Analysis and General Insights on Journalism and Original Article

JOURNAL TO JOURNALISM
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Journal to Journalism
Analysis of the Journalism Article (Popular Source)
The popular source I chose is the New York Times article by Maggie Scarf, written in 1974 as a review of a controversial psychological experiment. Her article was entitled, "The house is more deadly than the street, yet at home, we have more control--or at least the illusion of control." It is a popular source article based on the psychological experiment of John Watson and Rosalie Rayner in their experiment in 1919, where their journal for this experiment was published in 1920. The popular source article talks about the experiment on "Little Albert," a baby who was exposed to different sources of danger like rage and fear after having experienced nothing of the sort in the past (Scarf, 1974).
This popular source contained detailed information on the experiment, even information that was not included in the original publication. In Scarf's article, she included statistics on different types of dangers that are relevant to the findings of the study. Scarf included dangers such as murder rates, fatality rates, and other death rates from violence to situate the context of the psychological experiment being reviewed in a direction that claims that violence and danger are the main points of the original study. She also included reports from the FBI that gave context to the psychological nature of the danger faced by "Little Albert." After introducing the topic, she then proceeded to describe the experiment in a layman's version, where she summarized the experiment and any findings that Watson and Rayner found in their study. She also posited some insights about how fear can be cultivated in a laboratory or an experimental process. This confirms that almost everything can be produced in any laboratory setting, even psychological phenomena.
Analysis of the Original Article (Psychological Article)
The original article for the "Little Albert" experiment was published by John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner in the peer-reviewed journal, the Journal of Experimental Psychology, and was later republished in different journal articles. It was entitled "Conditioning Emotional Reactions," and it was based on a psychological experiment on a healthy young boy named Albert B. Psychologists later determined that the test subject was a boy named Albert Barger (Powell et al., 2014).
The experiments started when "Little Albert" was nine months old for about three months (until he was one year and 21 days old). The researchers introduced phobias to the subject at a young age and observed his reactions with repeated presentation of these prompts over a few months (Watson & Rayner, 1920). The journal article, despite being peer-reviewed, contained fewer explanations on the psychological side of the study. Somehow, the researchers presented the findings in a rather simple way, and because of this, it was subjected to further scrutiny by newer psychologists and research experts and was contested for validity. The findings explained that emotional ...