Staats Chapter 2: Conditioned Emotional Reactions Flashcards
1) Can we condition fear of an animal, e.g. a white rat, by visually presenting it and simultaneously striking a steel bar?
By pairing the rat with the unpleasant bell 7 times they were able to produce a conditioned fear response to the rat alone (when presented without the bell).
They predicted that if the sound was even more intense and unpleasant it would have taken even fewer joint presentations to condition the fear response
They were under going new studys to explore this possibility at the time.
If such a conditioned emotional response can be established, will there be a transfer to other animals or objects?
Five days later they brought Albert back in into the lab and tested him.
First they found that the conditioned response to the rat had carried over completely
They also observed that he had no fear when presented with blocks alone, but he did have a fear response when presented with a rabbit alone, dog alone, seal skin fur coat alone, and cotton wool alone, all of which he did not have a fear reaction to when originally tested at 9 months
He even feared a person wearing a Santa clause mask. But when presented with blocks intermediately he still didn’t have a fear response to them.
Thus, it appears that emotional transfer does takes place and the number of transfers resulting from an experimentally produced conditioned emotional reaction may be very large.
What is the effect of time upon such conditioned emotional responses?
If after a reasonable period such emotional responses have not dies out, what laboratory methods can be devised for their removal?
Albert was taken from the hospital the day those last experiments were conducted so they couldn’t explore these remaining questions
The authors hypothesize that those conditional emotional reactions in the home environment are likely to persist indefinitely unless an accidental method for removing them is hit upon
The authors then say if Albert happens to get psychoanalysis in 20 years and the analyst comes upon his fear of a seal skin fur coat they might come up with a post hoc explanation from dream analysis of why the he has this fear which would be total BS
And Albert may even become wrongly convinced that the analyst’s explanation of why he developed the fear is true
Additional Suggestions
Many phobias are true conditioned emotional reactions either of the direct or transferred type
Emotional disturbances in adults cannot be traced back to sex alone
They must be retraced along 3 collateral lines to conditioned and transferred responses set up in infancy and early youth in all three of the fundamental human emotions.
