1-History Of Psychology Flashcards
WHAT IS PSYCHOLOGY?
Primarily the scientific study of behaviour and their mental processes of living organisms
Roots of psychology?
-
roots in philosophy
- what’s the cause of behaviour?!?!?
- Socrates: nature!!
- Aristotle: nurture!!
René Descartes (1596-1650)
believed that the mind and body are different, and was concerned with how the two concepts integrated
how did floaty mind bit integrate with the meaty body bit?
Thomas Hobbs (1588-1679)
believed that the seat of consciousness is in the mind, and that the body is what the body does, the mind just controls the body
Hermann von Helmholtz and protopsychology
- medical model
- how long does it take for pain to register when pinching on different parts of the body?
- it took longer the further it was from the brain
- means that there’s a network of wires
- the brain is the seat of consciousness
- there’s some sort of cognitive processes
- it took longer the further it was from the brain
- he started measuring the phenomenon
- approach was considered empirical
- objective, repeatable, measurable
- he had a research assistant who adopted his approach of measuring reaction times
- Wilhelm Wundt
WILHELM WUNDT
viewed psychology as the scientific study of the conscious experience (1879)
- the father of psychology
- founded the first laboratory at University of Leipzig in 1879
- wrote the first psychology textbook
- 1st to teach psychology
- first person to be referred to as a psychologist
- Germany!
- wrote famous book entitled principles of physiological psychology
FOUNDED STRUCTURALISM
introspection
process by which someone examines their own conscious experience as objectively as possible
- he trained individuals to look in on their conscious experience and then report on what they were feeling
- describe the feeling
- first requirement was the use of “trained” or practiced observers, who could immediately observe and report a reaction.
- The second requirement was the use of repeatable stimuli that always produced the same experience in the subject and allowed the subject to expect and thus be fully attentive to the inner reaction.
what did Wundt measure using introspection
- measured reaction times under different conditions
- “when you hear the beep, press the button”
- “aight, now when you hear AND have cognitively processed the beep, press the button
- had instruments that could measure up to 1/100 of a second
- There was a difference!! led him to believe that some kind of cognitive processing was happening
STRUCTURALISM
what makes up consciousness? What is the structure of consciousness?
- what’s made up of our thoughts?
- what’s made up of our feelings?
- introspect on their conscious experience of emotions
issues with structuralism
- had to train people to introspect—needed very educated people
- sample bias
- couldn’t generalize to the general population
- subjective
- as a result, structuralism fell out of favour with the passing of Wundt’s student, Edward Titchener
FUNCTIONALISM
what (biological) FUNCTION does consciousness serve?
- america!!
- founded by William James
- was inspired by Darwin’s theory of evolution
- what function does it serve in keeping us alive
- was interested the mind as a whole, rather than individual parts
- also believed in introspection…
- but also relied on more objective measures, such as recording devices, examinations of concrete products of mental activities and of anatomy and physiology
GESALT PSYCHOLOGY
Sensory experience can be broken down into individual parts, but what the individual experiences as perception is the WHOLE
- originated in Germany too
-
Wertheimer, Koffka, Kohler
- jewish, moved to the US when the behaviorists were taking off
- were buried under the behaviourists
- jewish, moved to the US when the behaviorists were taking off
BRANCHES OF PSYCHOLOGY
Experimental branch
how do we perceive, experience?
- Vol Helmholtz—reaction times
- Wundt—structuralism
- James—Functionalism
- Gestalt—the whole experience
Clinical Branch
Applied branch!
FREUUUUUDDDDDD!!!!
- Hysteria, Depression, therapy
SIGMUND FREUD
Interested in the unconscious mind
- austrian neurologist, interested by patients suffering from hysteria and neurosis
psychoanalytic theory
focuses on the role of a person’s unconscious, as well as early childhood experiences
- wants, desires, behaviours (sexual nature)
-
two forces in our unconscious
- Sexual force
- death, destructive, aggressive force
- the wants and desires want to make it up to the conscious mind, but sometimes they’re so threatening that our brain has to try and keep it unconscious
hysteria
ancient diagnosis for disorders, primarily of women with a wide variety of symptoms none of which had an apparent physical cause
Methods used in psychoanalysis
- Dream analysis
- free association
- just talking
- Freudian slips
- slips in speech which is caused by parts of your unconscious desires
psychoanalysis
- involves the patient talking about their experiences and selves
- not invented by freud, but popularized by him
- still used today
issues with freud
- theory could not be proven false
- unfalsifiable—lost scientific credability
- placed too much emphasis on sex
what freud did well!!
- highlight importance of childhood experiences
- unconscious vs conscious
- motivaitons can cause psychological conflict
- take mental disorders seriously
- therapy
behaviourism
People are just complex computers! Primary mechanism: learning
- studying consciousness: flawed and subjective
- wanted to study things objectively
major object of study: learned behaviour and its interaction with inborn qualities of the organism
Ivan Pavlov
early work on behviourism
Russian physiologist
classical conditioning!!! pavlov’s dog!!!
John B. Watson:
FATHER OF BEHAVIOURISM!!!!
most famous work occurred during the early 20th century at John Hopkins University
- believed that objective analysis of the mind was impossible
- largely responsible for establishing psychology as a scientific discipline through its objective methods and experimentation
- used in behavioural and cognitive-behavioural herapy
classical conditioning
- Pavlov’s dog
- forming an association between two stimuli, resulting in a learned response
- conditioned reflex
operant conditioning
- B.F. Skinner
-
operant conditioning chamber (Skinner box)
- chamber that allowed the careful study of the principles of modifying behaviour through reinforcement and punishment
- behavior that results in a pleasant consequence will be repeated
- behaviour that results in an unpleasant consequence will be stopped
THE HUMANISTS
interested in the good in the growth potential as part of the human condition
- humans are inherently good!!!
- personal control and intentionality
- Abraham maslow and carl rogers
why did humanism emerge? what did they not like about the (then) current ideas about psychology?
- psychology was dominated by psychoanalysis and behaviourism
- focused on what was wrong with people
- deterministic, reductionism, too restrictive
- sees human behaviour as entirely determined by a combo of genetics and environment
- they didn’t like that!
- focused on what was wrong with people
client-centred therapy
carl rogers
- therapist just acts as a mirror for the client
- patient taking lead role in therapy session
- emphasized unconditional positive regard
- genuineness
- empathy
- believed that people were more than capable of dealing with and working through their own issues
THE COGNITIVE REVOLUTION
- placed emphasis on mental processes
- wanted to bring things back into studying about how our brain processes information
impact of cognitive revolution?
more collaboration across disciplines!!
Europe had never really been as influenced by behaviourism, so cognitive revolution helped reestablish lines of communication between European and American psychologists
cognitive sciences
interdisciplinary approach!!!
- linguistics (how language shapes thought)
- neuroscience (looking at how the brain works)
- more collaboration across disciplines (anthropologists!)
noam Chomsky
- was very influential in early days of cognitive revolution
- believed that psychology’s focus on behaviour was short-sighted and that the field had to reincorporate mental functioning!!
feminist psychology seeks to
- free psychology of ALL gender biases
- study gender differences
- reevaluate the contribution of women
Anna freud
the real person that came up with defense mechanisms (not Sigmund!!)
Crawford and Merck:
- reevaluate and discover contributions of women to the history of psychology,
- studying psychological gender differences
- question the male bias present across the practice of the scientific approach to knowledge
Karen Horney
“womb envy”
Noami Weisstein
- the psychology of women developed out of the male perspective
- published an article that stimulated a feminist revolution of psychology
- male psychologists constructed psychology of women entirely out of their own cultural biases
weakness of cross-cultural psychology?
- here is a need to go beyond simple descriptive statistics
- has remained a descriptive science, rather than one seeking to determine cause and effect
MULTICULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY
- explanations for different events depend on cultural upbringing
- precedents of eating disorders differ by culture
- culture influences the types of hallucinations that people have
Cecil Sumner
- first african american to receive a PhD in America
- much early work done by black scholars was on intelligence
- intelligence tests built up on WHITE PEOPLE
- different cultural knowledge
- intelligence tests built up on WHITE PEOPLE
