was about only him and Ivan Pavlov, I am going to talk about Watson’s “Little Albert” experiment and the associated systematic desensitization.
One of my favorite experiments that Watson conducted, along with his assistant Rosalie Raynor, was the Little Albert experiment. This is one of his most commonly discussed experiments because of both its result and Watson’s methodology. Before this experiment, Pavlov had done his using dogs over different types of conditioning. Pavlov was interested in if an unconditioned stimulus (US), like looking at an image of a circle, could produce the same unconditioned response (UR), salivating, as being presented with the conditioned stimulus (CS), food. Through a series of tests, Pavlov was able to confirm his hypothesis. Watson wanted to see how this concept could also be attributed to things other than a dog’s salivary glands, specifically emotional reactions in humans. In this experiment, Watson took a young child around the age of nine months, whom for the purpose of the experiment was known as Little Albert, and attempted to condition him to be fearful of new things. Before the experiment tests were given to determine what exactly Little Albert was afraid of and what he was not. Watson exposed him to various types of things with no fearful reaction: “a white rat, a rabbit, a monkey, masks and burning newspapers.” It was determined that what Albert was most afraid of was loud noises. Little Albert was then shown the white rat a second time, to which he continued to show no fear. When Albert began to reach for the rat, Watson mad a loud noise behind his head by hitting a metal pipe with a hammer. The natural reaction for Albert was to cry, which he did. When he calmed, and over the period of several days, they repeated the noise after Little Albert was exposed to the white rat. Eventually, Little Albert began to cry almost immediately after being exposed to the white rat. Albert had learned through classical conditioning to be fearful of the white rat and, through extension, other various white furry animals.
Despite the informative nature of this experiment, it also received much criticism. One of the first problems with this experiment was that Watson and Raynor never developed a means to measure Little Albert’s fearful responses. They used solely their opinioned observation. These could have turned out to be very subjective interpretations of Little Albert’s fear. The other main criticism is in the ethical standards of this experiment. Not long after Little Albert had been conditioned to fear white furry animals, his mother pulled him from any further experimentation. This meant that he had been removed from the experiment before Watson and colleagues had a chance to desensitize him of this new fear. There has been much speculation about how whether or not Little Albert would have grown out of this fear or if he would have perpetually been afraid of furry white objects and animals. Unfortunately, the child and his mother moved cities and their whereabouts were not proven discovered. We never had a chance to learn about the lasting effect of this experimentation, we only have speculation.
Watson is also known for his use of a concept called systematic desensitization. Watson observed Mary Cover Jones when she discovered that the presentation of a fearful stimulus coupled with something pleasurable would help to decrease the overall level of fear. Systematic desensitization is a type of therapy that is used to help rid a person of their phobias. The way that this type of therapy works is to categorize the phobia into a hierarchy. Let’s continue with an example of snakes: one might find a photo of a snake less scary than being in the same room as a snake in a tank; and the contained snake would be less scary than a snake that is free to wonder the room; and the wondering snake might be less scary than touching the snake. Now the idea is that if one is presented with a picture of a snake while also experiencing something pleasurable, specifically muscle relaxation, then the image will be less frightening. This is a gradual process and, according to Watson, the longer the process takes the more successful it will be when it is over.

http://psychology.about.com/od/classicpsychologystudies/a/little-albert-experiment.htm
I chose to use this source because it was all about Watson’s Little Albert experiment.
http://www.simplypsychology.org/classical-conditioning.html
This website is about classical conditioning and talks about its relation to Watson.
http://overshadows.wordpress.com/2013/06/03/systematic-desensitization-a-brief-synopsis/
This site was about systematic desensitization and has a section on how Watson’s use of it.

1a) State what your topic is.
Mary Cover Jones and the Little Peter Study
1b) Discuss how the topic relates to the chapter.
She was briefly discussed when the book was covering John Watson’s Little Albert study. She looked as the reversal of fear rather than the installment of it.
1c) Discuss why you are interested in it.
I didn’t like how Little Albert was left with his fear of small animals, so I wanted to see how Jones would reverse that fear if she had the chance.

Mary Cover Jones was born in 1897 in Pennsylvania. In 1915, she began attending Vassar College where she took a bunch of psychology courses. Soon after graduating from Vassar in 1919, she attended a seminar where Watson and Rayner, a friend of Cover Jones, talked about their Little Albert study. At this point, Mary Cover Jones knew that she wanted to pursue a career in the field of psychology.
Soon, she began graduate courses at Columbia University, and graduated with her masters in psychology in 1920. In 1923, Cover Jones was made an Associate in Psychological Research at the Institute of Educational Research at Columbia University Teachers’ College. During this time, Mary Cover Jones conducted her Little Peter study under the supervision of John Watson. During this study, she used direct conditioning to desensitize Peter. She did this by having him eat while the rabbit was sitting across the table from him. As time went on, she moved the white rabbit closer and closer to him. Eventually, the positive feelings Peter acquired from eating overrode the negative feelings he felt from being around the rabbit, desensitizing his feelings of fear.
She would go on to become an Associate at the University of California at Berkeley where her husband worked. There, the would conduct pediatric longitudinal studies. Later, she would become a professor at the institution, and eventually the head of the psychology department.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Cover_Jones
This website gave a decent overview of her life and career.

http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Jones/intro.htm
This source provided information about her life and the Little Peter study.

http://www.feministvoices.com/mary-cover-jones/
This site explained her life, career, and what she did after she conducted the Peter study.

My topic is the Little Albert case study conducted by John Watson and Rosalie Rayner.

My topic relates to the chapter because Watson believed you could condition emotional responses like Pavlov conditioned dogs to salivate at bells which is classical conditioning and a major theme in this chapter.

I am interested in this topic because I find classical conditioning to be very interesting and I am impressed with how easy it is to use in the real world, and I also wanted to know more about the Little Albert experiment and see what happened to him after the study.

John Watson and Rosalie Rayner believed that fear was innate and that emotional responses could be conditioned in humans. Watson thought that if Pavlov could condition animals then he could condition humans. They wanted to use infants who are the least conditioned humans to see if they could condition fear and create phobias. They chose a little boy by the name of Albert who was only nine months old at the time of the experiment. Watson first showed Albert an array of different stimuli from a white rat, rabbit, dog, monkey, and even burning newspaper. They found that he was unafraid of any of these stimuli. They then chose to use a metal bar and a hammer and banged them together which made Albert cry he was afraid of the loud noise. Soon after they brought back out the original stimuli and this time when Albert went to touch the rat he heard a loud bang which frightened him very much. In this experiment according to classical conditioning the noise was an unconditioned stimulus and Albert’s response of fear was the unconditioned response. They paired the unconditioned stimulus to the rat which was a neutral stimulus and created the unconditioned response of fear. After repeatedly doing this Albert was shown the rat again now being the conditioned stimulus without any loud sound following and Albert immediately began to cry which was now known as the conditioned response. After these series of experiments Albert generalized this response of fear for the rat to more furry objects even after a 17 days delay in testing he was still afraid. Unfortunately Albert was not able to begin the process of desensitization before leaving the hospital leaving many to wonder what ever happened to him. According to the APA website it was found that little Albert was actually Douglas Merritte whose mother was a wet-nurse at the hospital where Watson conducted the studies and paid her $1 for Albert’s participation. Albert did not live for very long after the experiment and in fact it was found he was not a very healthy infant but in fact not healthy having hydrocephalus since birth and that Watson knew about this and proceeded anyway. Douglas died at the age of six due to the large amount of fluid in his brain from hydrocephalus.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Albert_experiment

I chose this website because it provided a short narrative on the Albert study and explained what the UCS, UCR, CS, and CR were.

http://psychology.about.com/od/classicpsychologystudies/a/little-albert-experiment.htm

I chose this website because it provided more information on the Little Albert study as well as what condition Albert had since birth.

http://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/01/little-albert.aspx

I chose this website because it provided information on the whereabouts of little Albert know actually as Douglas Merritte and how he died.

1a) Little Albert
1b) This chapter is about the history of studies in behavioral psychology. If you are familiar with psychology in any way, you have most likely heard of the study with little Albert and the findings of this study in regards to behavioral psychology.
1c) I am interested in this topic because I had not previously known what had happened to little Albert after this study. Watson did not uncondition him after the study took place, so I was interested to see if he had carried this fear with him the rest of his life. I was also interested in learning more about Albert before the experiment. Why was he chosen for this? How was this made ethical to do?

2) John Watson and his graduate assistant, Rosalie Raynor, conducted an experiment with classical conditioning with Little Albert in 1920. Watson would later be let go from the university because of an apparent affair with this grad student, but nonetheless, this is experiment is one of the most widely known ones in the history of psychology. I was previously taught that Little Albert was an orphan and this is why they were able to use him this study, but in reality his mother most likely worked at the same hospital that this study was taking place and this is how he became involved in the experiment. I had no idea till I began researching this topic that for awhile, the identity of Little Albert was a huge mystery. Hall P. Beck and his team sorted through historical documents, consulted facial recognition experts, and met with relatives of who they theorized to be Albert. This took seven years before Beck and his team of scientists discovered who they thought to be Little Albert. This boy’s name was Douglas Merritte. The Mother was paid $1 for her child to partake in this experiment. They discovered that this child had actually died at the age of 6 from a condition called hydrocephalus. Hydrocephalus can be summarized as a build-up of fluid in his brain. This means the scientists spent more time trying to discover his identity than the child actually lived. What is interesting is Douglas would have had this condition since birth, which means that Watson must have lied about the healthy condition of the boy when conducting his experiments. Upon watching the footage, scientists came to spectulate whether Albert was a healthy boy at the time or not. If Douglas was truly “Little Albert”, his records show that he also suffered from iatrogenic streptococcal meningitis/ventriculitis and retinal and optic nerve atrophy in addition to hydrocephalus. However, it is possible that Little Albert could be another person. Another woman working at the hospital had a child the same day as Little Albert, and the same age as the boy they previously thought was little Albert. His name was William Barger, but commonly went by his middle name, “Albert”.

3) http://psychology.about.com/od/classicpsychologystudies/a/little-albert-experiment.htm
(This website offered a nice summary of the experiment in general. What was particularly helpful was the section labeled, “What ever happened to little albert?”
http://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/01/little-albert.aspx
(I had never heard of Watson being dismissed for messing around with his grad student, but this website confirms that fact. It also gave more indepth information about the journey for searching for little albert)
http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2012/03/10/history-of-psychology-a-new-twist-in-the-case-of-little-albert/
(more information is given here about the overall health of Douglas, who could potentially have been little albert. I like this website because it pulls in several other sources about the matter.)

John B. Watson was born on January 9, 1878 and he died on September 25, 1958. He grew up in South Carolina and entered Furman University at the young age of 16. He graduated 5 years later with a Master's degree in psychology before obtaining his Ph.D from the University of Chicago in 1903. Five years later, Watson ended up at John Hopkin's University where he taught psychology.According to Watson, psychology should be the science of observable behavior, which became apparent in his seminal lecture at Columbia University in 1913. Watson's most famous ( and also controversial) experiment is known as the Little Albert Experiment. During this experiment Watson and one of his graduate students conditions a child to be afraid of small animals. They did this by accompanying a loud, scary noise with the presence of a small rat. Soon the fear of the noise became projected onto the rat, and finally the boy became afraid of all small, white, furry animals. The ethics of this experiment were criticized due to the fact that they never deconditioned the boy. After the experiment, Watson remained at John Hopkins until 1920 until he was asked by the University to resign due to an affair with a student whom he later ended up marrying. Watson spend the remainder of his life as a bit of a recluse and even ended up burning many of his works before his death. Watson had set the stage for behaviorism. His conditioning and behavior modification are still widely used today.

http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesofmajorthinkers/p/watson.htm
Good overview of Watson's life.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Watson
More detail of his experiments

http://psychology.about.com/od/classicpsychologystudies/a/little-albert-experiment.htm
THis helped to explain the Little Albert Experiment more indepth.

1) I choose to do more research on Watson and Morgan and their work with emotional development. I wanted to do more research on Watsons lesser known experiment of emotional development because I feel that this work that is often overlooked and the focus is always on classical conditioning with Watson’s Little Albert experiment. Watson was covered in pretty great detail within the chapter, but it was the same details that are covered in every other psychology class out there.
2) Three aspects of the topic you want to talk about for this assignment are Watson’s thoughts leading to the theory of emotional development, a more in-depth look at the theory of emotional development, and Watson’s overall contributions to the theory.
3) After doing my research, the information all stated that Watson strongly believed that developmental issues were crucial for behaviorism. He said that unhealthy adult personalities were directly linked to habits that were developed in infancy. Watson began to think more about early childhood and how it was key to successful future health and well-being. Believing that child development was indispensable when it comes to behavioral social technology, Watson began focusing his research only on children by 1917. He became a very popular child-rearing expert and was very interested in distinguishing unlearned from learned behaviors within infants and toddlers. In fact, Watson stated that if he had a dozens of healthy infants he was allowed to raise how he saw fit, he could pick anyone of them at random and train them to become any desired type of specialist regardless of the child’s talents, tendencies, abilities, or any other variables involved.
After working more with infants, Watson became more and more interested in learned and unlearned behaviors and the impact they had over children’s development. After conducting studies, that would only be viewed as unethical today, he said that there are three forms of basic emotional response. These responses can be elicited at birth due to the stimuli and develop into more complex emotions as the child develops. The response are fear, rage, and love. With the study, Watson stated that children’s fears and habits are learned and that is what leads to them having unhealthy adult lives. If they are able to be desensitized to harmless stimuli from infancy, they would be a much more resilient adult. He also talked about how positive emotions, like love, is not instinctive initially and are shaped by conditioning. Watson said that these visceral habits show that babies do not have the emotion of love for their mother from the day they are born, but that emotion is shaped through experiences.
After all of his research was completed, Watson stated that knowing the basic emotional response would help better prepare people to known how they will naturally respond to terrible situations and find the best ways to cope with them. In the information I found, Watson stated the he considered the ultimate aim of psychology to be the adjustment of individual needs to created a better society and fulfill the needs of that society. He really stressed that each individual’s health needs to be addressed in order to benefit society and that, as a whole, people need to be more aware of the underlying development involved in unlearned and learned behaviors. Through understanding the severity in having a healthy early development, more people would be able to avoid negative and unhealthy times in their adult lives, according to Watson.
4) URLs:
http://psychology.jrank.org/pages/649/John-Broadus-Watson.html
This website gave me the information on Watson’s initial thought process that led him to work with children and develop the theory of emotional development.
http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Watson/emotion.htm
The website above gave me the information involving the theory and greater detail on Watson’s findings.
http://www.simplypsychology.org/behaviorism.html
This final website provided the information about Watsons contributions to the field through the study on emotional development.
5) Terminology Used: Watson, Morgan, emotional development, classical conditioning, Little Albert, behaviorism, unlearned behaviors, learned behaviors, visceral habits

1) the topic that i chose to do my blog on this week is Ivan Pavlov. i decided to do my blog on him because in the section about him in the book his research was very interesting to me. he made advances in multiple different aspects of psychology such as conditioning.
2/3) pavlov was born on September 14, 1849 in Ryazan. his father was a village priest there so naturally he was first educated at the church school there. after completing his schooling there he was educated at the theological seminary school there. inspired by the progressive ideas of Russian literary critic D. I. Pisarev and the father of Russian physiology I. M. Sechenov he quit his religious career and decided to devote his life to science. in 1870 he enrolled in the physics and mathematics faculty to take a course in natural science. in 1875 he completed his course with a great record and received his degree at that time. however due to his interest in physiology he decided to continue his education and went on to the academy of medical surgery to take a third course there. in 1879 he completed his education there and earned his degree. he again earned a gold medal for his accomplishments and because of this and him being the Director of the Physiological Laboratory at the clinic of the famous Russian clinician S. P. Botkin he was able to continue his research. in 1890 he was invited to organize and direct the Department of Physiology at the Institute of Experimental Medicine. under his 45 years of direction this institution became one of the most important centers of physiological research. In 1890 he was also appointed Professor of Pharmacology at the Military Medical Academy and five years after he was appointed to the then vacant Chair of Physiology, which he held till 1925.
one of the things that he is most known for is his experiment on conditioned reflexes. this came after he did all of his studies about the digestive process. in his reflex regulation activity study of the digestive glands he paid special attention to the concept of psychic secretion which was caused by food stimuli at a distance from the animal. by using this method developed by his colleague D. D. Glinskii he was able to carry out experiments on the nature of these glands. due to these experiments pavlov stumbled upon the concept of a conditioned reflex. due to this his theory of classical conditioning was eventually born. he determined that he could pair a neutral stimulus with an excitatory one. eventually he could get the neutral stimulus to get the original reaction of an unlearned reflex. in classical conditioning the terminology is as follows. there is a unconditioned stimulus which is an event that causes an response to occur.
the unconditioned response is the response that happens due to the unconditioned stimulus. there was also the conditioned stimulus which would be something that happened that automatically triggered a response. that response was known as the conditioned response. his famous experiment on this was him ringing a bell and then feeding dogs. eventually the ringing of the bell automatically made the dogs salivate because they associated the bell with being fed. eventually he removed the food after the bell and the dogs would still salivate. after doing so without the food for so long the dogs no longer had the response of salivating. the elimination of the conditioned response which is what he did is known as extinction. although this is true he waited a few days and rang the bell again and the dogs began to salivated. this came to be known as spontaneous recovery.

4)http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1904/pavlov-bio.html
on this site i found a bunch of information of pavlov's life and a little bit about his career.

http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/pavlov.htm
on this site i found info on some of his research and info on classical conditioning that he did.

http://www.simplypsychology.org/classical-conditioning.html
on this site i found info on the concept of classical conditioning.

1) Once you have completed your search and explorations, I would like you to say what your topic is, how exactly it fits into the chapter we have covered this week, and why you are interested in it.
My topic is Watson’s advertising outside of his psychology career. This is ties into our chapter because Watson used what he knew about behaviorism, to account for things that people looked for when wanting to buy products. This is different than just doing experiments for psychology , it is also about the application, because of this, this topic builds not only on this chapter with behaviorism, but also on the past couple chapters that have dealt with applied psychology.
2) What are three aspects of the topic you want to talk about for this assignment?
For this I would like to Relate his advertising career to what he accomplished in psychology career, next I would like to dig into what his career looked like and zoom in on what some of the advertisements and products he worked with, finally I would like to talk about what aspects of his psychology are still used in advertising today. This last point really being able to see how it is important to the history of psychology but also helping us to see how it is relevant in today’s society.
3) Next, I would like you to take the information you found from the various sources and integrate/synthesize them into the three aspects of the topic, and then write about the topic.
John B. Watson was a man who had put himself in a “pickle” after being academically exiled in psychology moved to the field of advertising. His goal was to try his hand in applying what he had learned and researched as a behaviorist to how people buy products. How does this relate to behaviorism? Or for that matter any of the research Watson has done before? The whole goal of behaviorism is to control human behavior, in fact during his time in advertising he published works about how to have control over human emotions. This is goal is similar to the goal of advertising, we advertise so that we can get people to buy products. Watson was able to do just that through his work in advertising. His advertising career was very successful, he even eventually became vice president of the company. Based on my research I was able to find that he did work for Ponds, Maxwell, Johnson & Johnson, Pebeco, and more. In one instance I learned that he used sex, as many ads do today, to sell a simple product, toothpaste! Likewise in our textbook they give the example of baby powder and using a fear tactic, young parents were almost scared into buying the product by believing that if they didn’t, there child could be at risk of not being clean. We see Watson’s application of behavioralism in advertising even today, according to The psychology of Advertising they claim that all advertising appeals to one of usually three emotions. Fear, love, and rage. There is the example of toothpaste, Watson could give this example to help us see that by not practicing dental hygiene could be bad for our health (fear). Now and very relevant to our society toothpaste is often sold as it will make your teeth whiter which will make you look more attractive (love). After Watson there were many more that took this same approach, Walter Scott another famous advertiser went by the theory that all advertising has to play on appeal, this is exactly what Watson did than and what people do now. Let’s think about cigarette ads, what emotions were they trying to control there? These Ads were after Watson’s career but held the same principles. Thinking to a recent example in our media anti-smoking advertisements use Watson’s theory too, they usually involve a scare portrayal of what will happen to you if you continue to smoke, this is controlling for the emotion of fear.
4) Finally, at the end of your post, please include working URLs for the three websites. For each URL you have listed indicate why you chose the site and the extent to which it contributed to your post
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Watson#Advertising
I used this source to not only find more information on his advertising career but to also find other sources with additional information on Watson. This source was used to see what companies he did do advertising for.
http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2011/02/15/the-psychology-of-advertising/
I used this source to find out how Watson’s practices are still being used in psychology today. This source also was able to help me see how behaviorism applied to advertising. I was also able to see through this source who came after Watson and used principles similar to his.
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/watson.htm
I used this source to find information on how his advertising career and his psychology were related. I found interesting information about his publications as well.

This week I chose to do research on Ivan Pavlov. He fits into this chapter because he was one of the two main behavioral psychologists that was discussed in the chapter. I’ve always thought that Pavlov’s experiments were interesting. When I first heard about his experiments with the dogs, I was surprised that a stimulus could cause a completely unrelated response if you pair them together enough times. I would like to talk about Pavlov’s biography, his most famous experiment on dogs, and some of his other work that is less well known.

Pavlov was born in 1849 in Russia. His father was a priest and Pavlov was expected to be a priest as well. Pavlov started theological seminary but quickly decided that it wasn’t for him. He studied chemistry and physiology and earned a science degree. He completed his graduate dissertation on the nerves of the heart. After graduation, Pavlov studied under a cardiovascular physiologist in Germany as well as a gastrointestinal physiologist in Poland. After this, Pavlov spent a couple years studying the regulation of blood pressure. Around 1890, Pavlov took a position to be in charge of the Department of Physiology at the Institute of Experimental Medicine. He did some research on digestion in dogs at this time, which led him to form one of his most famous theories about conditioned reflexes. Pavlov was a Nobel Prize winner in physiology for his work on the digestive system in dogs. He was also elected Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, giver an honorary doctorate at Cambridge University, and was awarded the Order of the Legion of Honor. Later in life, Pavlov also studied psychosis.

Pavlov’s research in classical conditioning is probably his most famous work in the field of psychology. While Pavlov was doing his research on digestion in dogs, he noticed that his dogs would salivate more when they were getting food. He also noticed that some of them would begin to salivate before even knowing that food was coming. Pavlov thought this was interesting, so he began pairing the food with other stimuli, such as the ringing of a bell. After the food and the bell were presented together several times, he tried just ringing the bell in front of the dogs. They found that the dogs salivated with only the presence of the bell and not the food. In this experiment, the food is an unconditioned stimulus and the salivation of the dog is an unconditioned response. The bell is a neutral stimulus that the dog learns to associate with food. Then the bell becomes the conditioned stimulus which elicits the conditioned response: dog salivation. There are many examples of how classical conditioning works in everyday life. One of the best examples is taste aversion. Taste aversion can occur in both humans and in animals. This occurs when a certain food makes you nauseous, such as with food poisoning. Let’s say that tacos from a restraint give you food poisoning. The nausea causing bacteria are the unconditioned stimulus and the nausea is the unconditioned response. The tacos are the neutral stimulus. Since you think that the tacos are what made you feel bad, the tacos become the conditioned stimulus and the nausea becomes the conditioned response. Sometimes even the smell of the food can cause nausea in someone that has had food poisoning.

One of the most interesting things that Pavlov did (in my opinion) was find a way to put a dog’s intestines in a pouch outside of their body so that he could properly study them. He did this while keeping all of the nerves attached properly. This was done while studying with the gastrointestinal physiologist in Poland. The majority of Pavlov’s research outside of psychology involved the physiology of digestion. Pavlov also studied blood pressure in dogs. He did this by inserting a catheter into the artery of a dog. He introduced various emotional and medicinal stimuli to the dog and measured the effect that the stimuli had on the blood pressure. He helped create new advancements in medicine. His research also showed that the digestive system is mostly controlled by the nervous system, which was the basis for modern findings in digestion. Pavlov also had theories about reflexes; the principle of determinism, the principle of analysis and synthesis, and the principle of structure. These theories helped build up other scientific theories in medicine. Some of Pavlov’s experiments on reflexes show that reflexes start in the cerebral cortex. He also did some research that showed some of the basic laws of brain structure and activity.

http://www.biography.com/people/ivan-petrovich-pavlov-9435332#later-years
This website had information on Pavlov’s biography as well as his research.
http://www.learning-theories.com/classical-conditioning-pavlov.html
This website had information on Pavlov’s classical conditioning experiment.
http://psychology.about.com/od/behavioralpsychology/a/classcond.htm
More information about classical conditioning.
http://faculty.frostburg.edu/mbradley/psyography/ivanpavlov.html
This website had information about Pavlov’s other areas of research.

Ivan Pavlov, behavioral psychology, stimulus, response, Institute of Experimental Medicine, conditioned reflexes, Nobel Prize, psychosis, digestion, classical conditioning, salivation, bell, unconditioned stimulus, unconditioned response, neutral stimulus, conditioned stimulus, conditioned response, taste aversion, reflexes, brain structure, brain activity, blood pressure

1) Once you have completed your search and explorations, I would like you to say what your topic is, how exactly it fits into the chapter we have covered this week, and why you are interested in it.
My topic for this week is John Watson. Watson fits into the chapter because he is considered the father of behaviorism. I am interested in Watson because of the different experiments that he performed. The one experiment that I am most interested in is his little Albert experiment. I thought it was interesting how he performed the study and the results that he found. I also found it interesting that when others tried to replicate the study they were unable to get the same results. When Watson was alive people didn’t see the promise in behaviorism. Watson never gave up though, and kept promoting it and that is why he is considered the father of behaviorism.
2) What are three aspects of the topic you want to talk about for this assignment?
Three aspects that I will talk about are his life, the little albert study, and his importance to the history of psychology.
3) Next, I would like you to take the information you found from the various sources and integrate/synthesize them into the three aspects of the topic, and then write about the topic.
John B. Watson was born in 1878 in South Carolina. His mother was very religious and pushed him to do a career in religion. Watson’s father was a heavy drinker and left the family in 1891. Watson took his father leaving hard and began to rebel against his mother. Watson did do well in school early but he knew that he needed to get a degree if he wanted to get out of poverty. He found his way to Furman University in South Carolina. He entered Furman University when he was 16 and he left with his masters at age 21. After he finished at Furman University he was accepted at the University of Chicago. It was at the University of Chicago that he found his love for comparative psychology. In 1903 he received his doctorate and would later become a professor of psychology at Johns Hopkins University. In 1913 Watson gave his famous lecture where he introduced people to the idea of behaviorism. His lecture was titled “Psychology as the Behaviorist views it”. In this lecture he argued against using introspection to be the way scientists learned about behaviors. He thought that introspection could be flawed and when people would get different results when doing the same experiment he was proven right. He thought psychology was the study of people’s actions and the ability to predict those actions. He thought that by observation we could see a behavior and we could predict when the behavior would occur. He thought that he could use some of Pavlov’s research and he could apply it to humans. That is when he came up with his idea for the little Albert study. Later in his career he would be kicked out of Johns Hopkins and he would start a career in advertising. He was very successful in this field and was one of the first to apply psychological principles to advertising. Watson died in 1958.
Watson’s most famous experiment was his little Albert experiment. This experiment was using some principles that Pavlov developed. This was an experiment using classical conditioning. Watson found the baby albert at a hospital and he had developed normally so he thought he would be a good candidate for the experiment. So Watson would present baby Albert with objects that he initially liked. The objects were fire, a monkey, a dog, a bunny, and a white rat. Watson noticed that baby Albert seemed to like the white rat the most. Now what Watson would do it he would present the white rat and whenever baby Albert would reach for the rat he would hit a medal pole that was behind Albert. The medal pole would surprise Albert and he would come to learn not to like the rat. Watson found that after a few trials of hitting the pole when Albert reached for the rat, Albert became fearful of the rat. Watson also wanted to see if the fear would generalize and he brought back the dog, the bunny, and a fur coat. Albert was afraid of all these objects because they had something in common with the white rat that produced a fear response. Watson also tried to see if Albert was fearful of him and he was. Watson also tested to see if the response would happen in another room and he found that it only happened when the animals were paired with the loud noises. Watson wanted to see if the fear would last over time so he let baby Albert go home for a month then he had his mom bring him back for more tests. He found that when the objects were paired with the loud noises that Albert would show signs of fear. Watson found in this experiment that he could make a child fear objects by conditioning the child.
Watson was an important person in psychology’s history because he was an advocate for behaviorism. He wasn’t necessarily the first to study behaviorism or to come up with the idea, but he was one that promoted it and made people more aware of the concept. What made him important was his lecture that he gave on behaviorism. This brought behaviorism to the front of psychology and showed the flaws with the system that was being used. Behaviorism never took off while Watson was still alive but he still played a major role in behaviorism becoming a major part of psychology.

4) Finally, at the end of your post, please include working URLs for the three websites. For each URL you have listed indicate why you chose the site and the extent to which it contributed to your post.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Watson this site helped with Watsons life and with the little Albert experiment.
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/watson.htm This site helped with Watsons life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hBfnXACsOI this site helped with the little Albert experiment.
- Watson, behaviorism, Pavlov, classical conditioning, baby Albert, generalization, University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins University, Furman University.

1) My topic I chose to discuss was Pavlov. This fits in with the chapter because Pavlov was talked about a lot since this chapter revolved around behaviorism and Pavlov was very well known for this. I found this interesting because it is one of the main things you learn about in psychology when you first take it and is something that is repeated throughout almost every psychology class I have ever taken. I wanted to see if there was more about it that I had not learned in previous classes and do more research to see what I could find.

2) Three aspects I want to talk about for this assignment are Pavlov's work with physiology, his work with classical conditioning, and a few interesting facts about Pavlov.

3) Pavlov's first research began with physiology. One of the things Pavlov looked at was the pancreas as well as a lot with nerves. Pavlov won a medal for his work on pancreatic nerves and then went on to look at the nerves of the heart and the nervous system - this was for his doctorate thesis. Later on, Pavlov decided to work with digestion. His work used dogs and he isolated different parts of the digestive system so he was able to monitor each part. He used different fluids throughout the digestive system and monitored the quantities. He was well known for how well and precise this research was done and actually helped pave the way for surgical techniques that were used in the future. He was able to create a small model of a stomach using parts of an actual stomach. He did this so that he could monitor the stomach and accurately analyze the fluids. Overall, his findings were able to show that the nervous system played a big role in digestion and the regulation of it, which is something that is still very important in physiology today. While doing his work with digestion, Pavlov also became interested in salivary glands and their responses to food in dogs. He noticed that dogs seemed to salivate when they saw food and he wanted to find out more about this and conduct research. This led to the research that seems to be most talked about for Pavlov and the idea of classical conditioning. Pavlov believed that there were some things that dogs did not have to be taught, such as the salivation that occurs when dogs see food. Pavlov put food in front of a dog and noticed it began to salivate. He wanted to manipulate this and see if he could make the dog salivate from something else, by associating it with the food. Pavlov was able to pair a bell with the food and get the dog to salivate. He then took away the food and found that the dog still salivated just from hearing the bell. The main aspects in this research were (un)conditioned stimulus/response, generalization, differentiation, and extinction. Pavlov described the unconditioned stimulus as something that was presented to the dog that caused an unconditioned response, a response that was not taught to the dog, it just happened naturally. In this case, the unconditioned stimulus was the food and the unconditioned response was to salivate. The conditioned stimulus would be the stimulus that is paired with the unconditioned stimulus until it becomes something that causes the conditioned response, the response that was learned. In this case the conditioned stimulus was the bell and the conditioned response was the salivating due to the bell. Another thing Pavlov discussed was extinction, this occurred when the conditioned stimulus did not come with the unconditioned stimulus. This would lead the dog to forget what it had learned and the behavior from the conditioned stimulus would go away. Similarly, generalization was when a a conditioned stimulus was similar to a new stimulus so it still caused the same response. If Pavlov used a bell the first time and then something that sounded very similar to a bell, the dog would not know the different and it would still salivate. Differentiation, on the other hand, occurs when the new stimulus is different from the conditioned stimulus, such as using a drum rather than a bell. This would cause the dog to not salivate because it is not close enough to the original conditioned stimulus to cause the response. Although Pavlov is someone discussed in psychology quite frequently, originally his ideas were not even stemmed in psychology. Pavlov created these theories and experiments based off physiology and cared much more about that aspect than transferring the information to a psychological realm. Some of the things I found to be interesting about Pavlov's research was that some of the information was actually not translated as well as it should have been. Many people believe that Pavlov did not use a bell when he did these experiments (the Russian was translated incorrectly when brought to the U.S.) and that Pavlov was just an interpretation that was changed somewhat when brought to the US. It was also stated that Pavlov did not say "conditioned" in his research but he said conditional and that this was also changed when brought to the U.S.

4) http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1904/pavlov-bio.html - This website focused the most on Pavlov's research prior to working with the dogs and his most famous experiments. It also gave some background information on him and physiology.

http://www.nobelprize.org/educational/medicine/pavlov/readmore.html - This website talked mainly about Pavlov's experiments with salivation and UCR/UCS and about his nobel prize.

http://www.famousscientists.org/ivan-pavlov/ - This website gave some additional information about Pavlov and just added onto the previous websites.

1. John B. Watson was a man who enjoyed being around animals and observing them. He studied the behavior of these animals and was said to often prefer the company of animals rather than humans. Watson was an American Psychologist and did a lot to contribute to the study of behavior. In past chapters psychology was mainly studied in different ways, but in this chapter we take a behaviorists' point of view. Like Pavlov, Watson encouraged the study of behavior rather than insight and cognitive approaches to study psychology and why people do what they do. Watson is a very interesting man, and of course, one of the first studies I learned about in psychology was the “Little Albert” study that he performed. This study is very famous, and was an eye opener to a lot of people about conditioning in general. When the study first came out people were amazed by his results, and myself too, find it very interesting how conditioning is done and why it works.

2. Watson has done so much to contribute to psychology, but I will only discuss a few topics that caught my eye. First, his work with Harvey Carr was interesting to note. They had made mazes for rats to go through and observed how and when the rats finished the maze. Then, I will discuss his classical conditioning experiment with “Little Albert.” This is a very important research experiment that is very popular even today when studying psychology. Lastly, I will talk about Watson's life after he got fired from Johns Hopkins school. This is also a crucial time period for him because he got a job in advertising and tried to spread and popularize the idea of behaviorism.

3. After reading chapter ten about the origins of behaviorism, I was amazed at just how much Watson had done, and how much he believed that behaviorism was the prime way to study people. But, he didn't study just people. He also studied the behavior of animals. A study he had done with Harvey Carr studied the behavior of rats trying to get through a maze. They found that yes, rats could figure out how to finish the maze, but their thought processes were somewhat slower than other animals and humans. But, if the same maze was shortened, the rats could not seem to figure how to get through. As noted, Watson said the rats would often run into the walls with the shortened maze. This study is important because it proves that the rats did not just go off of instinct, they might have when trying to get through the second maze since they had already gone through the first one, but it proved that the rats had to perform trial and error learning. They also had to use their own thought processes to complete it. They might have been slow, but it did the job for them.

We all know about the “Little Albert” study and how he was conditioned to be afraid of a rat when he heard a certain tone. Not only was Albert afraid of the rat once conditioned, but he was also afraid of Watson. I think that the child knew that Watson was doing this to him and didn't like it very much. After Albert was conditioned to be afraid of the rat when hearing a tone, he was afraid of everything that was presented to him when he heard that same tone. I think that this type of conditioning occurs all the time in our lives. For example, a soldier who fought in the war is used to hearing loud noises like guns firing, but once he is home safe and hears loud noises like a lawn mower, he will associate it with guns firing. PTSD I believe can be associated with conditioning. If something upsets us, we can always associate it with something completely different because we have been conditioned ti be afraid of that certain something.

Watson believed in behaviorism. He thought that taking the behaviorist approach was a very important way to study people and animals. We can learn a lot about a person by their behavior. After he got fired from Johns Hopkins school, he got a new job in advertising. This allowed him to get the word out that we should be studying behavior. He did write something that was controversial though. An article he had written about how a parent should treat their children stirred up problems with parents out there. He believed parents should be colder to their children, to shake their hand instead of hugging them, and talking to them like they were an adult rather than a child. I do not agree with his thoughts about this specific way of parenting. Children only get to be children for so much of their lives, so I believe they should be treated like it until they grow older.

4.www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2741879/pdf/behavan00062-0074.pdf
This article was very helpful in explaining all of Watson's work. I not only used it to find more information about his rat maze experiment, but it also discusses all of his other work that is often not mentioned as much as his famous work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hBfnXACsOI
This video I used because it brought the “Little Albert” experiment to life. It is one thing reading about the experiment, but to actually see how it was done gave me a lot of perspective.

psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2011/02/15/the-psychology-of-advertising/
This was a very interesting an helpful article. It helped me in understanding why psychologists make good advertisers because they are good at convincing, and Watson himself did a very fine job at getting his word out about behaviorism.

5. John B. Watson, classical conditioning, behaviorism, Ivan Pavlov

This week, one of the main topics relating to behaviorism is conditioning. The contributions of Ivan Pavlov and John B. Watson were discussed, and I was particularly interested in how behaviorism defines learning. The text focused heavily on classical conditioning, but I wanted to look further into the subject and see if I could find any other forms of learning studied by behaviorists. That is, to build on what I had already read so that I could get a better understanding of the different ways in which humans learn. Additionally, I wanted to see how these applied to our everyday life. As I did research, I discovered that there are three main behaviorist theories as to how learning occurs. The first was discussed in this chapter and is classical conditioning. The second is something called operant conditioning which I would like to define and give examples of. Finally, I found much information about observational learning, what it is, the research surrounding the topic, and where we can find it in our lives.

Our text did a great job of describing the theory of classical conditioning. That is, that when combining a certain conditioned stimulus (CS) with an unconditioned stimulus (US) known to produce an unconditioned response (UR) the CS comes to be associated with the US and therefore begins to produce the same conditioned response (CR) even when the US isn’t present. This is exhibited extremely well in Pavlov’s experiment with the dogs. Naturally, dogs start to salivate (UR) when shown food (US). However, Pavlov found that he was also able to train the dogs to salivate (CR) at the sound of a bell (CS) by first pairing this bell with the food. Thus, the dogs figured out that when the bell was rung, food was soon to follow. This is what we call classical conditioning and it can be found in many aspects of our society which we may never have considered before. One of the most prominent areas featuring classical conditioning is marketing. When a company wants to get an individual to buy a product, they formulate an ad which causes the consumer to associate good feelings with their product. This is quite crafty in my opinion. I can think of many things which may produce these good feelings including sports, music, and even sex. Thus, when you see your favorite sports player (US) which naturally puts you in a state of awe (UR) chowing down on a juicy hamburger (CS) from a national chain restaurant you come to associate those good feelings with the hamburger (CR). So, the next time you pass by that restaurant you will remember this and be drawn to purchase one of those massive pieces of meat. Music has also been found to be a popular way to condition a certain response. A commercial for a waterpark featuring upbeat, fun music will cause you to associate the waterpark with a fun atmosphere and make you more likely to visit. Naturally, it is possible to find these sorts of classical conditioning examples in all kinds of advertisements. Companies are using basic psychological principles to get your money!

After exploring the topic of classical conditioning and its examples further, I ran into another form of learning called operant conditioning. This type of conditioning involves the use of consequences after a behavior is exhibited. These consequences can be positive or negative and increase or decrease a behavior. When it comes to administering these consequences, one must decide on what schedule they will operate. The consequence can be delivered continuously (after each desired/undesired response) or intermittently. If done intermittently, the reinforcement is either given on an interval (time) or ratio (number of responses) and that interval or ration can either be fixed or varied. There are various advantages and disadvantages to each schedule, but it has been proven that a variable ratio schedule, that is giving the reinforcement after a number of responses which varies over time, is most effective in producing a desired response. Here we can see that the stimulus and response are in a sense reversed. In classical conditioning, a CS is associated with an US to produce a response; the stimulus comes before the response. Here, the stimulus comes after the response so as to reinforce the behavior in one way or another. Again, examples of operant conditioning are quite prevalent in society. One of the best examples is the use of this type of conditioning in education. Teachers have a desire to promote certain behaviors and discourage others which they often do through operant conditioning. For example, there may be a point system indicating where a student stands in terms of their behavior. If a student behaves in a negative manner, they may experience a response cost in which they lose points (a positive stimulus, points, is taken away). However, if they are behaving better, the student may then receive positive reinforcement by being allowed to add points to their total. Students with a certain number of points by the end of the week may then be able to pick out a prize. Many parents also use systems such as these to maintain order in their household. Operant conditioning is certainly a viable method for learning to behave or not to behave in certain manners.

The final type of learning I discovered while researching was developed and explained by Albert Bandura and is known as observational learning or modeling. Bandura believed that people could control their behavior through self-regulation. Through self-observation humans keep track of their behaviors, they then judge these behaviors against individual or societal standards, and reward or punish themselves accordingly. What we see others doing fits into this model as we may judge our behaviors against what other are or are not doing. So, Bandura theorized that another form of learning which influence behavior is observational. We observe another performing an action an seek to imitate this. In order to model someone else’s behavior, Bandura said one must go through four steps. First, the person must pay attention to the actions of others and then retain the model of these behaviors in their head through the use of images or other descriptions. The third step is reproduction, modeling the behavior they have seen and remember. The reproduction improves the more times one models it. Finally, Bandura said that the imitation of a behavior must be motivated by some specific outcome or a person will not be willing to imitate it. Bandura investigated his model by using the famous Bobo doll. He had children watch adults interacting with the doll, calling it names, punching it, etc. The adult was then rewarded, punished, or neither. He found that when the children were then left alone with the doll, the ones who had witnessed an adult being aggressive with the doll and then rewarded imitated that behavior. Those who had witnessed an adult receiving punishment were not as likely to model their behavior. I was rather interested in this type of learning as we so often discuss the importance of role models in the lives of children. We are well aware that children are extremely impressionable and will model behavior that they see demonstrated. Thus, it has practical application when we are teaching our children or peers. We must remember that there could be someone watching us; are we behaving in a way worthy of imitation?

After researching the various ways of learning, I am much more aware of the techniques used in the world around me and of the ways in which I have learned in the past. As is often the case, I understand that it is not one but all of these theories about learning which apply to a variety of circumstances.

http://teachers.sduhsd.net/jetheridge/Psychology/Classical%20Conditioning%20marketing.htm
This website reinforced what I had learned in the text about classical conditioning and supplied me with examples of this type of learning in advertising.

http://www.edpsycinteractive.org/topics/behavior/operant.html
This website provided me great information about operant learning and some practical examples.

http://muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/bandura.htm
From this website, I learned much about Albert Bandura, his Bobo doll experiments, and observational learning

Terminology: behaviorism, Ivan Pavlov, John B. Watson, unconditioned stimulus/response, conditioned stimulus/response, classical conditioning, operant conditioning, Albert Bandura, observational learning

The topic that I am typing this essay on is the Little Albert Study. This study fits into chapter 10 because it was one of the works of John Watson. Watson was one of the founders of behaviorism, and that is one of the main things that Chapter 10 is based on. The Little Albert study was one of the experiments that Watson did to try and support his theory of behaviorism. The reason that I am interested in this study is because it is one that I haven't heard before. When it comes to hearing about experiments with conditioning, it seems like Pavlov's dog experiment is the most popular. So, reading about a different experiment that also had to do with conditioning was intriguing and made me want to learn more about the study.

In this essay the three aspects that I am going to talk about are what the Little Albert study was, some of the confounds of the experiment, and lastly some of the unethical choices that were made throughout the experiment.

Like I stated before, Watson was one of the founders of behaviorism. Behaviorism is the theory that human and animal behavior can be explained in terms of conditioning, without appeal to thoughts or feelings, and that psychological disorders are best treated by altering behavior patterns. This is what Watson was trying to support in his experiment. Watson used an 11 month old baby in his study named Albert. He chose this baby because he was stolid and fairly unemotional. Watson was testing fear in his experiment. He says that there are 3 instinctive emotions humans have: fear, rage, and love. His question was why do people have a wider fear of things when they are older than when they are younger? His answer was conditioning, and this experiment was designed to support his theory. First, Watson grabber a white rat out of a basket, and showed it to Albert. Albert showed little emotion, and tried to reach out and touch it with his left hand. Right when he did, a hammer hit some metal, creating a loud noise at which point Albert did get scared. Then they did it again. And once again when Albert touched the rat, they created a loud noise that scared him. A couple weeks later Albert came back to the lab again, and they continued the study. They repeated the same experiment three more times. Then on the fourth trial they just showed him the rat by itself. Then they went back to showing Albert the rat mixed with the loud noise. The last thing that they did was show Albert just the rat. As soon as Albert saw they rat, he began to cry, and tried to get away. When Albert did this, it supported Watson's theory. Albert was not afraid of the rat at first, but after he was conditioned to the fact that every time he saw a rat there was a loud noise accompanied with it, eventually the sight of the rat scared him too.

The way I just described this experiment makes it sound like it is legitimate, and that it supports Watson's theory fully, however, there was a few confounds in the experiment. The first one is that they couldn't tell whether the experiment actually produced a strong fear in Albert. He was a little weary of the rat in the first place before the experiment even began, and although after the experiment he was even more weary, he didn't appear be in an extreme panic or anything like that. The second way is that a couple of the times the loud noise didn't really affect Albert until they did it a couple extra times. For example they would show Albert the rat, paired with a loud noise, and he wouldn't react, so they'd make the loud noise again until he would react and that made the test seem unclear. The third limitation is that Albert could've just of easily been afraid of Watson as he was the rat. It was unclear of what Albert was actually afraid of. Fourth, they only used one baby, and that was Albert. They didn't try this study on anybody else, they based all the results on one child. Lastly, several other people tried to duplicate this experiment with other babies and other miscellaneous stimuli, and some people got their babies to fear it and others could not condition them to be scared, so the test just didn't have good interrater reliability.

Along with some of the confounds that were mentioned, there was some unethical choices made in this experiment as well. One way that this is unethical is the fact that they are trying to condition a fear into a baby. They are not only trying to scare a baby once, but they are consistently scaring it to the point where the fear is stuck with them. This fear wasn't properly taken away either, and Albert could have easily kept the fear with him for a long time. Watson did create a plan to try to get the fear out of Albert, but he ran out of time, and wasn't able to desynthesize Albert's fear. So, this experiment wouldn't have been approved by the APA today simply because it was potentially harmful to Albert.

So, even though this is one of the most popular experiments is psychology, done by one of the biggest names in the field, the experiment definitely has its ups and downs. It is safe to say that some conditioning did occur during the experiment. The baby was not afraid of certain things in the beginning of the experiment, and by the end he was. As far as what exactly Albert was afraid of, and what exactly made him upset is hard to say. Also, this experiment was fairly unethical, and would not be allowed in today's standards. Nonetheless, it is a fascinating experiment, and contributed a lot to the era of behaviorism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Albert_experiment
I used this website to help me learn about some of the unethical decisions that were made in this experiment.

http://www.openculture.com/2015/01/the-little-albert-experiment.html
I used this website to help give me some information on some of the confounds that were in the Little Albert experiment.

http://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/01/little-albert.aspx
I used this website to help give an overview of the experiment, and help me to summarize it in the first paragraph.

1) Once you have completed your search and explorations, I would like you to say what your topic is, how exactly it fits into the chapter we have covered this week, and why you are interested in it.
John Watson. It is a big section on the assigned chapter this week. I wanted to look into it more because of the behaviorism theory. He had so many different theories on it and learned about it in so many different ways that it seemed as though he had a holistic view of the topic.
2) What are three aspects of the topic you want to talk about for this assignment?
• Watson’s early life
• Behaviorism theory
• accomplishments
3) Next, I would like you to take the information you found from the various sources and integrate/synthesize them into the three aspects of the topic, and then write about the topic.
Watson was born into a rather religious family but as he got older he grew to oppose religion. He studied psychology at University of Chicago and this is where he began to study his behaviorist theories (1.). This was a belief that behaviors can be measured, trained, and changed (2.). Behaviorism is how Watson was began to be called ‘father of behaviorism’. Watson looked at it in a systematic and observational manner considering no mental states. It excluded the mental states because cognitions, emotions, and moods were believed to be too subjective. His theory was focused on the effects of stimuli. He found some of his thoughts from Pavlov’s studies (3.)I also learned about the two types of conditioning. The first is called classical conditioning which a natural stimulus is matched with a response. The second is operant conditioning where learning happens through reinforcements and punishments of certain behaviors (2.). Behaviorism isn’t hugely studied today any more but it is still considered a rather influential force in psychology. Many parents, teachers, etc. still use the basics in order to teach or discourage behaviors (2.).
4) Finally, at the end of your post, please include working URLs for the three websites. For each URL you have listed indicate why you chose the site and the extent to which it contributed to your post.
1. http://www.goodtherapy.org/famous-psychologists/john-watson.html
This article gave me insight on how he was raised. It gave me a brief history of his life as well as letting me see how it all affected his accomplishments.
2. http://psychology.about.com/od/classicpsychologystudies/a/little-albert-experiment.htm
This article allowed me to see what exactly he contributed to psychology. It talks about all of his accomplishments and went into detail about them all.
3. http://www.lifecircles-inc.com/Learningtheories/behaviorism/Watson.html
This talked about the behaviorism theory. It went into more details about how he developed this theory and what exactly it covers within this theory.
Next make list of the terms and terminology you used in your post.
• Watson
• Behaviorism theory
• Observational
• Pavlov
• Classical conditioning
• Stimuli
• Operant conditioning

1) My topic for this week is B. F. Skinner. I came to be interested in Skinner by googling behavioral psychology. Skinner was a top result and was referred to as “Post-Watson behavioral science.” I was wondering what Skinner's specific contributions to behavioral psychology were, which is how I began researching the aspects for this assignment.

2) The aspects of Skinner that I have chosen to discuss are his beliefs on operant conditioning, the skinner box and finally, skinner's schedules of reinforcement.

3)
A man born under the same ideas of positivism and critiques of replication as Watson, B.F. Skinner became an influential figure in the world of behavioral psychology. Skinner took to elaborate from the ideas of unconditioned stimulus and reflexes turning into conditioned stimulus and reflexes. In doing so he coined the term operant conditioning. His operant conditioning was essentially taking the ideas of this more primitive classical conditioning and furthering it to the position that humans take on the matter, that is, to operate on our surroundings. Skinner's operant conditioning is best described in his Law of Effect. The Law of Effect states basically that rewarded behavior is likely to increase and punished behavior is likely to decrease. This takes a step further from classical conditioning which involves respondent behavior, or that which is naturally reflexive, while operant conditioning is direct and intentional influence on learning. Operant conditioning is the use of aversive or desired stimulus in response to a particular behavior, which is seen to shape that behavior. Adding stimulus is always a positive action, while taking away a stimulus is always a negative action. If you are adding or taking away an aversive stimulus, that action is punishment. If you are adding or taking away a pleasurable stimulus, that action is always reinforcement. Punishments are defined by actions and stimulus that decreases a likelihood that a behavior will continue in the future. Reinforcement is defined by actions and stimulus that increase the likelihood that a behavior will continue in the future. Extinction occurs when a behavior that was previously reinforced is no longer reinforced. The result is in the participant frantically trying anything that it can think of in order to to receive the reinforcement again. Typically this involves a long list of behaviors that are somewhat similar to the behavior that was initially rewarded. This process shows how effective operant conditioning is as a tool for teaching. Along with Loeb, Skinner was interested in tropisms. His curiosity of natural animal behavior led him to study pigeons and rats. Skinner devised a box that would allow him to initiate operant conditioning on animals, which would allow him to project results onto humans. Skinner's Box, or as he would have called it, an operant chamber, is a cage with a lever, a light and a food dispenser built into it. Skinner was able to find that he could pair a flashing light with an animals behavior of pushing a lever by releasing food as a positive reinforcement upon that action. Once the behavior was learned, skinner had the ability to tweak the circumstances of the food release. Skinner was able to train these animals to press the button many times in hopes of gaining food. Use of this same chamber to show effects of punishment were used in future trials as well. Such experiments included electrically charged grids which would shock the animals aversively. The overall implications of his chamber experiments were that he could train animals to do anything they are physically capable of if he rewarded their behavior. Finally we have an outcome of Skinner's analysis of his experiments. The schedules of reinforcement were founded by the tweaking of conditions that produced reinforcement or punishment in the operant chamber. Skinner found that there were two types of reinforcement schedules. The first is continuous reinforcement schedule which is where every correct behavior produces a reinforcer. The second is intermittent schedules of reinforcement where behaviors are only occasionally reinforced. The latter of reinforcement schedules has four layers of possibilities split up between two different groups. There are ratio schedules and interval schedules. Ratio schedules can be fixed or variable where the former rewards the subject for every certain amount of behavioral responses, and the latter rewards the subject on an average number of responses. Then we have interval schedules that can also be fixed or variable. Fixed interval schedules are based on amount of time that passes; so if a behavior occurs after a specific fixed amount of time the subject will be rewarded. Variable interval schedules are similar to variable ratio schedules in the way the interval will be based on an average number; but again, this number is based on time intervals. Skinner found that he could slowly change the intervals and have extinction allow the animal to figure out the new ratio of behavior to reward. He also found that using these schedules gave different effort level responses. It was found that depending on the effort you wanted to see, you could use different reward techniques. Likewise, if you didn't want to or couldn't afford to reward subjects all of the time, there were different schedules that would cater to your needs. The implications of the variable effort level responses held advancement in workplace management and token economies to be used in the workplace as well as schools and prisons.

4)
http://www.psych.purdue.edu/~willia55/120/7b.LearningOCMM.pdf
I chose this site because it is a universities website that puts its credibility on the line with all of the information that they post. I got most of my information about operant conditioning from this link.

http://www.juliantrubin.com/bigten/skinnerbox.html
I chose this link because the website is kept up to date and all of their references are clearly cited. This link gave me most of my information on skinner's box.

http://users.ipfw.edu/abbott/120/Schedules.html
I chose this site because it is a universities website that puts its credibility on the line with all of the information that they post. I got most of my information about schedules of reinforcement from this link.

unconditioned stimulus, unconditioned reflex, conditioned stimulus, conditioned reflex, extinction, replication, positivism, tropisms

1) Once you have completed your search and explorations, I would like you to say what your topic is, how exactly it fits into the chapter we have covered this week, and why you are interested in it.
This week I have chosen emotional development as my topic.

2) What are three aspects of the topic you want to talk about for this assignment?
Three aspects of emotional development that I want to talk about for this assignment include: the basic components of emotions (faculty.washington.edu/robinet/emotional.ppt), the basic functions of emotions (http://talentdevelop.com/articles/MFCE.html), and how it relates to chapter 10, Watson and behaviorism (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3181681/).

3) Next, I would like you to take the information you found from the various sources and integrate/synthesize them into the three aspects of the topic, and then write about the topic.
Emotional development consists of how an individual expresses themselves or handles situations where they feel anger, sadness, jubilant, fear, etc. According to the History and Systems of Psychology textbook author, C. James Goodwin, John Watson believed that there were three unconditioned/unlearned emotions that children experience. Through his behaviorism research, Watson believed that the three emotions expressed naturally were: fear, rage, and love (Link 3). Before his research on infants and their behaviors he worked with animals. The reason he switched to human infants was because his university threatened to cut off funding unless the research could be applied to humans. The university wanted to fund research that would be useful in everyday situations. It transferred John Watson’s work focus from animal behaviors to human behaviors.
There are a few basic components of human emotions that Watson and other behaviorists found. One of the basic components of human emotions includes any stimuli that provoke a reaction. For example, if an individual encounters a large dog and experiences the emotion of fear the dog is the stimuli and the reaction is fear. The second of the basic components of human emotions includes positive or negative experiences that we become aware of. For example, if an individual feels that they enjoy spending time with friends (positive experience) and despise running (negative experience). The third of the basic components of human emotions includes physiological arousal. For example, if an individual is giving a presentation at work or school his or her heartrate could increase and he or she could begin sweating. The fourth of the basic components of human emotions includes behavioral responses. For example, if an individual expresses the emotion of love, he or she could hug the other individual they are with to show affection (Link 2).
There are multiple functions of emotions as well that behaviorists have discovered. One theory of the function of emotion is that it serves an adaptive function. For example, emotions provide way to react or process environmental stimuli. A second theory of the function of emotion is that it serves to further socio-moral development. For example, negative emotions like guilt or shame serve the purpose of dissuading immoral behaviors. A third theory of the function of emotion is that it serves as a source of pain or pleasure. For example, if an individual experiences heartbreak he or she may feel distraught and miserable. On the other hand, emotion may cause an individual to experience pleasure if he or she is getting married to their long-term partner. A fourth theory of the function of emotion is that it serves as a source of communication with other individuals. For example, if an individual is crying and expressing the emotion of grief then another individual may communicate that they feel the emotion of closeness and empathy. A fifth theory of the function of emotion is that it serves the purpose of furthering social relationships. For example, if an individual would like to join a sorority they must show the emotion of happiness. This positive emotion displays that that individual is interested in joining the sorority (Link 1).

4) Finally, at the end of your post, please include working URLs for the three websites. For each URL you have listed indicate why you chose the site and the extent to which it contributed to your post.

Link 1: http://talentdevelop.com/articles/MFCE.html
I used this link to help me with describing the basic functions of emotions. I then provided multiple examples to go along with the basic functions of emotions.

Link 2: faculty.washington.edu/robinet/emotional.ppt
I used this link from a professor’s PowerPoint to help me with describing the basic components of emotions. I then provided multiple examples to go along with the basic components of emotions.

Link 3: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3181681/
I used this link to relate emotional development to chapter 10, John Watson, and behaviorism.

Terms: emotional development, expression, unconditioned responses, basic emotions, applied psychology, stimuli, reaction, positive/negative emotions, physiological arousal, behavioral responses, socio-moral development, communication, social relationships, John Watson, behaviorism

TB11
1) Classical Conditioning. Classical conditioning is a behavioral way of learning that was brought into the science by Ivan Pavlov a Russian scientist. Why I liked this topic and chose it from the other options was that I have a very good understanding of what this learning entails. I am not saying that It is an easy topic to write about but that I have been exposed to the dynamics and the implications from the topic.
2) Transition into Behavioral ‘learning’. Conditioning Process. Application of learning behavior.
3) Transition into behavioral ‘learning’.
What we look at here is how Ivan Pavlov came into find this learning. Pavlov started with a curiosity of how the digestive system worked. More importantly he looked into saliva samples and wanted to research more about it. He conducted experiments to find out just what happens to the dogs as they were given food for intake. On once aspect he looked into the levels of salivation and noticed that the dog had actually started salivating before the food was placed before the dog. Further evidence showed that the dog even showed salivation level increases when the assistant was walking. Pavlov was then curious to why this happened. At this point the curiosity is the spark of the transition. The transition happens when Pavlov starts to conduct settings in which the scenarios are changed and manipulated on a variable basis. He took bells, sounds, sights, anything that would be a strong thing to sense. He is famous for the ringing bell that conditioned the dog to salivate. The act of ‘learning’ showed its biggest evidence when Pavlov was able to successfully manipulate a sound that had not shown signs of salivation and eventually get the dog to salivate when it heard that sound, or stimulus. He then showed yet another connection when he was able to successfully exterminate a stimulus that a dog had conditioned itself to.
Conditioning Process.
The conditioning process is relatively straight forward. For visualization purposes let’s look at the example that food was brought out on a plate to a dog and the dog salivated. The first thing that we need to look at is the unconditioned stimulus. The Unconditioned stimulus is the food in this example. The food is simply an object that brings out an incitement to a sensory receptor. Let’s now look at the salivation. The salivation is an unconditioned response. It is the natural response when food is presented. So how was Pavlov able to make a dog salivate with a bell? Lets take another example. You ring a bell, walk in with food, and the dog salivates. There’s not much different in the scenarios. The dog salivated when he saw the food. Imagine that we repeat this test 10 times, but on the 11th time we ring the bell but do not walk in. to our surprise the dog still salivates even though there is no food presented! This happens because the dog connected the ring as a sign that he will get food, therefor he prepped his body for food. The ring became associated or conditioned by the act of introducing the ring (now conditioned stimulus) with the unconditioned stimulus food. This creates the conditioned stimulus of the dog salivating from the ring and not the food.
Application.
So what a dog can salivate with a ring instead of a plate of food how does that help us? That’s a good question, so a man by the name of John B Watson created a test with a human being to find out if we could be conditioned like the dogs. John took a child who was afraid of nothing at all and tried to entice fear from an object. The child did not like loud noises and that was his one fear, even though he was willing to hold rats, snakes, rabbits. What then happened was that John took a loud noise and used it when the rabbit was in the boy’s Hand. The boy was afraid and dropped the rabbit. After john did this multiple times he found that the boy (albert) was just as afraid of the rabbit as we was the loud noises. For one as a teacher you can what we learned here and apply it to your classroom. Let’s say your class is rowdy, you turn off the lights and tell the kids to be quiet. After a number of repetitions the next time you turn off the lights the children will be quiet without you needing to tell them to be quiet. If we break it down
(Being careful not to get into operant conditioning) we took a behavior, implemented a sensory reception, applied a que that was already naturally conditioned, and in a result controlled a behavior from the sensory reception and not the Que.
4) http://www.simplypsychology.org/classical-conditioning.html This web source gives information about John B Watson's work in the experimental field of psychology and the classical conditioning experiments that he conducted. That experiment which is known as the Little Albert study from which he discovered classical conditioning learning. I used this web source for my own critical evaluation and for my process aspect in which i discuss how experiments used the classical conditioning response and for what dynamics they were applied to.
http://psychology.about.com/od/behavioralpsychology/a/conditioning-study-guide.htm
This web source gives detailed account of the Pavlov study along with it how the process of classical conditioning is used. This study was the first one done and thus i would classify it as the origin experiment. This experiment you can see with your own eyes the shift from the science of the study to how the behavioral modification was learned by both pavlov and the dogs. i used this web source to find out how the study came about and to include the introduction of my assignment with the aspect application as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhqumfpxuzI
This is a youtube video that gives an account of Ivan Pavlov and the original experiment video footage. We can see exactly what pavlov studied and how the salivation of the dog grew into an entirely new concept in learning. I used this video to get the original footage so i could understand what pavlov did on a new deeper level. This helped in my classical conditioning understanding.

Terms: Classical conditioning, Operant conditioning, Conditioning, Pavlov, Watson, Unconditioned: stimulus, response, Conditioned: stimulus, response, Little Albert

1) Once you have completed your search and explorations, I would like you to say what your topic is, how exactly it fits into the chapter we have covered this week, and why you are interested in it.

In this chapter I found the Watson-Carr maze studies very interesting. Watson, like Pavlov, wanted to look at human nature through behaviorism. He studies on rats that lead to the discovery that the rats could learn without certain senses and linking that to repetitive behavior and “muscle memory,” is interesting because that applies to music and a whole slew of behaviors. There was a big section of the chapter dedicated to the Watson-Carr maze studies and Watson’s studies on behavior so I’d like to expand on what I have learned.

2) What are three aspects of the topic you want to talk about for this assignment?

The three aspects I will be talking about are the Watson-Carr maze experiments, how Watson influenced one of his students to further study learning and memory, and finally I am going to talk about how all of this applies and how we can use this information today.

3) Next, I would like you to take the information you found from the various sources and integrate/synthesize them into the three aspects of the topic, and then write about the topic.

John B. Watson was a behaviorist that came up with something known as the Kerplunk studies. In this study, he would train rats tor run in a straight line to a positive reward (which was food), and once they could run to the food automatically, he changed the size of the maze box they were running in and they would smack their faces into the wall. This lead him to do more research to see how the rats learned. In the Watson-Carr maze studies, he would take away some of the rats senses and see if the rat could still learn the maze. This did lead to the rat still being able to run through and learn the maze. Watson and Carr concluded that, “the only important factors in the formation of learned associations were the kinesthetic impressions coupled with certain other intra-organic impressions.” What that means is that the rat learned by remembering muscle twitches and which way to turn.

Watson’s studies on the rats influenced a man named Karl Lashley. He took Watson’s studies a few steps further and researched brain mechanisms and where motor activities come from. Lashley would train rats in a maze, and then make lesions on their cortex to see how well the rats could remember the maze. He found that they could not remember how to do the maze and this finding lead him to study cerebral localization which is what he is most famous for. Lashley hypothesized that there was a certain area of the brain where memories were stored and to test this, he trained the rats to do the maze, but instead of taking away senses, he made lesions to the cerebrum. All of these expariments failed but he did come up with two theories. The first one was the principal of mass action that stated the cerebrum acts as a whole and participates in many different types of learning. The second was the principal of equopotentiality, which stated that if certain parts of the brain were damaged, other parts would take over that part of the brains duties.

Without the Watson-Carr maze studies, Karl Lashley might not have every found out what cerebral localization or equopotentiality was. But why were both of these studies important and why are Karl Lashley’s findings important and how does this apply to us today? Muscle memory is a term that refers to a phenomenon where your muscles seem to control your body in certain patterns even when you haven’t done something for a long time. For example, when an athlete stops practicing for a long time but goes back to the sport and needs little to know practice because they remember how to do the fundamentals and remember how it feels, that is muscle memory. New research has been coming out and it supports part of Lashley’s theory that memories are stored in certain places. Motor memory sits mainly in the cerebellum because that is where the motor cortex is. So we now have a lot of research that says with enough practice and training, we can learn something so well that it becomes automatic and it is localized in a certain part of the brain. So without realizing it, Watson and Lashley both contributed not only to behaviorism, but also neuropsychology.

In conclusion, the Watson-Carr maze studies were very important to behavioral psychology because they were used in many different ways and lead to more than one scientific discovery. If it were not for Watson’s maze studies, Lashley might not have had a good way to measure how much the rats remembered. Applying what we know about the rats and localization can also help us further our knowledge about muscle memory, how it works, and how it can help us in our day to day lives.

4) Finally, at the end of your post, please include working URLs for the three websites. For each URL you have listed indicate why you chose the site and the extent to which it contributed to your post.

http://faculty.coe.uh.edu/smcneil/cuin6373/idhistory/watson2.html
I used this site to get a better understanding of the Kerplunk experiments and to see where Watson got his idea for the maze experiments.

http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Karl_Lashley
This website helped me understand Lashley’s connection to Watson and what Lashley discovered during his experiments. This also made me realize how important the maze studies were to behavioral psychology because they were used over and over again.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-athletes-way/201503/how-does-practice-hardwire-long-term-muscle-memory
I used this article to see some new research on the muscle memory topic. I learned from this article that muscle memory is located in a specific part of the brain and that practice and training is what helps with the kinesthetic learning.

Terms: Watson-Carr Maze Studies, John B. Watson, Kerplunk studies, Karl Lashley, cerebral localization, behavioral psychology.

1). I picked the little Albert study done by Watson for my topical blog this week. I think this topic is very interesting and although I have talked about it and learned about it in many of my classes. I am interested to learn about it in more details and learn more in depth about the topic.

2) I am going to talk about how he started his research about little albert, then I am going to discuss the research done with Little albert then I am going to talk about what happened to baby albert after the study.

3). Watson wanted to find out if classical conditioning worked on humans, after Pavlov proved it worked on animals. That is how this study began. The study took place in 1920 at Johns Hopkins University. Little Albert was nine months old when the research with him began. He was first tested based on his reactions to different stimuli such as animals. He was unemotional and had no shown fear of any of the stimuli presented. But when little Albert was presented with the stimuli of a metal bar being struck by a hammer he cried. When Albert was 11 months old he was present with the stimuli of the white rat and the loud bang. He was present with this exact situation seven times in seven consecutive weeks. Every time he was present with these stimuli he started crying. At this point he had shown signs of fear almost immediately and start crying whether or not the hammer struck the bar. With this finding, they present other objects with similar color and fur to little Albert and he showed signs of fear and cried. These other objects were a fur coat, family dog, a bunny rabbit, cotton, and Santa Clause. Little Albert is one of the biggest mysteries of psychology. The American Psychological Association thinks they have solved the mystery. Little baby Albert has been identified as Douglas Merritte, his mother worked in the hospital and was paid $1 to have her baby be apart of the experiment. Douglas died at the age of six of hydrocephalus. It is unknown if he was still scared of all fury objects after he left Johns Hopkins. The research was found and published by the grandson of Douglas’s mother.

4) http://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/01/little-albert.aspx
http://www.openculture.com/2015/01/the-little-albert-experiment.html
http://www.simplypsychology.org/classical-conditioning.html

Watson, classical conditioning, Pavlov, Little Albert, Douglas Merritte, Johns Hopkins,

1) Once you have completed your search and explorations, I would like you to say what your topic is, how exactly it fits into the chapter we have covered this week, and why you are interested in it.
The topic I chose for this week is John B. Watson, a very well-known name though out the world of psychology, also known as the founder of Behaviorism.
2) What are three aspects of the topic you want to talk about for this assignment?
Three aspects of John B. Watson I would like to talk about are his Behaviorist Manifesto, Little Albert studies and systematic desensitization.
3) Next, I would like you to take the information you found from the various sources and integrate/synthesize them into the three aspects of the topic, and then write about the topic.
The behaviorist manifesto set the tone for behaviorism. John B. Watson wrote his article, Psychology as the Behaviorist Views it with the intentions of a way to make psychology known as a natural science. What the article actually accomplished was establishing behaviorism as it's own field and area of study. This is why it is known as the behaviorist manifesto, it sparked or manifested behaviorism. This document set the foundations for behaviorism and changed how people view psychology as a whole. It emphasized that psychology is a natural science. He did this by explaining how introspection was useless to behaviorism and even to psychology as a whole. He wanted psychology to focus on tangible things and less on philosophical ideas. The goal of behaviorism became known as improving society by means of predicting and controlling behavior. This leads me into my second topic of interest from Watson's life, his Little Albert studies. The intention of these studies was to see if human behavior can be controlled and conditioned. He did this by showing a nine-month old baby some objects that could be identified as scary or new to the baby. These included a white rat, a monkey, masks and burning newspaper. Initially the baby showed no fear of any of the objects. When Watson and Rayner reintroduced Albert to the white rat, they waited until his attention seemed absorbed and hit a metal pipe with a hammer making a loud and unpleasant noise close to Little Albert, startling him. This was repeated a few times a week until Albert was afraid of the rat in itself. After they put this fear into Albert's head they were unable to attempt and remove it because the mother of Albert moved away. The question then becomes what of Little Albert and his fear today? Does he still have an irrational fear of white furry objects? This leads me into systematic desensitization. Mary Cover Jones a friend of Rosalie Rayner, became interested in experiments involving children after seeing Watson's experiments with Little Albert. She was working with many children who feared random objects and tried a few different approaches. These included giving the child time, explaining to the child why their fear is irrational and having other children make fun of said child. None of these worked. It wasn't until she looked more at Watson and Rayner's paper that she found the idea. Although Watson and Rayner never got to desensitize Albert, they theorized on how they would do this. This theory was to reintroduce the now conditionally feared object while the child is eating or doing a pleasant activity and slowly decreasing the distant between the child and their feared object. This showed that fear can't be taken away completely but it can be replaced. Similarly to how breaking bad habits works. You can't quit the bad behavior cold turkey or chances increase for a relapse. What you can do is replace the bad habit with a better habit. For example if a person were trying to quit smoking they could always carry a pack of gum with them and whenever they do an activity they usually smoke while, before or after doing chew a piece of gum instead.
4) Finally, at the end of your post, please include working URLs for the three websites. For each URL you have listed indicate why you chose the site and the extent to which it contributed to your post.
http://rmac-mx.org/john-b-watsons-1913-behaviorist-manifestosetting-the-stage-for-behaviorisms-social-action-legacy/
I chose this website because it looked more in-depth at the original purpose and goals of the article that became known as the behaviorist manifesto, seemingly by accident.
http://psychology.about.com/od/classicpsychologystudies/a/little-albert-experiment.htm
This website went very in-depth on the Little Albert Studies and explained the outcomes and what could have happened to Albert B.
http://www.simplypsychology.org/Systematic-Desensitisation.html
I used this site to explain the process of systematic desensitization to me a little bit more because the textbook only briefly touches on it.
Next make list of the terms and terminology you used in your post.
Terminology: John Watson, Behaviorism, Behaviorist Manifesto, Little Albert, Systematic Desensitization, introspection, Mary Cover Jones, Rosalie Rayner