Watson Rayner's Little Albert Study

The purpose of this essay is to explain the behaviourism perspective for maladaptive behaviour and to assess the usefulness of therapies for maladaptive behaviour based on operant and classical conditioning theories. The behavioural approach hold the view that ‘It is probable that many phobias are true conditioned emotional reactions either of the direct or the transferred type’ (Watson Rayner 1920) This means the approach assumes that all behaviour is the result of a learning process and that mental disorders ranging from obsessive compulsive disorder to schizophrenia are the result of ineffective learning. Focus is given to observable behaviour believed to be a reaction to experience during the process of classical and operant conditioning. Classical conditioning can be shown using Watson and Rayner’s (1920) Little Albert study. This study involved associating a neutral stimulus, a furry rabbit to an eleven month old child with an unconditioned stimulus which was a loud noise. The neutral stimulus rabbit associated with the …show more content…
case study but is not appropriate for treatment of disorders such as depression due to not addressing the underlying chemical imbalance within the brain shown to be at part responsible for this disorder. The effectiveness and reliability of systematic desensitisation is shown to be successful in the treatment of obsessive compulsive disorder in around sixty percent of cases as found by (Comer, 2002); but unsuccessful in cases of agoraphobia as found by Craske & Barlow (1993) with a fifty percent relapse rate occurring within six months. Nomothetic attribution cannot be given to this treatment due to differing results in each case and the ethical considerations of this treatment are questionable due to the requirement of confronting the patient with the object of fear which could make the anxiety