(Screen capture via YouTube)

On the How Fear Works episode SYSK released, we talked about fear conditioning, the capability for humans top learn and develop new fears, rather than just have to be afraid of the same old boring things throughout our entire lives. Our ability to gain fears as we encounter new things worth fearing makes sense as a survival skill, and it makes further sense that fear acquisition shouldn’t take too much trouble, since we should probably learn to fear snakes and the guy who’s mugging us in real time rather than slowly, over the course of several weeks.

And because fear acquisition is a quick process, we should all be very grateful that we have a converse to that, fear extinction, where repeated exposure to a fear stimulus that proves harmless or manageable loses its ability to produce fear in us.

It was John Watson, the behavioral psychologist from the 1910s and 20s, who established that fears, phobias really, could be artificially conditioned in  humans. He famously proved this by using an 11-month-old boy, he gave the pseudonym of “Albert B.” (Here’s a post I wrote on the study.) Over time, as Watson’s fear conditioning study grew more famous and eventually infamous, the child came to be called Little Albert or Baby Albert. Whatever the name, the child’s identity was hopelessly lost to time. Watson’s career in psychology ended abruptly after his affair with his grad student and collaborator Rosalie Raynor became public just about the time he published his study. Driven from the profession, he left the study incomplete.  The fear he created  in Little Albert was never extinguished.

Psychology long fretted about the possibility that somewhere out in the big wide world was a man who had been unfairly wronged  by the relaxed attitudes towards ethical treatment of subjects that informed the early era of the field. Perhaps he had an inexplicable fear of rabbits and cotton balls and Santa Claus that had driven him crazy and undermined other areas of his life outside of petting zoos and the mall around Christmastime.

It turns out that a number of psychologists have tried (and failed) to positively identify Little Albert to learn what became of him. But a seven-year investigation published in the October 2009 issue of American Psychologist (thanks to SYSK listener Marylee D. for sending a copy), it appears that at long last Little Albert has been found.

The news is kind of grim, but the article is an engrossing look at the Little Albert study, Watson himself and the means the authors used to solve the 90-year old mystery of Little Albert’s identity. Check it out; here’s a link to a PDF of it.