Читать книгу Child Development From Infancy to Adolescence - Laura E. Levine - Страница 106

John B. Watson (1878–1958) developed the theory he called behaviorism. He concentrated on what he could see: behavior, or what people do. The modern academic field of psychology was just emerging, and psychologists in America were trying hard to establish the field as an experimental science, with testable predictions based on observable phenomena rather than unseen concepts such as Freud’s unconscious mind.

John B. Watson. John B. Watson is called the father of the theory of behaviorism, which focuses on what people do rather than on what they think.

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Watson studied the ways in which the environment influences human behavior. He described a process called classical conditioning and carried out an experiment with a 9-month-old infant, known only as Little Albert, to demonstrate that he could use this process to create fear in a human infant (Watson & Rayner, 1920). You can think of “conditioning” as a type of learning. When we refer to something as “unconditioned,” it means that you don’t need to learn about it because your response is automatic. In classical conditioning, a particular stimulus or event in the environment is paired with another stimulus over and over again. The first stimulus is known as the unconditioned stimulus (UCS), because it provokes a natural or unlearned response, known as the unconditioned response (UCR). Watson found that Little Albert, like many infants, was frightened by a sudden loud sound, so in this experiment the noise was the UCS and Albert’s fear was the UCR. The learning that occurs in classical conditioning comes when the UCS is paired over and over again with a neutral stimulus that does not originally provoke any response. Eventually, the neutral stimulus begins to evoke the same response as the UCS, and is then called the conditioned stimulus (CS) and the response is the conditioned response (CR).

Classical conditioning: The process by which a stimulus (the unconditioned stimulus) that naturally evokes a certain response (the unconditioned response) is paired repeatedly with a neutral stimulus. Eventually the neutral stimulus becomes the conditioned stimulus and evokes the same response, now called the conditioned response.

When Little Albert was first shown a white rat, he was curious and unafraid, so the rat was initially a neutral stimulus because it did not produce a fear response. However, Watson then made the loud sound at the same time that he presented the white rat to the infant. He did this numerous times over a number of days, and Little Albert soon began to express fear by crying as soon as he saw the white rat. Eventually Watson stopped making the loud sound, and yet every time he showed Little Albert the white rat, which by now had become a CS, the infant continued to show fear, which now was a CR, or learned response. Figure 2.2 illustrates the process of classical conditioning.

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Figure 2.2 Classical conditioning.

Classical conditioning has become an accepted principle of learning. It’s easy to think of examples in everyday life. A child who visits fast food restaurants with a play area (UCS) has fun there and feels happy (UCR). Although she may have had no preference for this type of food (neutral stimulus), she may come to associate that type of food (CS) with the fun she has at the play areas provided and subsequently feel happy (CR) when she has that food (Petrovich & Gallagher, 2007). To check whether you understand the steps of the classical conditioning process, try Active Learning: Understanding the Process of Classical Conditioning.

Active Learning: Understanding the Process of Classical Conditioning

Read the following paragraph and then answer the questions below.

Every time your roommate leaves the room he says “Goodbye!” and loudly slams the door, making you flinch. After this happens a number of times, your roommate says to you “Gotta go now. Goodbye!” and you realize that you are flinching even before you hear the door slam. Can you identify all the elements in this classical conditioning paradigm listed below?

 Unconditioned stimulus (the stimulus that naturally is tied to a response that you can’t control):

 ____________________________________________________________________

 Unconditioned response (the response that is automatic):

 ____________________________________________________________________

 Conditioned stimulus (the stimulus that starts out neutral but is paired with the unconditioned stimulus):

 ____________________________________________________________________

 Conditioned response (the response you have learned):

 ____________________________________________________________________

Answer: Originally, the UCS always produces the UCR. In this case, the slamming door is the UCS and your automatic flinch is the UCR. However, over time the slam has been paired with your roommate saying “Goodbye!” You didn’t originally flinch when he said it, so “Goodbye” was originally a neutral stimulus. With repeated pairings with the slamming door, “Goodbye” has become a CS and your flinch has become a CR.

One of the dangers of this type of learning is that once the conditioned (or learned) response has been established, people understandably avoid a stimulus that produces the unpleasant unconditioned response, so they don’t have the opportunity to find out that they really have nothing to fear. If you once got very sick after eating asparagus, you avoid it in the future and never find out that it had nothing to do with your illness. Classically conditioned fears can be so powerful that they begin to limit what people who experience them are able to do. This type of unreasonable fear is called a phobia.

Phobia: An irrational fear of something specific that is so severe that it interferes with day-to-day functioning.

People who experience phobias go to extremes to avoid the object of their fears. Psychologists have used classical conditioning to treat phobias by exposing patients to their feared situations in a controlled way. This idea began long ago when Mary Cover Jones (1924) followed Watson’s experiment with Little Albert with a study of a 2-year-old boy who seemed to have the exact phobias of rats, rabbits, and other objects that Watson had conditioned into Little Albert. Jones was able to undo these fears by deconditioning the child; she presented him with candy at the same time a rabbit was brought to him and encouraged imitation when he saw another child holding the rabbit.