Research Paper On Little Albert

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Little Albert was a subject of John Watson, in the study of conditioned responses. In class we received three articles to read and analyze. The first article is the study of Little Albert. While, the other two articles are possible ideas of what happened to Albert after he was conditioned to fear white objects. The first article that I read was Conditioned Emotional Reactions; this article was the actual report of the Watson and Rayner experiment on Little Albert. My first reaction to the article was that I felt sorry for Albert B.. He did not choose this for himself. Although, because he was unemotional was the reason he was chosen. Would the experiment have been different if another infant was chosen? I’m sure depending on the infant, yes …show more content…

I say this because Albert was never unconditioned of his fear of white rats, dogs, rabbits, masks and etc. For some people, their fears are very detrimental and will keep them from doing things that they love. So, Albert was trained to fear everyday things, like dogs. Now, if you were walking down the street and see a dog, it can cause some high anxiety, which is not always good. In addition, Albert was conditioned to fear a Santa Claus mask. Many children already are scared of Santa, probably only because he is different looking. Yet, Santa is a fun person for about everyone’s childhood. Therefore, this could be traumatic to Albert’s …show more content…

This question was investigated in the remaining two articles. I think that it is interesting that no one ever really knew what happened to Albert. Watson and Rayner conducted their study on “Albert” about 90 some years ago. In the article Finding Little Albert the authors tried to identify potential Alberts. At first when I was reading the article I thought it would be easy to find Albert, based on the dates that Watson and Rayner provided in the documentation of their study. Then with the birth date of Albert, go the hospital and find the records of babies born on that date. Although, as I continued to read in the first investigation article it was not that simple. Therefore, I agree with the intense investigation of finding the exact date to in which the Albert studies were conducted. Even though the exact age of Albert was given, there were no dates of when the experiment occurred. In the first article, it was apparent that they did extensive research to when the study could have taken place. The different resources they accessed was interesting to me. I say this because any type of documentation they could find with a date related to when the experiment, they used it. For instance, I found it interesting that Beck and others, referenced the letters Watson had sent to Goodnow including the thank you letter. Also, beside that actual birthdate of Albert maybe it was possible that people working in the

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