Classical Conditioning: Watson & Rayner's Research (College Board AP® Psychology): Study Guide

Watson & Rayner: the 'Little Albert' study

• Watson and Rayner (1920) aimed to demonstrate that emotional responses can be classically conditioned

  • They directly challenging the idea that fear is innate

• They hypothesized that phobias and emotional reactions in humans could be acquired through the same associative mechanisms Pavlov identified in dogs

Procedure

• 'Little Albert' was an infant who initially showed no fear of small white animals or objects

  • In the baseline trial:

    • Albert was presented with a white rat (NS) and he showed no fear

  • Conditioning phase:

    • Each time Albert reached for the rat (NS), Watson struck a steel bar loudly behind Albert's head (UCS), causing Albert to cry and show distress (UCR)

  • Test phase:

    • After repeated pairings, Albert cried and showed fear (CR) when presented with the rat alone (CS), without the loud noise

• Albert's fear generalized to other white, furry objects: a white rabbit, a white dog, a fur coat, and a Santa Claus mask

Findings and conclusions

• Watson & Rayner's findings:

  • demonstrated that an emotional response (fear) can be conditioned in a human infant using classical conditioning principles

  • supported the claim that emotional responses are learned through experience, and are not innate

  • helped form a theoretical basis for explaining the development of phobias

  • provided evidence for stimulus generalization in human conditioning

Ethical evaluation of Watson & Rayner's study

• Watson and Rayner's study produced valuable evidence for the conditioning of emotional responses

• However, it raises several significant ethical concerns when evaluated against contemporary APA guidelines:

Taste aversions and biological preparedness

Conditioned taste aversions

• Conditioned taste aversion occurs when an organism eats or drinks something and then becomes ill

  • This leads to a learned avoidance of that food or drink:

    • The food/drink = CS

    • Illness = UCS

    • Nausea = UCR

    • Avoidance of the food = CR

• One-trial learning is where a taste aversion can be acquired after a single pairing of the CS and UCS

  • This is unlike most classical conditioning, where repeated pairings are required

• Taste aversions are highly resistant to extinction and can persist for years, even when the person knows rationally that the food was not responsible for their illness

  • E.g. if you eat a new food and then become unwell several hours later, you may develop an aversion to that food, even though the food itself did not make you sick

Biological preparedness

• Biological preparedness refers to the idea that organisms are biologically predisposed to learn certain stimulus-response associations more easily and rapidly than others

  • Not all CS–UCS pairings are equally easy to acquire, as evolution has shaped organisms to form associations that are adaptive for survival

• Garcia & Koelling's (1966) research demonstrated this:

  • Rats learned to associate nausea with taste, and pain with audio-visual stimuli, even when the CS–UCS pairings were experimentally reversed

    • This challenged the behaviorist assumption of equipotentiality - that any CS can be paired with any UCS with equal ease

• Taste aversions demonstrate both one-trial learning and biological preparedness

  • They occur so rapidly because organisms are biologically prepared to associate illness with ingested substances

Habituation

• Habituation is a form of non-associative learning where an organism stops responding to a stimulus after repeated exposure

  • This is because the organism grows accustomed to it

• Habituation involves just one stimulus

  • This is unlike classical conditioning, which involves pairing two stimuli

• The stimulus is still detected, but the organism chooses to ignore it, e.g.

  • when you first enter a room, you notice the sound of an air conditioner

  • after a while, you stop paying attention to it

  • the sound is still there, but your response has decreased, which is habituation

• This is unlike sensory adaptation, where the sense receptors become less responsive and this cannot be controlled

  • E.g. you stop noticing a smell because your receptors are fatigued - this is sensory adaptation

Dishabituation

• Dishabituation occurs when a change in a familiar (habituated) stimulus causes the organism to notice it again

  • An organism responds as if the stimulus is new, even though it has been experienced before

• This shows that the stimulus was still being detected, but the reduced response during habituation was due to learning, not sensory failure, e.g.

  • you stop noticing the constant sound of an air conditioner (habituation)

  • suddenly, the sound changes slightly (e.g. the pitch changes), and you notice it again - this renewed response is dishabituation