Albert's Experiment: The Little Albert Experiment

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The Little Albert experiment (Watson and Rayner 1920) was a controlled classical conditioning study on phobias, conducted on a nine months old infant. Little Albert was put through a series of emotional tests to see how he would react to various stimuli. He was presented with a variety of animals, however, on the whole, Little Albert showed no fear. Again, Little Albert was presented with an animal, this time a white rat. As before, Little Albert showed no sign of fear at the initial sight of the rat, however, when a sudden loud noise occurred, Little Albert would become hysterical. This continued as Little Albert got older, this time, he’d repeatedly be presented with a rat followed by a loud noise, by now all it took was for Little Albert …show more content…

In the case of Little Albert, he learnt that when presented with a rat, a loud noise would follow, therefore the seemingly innocent non-threatening rat soon became something Little Albert feared. Most of the time, natural fear conditioning is beneficial, if one is to touch a hot stove they would soon learn not to repeat their actions again. However, sometimes fear can become unmanageable especially to those who suffer from a post-traumatic stress …show more content…

The phobic stimulus was repeatedly being exposed to the patient without any harm being experienced, eventually allowing the patient to gradually extinguish the fear of the stimuli. Within therapy, this application is applied via systematic desensitisation (Wolpe, 1950) which, by social learning theorists, is paired with modelling. In modelling, the client observes others, the ‘models’, who respond to the client’s feared stimuli with relaxation rather than fear. This encourages the client to imitate the observed model and therefore learn to remain composed in presence of the phobic stimulus; returning them back to an optimal

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