ABSTRACT

The current interest in the temperamental qualities of children, which is attributable, in part, to the work of Thomas and Chess (1977), is linked to a new view regarding the establishment of young children’s fears. During the decades when behaviorism and psychoanalytic theory were popular, both American and European psychologists believed that the variation among children in the disposition to acquire fears was learned in the home. The behaviorists assumed that most fears were conditioned and cited Watson’s demonstration of a classically conditioned fear of an animal in a young child (Watson & Rayner, 1920). Hence, it was deduced that a child who was afraid of unfamiliar adults must have had painful experiences with strangers in the past. The psychoanalysts regarded fears as the product of conflict and cited the famous case of “Little Hans” whose fear of his father was presumably generalized to other potentially dangerous objects (Freud, 1953). Although both of these explanations seemed eminently reasonable a quarter of a century ago, there is only a small number of contemporary psychologists who continued to promote orthodox versions of either argument.