In Chapter four I came across a scientist that I have learned about in many of my previous classes. His name is Ivan Pavlov and I remember hearing about Pavlov's dog in my first semester of college in Psychology. Ivan Pavlov developed the basic type of learning called classical conditioning. As I have learned more about young children, I see what a benefit classical conditioning can have as soon as the baby is a few days old. A baby can learn to respond to a neutral stimulus that they usually wouldn't respond to, unless paired with a stimulus they are used to already. A baby could hear the cap being screwed onto the bottle and eventually relate it to 'being time to eat." If something is done over and over in the same manner, it could be easily related to what is about to happen next. I really like this early learning capability. After reading about Pavlov, I read about "Little Albert." I don't feel that one should shape human emotions. I know that today the whole test would be unethical, but I just wanted to add in that young children should not be trained to feel certain emotions. Every time I hear about "Little Albert" my stomach churns. How does one make a child afraid of an animal that he wasn't afraid of in the first place?
Mollie Lanigan
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