Conditioned Emotional Response in Children - Assignment Example

The child normally tried to play with the rabbit, dog, and rat that were presented to him. Then one day, while he was again given the rat and he moved to touch it with his hand, a person struck a hammer hard on a steel bar and a sharp sound produced. Instantly the child fixated both his eyes and hands. The next time he got to see the rat, he was not that much excited to touch the animal, obviously still shocked by the previous incident. This means that the child's emotional response was conditioned to the stimulus of sharp sound which was the expected result of joint stimulation.

Similar experiments were done substituting the rat with other animals and conditioned responses were established. When Albert was eleven months he was again tested to see whether there was a transfer in the conditioned emotional response. A rat was shown to the child and his reaction was still negative. He started crying and crawled away. This was a very persuasive test. Such conditioned responses persist in different situations. When the child has experimented in a different setting following the same strategy, his fearful reaction was exactly similar to the ones already observed.

The potency of such responses persists sometimes throughout life, not weakening over time. When Albert was tested when he was over one year old and again given a rat, he showed fear again. Even when he was forced to touch it, he did so very hesitatingly. The very important part of the experiment, that is the removal of these implanted responses in the child, was not carefully regarded by the experimenters, due to the unavailability of the child. Every effort should have been made to pursue the child and root out all the scary conditioned responses, that could tail him for life.

In my opinion, detachment of such noxious conditioned responses is very important, since they can affect one's whole life. So every effort should be made to remove such ghastly beliefs. One way is to confront the person again and again with the same stimuli that produce fearful responses. This would result in dying out of the conditioned responses. There is a ground basis for this behavior-modifying solution since many phobias all over the world are treated this way. Walton also proposed the solution of bringing the fear-producing objects in view and simultaneously stimulating the erogenous zones.

But this is not a very refined idea since if it is practically applied, it can render one in jail for child abuse.