Instruct: Given a question, retrieve passages that can help 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".
The Bobo doll experiment (or experiments) is the collective name for the experiments performed by Albert Bandura during 1961 and 1963 when he studied children's behavior after they watched a human adult model act aggressively towards a Bobo doll, a doll-like toy with a rounded bottom and low center of mass that rocks back to an upright position after it has been knocked down. There are different variations of the experiment. The most notable experiment measured the children's behavior after seeing the human model get rewarded, get punished, or experience no consequence for physically abusing the Bobo doll. The experiments are empirical methods to test Bandura's social learning theory. The social learning theory claims that people learn largely by observing, imitating, and modeling. It demonstrates that people learn not only by being rewarded or punished (behaviorism), but they can also learn from watching somebody else being rewarded or punished (observational learning). These experiments are important because they resulted in many more studies concerning the effects of observational learning. The new data from the studies has practical implications, for example by providing evidence of how children can be influenced by watching violent media.
Albert Bandura, a social learning theorist suggested the forces of memory and emotions worked in conjunction with environmental influences. Bandura was known mostly for his "Bobo doll experiment". During these experiments, Bandura video taped a college student kicking and verbally abusing a bobo doll. He then showed this video to a class of kindergarten children who were getting ready to go out to play. When they entered the play room, they saw bobo dolls, and some hammers. The people observing these children at play saw a group of children beating the doll. He called this study and his findings observational learning, or modeling.
The Bobo doll experiment was a study carried out by Albert Bandura who was a professor at Stanford University. It focused on the study of aggression using three groups of preschoolers as the subjects. Bandura took inflatable plastic toys called Bobo dolls and weighted them down to always stand upright. The preschoolers were divided into three groups by gender, and then into six subgroups. One of the groups would observe an adult act aggressively towards the bobo doll, another group would observe an adult with non-aggressive behaviors, and the last group would not be exposed to any behavior models. The study found the preschoolers exposed to the aggressive behavior had imitated the aggressiveness towards the doll, regardless of gender. The other two groups showed significantly less hostility towards the doll. The study had showed aggressive and non-aggressive behaviors were learned by observing others and had a significant effect on the subjects even after the study was concluded.
Psychology was a branch of the domain of philosophy until the 1870s, when it developed as an independent scientific discipline in Germany and the United States. Psychology as a self-conscious field of experimental study began in 1879, in Leipzig Germany, when Wilhelm Wundt founded the first laboratory dedicated exclusively to psychological research in Germany. Wundt was also the first person to refer to himself as "a psychologist". Other important early contributors to the field include Hermann Ebbinghaus (a pioneer in the study of memory), William James (the American father of pragmatism), and Ivan Pavlov (who developed the procedures associated with classical conditioning).
Following that study, Albert Bandura tested whether the same was true for models presented through media by constructing an experiment he called "Bobo Doll Behavior: A Study of Aggression". In this experiment Bandura exposed a group of children to a video featuring violent and aggressive actions. After the video he then placed the children in a room with a Bobo doll to see how they behaved with it. Through this experiment, Bandura discovered that children who had watched the violent video subjected the dolls to more aggressive and violent behavior, while children not exposed to the video did not. This experiment displays the social cognitive theory because it depicts how people reenact behaviors they see in the media. In this case, the children in this experiment reenacted the model of violence they directly learned from the video.
Fechner, along with Wilhelm Wundt and Hermann von Helmholtz, is recognized as one of the founders of modern experimental psychology. His clearest contribution was the demonstration that because the mind was susceptible to measurement and mathematical treatment, psychology had the potential to become a quantified science. Theorists such as Immanuel Kant had long stated that this was impossible, and that therefore, a science of psychology was also impossible.
Sherif was a founder of modern social psychology, who developed several unique and powerful techniques for understanding social processes, particularly social norms and social conflict. Sherif's experimental study of autokinetic movement demonstrated how mental evaluation norms were created by human beings. Sherif is equally famous for the Robbers Cave Experiments. This series of experiments, begun in Connecticut and concluded in Oklahoma, took boys from intact middle-class families, who were carefully screened to be psychologically normal, delivered them to a summer camp setting (with researchers doubling as counselors) and created social groups that came into conflict with each other.
The first practical intelligence test was developed between 1905 and 1908 by Alfred Binet in France for school placement of children. Binet warned that results from his test should not be assumed to measure innate intelligence or used to label individuals permanently. Binet's test was translated into English and revised in 1916 by Lewis Terman (who introduced IQ scoring for the test results) and published under the name the Stanford–Binet Intelligence Scales. As Terman's test was published, there was great concern in the United States about the abilities and skills of recent immigrants. Different immigrant nationalities were sometimes thought to belong to different races, such as Slavs. A different set of tests developed by Robert Yerkes were used to evaluate draftees for World War I, and researchers found that people from southern and eastern Europe scored lower than native-born Americans, that Americans from northern states had higher scores than Americans from southern states, and that black Americans scored lower than white Americans. The results were widely publicized by a lobby of anti-immigration activists, including the New York patrician and conservationist Madison Grant, who considered the Nordic race to be superior, but under threat of immigration by inferior breeds. In his influential work "A Study of American Intelligence" psychologist Carl Brigham used the results of the Army tests to argue for a stricter immigration policy, limiting immigration to countries considered to belong to the "nordic race".
Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt (; ; 16 August 1832 – 31 August 1920) was a German physician, physiologist, philosopher, and professor, known today as one of the founding figures of modern psychology. Wundt, who noted psychology as a science apart from philosophy and biology, was the first person ever to call himself a psychologist. He is widely regarded as the "father of experimental psychology". In 1879, Wundt founded the first formal laboratory for psychological research at the University of Leipzig. This marked psychology as an independent field of study. By creating this laboratory he was able to establish psychology as a separate science from other disciplines. He also formed the first academic journal for psychological research, "Philosophische Studien" (from 1881 to 1902), set up to publish the Institute's research.
With the outbreak of World War II, weaponization of botulinum toxin was investigated at Fort Detrick in Maryland. Carl Lamanna and James Duff developed the concentration and crystallization techniques that Edward J. Schantz used to create the first clinical product. When the Army’s Chemical Corps was disbanded, Schantz moved to the Food Research Institute in Wisconsin, where he manufactured toxin for experimental use and generously provided it to the academic community.
Another experimental-vs-control study compared the effect of the Roots and Shoots humane education program on elementary students in several schools in two cities in the United States. The authors found that "[s]tudents who participated in the humane education program showed stronger growth in both of these outcomes compared with students in the control group". However, they did not find differences in disruptive behaviors between students who participated in the humane education program and the control program (a chess club). Overall, the authors state that "[e]ffects appeared strongest on attitudes; behavioral effects were found to be largely limited to behaviors directly addressed by the humane education program".
Alfred Binet (; July 8, 1857 – October 18, 1911) was a French psychologist who invented the first practical IQ test, the Binet–Simon test. In 1904, the French Ministry of Education asked psychologist Alfred Binet to devise a method that would determine which students did not learn effectively from regular classroom instruction so they could be given remedial work. Along with his collaborator Théodore Simon, Binet published revisions of his test in 1908 and 1911, the last of which appeared just before his death.
Social learning theory originated with Bandura's which suggests that children may learn aggression from viewing others. Modeling of behavior was observed in Bandura's Bobo Doll experiments. Bandura presented children with an Aggressive Model: The model played with 'harmless' tinker toys for a minute or so but then progressed onto the Bobo doll, the model lay the Bobo doll down and was violent towards it; punched its nose, hit it with a mallet, tossed it in the air, and kicked it. In addition, verbal comments were made in relation. They then put the children in a room with a Bobo doll to see if he/she would imitate the behavior previously seen on the video.
Following the Army Alpha and Army Beta tests for soldiers in World War I, mental testing became popular in the US, where it was soon applied to school children. The federally created National Intelligence Test was administered to 7 million children in the 1920s, and in 1926 the College Entrance Examination Board created the Scholastic Aptitude Test to standardize college admissions. The results of intelligence tests were used to argue for segregated schools and economic functions—i.e. the preferential training of Black Americans for manual labor. These practices were criticized by black intellectuals such a Horace Mann Bond and Allison Davis. Eugenicists used mental testing to justify and organize compulsory sterilization of individuals classified as mentally retarded. In the United States, tens of thousands of men and women were sterilized. Setting a precedent which has never been overturned, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the constitutionality of this practice in the 1907 case "Buck v. Bell".
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. 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. 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.
Later research was focused more on refining the hypothesis, rather than on denying its correctness. In one of the earlier studies, following the publication of Dollard et al.'s book, Pastore argued that the hypothesis should distinguish between arbitrary and non-arbitrary situations, as non-arbitrary situations decrease the aggressiveness of response. In this study, participants from a sample of 131 college students were presented with the verbal description of two types of situations, arbitrary and non-arbitrary. One of the arbitrary situation examples was being intentionally passed by the bus driver, while waiting at the correct bus stops. A non-arbitrary situation was described in one of the examples as being passed by the bus, while it was specifically marked as heading for a garage. The study results suggested that arbitrariness of the situation is an important factor in eliciting aggressive behavior in frustrating situations, with arbitrary situations inducing more aggression.
Spontaneous recovery is associated with the learning process called classical conditioning, in which an organism learns to associate a neutral stimulus with a stimulus which produces an unconditioned response, such that the previously neutral stimulus comes to produce its own response, which is usually similar to that produced by the unconditioned stimulus. Although aspects of classical conditioning had been noted by previous scholars, the first experimental analysis of the process was done by Ivan Pavlov, a nineteenth-century physiologist came across the associative effects of conditioning while conducting research on canine digestion.
Pavlov won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1904, becoming the first Russian Nobel laureate. A survey in the "Review of General Psychology", published in 2002, ranked Pavlov as the 24th most cited psychologist of the 20th century. Pavlov's principles of classical conditioning have been found to operate across a variety of behavior therapies and in experimental and clinical settings, such as educational classrooms and even reducing phobias with systematic desensitization.
Ernst Heinrich Weber (24 June 1795 – 26 January 1878) was a German physician who is considered one of the founders of experimental psychology. He was an influential and important figure in the areas of physiology and psychology during his lifetime and beyond. His studies on sensation and touch, along with his emphasis on good experimental techniques gave way to new directions and areas of study for future psychologists, physiologists, and anatomists.
In 1893, fourteen years after Wilhelm Wundt founded the first psychology laboratory in the world, a Psychology Laboratory was built in Nassau Hall, the oldest building in the university, under the leadership of J. Mark Baldwin. In 1915, psychology received recognition in the title when the department was renamed Department of Philosophy and Psychology. It was not until 1920, however, that the Department of Psychology was established with Howard Warren as its first chairman. In 1924, Eno Hall was constructed to house the department. The building was named in honor of Henry Eno, the principal donor and research associate in psychology. Warren was also a donor, but he chose to keep his donation anonymous at the time. He commented that it was "the first laboratory in this country, if not in the world, dedicated solely to the teaching and investigation of scientific psychology." According to university president John Hibben, the laboratory was the realization of a dream that Warren had cherished for a long time.
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.
A detailed review of the original study and its subsequent interpretations by Ben Harris (1979) stated:
It is difficult to be certain exactly what happened during the Little Albert Experiment since concrete evidence and scientific records are lacking. Though a film was shot during the experiment, textbooks interpret the movie differently. Various sources give contradicting accounts of events that took place, and they raise questions about exactly what stimuli were used, which stimuli the baby came to fear, and what happened to the child after the experiment. It was said that most textbooks "suffer from inaccuracies of various degrees" while referring to Watson and Rayner's study. Texts often misrepresent, exaggerate, or minimize the range of Albert's post-conditioning fears.
The aim of Watson and Rayner was to condition a phobia in an emotionally stable child. For this study they chose a nine-month old infant from a hospital referred to as "Albert" for the experiment. Watson followed the procedures which Pavlov had used in his experiments with dogs.
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. 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.