Entry #4: Conditioning negative response to roses.

Following a related theme of the previous post, particularly the part where I mentioning the 1920's psychology experiment on conditioning a response of fear where previously none existed; reminded me of my own take on the experiment during one of my high school years. After learning in my psychology class of the Watson and Rayner experiment involving a 9 month old male child I was intrigued. The boy in the study  was nicknamed Albert, and he was influenced to produce a negative emotional response such as avoidance, and crying following a loud noise of a hammer striking a steel metal bar when he was presented with the object he had previously had a neutral reaction to (Little Emotional Albert). [Below is actual video footage of the experiment by John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner.]

 After learning of the experiment in class, I was compelled by the results, which showed that the child did learn to fear the objects as a result of associating a loud, fear-inducing noise in tandem of viewing the objects in the study and later learning to generalize the fear response to other similar objects. Later on, while at home, a particularly annoying teen aged sibling was practicing the art of getting on my nerves yet again. Then an "evil" idea concocted in  my mind. I informed said sibling of the study and sarcastically joked that since the behavior they were displaying on a continuous basis was annoying, I was going to test a similar experiment on them. A few days later, using some roses that were in the house, I nonchalantly sat next to said sibling on the couch, while we were watching TV (in clear view of the sibling) and pretended to be fascinated by one of the flowers. Then ever so often I would make a loud "accidental" noise with some metal pieces next to me, and then quickly raised the flower in the siblings view. The sibling was startled and would look at the flower I was holding up and then at me with an not pleased look. After a few cycles of this, the said sibling finally put two and two together, and realized what I was doing (since I had made the grave error of informing them of my experiment intentions previously). And in the true fashion of the annoying sibling behavior, the sibling rushed to our mother babbling about the horrible experiment I was doing. Needless to say, even though I eloquently and charmingly (or so I thought), defended my scientific reasoning, my mother wasn't buying it and told me to stop (Basically my mother inhibited science; I was merely trying to see if the results were reproducible. I would of course have later deconditioned the sibling. It was, after all, just a joke...cough...cough.)

My experience also highlights how the actual "Little Albert" experiment came to be generally viewed by society as being unacceptable, and unethical because it was creating an intentional phobia on the child. On a side note, question that I had (still have), is was the whole experiment in vain? Did the child really learn to fear those specific related objects with the specific characteristics? Or did he learn to fear unfamiliar objects coming toward him, near him and/or coming in contact with him? What can be said is that the child did display a negative emotion after the loud fear-inducing stimulus was presented and also later when viewing the objects without the loud noise. But did he truly fear those specific objects? I can't say I'm 100% convinced. After searching (today) to see if anyone else has a similar view on the test results, I found a book titled "Personality Theories: Critical Perspectives" by Albert Ellis that on page 255 seems to pursue a similar objective view. The book is available on Google Books (some pages are omitted), and it seems like an interesting read for anyone intrigued on the subject.

Lastly I leave a comedic video showing that experiments like mine were are perfectly innocent and harmless. Okay....maybe these experiments should be avoided, but siblings/"friends" shouldn't tether with the threshold of being too annoying to handle as they might inspire such unethical psychology experiments

Source: 
 
"Little Emotional Albert." Edmond Schools. Edmond Public Schools. Web. 15 Nov. 2015. <http://www.edmondschools.net/Portals/3/docs/Terri_McGill/READ-LITTLE ALBERT.pdf>.