Watson And Rayner Conditioning Emotional Response

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Recommended: John B Watson And Rosalie Rayner Experiment With Little Albert

The article, that I will be discussing throughout this reaction paper is the famous research experiment done by John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner in 1920, titled “Conditioned Emotional Reactions”. From what I have gathered, the main focus of this experiment was to identify whether or not conditioned emotional responses could occur in human subjects. Therefore, the participant in the experiment was a nine-month-old infant who was identified as “Albert B”. In their research, Watson and Rayner objective was to find out if they could indeed condition an emotional response like a phobia in a stable child. Thus, in the initial stage of the experiment, Watson and Rayner exposed Albert to a number of stimuli in a conditioned environment and observed his reactions to those stimuli. The stimuli included a rat, a rabbit, a dog, a monkey, masks with and without hair, and cotton wool. In this stage of the experiment, …show more content…

Particularly, one of the strengths that I found in this research experiment was how thorough and detailed they were at recording their findings. For instance, the researchers and the witnesses thoroughly documented the experiment from beginning to end. However, as I was reading through the study I began to identify areas that seemed to be very unethical. For instance, Albert was obviously showing signs of distress and fear. Yet, the experimenters continued on even though he was clearly distressed and unhappy. Another weakness that I gathered from reading this article was the fact that they did not extinguish or remove the conditioned emotional responses of. Therefore, as they also recognized in the article the possibility of these fears remaining throughout Albert’s life is a high possibility. However, it is easy to recognize that had this experiment been an ethical practice it would definitely be something that could be replicated

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