Little Albert experiment
The Little Albert experiment was an unethical study that mid-20th century psychologists interpret as evidence of classical conditioning in humans.
[5] Before the experiment, Albert was given a battery of baseline emotional tests: the infant was exposed, briefly and for the first time, to a white rat, a rabbit, a dog, a monkey, masks (with and without hair), cotton, wool, burning newspapers, and other stimuli.
At this point, Watson and Rayner made a loud sound behind Albert's back by striking a suspended steel bar with a hammer each time the baby touched the rat.
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.
Mary Cover Jones was the first psychologist to desensitize, or decondition, a fear response and become known as the "Mother of Behavior Therapy".
[citation needed] In 2009, psychologists Hall P. Beck and Sharman Levinson published an article in which they claimed to have discovered the true identity of "Albert B.
With this condition, which is an accumulation of cerebrospinal fluid on the brain, Merritte may have had severe trouble seeing at the time of the experiment, and this disputes the claim that the child in question was average and healthy.
[12] According to researchers who looked at this case years later, if Douglas Merritte was, indeed, Little Albert, his actions during the conditioning sessions align with signs of neurological impairment.
[14] This includes Little Albert's use of hand-scooping, rather than grasping gestures typical of this age, as well as poor eye-scanning abilities and his lack of facial expressions.
[18] Finally, when Powell et al. were allowed to independently verify Douglas Merritte's clinical file, it was revealed that he was "completely blind",[19] which is at odds with the experiment's films where Little Albert engages in probable instances of object-directed action and social referencing.
Through the use of a professional genealogist, the researchers learned Barger had died in 2007 at age 87 and identified one close living relative, a niece.
[22] In 1979, the Commission issued a report entitled Ethical Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects of Research (commonly called the Belmont Report), which provided the ethical framework on which current federal regulations for the protection of human participants in research are based.
[22] A detailed review of the original study and its subsequent interpretations by Ben Harris (1979)[27] stated: Critical reading of Watson and Rayner's (1920) report reveals little evidence either that Albert developed a rat phobia or even that animals consistently evoked his fear (or anxiety) during Watson and Rayner's experiment.
[28] Other criticisms stem from the health of the child (cited as Douglas Merritte) who was not a "healthy", "normal" infant as claimed in the study, but one who was very ill and had exhibited symptoms of hydrocephalus since birth—according to relatives he never learned to walk or talk later in life.
