The Apartment - K. L. Slater Page 0,63

as Dougie opens his mouth to wail, Rosalie produces a small cage containing a white rat. She slides up the side and removes the wriggling rodent, handing it to Professor Watson.

Dougie falls quiet and watches the animal with wide eyes. I watch as my son reaches out to touch its warm, soft fur. He is OK. Dougie is going to be fine, I tell myself silently.

I am getting the whole day off and will be receiving an expense payment, and my son is to become part of a very important study in the area of psychology.

Everything seems to be going quite well until Dougie lets out a blood-curdling scream.

1920 Johns Hopkins University Hospital, Baltimore

Extract from the confidential case study diary of Professor J. Watson

OVERVIEW

Session five, the final stage, takes place in the hospital’s private lecture theatre in front of a carefully selected audience of esteemed academics. The presentation is made by myself, Professor John B. Watson. Also present is Dr Rosalie Rayner and Beatrice, the subject’s mother.

STAGE FIVE

Albert is taken to a well-lit lecture theatre to allow me to present my findings so far and to demonstrate the effects of the conditioning on Little Albert.

Child is initially presented with the white rat without accompanying noise. There is an extreme negative reaction. The child becomes very anxious and distressed within seconds.

When calmed by his mother, all the other stimuli are presented, and the steel bar is hit each time.

The child is clearly terrified of anything resembling the white rat.

The conditioning is judged to be a success by all who are present.

BASELINE REACTIONS:

Child appears traumatised.

Child distressed at mere sight of stimuli and refuses to touch or remain close to them. At the sight of the white rat, Little Albert turns sharply and falls over on his left side.

He raises himself on all fours and proceeds to crawl away so rapidly, Dr Rayner is just able to catch him before he reaches the edge of the table.

Little Albert displays worsening fear reactions and we are unable to continue with the session.

CONCLUSIONS:

My interest in the Little Albert experiment first began because I wanted to develop and take the great Ivan Pavlov’s research with dogs a step further.

Pavlov noticed the dog would salivate when its food appeared. In his controlled studies, he showed, in a few sessions, that by ringing a bell when the dog’s food appeared, he could easily condition the animal to salivate without the food, simply at the sound of the bell ringing.

I pondered then; could certain emotional reactions not be classically conditioned in people? Could an ordinary child, showing no fear, be conditioned with a fear response in just a few sessions?

I have today successfully proven that this indeed can be done.

The boy initially showed no fear and is now terrified merely at the sight of the white rat, in fact, of all white objects.

Give me a dozen healthy infants, well formed, and I will guarantee to take any one at random and train him to be any type of specialist I might select – a doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant, and yes, even a beggar or a thief.

This is the power of my revolutionary study.

37

Viv is away on business, so I call Brenna and ask if she’d like to come over for a glass of wine and a chat later.

‘Now there’s an offer I can’t refuse,’ she says before hesitating. ‘Are you OK, Freya? You sound a bit, I don’t know, weird.’

‘I’m OK now, but we had a bit of an upset here earlier and there are one or two things on my mind. I’ll explain everything later, shall we say about seven? Then you can have half an hour with Skye before she goes to bed.’

I know I’ll have a hellish job to get Skye to sleep when she knows her aunt Brenna is around, but that’s the least of my worries. Having someone to talk to who knows me well . . . who knows I’m not crazy, is what I need right now to help me make sense of things.

I make Skye something to eat and tidy around a bit. Lily Brockley insisted on cleaning the window and windowsill in Skye’s bedroom. She even vacuumed in there, too, so we could be sure not one dead fly remained. I felt so grateful.

Dr Marsden had me doubting myself in the end but now I’ve calmed down; I know what I saw in there and that was a black wall of flies. I don’t know where they came from and