"We have shown experimentally that when you condition a child to show fear of an animal,?

Question

this fear transfers or spreads in such a way that without separate conditioning he becomes afraid of many animals. If you take any one of these objects producing fear and uncondition, will fear of the other objects in the series disappear at the same time? That is, will the unconditioning spread without further training to other stimuli?"
Furthermore,
This case made it possible for the experiment to continue where Dr. Watson had left off. The first problem was that of "unconditioning" a fear response to an animal, and the second, that of determining whether unconditioning to one stimulus spreads without further training to other stimuli.

Does anyone know what this means? what does unconditioing and direct conditioning and stimuli mean?

Answer 1

Conditioning: Convincing someone to act out in a specific manner.

Unconditioning: Convincing someone to not act out when presented with a specific stimulus.

Direct conditioning: Conditioning someone to act out in a specific manner when presented with a very specific stimulus. For example, to be afraid of an elephant, but not other animals.

Stimulus: A scenario presented to an individual to attempt to elicit a certain response..

Answer 2

In the case of Dr. Watson and Little Albert. Little Albert was severely startled by a loud noise while playing with a white rabbit numerous times so that when he saw the rabbit he became scared even without the noise. The noise is an unconditioned stimulus because it causes fear automatically. The rabbit is the conditioned stimulus because only through conditioning did Albert become fearful of it. It is said that Albert generalized his fears to other white fluffy objects.

So what the researcher is saying is that if he makes Albert no longer afraid of white rabbits will that transfer to other white fluffy objects as well.

The term unconditioning doesn't really make sense. It is really just conditioning for another response.

A stimulus (stimuli is plural form) is anything that causes an activity. There is a stimulus (your morning wake up alarm clock) and a response to that stimulus (waking up and throwing the clock across the room).