Watson And Rayner's Experiment

The child at the center of John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner’s study of conditioned emotional reactions was an infant named Albert B. Albert was the first child who was actually involved in Watson and Rayner’s experimental work. Born to a wet nurse and raised in a hospital environment for most of his life, Albert was considered healthy, normal and well-developed. Albert’s stability was cited by Watson and Rayner as one of the main reasons for his involvement in their study, because they felt his pre existing development would impede them from causing him major harm with their experiment. When he was nine months old, Albert was administered Watson’s standard tests used to determine whether “fear reactions can be called out by other stimuli than sharp noises and the sudden removal of support” (p. 2), and was found to not exhibit any signs of fear in any situation. In keeping with his earlier description as emotionally stable, Albert was said to never have been seen to exhibit fear or rage, and almost never cried. Up until that point Albert had never been tested with loud sounds, and Watson and Rayner tested whether they could elicit a reaction of fear at around that time. On the third stimulation of their test, Albert started

The first time he was presented with a white rat alone, his response was “much less marked” (p. 7) than the one from five days earlier, so he was presented once again with joint stimulation, as well as with similar stimulators (rabbit, dog) to once again see if the reaction transferred. This was also the day that Albert was taken out of the laboratory all previous testing had been done in and brought into a well-lit lecture room, in stark contrast with the dark laboratory. After the stimulations in the lecture room, Watson and Rayner observed that emotional transfer does take place, and that the number of transfers that result from experimental conditioning may be very