[canon] Conditioned Response

By youkofujima

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”Little Albert” was a placid child who rarely cried. When Watson and Rayner gave him a furry white rat to play with (a live one, not a toy), Albert showed no fear; in fact, he was delighted. However, like most children, Albert was afraid of loud noises. When the researchers made a loud noise behind his head by striking a steel bar with a hammer, he would jump and fall sideways onto the mattress he was sitting on.

Having established that Albert liked rats, Watson and Rayner set about teaching him to fear them. Again they offered him a rat, but this time, as Albert reached for it, one of the researchers struck the steel bar. Startled, Albert fell onto the mattress. The researchers repeated this procedure several times. Albert began to whimper and tremble. Finally, they held out the rat to him without making the noise. Albert fell over, cried, and crawled away as fast as he could. Tests done five days later showed that Albert’s fear had generalized to other hairy or furry objects, including white rabbits, cotton wool, a Santa Claus mask, and even John Watson’s hair.

Unfortunately, Watson and Rayner lost access to Little Albert and so were unable to reverse the conditioning.

--Source: Psychology in Perspective (Third Edition) by Carol Travis and Carole Wade, page 190.

The first time he used fire during the war, he spent the whole night dry heaving. At first he thought it was only because of the fact that he had killed someone perhaps only a little younger than he was. He had been in certain violent situations, just not a grand-scale battlefield; yes, that must have been the reason.

Other times, he figured that he should blame it on the closeness of the cremation bonfire to his tent. He would sometimes stay up the whole night with his eyes wide open, watching the shadows dance on the sides of his tent. They would flicker, turn, and turn around with accusing fingers pointed at him, laughing. The cremation of his comrades spread the scent of scorched flesh and hair about the camp and laid the thickness of their grease onto his lips like a bad repeat of what he’d done in the morning. Yes, it must be that reason that he was so sick, that he only ate the bread of his rations because the smell of cooked meat reminded him more of burnt flesh.

But then when the nightmares didn’t stop even when he’d finally gotten used to eating cooked meat again, when the civil war was drawing to an end, he’d figured that it was something else.

In fact, he can safely say that it wasn’t because of the deaths around him and the faces of the people who peered into his eyes the moment before he killed them that made him sick. It wasn’t even the smell of flesh—the one thing that he was sure that would conjure up feelings of nausea, since scent is the sense tied most strongly to memory…

It was that he would see his mother’s face every time he burned something, and he felt as though he was killing her. When he snapped his fingers—no—when his fingers released the tension and broke apart from each other after each time he snapped them, he would see his hand as his grandmother’s. That pale, old, wrinkled hand would pick up his mother as though she were nothing but an object and throw it into the fire. Then all the faces transformed into his mother’s, his father’s, and sometimes his own—their eyes falling out of their sockets from the way the flesh around it shriveled up, their hair singeing and curling off the scalp into ashes, and finally the edges of the photos curling up into useless little brown wads.

It made him wonder, sometimes, what was the conditioned stimulus and what was the conditioned response now. Was it what his grandmother did with all of his photos save one that made it this way? Then the stimulus should be his grandmother—no, too specific an object. Then, it should be the action of her throwing photos into the fire that made him this way—no, because then it happened only once, not enough to become a conditioned response. But really, deep down, he knew. He knew that it was because he hated fire. He wasn’t necessarily afraid of it, he just hated it. There was a difference. People naturally were afraid of fire because of its form, and therefore would not go near it—but he was different.

He hated it, and like children who were displeased with a parent who had a knack with tightening the umbilical cord, he chose to try and overcome it.

That’s why, even when he screamed the first time he created the fire within his hands, he held on. That’s why, even when he spent days hallucinating within nauseating fevers, he held onto the flame. Creating them, destroying them, feeling as though he had control and dominance over them to make and unmake them gave him a sense of satisfaction.

It was as though he had transformed his hatred and made it into a pawn of his own.



Like he had taken a noose and put it around the demon that swallowed his mother, father, and himself.

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