In the little albert study, the fear-producing stimulus used as a ucs was the ______.

The Little Albert experiment was a famous psychology experiment conducted by behaviorist John B. Watson and graduate student Rosalie Rayner. Previously, Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov had conducted experiments demonstrating the conditioning process in dogs. Watson took Pavlov's research a step further by showing that emotional reactions could be classically conditioned in people.

The participant in the experiment was a child that Watson and Rayner called "Albert B." but is known popularly today as Little Albert. When Little Albert was 9 months old, Watson and Rayner exposed him to a series of stimuli including a white rat, a rabbit, a monkey, masks, and burning newspapers and observed the boy's reactions.

The boy initially showed no fear of any of the objects he was shown.

The next time Albert was exposed to the rat, Watson made a loud noise by hitting a metal pipe with a hammer. Naturally, the child began to cry after hearing the loud noise. After repeatedly pairing the white rat with the loud noise, Albert began to expect a frightening noise whenever he saw the white rate. Soon, Albert began to cry simply after seeing the rat.

Watson and Rayner wrote: "The instant the rat was shown, the baby began to cry. Almost instantly he turned sharply to the left, fell over on [his] left side, raised himself on all fours and began to crawl away so rapidly that he was caught with difficulty before reaching the edge of the table."

The Little Albert experiment presents an example of how classical conditioning can be used to condition an emotional response.

• Neutral Stimulus: A stimulus that does not initially elicit a response (the white rat).
• Unconditioned Stimulus: A stimulus that elicits a reflexive response (the loud noise).
• Unconditioned Response: A natural reaction to a given stimulus (fear).
• Conditioned Stimulus: A stimulus that elicits a response after repeatedly being paired with an unconditioned stimulus (the white rat).
• Conditioned Response: The response caused by the conditioned stimulus (fear).

In addition to demonstrating that emotional responses could be conditioned in humans, Watson and Rayner also observed that stimulus generalization had occurred. After conditioning, Albert feared not just the white rat, but a wide variety of similar white objects as well. His fear included other furry objects including Raynor's fur coat and Watson wearing a Santa Claus beard.

While the experiment is one of psychology's most famous and is included in nearly every introductory psychology course, it is widely criticized for several reasons. First, the experimental design and process were not carefully constructed. Watson and Rayner did not develop an objective means to evaluate Albert's reactions, instead of relying on their own subjective interpretations.

The experiment also raises many ethical concerns. Little Albert was harmed during this experiment—he left the experiment with a previously nonexistent fear. By today's standards, the Little Albert experiment would not be allowed.

The question of what happened to Little Albert has long been one of psychology's mysteries. Before Watson and Rayner could attempt to "cure" Little Albert, he and his mother moved away. Some envisioned the boy growing into a man with a strange phobia of white, furry objects.

Recently, the true identity and fate of the boy known as Little Albert was discovered. As reported in American Psychologist, a seven-year search led by psychologist Hall P. Beck led to the discovery. After tracking down and locating the original experiments and the real identity of the boy's mother, it was suggested that Little Albert was actually a boy named Douglas Merritte.

The story does not have a happy ending, however. Douglas died at the age of six on May 10, 1925, of hydrocephalus (a build-up of fluid in his brain), which he had suffered from since birth. "Our search of seven years was longer than the little boy’s life," Beck wrote of the discovery.

In 2012, Beck and Alan J. Fridlund reported that Douglas was not the healthy, normal child Watson described in his 1920 experiment. They presented convincing evidence that Watson knew about and deliberately concealed the boy's neurological condition. These findings not only cast a shadow over Watson's legacy, but they also deepened the ethical and moral issues of this well-known experiment.

In 2014, doubt was cast over Beck and Fridlund's findings when researchers presented evidence that a boy by the name of William Barger was the real Little Albert. Barger was born on the same day as Merritte to a wet-nurse who worked at the same hospital as Merritte's mother. While his first name was William, he was known his entire life by his middle name, Albert.

While experts continue to debate the true identity of the boy at the center of Watson's experiment, there is little doubt that Little Albert left a lasting impression on the field of psychology.

By Dr. Saul McLeod, published 2020

Little Albert Experiment Summary

• Watson and Raynor presented Little Albert with a white rat and he showed no fear.
• Watson then presented the rat with a loud bang that startled Little Albert and made him cry.
• After the continuous association of the white rat and loud noise, Little Albert was classically conditioned to experience fear at the sight of the rat.
• Albert's fear generalized to other stimuli that were similar to the rat, including a fur coat, some cotton wool, and a Father Christmas mask.

Watson and Rayner (1920) conducted the Little Albert Experiment to answer 3 questions:

1. Can an infant be conditioned to fear an animal that appears simultaneously with a loud, fear-arousing sound?

2. Would such fear transfer to other animals or to inanimate objects?

3. How long would such fears persist?

Ivan Pavlov showed that classical conditioning applied to animals.  Did it also apply to humans? In a famous (though ethically dubious) experiment, John Watson and Rosalie Rayner showed that it did.

At the outset of the study, Watson and Rayner encountered a nine-month-old boy named "Little Albert" - a remarkably fearless child, scared only by loud noises. After gaining permission from Albert's mother, the researchers decided to test the process of classical conditioning on a human subject - by inducing a further phobia in the child!

Little Albert was a 9-month-old infant who was tested on his reactions to various neutral stimuli. He was shown a white rat, a rabbit, a monkey and various masks. Albert described as "on the whole stolid and unemotional" showed no fear of any of these stimuli.

However, what did startle him and cause him to be afraid was if a hammer was struck against a steel bar behind his head. The sudden loud noise would cause "little Albert to burst into tears.

When Little Albert was just over 11 months old, the white rat was presented, and seconds later the hammer was struck against the steel bar.

After seven pairings of the rat and noise (in two sessions, one week apart), Albert reacted with crying and avoidance when the rat was presented without the loud noise

This fear began to fade as time went on, however the association could be renewed by repeating the original procedure a few times.

Five days later, Watson and Rayner found that Albert developed phobias of objects which shared characteristics with the rat; including the family dog, a fur coat, some cotton wool and a Father Christmas mask! This process is known as generalization.

The Little Albert Experiment demonstrated that classical conditioning could be used to create a phobia. A phobia is an irrational fear, that is out of proportion to the danger. In this experiment, a previously unafraid baby was conditioned to become afraid of a rat.

It also demonstrates two additional concepts, originally outlined by Pavlov.

• Extinction: Although a conditioned association can be incredibly strong initially, it begins to fade if not reinforced - until is disappears completely.
• Generalisation: Conditioned associations can often widen beyond the specific stimuli presented. For instance, if a child develops a negative association with one teacher, this association might also be made with others

Over the next few weeks and months, Little Albert was observed and ten days after conditioning his fear of the rat was much less marked. This dying out of a learned response is called extinction.

However, even after a full month, it was still evident, and the association could be renewed by repeating the original procedure a few times.

Unfortunately, Albert's mother withdrew him from the experiment the day the last tests were made, and Watson and Rayner were unable to conduct further experiments to reverse the condition response.

Critical Evaluation

• The researchers confounded their own experiment by conditioning Little Albert using the same neutral stimuli as the generalized stimuli (rabbit and dog).
• Some doubts exist as to whether or not this fear response was actually a phobia. When Albert was allowed to suck his thumb he showed no response whatsoever. This stimulus made him forget about the loud sound. It took more than 30 times for Watson to finally take Albert's thumb out to observe a fear response.
• Other limitations included no control subject and no objective measurement of the fear response in Little Albert (e.g. the dependent variable was not operationalized).
• As this was an experiment of one individual the findings cannot be generalized to others (e.g. low external validity). Albert had been reared in a hospital environment from birth and he was unusual as he had never been seen to show fear or rage by staff. Therefore, Little Albert may have responded differently in this experiment to how other young children may have, these findings will therefore be unique to him.
• The Little Albert Experiment was conducted before ethical guidelines were implemented in psychology, and this study can only be judged retrospectively. For example, (i) the experiment was conducted without the knowledge or consent of Albert's parents, (ii) creating a fear response is an example of psychological harm, and finally (iii) Watson and Raynor did not desensitize Albert to his fear of rats.

The cognitive approach criticizes the behavioral model as it does not take mental processes into account. They argue that the thinking processes that occur between a stimulus and a response are responsible for the feeling component of the response.

Ignoring the role of cognition is problematic, as irrational thinking appears to be a key feature of phobias. Tomarken et al. (1989) presented a series of slides of snakes and neutral images (e.g. trees) to phobic and non-phobic participants. The phobics tended to overestimate the number of snake images presented.

How to reference this article:

McLeod, S. A. (2018, October 08). Pavlov's dogs. Simply Psychology. www.simplypsychology.org/pavlov.html

APA Style References

Harris, B. (1979). Whatever happened to little Albert?. American psychologist, 34(2), 151.

Tomarken, A. J., Mineka, S., & Cook, M. (1989). Fear-relevant selective associations and covariation bias. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 98(4), 381.

Watson, J.B. (1913). Psychology as the behaviorist Views It. Psychological Review, 20, 158-177.

Watson, J. B., & Rayner, R. (1920). Conditioned emotional reactions. Journal of experimental psychology, 3(1), 1.

How to reference this article:

McLeod, S. A. (2020, May 30). The little albert experiment. Simply Psychology. www.simplypsychology.org/little-albert.html

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