Lesson 1- Fear or Phobia
Charlie McCarthy
For many people, The Bubble Room on Captiva Island stirs up pleasant memories. This fascinating American-cuisine restaurant is composed of eye-catching memorabilia from the 1930's, 1940's and 1950's. Toy trains, twinkling colored lights and more than 2,000 movie stills and glossies of stage and screen legends greet customers curious to see Captiva's famed restaurant. I, for one, loved the place until I went on a quick tour only to see the dreaded toy of my childhood, Charlie McCarthy. For most people, the Charlie McCarthy doll is a neutral stimulus. Not the case for me.
My sister, who is eight years older than myself, received a Charlie McCarthy doll for a gift when she was 13. I liked the doll as much as she did. Around this time I wanted to be like my sister and be around her all the time. For someone just entering her teenage years, it didn't seem appealing to have a five year old around all the time. She tried various methods to get rid of me but nothing seemed to work. One day she was playing with her new ventriloquist doll when I appeared. All of a sudden she, acting as Charlie, started saying mean things in a terrible voice to me in order to scare me. It worked. Immediately I left the room and didn't return. She was elated that something finally worked to rid her of her bratty younger sister.
A few days later, the same scenario happened again. The stimulus elicited the same response. The same thing occurred a couple more times, all with the same response. A few days later, my sister wanted to get rid of me, but didn't want to go to the trouble of taking the doll out of its case and speaking with it. She merely pulled the box down started to open it and I left screaming. Once again, she was rewarded with the response she wanted.
She continued using the stimulus to get the response she wanted. The response never changed. She merely had to mention that she was getting the doll and I was scared to death. At times, I wouldn't even go to her room for fear of the doll.
As I grew older, the fear began to fade. (It helped that she went to college and got rid of the doll.) It was only when I was 18 and on a family trip to Captiva Island, Florida that I remebered the fear. Seeing the doll on the shelf immediately triggered the memories of being very scared. My family had a great time, at my expense, rehashing my experiences with the doll.
Looking back, my sister pulled of a case of classical conditioning. I didn't have an innate fear of the Charlie McCarthy doll, in fact I liked it when she first received the gift. In this case, the Charlie McCarthy doll was the neutral stimulus that was associated with the unconditioned stimulus of fear. The unconditioned response of fear became a conditioned response to the newly conditioned stimulus of the doll. Given that this response is not natural and has to be learned, the response is now a conditioned response and the neutral stimulus is now a conditioned stimulus.
Fortunately, I was able to break the stimulus-response connection and no longer fear the Charlie McCarthy doll.
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