Little Albert and the White RatOnce upon a time, in a psychology research laboratory in Baltimore, there worked a young psychologist, John B. Watson, and his lovely assistant, Rosalie Rayner. Watson had already published his ‘Behaviorist Manifesto’ in which he stated that
psychology should study only observable behavior . Now he was determined to demonstrate that fears could be conditioned (learned), although ordinary processes involving association of stimuli.
Watson had already done extensive research to demonstrate that young children are not naturally afraid of fire or animals. At the time Watson and Rayner began their now-famous study, ‘Little Albert’ was 11 months old. He was described as a remarkably stable infant who rarely displayed fear of anything. He was not afraid of animals, including the white laboratory rat.
He was, however, afraid of loud noises.
Watson and Rayner decided to take advantage of his natural fear response to loud noise; they wanted to see whether they could condition Little Albert to fear the white laboratory rat, by pairing it with the presentation of a loud noise. Watson and Rayner produced the loud noise by striking a large steel pipe with a hammer, just above and behind Little AlbertÂ’s head.
After only seven paired presentations of the rat and the loud noise, Little Albert began to cry and try to crawl away as soon as he saw the rat, even though the rat was not paired with the loud noise on this occasion.
The fear response generalized to other furry objects, including a rabbit, a dog, a fur coat, and a Santa Claus mask. Little Albert had not displayed fear of any of these objects prior to the pairing of the loud noise with the presentation of the rat. Little AlbertÂ’s fear response to all these furry objects persisted for over a month while Little Albert remained in the hospital.
However, Watson and Rayner did take steps to ‘freshen’ his responses to the furry objects by pairing them with the loud noise periodically.
If Little AlbertÂ’s fear responses behaved just like PavlovÂ’s dogs salivation response, we would expect that Little AlbertÂ’s fear of rats and other furry objects would extinguish when they were no longer paired with the loud noise. However, Watson and Rayner indicated that Little Albert left the hospital before that had a chance to see whether they could decondition his response to furry objects.
“Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, merchant-chief, and yes, even beggar man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.” (1930 John B. Watson)Please do not try this at home, it is dangerous & unethical to conduct such experiment on human beings especially babies.
At first, a baby may not have any dislikes for foods that are red in colour. 
Yum Yum 
And suffered the pain for several days. 