Little Albert: Lucid Dreaming

Part 1: Little Emotional Albert In the case study of Little Albert, the researchers were exploring where one’s emotions come from. During the 1920’s, there was a rise in behaviorism, which was the complete opposite of psychoanalytical. Sigmund Freud had hypothesized that humans were motivated by unconscious instincts and repressed conflicts from our childhood. However, behaviorists, such as Watson, strongly believed that behavior was the result of learning. Therefore, Watson that if a stimulus creates a certain emotion in you, then after repeated experiences will that object be automatically associated with that emotion. In the study, researchers tested the reactions of Albert, a nine month old child through a white rat, a startling noise, and various other objects such as a rabbit, a monkey, a …show more content…
Before the experiment, the researchers hypothesized that only the imagery rehearsal therapy treated patients would have enhanced lucid dreaming, which in turn would decrease the amount of nightmare symptoms. The results showed that out of the three components of lucid dreaming, two of them, dream content control and purposeful waking, showed an increased amount in the patients that underwent imagery rehearsal therapy than those who did not. This study adds to the understanding of human behavior and mental processes as it shows how individuals (without imagery rehearsal therapy) that suffer from PTSD and recurrent nightmare are more aware of their dreams, yet have low control over the content of the dreams. This is a symptom of PTSD as victims often feel trapped while reliving the traumatic event. However, there are some variables that make the experiment questionable. For example, in total there were only 26 participants in the study. While there were originally 33, this is not a large enough sample size that can make conclusions about the entire population of PTSD victims. Therefore, a larger sample size is