rosalie rayner was the graduate student researcher who conducted the little albert study on conditioned fear.
rosalie rayner was the graduate student researcher who conducted the little albert study on conditioned fear.
who is the graduate student researcher who conducted the little albert study on conditioned fear?
rosalie rayner
one might consider the experiment watson and his assistant rosalie rayner carried out to be one of the most controversial in psychology in 1920. it has become immortalized in introductory psychology textbooks as the little albert experiment. the goal of the experiment was to show how principles of, at the time recently discovered, classical conditioning could be applied to condition fear of a white rat into "little albert", a 9-month-old boy. watson and rayner conditioned "little albert" by clanging an iron rod when a white rat was presented. first, they presented to the boy a white rat and observed that he was not afraid of it. second, they presented him with a white rat and then clanged an iron rod. "little albert" responded by crying. this second presentation was repeated several times. finally, watson and rayner presented the white rat by itself and the boy showed fear. later, in an attempt to see if the fear transferred to other objects, watson presented albert with a rabbit, a dog, and a fur coat. he cried at the sight of all of them. this study demonstrated how emotions could become conditioned responses. as the story of "little albert" has made the rounds, inaccuracies and inconsistencies have crept in, some of them even due to watson himself. analyses of watson's film footage of albert suggest that the infant was mentally and developmentally disabled. an ethical problem of this study is that watson and rayner did not uncondition "little albert". in 2009, beck and levinson found records of a child, douglas merritte, who seemed to have been little albert. they found that he had died from congenital hydrocephalus at the age of 6. thus, it cannot be concluded to what extent this study had an effect on "little albert"'s life. on 25 january 2012, tom bartlett of "the chronicle of higher education" published a report that questions whether john watson knew of cognitive abnormalities in little albert that would greatly skew the results of the experiment. in 2014, however, the journals that initially endorsed beck and fridlund's claims about albert and watson (the "american psychologist" and "history of psychology") published articles debunking those claims
john b. watson
watson later gave a series of weekend lectures describing the little albert study. one of these lectures was attended by mary cover jones, which sparked her interest in pursuing graduate work in psychology. jones conducted an experiment to figure out how to eliminate fear responses in children and studied a boy named peter, who was two years old. peter shared similar fears of white rabbits and furry objects to little albert. jones was able to increase peter's tolerance of white rabbits by exposing him to the animal, known as direct conditioning, and having peter interact with children who were not afraid of the rabbit. mary cover jones was the first psychologist to desensitize or uncondition a fear response and become known as the "mother of behavior therapy".
little albert experiment