J.— PSYCHOLOGY. 183 



I put before my little girl of twelve montlis a creeping woolly caterpillar, at 

 which she gazed with apparently anxious fascination but without protest. 

 I then blew behind her a whistle which had previously caused not the 

 slightest fear, even when blown suddenly behind her. With the added 

 slight disturbance, at once the lurking fear of the caterpillar seemed to 

 spring into full activity, and she screamed and shrank from it. 



Turning definitely to this question of Fear, I would point out that the 

 innate basis of some fears of animals is by no means disproved by J. B. 

 Watson's experiments, in which he produced in infants of eleven months 

 fear reactions towards white rats, which had not been feared before, by 

 striking a steel bar loudly behind the infants when they tried to touch 

 the rats. For we must allow for the period of maturing, and the maturing 

 of some of these fears of animals seems to take place only towards the end 

 of the second year.® 



The attributing of the fear of, say, dogs (which may suddenly appear, 

 even when a child has constantly seen and heard and played with dogs) 

 to some unpleasant experience is quite unsatisfactory in view of the way 

 in which severe hurt will often fail in the same child to set up fear of, say, 

 climbing. And the explanation that fears of animals or the dark are 

 merely due to suggestion is faced by the fact that in these directions 

 suggestion works with such amazing facility, whereas suggestion to 

 children that they will ' catch their death of cold ' if they play in the rain, 

 or suffer violent pains if they eat a new, attractive looking fruit, often fails 

 miserably. And neither experience or suggestion can account for the 

 horror of the uncanny — of strange masks or horrid faces. Finally, I had 

 ample evidence of a love of ' playing ' with the fear stimulus, which I 

 have seen lead children to ask over and over again for a game of ' lions ' 

 which has previously ended and again ends in tears and shrieks of fear. 

 This love of playing with fear suggests a deep innate tendency, craving 

 for stimulus denied it in our civilised life. 



Let us consider another topic, important as a foundation of child 

 psychology, namely Imitation. Here again the testing of children by a 

 stranger, even if the child is in the mother's arms, is quite inadequate 

 as a clue to the strength of the tendency to imitation, or as a test of the 

 stage of development of the child. Prolonged experiments with one of 

 my children showed very clearly the importance of the imitatee. Some- 

 times, for example, the child, at twelve months and two years, would 

 imitate nearly everything done by the father (if only the father or other 

 member of the family were present) but sometimes no one but the mother 

 would be imitated. 



There are extreme differences of opinion as to whether there is such 

 a thing as a primary innate disposition to imitate, apart from any ulterior 

 ends served by the action itself. Thorndike criticises Stout and Kirk- 

 patrick for asserting its existence. Watson supports him. Drever finds 

 his view incredible. Baldwin asserts that imitation ' is the controlling 

 impulse.' Kofika says that animals and children only imitate what they 

 understand. 



" I have dealt more fully with the development of fear in a paper on ' The Innate 

 Bases of Fear ' in The Journal of Genetic Psychology, September 1930. 



