The Burnt Child Dreads the Fire

EDITORS' COMMENTS. There's an old saying that "the burnt child dreads the fire." And once burned, the child dreads not only the fire, but also the stove, the kitchen, and perhaps pictures of fires as well. That's only to be expected, you say? Maybe. But when we try to analyze the situation in scientific terms, this type of emotional conditioning turns out to be surprisingly complex. Why should we bother analyzing such things? Because a knowledge of how fear and other emotional reactions are acquired might give us important insights into how best we might help people who suffer from a variety of emotional problems, such as phobias.

Let's begin with a child named Mary who's never experienced fire before. The pretty blue and orange flames look attractive, so Mary leans forward and tries to touch them. Almost immediately she experiences intense pain and jerks back her hand. The next time she sees dancing flames, presumably, she will avoid touching them. That's what conditioning is all about. But once conditioned to avoid fire, why should the child also avoid (dread?) pictures of the fire as well? Surely the child can discriminate the difference between a real flame and a photograph.

Cognitive psychologists would probably say that the child avoids the picture of the fire because it reminds her of a painful experience. However, John B. Watson refused to use such "mentalistic" terms as "dread" and "reminds." Instead, he assumed that the sight of a fire is a highly complex visual pattern, made up of many different stimulus elements. Each of these elements (and everything else physically present when the child was burnt) presumably becomes associated with the fear/withdrawal response. Since the picture of the fire contains some of the same visual stimuli present in the fire itself, we would expect the picture to elicit a similar (but weaker) avoidance reaction as does the flame itself. Indeed, if we could somehow measure what the "visual stimuli" were, we could determine how many of the stimulus elements in the fire itself were also found in the picture and thus could predict how much of the avoidance reaction would generalize from the actual flame to the picture. And that, to some extent, is what Watson and Rayner actually did some 70 years ago.

The Watson and Rayner article is important not only for the details it gave us about how fears are acquired and how