Early Demonstrations in Humans
Early Demonstrations in Humans
J. B. Watson, one of the leading figures in American psychology, recognized the potential utility of classical conditioning as an explanation for the development of symptoms of psychopathology. Watson and a graduate student conducted a classic demonstration of how the principles of classical conditioning explicated by Pavlov could be extended to humans. In this study, Watson first showed that a 3-year-old boy called Little Albert had no particular aversion to a small white laboratory rat: He would reach for it and try to pet it, as young children are inclined to do. Watson and his assistant then placed a large gong out of sight behind Little Albert and sounded it loudly every time they brought the rat into the room. Although Little Albert had shown no initial aversion to the rat, he showed a typical startle response to the sounding of the gong (again, like most young children would). Before long, he began to become upset and burst into tears at the sight of the rat alone and would try to withdraw whenever it was brought into the room.
According to Watson, this study demonstrated that phobic reactions could be acquired purely on the basis of traumatic conditioning. Although Little Albert had previously been intrigued by the presence of the rat and showed no evidence of any fear in its presence, pairing of the rat (the conditioned stimulus) with the loud, unpredictable noise produced by the gong (the unconditioned stimulus) led him to become anxious and upset in the rat’s presence (the conditioned response), just as he had naturally become upset by the sound of the gong (unconditioned response). He had not only acquired a fear response to the rat but also tried to escape from its presence or avoid exposure to it. According to Watson, Little Albert had acquired the two hallmarks of a phobia (unreasonable fear, and escape or avoidance behaviors) purely as a consequence of simple classical conditioning.
The next major study in the sequence was conducted by Mary Cover Jones in 1924. She reasoned that if classical conditioning could produce a phobic reaction in an otherwise healthy child, the same laws of learning could be used to eliminate that reaction. She also trained a young child to have a conditioned fear response to a small animal (a rabbit) and then proceeded to feed the child in the presence of the rabbit. She found that pairing of the conditioned stimulus (the rabbit) with a second, unconditioned stimulus (food)—which produced a different unconditioned response (contentment) that was incompatible with the first (anxiety)—came to override the original learning. The child began to relax in the presence of the rabbit and no longer showed the fear response that he had acquired earlier. Thus, Jones argued, she was able to provide relief via counterconditioning.
Despite these early demonstrations, it was several decades before behavioral principles began to be applied systematically to the treatment of psychiatric disorders. This delay resulted partly from the sense that these procedures were just too simplistic to be of practical use in the treatment of complex human problems. Required were methods based on these learning principles that could be adapted to deal with more complex problems in living. Andrew Salter provided the first such method. In a text that was somewhat ahead of its time, Salter described a series of procedures based on principles of conditioning that were suitable for addressing emotional and behavioral problems in human patients. Although that text attracted little attention when it was published in 1949, it described (in vestigial form) many of the strategies and procedures that would later be used in the clinical practice of behavior therapy.
