Clinical Psychology
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Psychology: Revisiting the
Classic Studies
Series Editors:
S. Alexander Haslam,1 Alan M. Slater2 and Joanne R. Smith2
1
School of Psychology, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia
2
School of Psychology, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK
P
sychology: Revisiting the Classic Studies is a new series of texts aimed at
students and general readers who are interested in understanding issues
raised by key studies in psychology. Volumes centre on 12–15 studies, with each
chapter providing a detailed account of a particular classic study and its empirical
and theoretical impact. Chapters also discuss the important ways in which thinking and research have advanced in the years since the study was conducted. They
are written by researchers at the cutting edge of these developments and, as a
result, these texts serve as an excellent resource for instructors and students looking to explore different perspectives on core material that defines the field of
psychology as we know it today.
Also available:
Personality and Individual Differences
Philip Corr
Social Psychology, second edition
Joanne R. Smith and S. Alexander Haslam
Brain and Behaviour: Revisiting the Classic Studies
Bryan Kolb and Ian Wishaw
Cognitive Psychology: Revisiting the Classic Studies
Michael W. Eysenck and David Groome
Developmental Psychology: Revisiting the Classic Studies
Alan M. Slater and Paul C. Quinn
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Clinical Psychology
Revisiting the Classic Studies
Edited by Graham C.L. Davey
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SAGE Publications Ltd
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Introduction and editorial arrangement © Graham C.L.
Davey 2019
Chapter 1 © Richard Bentall 2019
Chapter 2 © Dirk Hermans, Yannick Boddez & Bram
Vervliet 2019
Chapter 3 © Adrian Whittington 2019
Chapter 4 © David Mason, Victoria Grahame & Jacqui
Rodgers 2019
Chapter 5 © Clara Strauss 2019
Chapter 6 © Gail S. Goodman, Samara Wolpe &
Lauren Gonzalves 2019
Chapter 7 © Maree J. Abbott & Alice R. Norton 2019
Chapter 8 © Louise Waddington 2019
Chapter 9 © Christine Purdon 2019
Chapter 10 © Ed Watkins 2019
Chapter 11 © Filippo Varese & Gillian Haddock 2019
Chapter 12 © Scott Koenig and Yu Gao 2019
Chapter 13 © Rudi Dallos 2019
First published 2019
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ISBN 978-1-5264-2811-0
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Contents
About the Editor
About the Contributors
vii
ix
Introduction
1
Graham C.L. Davey
1
Defining ‘Insanity’: Building on Rosenhan (1973)
9
Richard Bentall
2
The Experimental Study of Mental Health Problems:
Building on Watson and Rayner (1920)
27
Dirk Hermans, Yannick Boddez and Bram Vervliet
3
The Origins of Cognitive Therapy: Building on Beck (1964)
41
Adrian Whittington
4
Defining Autism Spectrum Disorder:
Building on Kanner (1943)
61
David Mason, Victoria Grahame and Jacqui Rodgers
5
Cognitive Models of Depression: Building on Beck (1987)
79
Clara Strauss
6
Childhood Trauma and Repressed Memories: Building on
Williams (1994)
97
Gail S. Goodman, Samara Wolpe and Lauren Gonzalves
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VI
7 Negative Automatic Thoughts and Mental Health:
Building on Wenzlaff, Wegner and Klein (1991)
CONTENTS
117
Maree J. Abbott and Alice R. Norton
8 Panic Disorder as a Psychological Problem:
Building on Clark (1986)
135
Louise Waddington
9 Cognitive-Behavioural Analyses of Obsessive-Compulsive
Disorder: Building on Salkovskis (1985)
157
Christine Purdon
10 Depression as an Attributional Style: Building on
Abramson, Seligman and Teasdale (1978)
171
Ed Watkins
11 The Diathesis-Stress Model of Psychosis: Building on
Brown and Birley (1968)
191
Filippo Varese and Gillian Haddock
12 The Antisocial Personality: Building on Lykken (1957)
207
Scott Koenig and Yu Gao
13 From Family Therapy to Systemic Approaches to Treatment:
Building on Rosman, Minuchin and Liebman (1975)
225
Rudi Dallos
Index
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2
The Experimental Study of Mental
Health Problems: Building on
Watson and Rayner (1920)
Watson, J.B. & Rayner, R. (1920)
Conditioned emotional reactions,
Journal of Experimental Psychology,
3: 1–14
Dirk Hermans, Yannick Boddez and
Bram Vervliet
BACKGROUND
I
n 1920, John B. Watson and his collaborator Rosalie Rayner published a study
that is best known in reference to the name of its sole participant: Little Albert.
Conditioning was induced in the 11-month-old Albert by pairing a stimulus that
initially did not evoke fear (i.e., a white rat) with an aversive outcome (i.e., a loud
noise). After repeatedly presenting the rat together with the loud noise, Albert
started to react fearfully to the rat. In addition, Watson showed that this acquired
fear ‘transferred’ to related stimuli, such as a rabbit and a dog. The study can be
viewed as the very first laboratory demonstration of conditioned emotional
responses in humans.
The ‘Little Albert’ study is a classic in psychology textbooks and is often cited as
the foundation on which the domain of the experimental study of psychopathology
has been built. The experiment, which was conducted exactly 100 years ago,1
became part of psychology’s heritage and folklore, but not without being surrounded by ethical and methodological critique, myths, and a quest for the identity
of Little Albert.
John Broadus Watson was born in 1878, studied philosophy under John Dewey,
and received his PhD in 1903 from the University of Chicago. In 1908 he was
offered a position at Johns Hopkins University, where he became chair of the
1
The first part of the study is assumed to have taken place around late November or early
December 1919 (Beck et al., 2009).
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psychology department. His academic career, which ended around 1920, was
amidst exciting times for the newly developing domain of psychology.
First, Wilhelm Wundt had opened the Institute of Experimental Psychology in
Leipzig in 1879, which is often regarded as marking the start of psychology as a
modern science. Much of this early work was directed at the study of phenomena
of consciousness, such as perception, memory and language. As we will discuss
later, Watson took issue with the concept of consciousness, which he considered
as nothing more than superstition or magic.
Second, Watson’s work has to be situated in an era that was characterized by
Freudian theorizing, which was penetrating the American culture more and more,
in particular after Freud’s only visit to the United States in 1909 during which he
gave a series of lectures. The work of Freud was not only a basis for therapeutic
interventions, which were usually carried out by physicians, but also comprised a
‘psychology of everyday life’. Watson was fascinated by psychoanalysis and was
particularly interested in Freud’s theory on affective processes and on how emotions could be ‘transferred’ from one person or object to another (see Rilling,
2000, for an extensive discussion on Watson in relation to Freudian theorizing).
However, Watson rejected both the focus on the unconscious and Freud’s methods
to study such emotional transfer.
The above already illustrates that, even though Watson is publicly best known
for the Little Albert paper, he is first and foremost the founding father of behaviorism. He believed that psychology could only progress as a science if it would
stick to the ‘observables’: the observable responses of the person (‘behavior’)
and the observable stimuli that drive these responses. This was in strong opposition to the work (inspired) by Wundt, in which mental states (such as attention,
perception and memory), which could not be directly observed but only inferred,
were the subject of psychological investigation. Needless to say, it also contrasted
with Freud’s approach. Watson’s 1913 article (‘Psychology as the behaviorist
views it’) can be considered his personal ‘behaviorist manifesto’ and a turning
point for the future of psychology. Psychology should not be a science of the
‘mind’, but of ‘behavior’. He further argued that methods like ‘introspection’,
which are inherently subjective and therefore supposedly unreliable, should be
abandoned. In search of methods that allowed objective testing, Watson became
interested in the work of Pavlov, whose work on classical conditioning involved
objective manipulation of stimuli (i.e., the contingent presentation of a sound
and food) and the objective recording of the response (i.e., the number of drops
of saliva by the dog).
As we will discuss later on, Pavlov’s methodology inspired the Little Albert
study. However, other than in Pavlov’s experiments, the response under investigation was an emotional one: Albert’s fear response. Watson believed that the study
of human emotions was a crucial terrain for psychological experimentation. In a
1917 paper he wrote: ‘The psychologist is being constantly asked by his own students as well as by the physicians, educators, and jurists: “Why do you not work upon
the emotions? They are of more importance in the guidance and control of the
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human organism than any of your hair-splitting work upon thresholds”’ (Watson &
Morgan, 1917: 164). This critical remark about work on thresholds was a direct
criticism of work on perception by Wundt and associates.
The existing approaches to emotion research were unsatisfying to Watson.
First, Thorndike (1913) had published on the nature/nurture debate in The
Original Nature of Man and presented a detailed description of all kinds of situations and responses that are involved in emotions. This resulted in an
enumeration that ran into the hundreds. Moreover, Thorndike proposed that
these situation–response connections (e.g., a large animal eliciting a fear
response) are mostly based on nature, not nurture. Watson argued that environment (nurture) has a bigger role to play and that the descriptive approach,
while interesting, provides little insight into the mechanism of emotions.
Second, while Thorndike was prodigal in ascribing hundreds of different emotions to human nature, Freudian psychoanalysts were overly parsimonious:
they only emphasized the fundamental role of sex/love as the emotion/drive
that guides and controls human behavior. The Freudian approach has two
downsides, according to Watson: it restricts the realm of emotion research to
sex/love, and it makes it hardly possible to study emotions in an experimental
way. With respect to the first comment, and based on extensive and detailed
observations in infants, Watson proposed three fundamental or unlearned
emotions: fear, rage and love. Even though he suggested that the number of
inborn emotions is broader than sex/love alone, it remains a far more limited
set than that proposed by Thorndike. Hence Watson immediately highlights the
following challenge: ‘It may be argued that if these three emotional reactions are
the important ones and that if the stimuli which call them out are as simple and
crude as we now suppose them to be, then our theory of the emotions is superficial and patently unable to care for the enormous complexity in the shading of
emotional reactions in adults’ (Watson & Morgan, 1917: 168). Indeed, adults
experience and express a much wider range of emotions than fear, rage and
love alone. For Watson, it was up to scientific psychology to unveil the mechanisms by which this complexity arises. In order to do so, one should rely not on
introspection (as used by Wundt and Freudians), but on a methodology that
would fit a behaviorist approach. In that context Watson writes: ‘We should
strive to reach some formulation of the emotional reactive tendencies which will
give ample scope for psychological experimentation and which will at the same
time do justice to the wealth of material which modern psychiatric methods have
yielded’ (Watson & Morgan, 1917: 165). In the meantime, Watson was familiar
with the work of Pavlov on the conditioned reflex and believed that this methodology could be expanded to study conditioned emotional reactions. The
Little Albert paper, published in 1920, carried exactly this title: ‘Conditioned
emotional reactions.’
In conclusion, the Little Albert experiment conducted by Watson and Rayner
(1920) was an early investigation into the mechanisms by which unlearned emotions that are elicited by simple stimuli (e.g., a fear response resulting from a
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sudden loud noise) can be ‘attached’ to other stimuli (in this case a rat). According
to Watson, this could help explain the complex variety of emotions and emotioneliciting stimuli in adults. In 1917 he had already hinted at related conditioning
research being conducted in his lab: ‘The writers have already begun the following
experiment: by means of a heliostat to suddenly flash a beam of light upon an infant’s
face, the infant lying face upward upon a table in a dark room; simultaneously with
the flash a sound stimulus resembling thunder is made. Our object is to see whether
the flash of light will in time come to produce the cry which the noise calls out’
(Watson & Morgan, 1917: 171). This study remained, unpublished, however. As
such, the Little Albert experiment can be seen as another attempt at testing this
hypothesis.
WATSON AND RAYNER’S STUDY
Theory
Even though we can nowadays position the Little Albert study within a rich theoretical framework of human fear learning (see Craske et al., 2006), the original
theoretical basis was rather elementary. It is remarkable that the introduction of
the Watson and Rayner (1920) paper only contains a very brief rationale for the
study. Actually, the article would best be read together with the Watson and
Morgan (1917) paper that was published 3 years earlier (‘Emotional reactions and
psychological experimentation’) as this theoretical manuscript does a good job in
clarifying the background to the study.
As already indicated, Watson believed that the limited set of fundamental and
unlearned emotions (fear, rage, love) could be expanded to the complex repertoire
of emotional responses in adults by means of conditioning. For the Little Albert
study, four research questions were presented: ‘(1) Can we condition fear of an
animal, e.g., a white rat, by visually presenting it and simultaneously striking a steel
bar? (2) If such a conditioned emotional response can be established, will there by a
transfer to other animals or other objects? (3) What is the effect of time upon such
conditioned emotional responses? (4) If after a reasonable period such emotional
responses have not died out, what laboratory methods can be devised for their
removal?’ (Watson & Rayner, 1920: 3). In contrast to what was sometimes inaccurately described in older textbooks (Griggs, 2014; Harris, 2011), Watson and
Rayner had not been able to ‘decondition’ the fear in Little Albert, for the simple
reason that the boy and his mother left the hospital setting where they were residing before the fourth research question could be tested. Hence, the study focused
on the first three.
Methodology and findings
The participant in the study, referred to as Albert B. in the original paper, was
tested for the first time around the age of 9 months. His mother was referred to as
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a ‘wet nurse’ in the Harriet Lane Home for Invalid Children. A wet nurse is a
woman who breastfeeds and cares for another’s child. This position was held by
women, often poor, who had just given birth to their own child and were thus able
to lactate for a second child for whom the biological mother was absent. As such,
Albert was reared almost from birth in the hospital environment. He was described
as a healthy, emotionally stable child who almost never cried. At the age of
9 months he was tested with stimuli such as a white rat, a rabbit, a dog, a monkey,
masks with and without hair, and cotton wool. At no time did Albert show fear of
these stimuli. However, when the child was exposed to the sound of a hammer
striking upon a suspended steel bar, he started to cry. So during this baseline test
no fear for the white rat and related stimuli was observed, although he clearly
disliked the loud noise.
At the age of 11 months, 8 weeks after baseline testing, Watson and Rayner
attempted to condition Albert to fear the white rat (Research Question 1). On
the first test day (age 11 months and 3 days), the white rat was taken from the
cage. As soon as Albert touched the rat, the metal bar was struck behind his
head. A second conditioning trial was conducted in the same session. A week
later the rat was presented again. The laboratory notes for this second session,
which are presented in the article in much detail, describe how Albert was
already hesitant to touch the rat. The first conditioning trials were thus not
without effect. Another five conditioning trials followed during that second session: each time the touching of the white rat (conditioned stimulus; CS) was
followed by the loud sound (unconditioned stimulus; US). At the end of the session, the rat was presented without US. Watson reports: ‘The instant the rat was
shown the baby began to cry. Almost instantly he turned sharply to the left, fell
over on 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.’ Based on
these observations the authors concluded that this was a ‘case of a completely
conditioned fear response as could have been theoretically pictured’ (Watson &
Rayner, 1920: 5).
Five days after this session, Watson and Rayner set out to test Research
Question 2, which was whether the conditioned emotional response would transfer to other animals or objects. First, the rat was presented alone. It produced a
fear response, indicating that the conditioned emotional response was still there
after 5 days. Subsequently, the experimenters presented a rabbit, a dog, a seal fur
coat, cotton wool, and a Santa Claus mask. All these stimuli, which previously did
not elicit any fear, now elicited a fear response. However, no fear was observed for
a stimulus that was clearly distinct from the white rat (i.e., playing blocks that
were often presented to test Albert’s general emotional response). It is of note that
these observations provided a simple account for the Freudian transfer (e.g., a
person eliciting fear or rage due to experiences with a different but resembling
person) which, as mentioned above, was of great interest to Watson. Another 5
days later – Albert was 11 months and 20 days old – and after some additional
conditioning trials to the rat (to ‘refresh’ the conditioned fear response that had
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CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY
somewhat weakened) as well as to the rabbit and the dog, Albert was now tested
in a room that was different from the laboratory room in which he had been tested
before. In this new context the rat, the dog, and rabbit elicited fear responses,
albeit not always very pronounced. Based on these observations the authors concluded that emotional transfers take place to stimuli that are related to the
conditioned stimulus (white rat). In addition, the fear responses also emerged
when tested in a new context.
Finally, 1 month after the last session, Albert (now 1 year and 21 days) was
tested again to assess the effect of time upon conditioned emotional responses
(Research Question 3). The Santa Claus mask, the fur coat, the rat, the rabbit,
and the dog were presented again (without the aversive loud noise). Fear
responses were recorded for all stimuli. Watson concluded that: ‘These experiments would seem to show conclusively that directly conditioned emotional
responses as well as those conditioned by transfer persist, although with a certain
loss in the intensity of the reaction, for a longer period than one month. Our view
is that they persist and modify personality throughout life. It should be recalled
again that Albert was of an extremely phlegmatic type. Had he been emotionally
unstable probably both the directly conditioned response and those transferred
would have persisted throughout the month unchanged in form’ (Watson &
Rayner, 1920: 12).
Conclusions
According to Watson the study provided evidence that fear responses could be
conditioned, could be ‘transferred’ to other stimuli, and persisted over time. As
already noted, Watson was not able to further investigate the ‘detachment’ or
removal of the conditioned responses (Research Question 4) due to Albert’s departure from the hospital. Nevertheless, the authors suggested a number of possible
ways in which such ‘treatment’ could proceed. Their first suggestion was to repeatedly expose Albert to the fear-provoking stimuli without the US being presented.
In conditioning terminology this is the equivalent of ‘extinction’, a procedure that
is known to lead to a reduction of the conditioned response, and which is assumed
to be the laboratory analogue for exposure therapy (i.e., the treatment of choice for
most anxiety disorders). A second suggestion was to ‘recondition’ Albert by presenting the feared objects while simultaneously stimulating erogenous zones (e.g.,
lips, nipples) or while simultaneously feeding him candy or other food. In conditioning terminology this procedure is now referred to as ‘counterconditioning’,
again a central element in many effective treatment protocols for anxiety disorders. Finally, Watson suggested a method that would now be considered as
‘modeling’. This would have allowed Albert to acquire new behavior by imitation of
people who did not behave fearfully or by direct manipulation of his responses
around the object of fear (e.g., directing his hands towards it).
The manuscript closes with some final remarks on the impact of the findings.
First, Watson argued that whereas ‘Freudians’ believe that sex (or for Watson love)
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is the only basic unlearned emotion from which all others arise, fear (and probably
also ‘rage’) is as primal and is not derived from sex/love. Second, and somewhat
more critical for Freudian theorizing, Watson stated that phobias should thus not
be traced back to sex alone, but that emotional disorders should be retraced ‘…
along at least three collateral lines – to conditioned and transferred responses set up
in infancy and early youth in all three of the fundamental human emotions’ (Watson
& Rayner, 1920: 14). As Rilling (2000) notes and as mentioned above, Watson was
interested in the work of Freud and initially tried to explain psychoanalysis in
terms of habits and classical conditioning. However, backed by solid scientific
criticism (e.g., on the methods and mental concepts that were used), Watson
moved to another position and emerged as an arch anti-Freudian (Rilling, 2000:
302). A hint of this might already be observed in one of the closing sentences of the
Watson and Rayner (1920) paper, as he stated in a somewhat imaginary reflection:
‘The Freudians twenty years from now, unless their hypotheses change, when they
come to analyze Albert’s fear of a seal skin coat – assuming that he comes to analysis
at that age – will probably tease from him the recital of a dream which upon their
analysis will show that Albert at three years of age attempted to play with the pubic
hair of the mother and was scolded violently for it. (We are by no means denying that
this might in some other case condition it)’ (Watson & Rayner, 1920: 14). Watson
indeed would not have needed such speculation, but would have simply explained
Albert’s fear of the seal skin coat by means of transfer from the conditioning experience with the white rat.
IMPACT
I
n discussing the impact of the Watson and Rayner study, it first has to be noted
that this paper marked the end of Watson’s academic career. After his wife Mary
Amelia Ickes found out about his ongoing affair with Rosalie Rayner (the co-author
on this paper), she sought a divorce. Watson’s affair and the divorce proceedings
became front-page news across the United States, including excerpts of the love
letters to Rosalie Rayner (Benjamin et al., 2007; Chamberlin, 2012). Because of
this public indiscretion, Johns Hopkins fired Watson in the fall of 1920. After these
incidents Watson married Rosalie Rayner, but did not return to academia. These
elements are important, as the abrupt end of his academic career prohibited a
further investigation of the conditioned emotional response, and left the field with
this single N=1 study. As Samelson (1980) argues, the Little Albert study should be
viewed as an interesting pilot study, rather than as an example of convincing scientific evidence. As a matter of fact, as Watson (now with his wife Rayner-Watson)
wrote in a footnote for a 1921 paper: ‘The work at Hopkins was left in such an
incomplete state that verified conclusions are not possible; hence this summary, like
so many other bits of psychological work, must be looked upon merely as a preliminary exposition of possibilities rather than as a catalogue of concrete usable results’
(Watson & Watson, 1921: 493).
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Nevertheless, in spite of the fact that his work was incomplete and has not been
without critique (see later), the Little Albert study has changed and shaped the
field for many decades to come. The impact on the field of clinical psychology was
eloquently expressed by Field and Nightingale (2009), who guide the reader
through a thought experiment, taking place in a parallel universe where Little
Albert escaped from the hospital before Watson could start experimenting on the
boy. Having a premonition of what would happen to him, Albert crawled into a
laundry basket and so escaped from the Harriet Lane Home for Invalid Children.
Watson started a nationwide search for the boy and eventually lost interest in the
topic. In that parallel universe, things would have been very different according to
Field and Nightingale. Conditioning theories of fear and conditioning-based treatments for fear would be absent, and ‘treatments for anxiety would not be
exposure-based and would rely on techniques the efficacies of which were not tested
empirically. In which case, this parallel world would lack many of the highly successful, quick and economical interventions that our actual world enjoys’ (Field &
Nightingale, 2009: 317).
Indeed, even though Watson himself was unable to test techniques to remove
the acquired fear in Albert, his views on conditioned emotional responses and
how to ‘detach’ them were included in the work of Mary Cover Jones, who attended
a weekend lecture of Watson’s in New York and became fascinated with the Little
Albert study. She set out to work on this topic and in 1924 reported a case study
in which she treated a 3-year-old boy, named Peter, for his fear of rabbits. Jones
wrote that ‘This case made it possible for the experiment to continue where
Dr. Watson had left off’ (Jones, 1924: 310). Basically, she put into practice the plans
that Watson had for his fourth research question. In a first phase of the treatment,
Peter was confronted with a rabbit over several sessions. The type of confrontation varied gradually from ‘12 feet distance’ to ‘let rabbit nibble his fingers’. In
addition, together with Peter, three other children – who were carefully selected
for their absence of fear of the rabbit – were brought into the room. Using these
methods that are now known as gradual exposure by means of a fear hierarchy
and modeling, Peter’s fear of the rabbit subsided throughout the sessions. In a
second part of the treatment, Jones used another method, in which Peter was
allowed to eat his favorite food while the rabbit was brought as close as possible
without arousing a response that would interfere with the eating. This is what
Watson coined ‘reconditioning’ and is now known as counterconditioning. The
treatment effects were not restricted to the rabbit alone: ‘The fear of the cotton, the
fur coat, feathers, was entirely absent at our last interview. He looked at them, handled them, and immediately turned to something which interested him more. The
reaction to the rats, and the fur rug with the stuffed head was greatly modified and
improved. While he did not show the fondness for these that was apparent with the
rabbit, he had made a fair adjustment’ (Jones, 1924: 314). The treatment that was
conducted by Mary Cover Jones, under the supervision of John Watson, was simply
revolutionary, as it was so different from the few existing approaches (e.g., the
psychoanalytic methods). There is no doubt that the combination of Watson’s
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theoretical analysis and Jones’s case study that directly evolved from that work
should be viewed as pioneering and groundbreaking work. About 30 years later,
Joseph Wolpe would perfect these methods for the treatment of anxiety disorders
(Wolpe, 1958). But the basis for modern exposure therapies can be traced directly
to Watson and Jones. Wolpe even dubbed Mary Cover Jones the ‘mother of behaviour therapy’. In the parallel universe where Little Albert escaped, we would be
without the most effective treatment for anxiety, namely exposure therapy, for so
many years the flagship of cognitive behavior therapy.
John Watson and Mary Cover Jones also present a broader historical model for
the philosophy behind cognitive behavior therapy: treatment as applied experimental psychology. Scientific knowledge about the mechanisms that drive
psychopathology is used to develop and refine treatment procedures. In that sense
one could consider Watson to be the father of a domain now known as ‘experimental psychopathology’ (Boddez et al., 2017).
Other contributions of the Watson and Rayner (1920) study can be summarized
as follows: (1) start of experimental research on human emotions, (2) extension of
the study of classical conditioning to the domain of emotions, (3) first demonstration of generalization of conditioned fear (Hermans et al., 2013), and (4) bringing
attention to crucial learning experiences in childhood to understand adult anxiety
(developmental psychopathology). The fact that the Little Albert study is cited in
almost all textbooks on psychology is thus not without reason.
CRITIQUE
T
he Watson and Rayner (1920) study has not been without critique. The first
and probably most obvious one is that, at least according to modern standards, the study is methodologically poor and the conclusions are stretched beyond
what the data allow. One element is the lack of control: Valentine (1930) had
already commented on that aspect of the study. Modern fear-conditioning studies
employ one CS that is followed by the US (CS+) and one that is not (CS–; Boddez
et al., 2013). The two stimuli are typically similar in terms of previous experience
and it is usually determined by chance (or counterbalancing) which one will serve
as CS+. The control stimulus allows us to assess the impact of events other than the
CS–US pairing that could have an effect on changes in fear to the CS+ (e.g., just being
part of an experiment). Even though Watson mentioned that no fear changes were
observed for the toy blocks with which Albert was allowed to play, no proper control
stimulus was present. That is, the toy blocks probably differed in important respects
from the white rat other than just conditioning history (e.g., Albert probably had had
more positive previous experiences with toy blocks than with rats).
With respect to the possible criticism of Albert being the only participant of the
study, it should be noted that designs with a single participant (N=1) are not
uncommon and have actually attracted increased interest over recent years. But
N=1 designs also require excellent controls and statistical analysis. Even though
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Watson himself at one point referred to his work as unfinished and at the level of
a pilot study (see above), at other times the conclusions that he drew from the
experiment went way beyond the data.
Another element of critique has been that early attempts to replicate the
Watson and Rayner study apparently failed (Bregman, 1934; English, 1929;
Valentine, 1930; but see also Jones, 1931). What is not always added to the citation
of these failures is that these studies also suffered from severe shortcomings. For
instance, in a laboratory study by English (1929) a metal bar was struck with a
hammer as soon as a 14-months-old child touched a painted wooden toy duck. No
conditioned fear was observed. However, it would be incorrect to classify this
study as a non-replication, since English himself hastened to add that ‘We did not
succeed in establishing a conditional fear response to the duck for the simple reason
that the noise failed to evoke fear’ (English, 1929: 222). Likewise, the other ‘nonreplications’ were actually informal descriptions, non-informative or
methodologically as bad – or even worse – as the Watson and Rayner study (Field
& Nightingale, 2009; Todd, 1994). As a matter of fact, the question of ‘whether or
not’ fear can be induced by means of a classical conditioning procedure is no
longer at stake: this has been amply demonstrated under excellent laboratory
conditions in adults as well as children (e.g., Craske et al., 2006; Field & StorksenCoulson, 2007). The significance of the Watson and Rayner study lies in the fact
that it opened a research perspective on human fears that was absent and nonevident at that time.
Other critiques of the study were actually based on misrepresentations of the
work, rather than on the study itself. As a matter of fact, the Little Albert experiment has been inaccurately described in many introductory textbooks – sometimes
with minor errors such as the age of the boy or the fact that he was conditioned to
a rabbit instead of a rat, while other accounts include more important misrepresentations (e.g., Griggs, 2014; Harris, 1979).
Finally, the ethical aspects of the Little Albert study have been a matter of
debate. Digdon and colleagues (2014) describe how in the mid-1970s, triggered
by a broader concern about ethical conduct in psychology experiments, the study
was now reinterpreted as a violation of Little Albert’s rights. This went hand in
hand with the question of what had become of Albert, as he had been taken from
the hospital before Watson could ‘decondition’ his fears. What had been the consequences of the experiment? Was there any permanent harm?
An early attempt to learn about Albert’s identity failed (Murray, 1973). But in
2009, Beck and colleagues published an investigative study that seemed to resolve
the 90-year-old cold case. After extensive historic investigation, they identified
three foster mothers living at Johns Hopkins hospital and for which there were
indications that they were lactating in the winter of 1919–20. One of those was a
black woman who could not possibly have been the mother of Albert. The other
two were Caucasian. After no association could be found between Albert and one
of the two Caucasian women (Pearl Barger), the attention shifted to Arvilla
Merritte. Tracing the family history of Arvilla, the researchers contacted Gary
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Irons, Arvilla’s grandson and one of the co-authors of the 2009 paper. He confirmed that Arvilla had given birth to a boy called Douglas Merritte while working
at Harriet Lane Home. Further investigations, including biometric analyses on
available pictures of Douglas and Albert, led the authors to the conclusion that
baby Albert was indeed the son of Arvilla Merritte. This conclusion was, however,
not without debate (Beck et al., 2010; Powell, 2010; Reese, 2010). This was more
than a historical debate, particularly when the stakes were raised by a paper in
which Fridlund and colleagues (2012) presented evidence that Douglas Merritte
was a neurologically damaged boy at the moment of testing. This would imply that
Albert had not been the healthy, well-developed and stable boy that Watson had
claimed. Moreover, there were indications that Watson may have been aware of
these medical problems, which would impact on both ethical and scientific considerations concerning the study. It was at one point even suggested that Watson
picked Albert because he was so passive around frightening stimuli, and would
have guaranteed low levels of fear during baseline testing.
However, the saga continued when Digdon et al. (2014) revisited the conclusion
that Douglas Merritte was Little Albert. With the help of a professional genealogist
they identified another boy, Albert Barger, who was the son of Pearl Barger (the
second Caucasian foster mother), as the ‘real Albert’. Not only would his name suggest that he was baby Albert B., other indications also made him a more plausible
candidate than Douglas Merritte. Reviewing all the available evidence, Griggs
(2015) came to that same conclusion.
It is clear that the Watson and Rayner study, 100 years later, still appeals to the
imagination, and that the impact of the paper goes further than its content alone.
It also raises questions about scientific integrity (as viewed in their historical context) and the incessant quest for correct ethical criteria for research with adults
and particularly with young children.
CONCLUSIONS
T
he Watson and Rayner (1920) study is a psychology textbook classic. Indeed,
the case of Albert and the white rat presents – like Pavlov’s dog – a nice
‘opener’ for a psychology lecture. But the story is much broader and richer than
that. It is the tale of a man (Watson) who struggled to combine his fascination for
parts of Freud’s theorizing with his own strong views on behaviorism and the
directions academic psychology should move into. It is a tale about the romance
with his co-author Rosalie Rayner and the abrupt end of his academic career that
resulted from this.
What would a parallel universe look like in which Watson and Rayner never
met, and in which Watson would have added another 30 years of academic investigations and writings? How would that have changed the face of psychology? It is
very plausible that treatments for anxiety would not be exposure-based today.
This treatment indeed can be traced back to empirical work that was conducted
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by Mary Cover Jones and inspired by John Watson. This clinical application of conditioning principles was simply revolutionary, as it was very different from the
dominant approaches at that time (e.g., the psychoanalytic methods).
The Little Albert study also illustrates how psychology classics are presented
and often misrepresented in textbooks. It is a saga full of myths and historical
detective work about the identity of a boy who participated in a study exactly 100
years ago. It concerns statistical analysis and reporting of studies, the replicability
of scientific work as well as ethical questions, all of which should be considered
within their historical context.
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