Conditioned Emotional Response Article Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Conditioned Emotional Response - Article Example was tested. The experimenters had him confronted with different animals when he was nine months old. He 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 was 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.