Instruct: Given a question, retrieve documents that answer the question.
Query: Where was The Little Albert experiment conducted?
The Little Albert experiment was a controlled experiment showing empirical evidence of classical conditioning in humans. The study also provides an example of stimulus generalization. It was carried out by John B. Watson and his graduate student, Rosalie Rayner, at Johns Hopkins University. The results were first published in the February 1920 issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology.
Rayner and Watson claimed to have studied over 500 children, with the Little Albert experiment being their only attempt at a psychological experiment (it would not be categorised as an experiment today). The basis of their study was conditioning a 9-month old baby, referred to as "Albert", to fear a white rat, which had previously been a neutral stimulus. The fear was generalized to other white, furry stimuli, such as fur coats, rabbits, and a Santa Claus mask. The results of the study were published in the "Journal of Experimental Psychology". Despite its prominence, the "Little Albert" study would be deemed highly unethical by modern standards.
Watson later gave a series of weekend lectures describing the Little Albert study. 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. Peter shared similar fears of white rabbits and furry objects to Little Albert. Jones was able to increase Peter's tolerance of white rabbits by exposing him to the animal, known as direct conditioning, and having Peter interact with children who were not afraid of the rabbit. Mary Cover Jones was the first psychologist to desensitize or uncondition a fear response and become known as the "Mother of Behavior Therapy". [7]
In further experiments, Little Albert seemed to generalize his response to the white rat. He became distressed at the sight of several other furry objects, such as a rabbit, a furry dog, and a seal-skin coat, and even a Santa Claus mask with white cotton balls in the beard. However, this stimulus generalization did not extend to everything with hair.[4]
In 1906 Wolff joined the staff of the Opéra-Comique, the theatre which became the centre of his career, while leading ensembles elsewhere in the city of Paris. He made his conducting debut at an opera gala in Strasbourg (then under German control) on 9 May 1909, following this by getting as much experience as possible with many short engagements in all operatic genres around France. Meanwhile, in 1908, Wolff was appointed chorus master at the Opéra-Comique. This was his first experience with any form of stage work. He remained in that position for three years before being given an opportunity to conduct the premiere of Laparra's "La jota". Impressed with his performance, the Opéra-Comique took him with them to Argentina in 1911 where he conducted the Buenos Aires premiere of "Pelléas et Mélisande" at the Teatro Colón. He later conducted the opera again in its premieres in Naples, Copenhagen, Kristiania (now Oslo) and Stockholm. In August 1910 Wolff conducted Fauré’s incidental music in Georgette Leblanc’s production of the play "Pelléas and Mélisande" in the cloisters and gardens of Saint-Wandrille abbey.
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."[9] After reviewing Watson's correspondence and publications, as well as research in public documents (such as the 1920 United States Census and state birth and death records), Beck argued that "Albert B." was a pseudonym for Douglas Merritte, the son of Arvilla Merritte, then a woman who appears to have been a wet nurse at the Harriet Lane Home.[9] Recent research has shown, however, that Douglas Merritte may not have been "Little Albert",[10] who may in fact have been young William Barger.
In 1920 John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner demonstrated such fear conditioning in the Little Albert experiment. They started with a 9-month boy called “Albert”, who was unemotional but was made to cry by the loud noise (unconditioned stimulus) of a hammer striking a steel bar. Albert initially showed no fear of a white rat (neutral stimulus), but after the sight of the rat had been accompanied five times by the loud noise, he cried and tried to escape the rat, showing that the rat had become a conditioned stimulus for fear. Although the Watson and Rayner work with Little Albert clearly falls under the broad umbrella of "conditioned fear" they did not use the term CER and thought they were applying more general conditioning principles to human behavior.
Charles Albert Browne Jr. was born in North Adams, Massachusetts, on August 12, 1870, the eldest of five children. His father, Charles Albert Browne Sr., was an inventor and held several patents dealing with explosive technologies including electric fuses. His father helped to apply these technologies during the construction of the Hoosac Tunnel near North Adams, where Charles grew up. In his youth, Charles assisted his father in conducting experiments which naturally aroused the boy's interest in chemistry.
The author has conducted lab and public experiments to determine under what conditions people will cheat and by how much. Under circumstances where cheating is made possible, people cheat almost always, but only by a little amount of reward. People cheat up to the level where they start to feel bad about their own internal sense of integrity.
Little Albert experiment
Albert was about one year old at the end of the experiment, and he reportedly left the hospital shortly thereafter.[5] Though Watson had discussed what might be done to remove Albert's conditioned fears, he had no time to attempt such desensitization with Albert, and it is likely that the infant's fear of furry things continued post-experimentally.[6]
The Michelson–Morley experiment was conducted in 1887 by physicist Albert A. Michelson of Case School of Applied Science and chemist Edward W. Morley of Western Reserve University. This experiment proved the non-existence of the luminiferous ether and was later cited as circumstantial evidence in support of special relativity as proposed by Albert Einstein in 1905. Michelson became the first American to win a Nobel Prize in science.
Alfred Yarrow conducted a famous experiment where he disproved this assumption. Sources are unclear as to whether he discovered this during the experiment, or conducted the experiment merely to demonstrate a theory that he already held.
The Spring Grove Experiment is a series of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) studies performed from 1963 to 1976 on patients with psychotic illnesses at the Spring Grove Clinic in Catonsville, Maryland. These patients were sponsored by a federal agency called the National Institute of Mental Health to be part of the first study conducted on the effects of psychedelic drugs on schizophrenics. Then, the Spring Grove Experiments were adapted to study the effect of LSD and psychotherapy on patients including alcoholics, heroin addicts, neurotics, and terminally-ill cancer patients. The research done was largely conducted by the members of the Research Unit of Spring Grove State Hospital. Significant contributors to the experiments included Walter Pahnke, Albert Kurland, Sanford Unger, Richard Yensen, Stanislav Grof, William Richards, Francesco Di Leo and Oliver Lee McCabe. Later, Spring Grove was rebuilt into the Maryland Psychiatric Center, where studies continued to be performed for the advancement of psychiatric research. This study on LSD is the largest study on psychedelic drugs to date.
G. A. Slack proposed that in order to optimize the figure of merit, phonons, which are responsible for thermal conductivity must experience the material as a glass (experiencing a high degree of phonon scattering—lowering thermal conductivity) while electrons must experience it as a crystal (experiencing very little scattering—maintaining electrical conductivity). The figure of merit can be improved through the independent adjustment of these properties.
Albert had his own daytime variety program, "The Eddie Albert Show", on CBS television in 1953. Singer Ellen Hanley was a regular on the show. A review in "Broadcasting" magazine panned the program, saying, "Mr. Albert with the help of Miss Hanley, conducts an interview, talks a little, sings a little and looks all-thumbs a lot."
For the experiment proper, Albert was put on a mattress on a table in the middle of a room. A white laboratory rat was placed near Albert and he was allowed to play with it. 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. Albert responded to the noise by crying and showing fear. After several such pairings of the two stimuli, Albert was presented with only the rat. Upon seeing the rat, Albert got very distressed, crying and crawling away. Apparently, the infant associated the white rat with the noise. The rat, originally a neutral stimulus, had become a conditioned stimulus, and it was eliciting an emotional response (conditioned response) similar to the distress (unconditioned response) originally given to the noise (unconditioned stimulus).[4]
The faculty of the Franz Liszt Academy included some of the most eminent Hungarian musicians, including Béla Bartók, Leó Weiner, Ernő Dohnányi and Zoltán Kodály. Solti studied under the first three, for piano, chamber music and composition respectively. Some sources state that he also studied with Kodály, but in his memoirs Solti recalled that Kodály, whom he would have preferred, turned him down, leaving him to study composition first with Albert Siklós and then with Dohnányi. Not all the Academy's tutors were equally distinguished: Solti remembered with little pleasure the conducting classes run by Ernö Unger, "who instructed his pupils to use rigid little wrist motions. I attended the class for only two years, but I needed five years of practical conducting experience before I managed to unlearn what he had taught me".
It should be noted that Watson's experiment had many failings by modern standards. For example, it had only a single subject and no control subjects. Furthermore, such an experiment could be hard to conduct in compliance with current law and regulations, given the expected risks to the subject.
The identity claimed by Beck, Levinson, and Irons has been contested by psychology researchers, Russ Powell and Nancy Digdon, as well as Watson scholar, Ben Harris, who offer an alternative identity based on available data.[10][11] William Barger had been born within a day of Merritte, was known by friends and family as "Albert" (even though his given name was William), and his mother had also worked at the hospital where the experiment was conducted. In addition, his size and developmental condition much more closely matched the experiment's documentation of the subject baby's condition.[12] 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. In an interview, Barger's niece stated that she and her uncle had been quite close throughout his life, acknowledged Barger's antipathy toward dogs as a well-known fact that family members would tease him about (the researchers noted there was no way to determine whether or not this behavior was linked to Watson's experiment), and stated that she did not recall any other phobias. The researchers concluded that Barger would have been unaware of his role as an infant test subject.[13]
From 1921, he conducted several aether drift experiments, repetitions of the Michelson-Morley experiment and the Trouton–Noble experiment, whose negative outcome further supported Albert Einstein's special relativity – although Tomaschek was a critic of that theory.
John Broadus Watson (January 9, 1878 – September 25, 1958) was an American psychologist who established the psychological school of behaviorism. Watson promoted a change in psychology through his address "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views it", which was given at Columbia University in 1913. Through his behaviorist approach, Watson conducted research on animal behavior, child rearing, and advertising. In addition, he conducted the controversial "Little Albert" experiment and the Kerplunk experiment. Watson popularized the use of the scientific theory with behaviorism. He was also editor of "Psychological Review" from 1910 to 1915. A "Review of General Psychology" survey, published in 2002, ranked Watson as the 17th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
The famous Michelson–Morley interferometer experiment was conducted in 1887 in the basement of a campus dormitory by Albert A. Michelson of Case School of Applied Science and Edward W. Morley of Western Reserve University. This experiment proved the non-existence of the luminiferous ether and was later understood as convincing evidence in support of special relativity as proposed by Albert Einstein in 1905. Michelson became the first American to win a Nobel Prize in science. The commemorative Michelson-Morley Memorial Fountain as well as an Ohio Historical Marker are located on campus, near where the actual experiment was performed.
According to some textbooks, Albert's mother worked in the same building as Watson and didn't know the tests were being conducted. When she found out, she took Albert and moved away, letting no one know where they were going. A 2009 report, however, disputes that.[8] The original report had stated that the baby's mother was a wet nurse at the hospital, who may have felt coerced and unable to turn down a request for her baby to be used in Watson's experiment.
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. Albert showed no fear of any of these items during the baseline tests.