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to test separation from mother. We have to test him with different and uncustomary foods, with strange people to feed him, with strange nurses to bathe him, clothe him and put him to bed. We must rob him of his toys, of things he is playing with. We must let a bigger boy or girl bully him, we must put him in high places, on ledges (making injury impossible however), on the backs of ponies or dogs.

One of the sad things we find by such tests is that even at three years of age many (but not all) of the children are shot through with all kinds of useless and actually harmful reactions which go under the general name emotional.

They are afraid in many situations. They are shy in dozens of others. They go into tantrums at being bathed and dressed. They go into tantrums when given certain foods or when a new nurse feeds them. They go into crying fits when the mother leaves them. They hide behind their mother's dress. They become shy and silent when visitors come. A characteristic picture is to have one hand in the mouth and the other grasping the mother's dress. One fights every child that comes near. He is called a bully, a ruffian, sadistic. Another cries and runs away if a child half his size threatens him. His parents call him a coward and his playmates make him the scapegoat.

Must we conclude that emotional reactions are hereditary? Is there an hereditary pattern of love, of fear, rage, shame, shyness, humor, anger, jealousy, timidity, awe, reverence, admiration, cruelty? Or are these just words to describe general types of behavior without implying anything as to their origin? Historically, they have been considered hereditary in origin. To answer the question scientifically, we need new methods of experimentation.

In our experimental work we early reached the conclusion that young children taken at random from homes both of the poor and of the well-to-do, do not make good subjects for the study of the origin of emotions. Their emotional behavior is too complex. Fortunately we have been able to study a number of strong healthy children . . . brought up in the home under the eye of the experimenters. Several of these children were observed from approximately birth through the first year, others through the second year and two or three children through the third year. . . . We think that we have carried these experiments far enough on infants, the genesis of whose emotional behavior we know, to uphold our main contention that when fear responses occur in the presence of all objects and situa

tions such as we have described they are always conditioned. Are we to conclude from this work that in infants there are no unlearned reactions of a kind that might give us a starting point for building up emotional behavior?

I feel reasonably sure that there are three different forms of response that can be called out at birth by three sets of stimuli. Don't misunderstand me if I call these responses "fear," "rage," and "love." Let me hasten to assure you that while I use the words fear, rage, and love, I want you to strip them of all their old connotations. . .

Fear. Our work upon infants, especially those without cerebral hemispheres, where the reaction is more pronounced, early taught us that loud sounds almost invariably produced a marked reaction in infants from the very moment of birth. For example, the striking of a steel bar with a hammer will call out a jump, a start, a respiratory pause, followed by more rapid breathing with marked vasomotor changes, sudden closure of the eyes, clutching of hands, puckering of lips. Then occur, depending upon the age of the infant, crying, falling down, crawling, walking or running away. I have never made a very systematic study of the range of sound stimuli that will call out fear responses. Not every type of sound will do it. . . Considerably more work must be done upon the nature of the auditory stimulus as well as upon the separate part reactions in the response before the whole stimulus-response picture is complete.

The other stimulus calling out this same fear reaction is loss of support-especially when the body is not set to compensate for it. It can best be observed in newborns just when they are falling asleep. If dropped then, or if the blanket upon which they lie is suddenly jerked, pulling the infant along with it, the response invariably occurs.

Rage.- .. Hampering of bodily movement brings out the series of responses we call rage. This can be observed from the moment of birth but more easily in infants 10 to 15 days of age...

Love.- The stimulus to love response apparently is stroking of the skin, tickling, gentle rocking, patting. The responses are especially easy to bring out by the stimulation of what, for lack of a better term, we may call the erogenous

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Whether these three types of responses are all that have an hereditary background we are not sure. Whether or not there

are other stimuli which will call out these responses we must also leave in doubt. If our observations are in any way complete, it would seem that emotional reactions are quite simple in the infant and the stimuli which call them out quite few in number.

These reactions which we have agreed, then, to call fear, rage, and love, are at first quite indefinite. Much work remains to be done to see what the various part reactions are in each and how much they differ. They are certainly not the complicated kinds of emotional reaction we see later on in life, but at least I believe they form the nucleus out of which all future emotional reactions arise. So quickly do they become conditioned that it gives a wrong impression to call them hereditary modes of response.

How Our Emotional Life Becomes Complicated.-How can we square these observations with those which show the enormous complexity in the emotional life of the adult? We know that hundreds of children are afraid of the dark, we know that many women are afraid of snakes, mice and insects, and that emotions are attached to many ordinary objects of almost daily use. Fears become attached to persons and to places and to general situations, such as the woods, the water, etc. In the same way the number of objects and situations which can call out rage and love become enormously increased. Rage and love at first are not produced by the mere sight of an object. We know that later on in life the mere sight of persons may call out both of these primitive emotions. How do such "attachments" group up? How can objects which at first do not call out emotions come later to call them out and thus greatly increase the richness as well as the dangers of our emotional life?

The laboratory notes describing the experiments performed by Rosalie Rayner and John B. Watson, Scientific Monthly, 1921, pp. 493-515, furnish proof of the conditioned origin of some fear responses. There is insufficient proof at the present time, however, to warrant the belief held by some that the conditioned reflex is sufficient to explain all patterns of acquired behavior. In fact, there is very little known about the conditioned reflex.

6. Experiments in the Field of Emotions

[WATSON, J. B., "Recent Experiments on How We Lose and Change Our Emotional Equipment," Pedagogical Seminary, June, 1925, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 349–371.]

Use of Corporal Punishment in Building in Negative Responses.--The question of corporal punishment in the bringing up of children at home and at school comes up periodically for discussion. I believe our experiments almost settle the problem. Punishment is a word which ought never to have crept into our language. Whipping or beating the body is a custom as old as the race. Even our modern views on the punishment of criminals and children have as their basis the old religious, masochistic practices of the church. Punishment in the biblical sense of "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" honeycombs our whole social and religious life.

Certainly punishment of children is not a scientific method. As parents, teachers and jurists, we are or ought to be interested only in setting up ways of acting in the individual that square with group behavior. . . the child or adult has to do what he does do. The only way he can be made to act differently is first to untrain him and then to retrain him. Both children and adults do things which do not correspond with the standards of behavior set up by the home or by the group. This deviation from social standards is due to the fact that the home and the group have not sufficiently trained the individual during the formative period. Since the formative period is coextensive with life, social training should be continuous throughout life. It is our own fault, then, that individuals (other than defectives and psychopaths) go "wrong," that is, deviate from set standards of behavior-and by "our own fault" I mean the fault of the parent, the teacher and every other member of the group; we have neglected and are neglecting our opportunities.

But to return to the question of whipping and beating. There is no excuse for either!

First. Because very often the deviating act occurs many hours before father or mother come home to engage in the act of chastising. Conditioned responses are not built up by this unscientific procedure. The idea that a child's future bad behavior will be prevented by giving him a licking in the evening for something he did in the morning is ridiculous. Equally ridiculous from the standpoint of preventing crime, is our legal and judicial method of punishment which allows a crime to be

committed in one year and punishment administered a year or two later-if at all.

Second. Whipping is used more often than not to serve as an emotional outlet (sadistic) for parent or teacher.

Third. Often when the beating occurs immediately after the act (the only time for it if it is to take place at all) it is not and cannot be regulated according to any scientific dosage. It is either too mild, therefore not a strong enough stimulus to establish the conditioned negative response; or too severe, thus stirring up unnecessarily the whole visceral system of the child; or the deviating act does not occur frequently enough, with attendant punishment, to meet the scientific conditions for setting up a negative response; or, finally, it is repeated so frequently that all effect is lost-habituation comes in, leading possibly to the psychopathological condition known as "masochism," a condition in which the individual responds positively (sexually) to noxious stimuli.

How, then, are we to build in the negative responses which I said above are necessary to build in? I thoroughly believe in rapping a child's fingers when it puts them in its mouth, when it reaches up and pulls down glass dishes and trays, or turns on gas cocks or water hydrants, etc., provided the child is caught in the act and the parent can administer the rap at once in a thoroughly objective way-just as objectively as the behaviorist administers the faint electric shock when building up a negative or withdrawal response to any given object. Society, both the group and the immediate parents, uses the verbal "don't" to older children in place of the rap. It will of course always have to use "don't," but I hope some time we can rearrange the environment so that less and less negative reactions will have to be built in in both child and adult.

One bad feature in the whole system of the building in of negative responses is the fact that the parent becomes involved in the situation-I mean by that becomes a part of the punishment system. The child grows up to "hate" the person who has most often to administer the beating-usually the father. .. I should like to make the objects and situations of life build in their own negative reactions.

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