Applied Psychology Flashcards

Question

How did WWII affect the practice of clinical psychology?

Answer 1

Assessment was and remains an important activity of clinical psychologists, but expanded from intelligence to personality assessment, with the creation of both projective tests (e.g. the Rorschach or the Thematic Apperception Test) or better standardized tests such as the MMPI. Also, because of the tremendous load placed on psychiatrists during WWII, clinical psychologists were able to do much more treatment.

Answer 2

I/O psychology continued to place a strong emphasis on personnel selection, but also got into human relations and human factors.

Answer 3

Counselling psychology had its roots in vocational counselling, but eventually started providing help for people with a wide variety of problems. Differentiation from clinical psychology was an ongoing problem.

Answer 4

1973 - convened a 2nd conference - Vail Conference - Vail Model or Scholar Practitioner Model - easier to get into - easier program - however, mostly run in stand-alone institutions (Adler, Trinity Western) so they are much more expensive than government-funded institutions

Answer 5

Francis Galton was the first person to try to develop an intelligence test. Though his tests never amounted to much as measures of intelligence, he did develop the correlation coefficient in his attempts to make sense of his data. He measured head size (following Broca and others). He also measured reaction time and sensory acuity as measures of CNS intactness and precision of internal representations (cf. Hume and empiricists).

Answer 6

Professional “fee for service”: People paid to be tested. There was a relationship between this intellectual project and his social one (eugenics). Since his whole point was to encourage those with good genes to breed more, he had to find a way to identify those with good genes.

Answer 7

1905 - Working for the French government, his specific limited goal was to identify children in need of extra support when going to school.

Answer 8

His approach was eclectic; for example, he tried both craniometry and palmistry, but eventually discarded them. What he wound up with was a graded series of tasks of varying difficulty. He put a lot of energy into finding out at what ages children mastered various tasks. He calculated mental age by looking at which particular tasks a child could carry out. If they could carry out most of the tasks a 3-year-old could do but not those a typical 4-year-old could, then that child’s mental age was 3, regardless of their chronological age.

Answer 9

If a child’s mental age was the same as the chronological age at which children normally entered school, Binet figured they were ready.

Answer 10

Binet had practical goals, and therefore formulated no general theory. He also did not assume that children whose mental age was lower than their chronological age would remain that way.

Answer 11

William Stern was the first person to divide mental age by chronological age to obtain IQ. (Multiplying by 100 came later) This may seem like an innocuous move, but once IQ became a number, it became easier to talk about it as if it was a stable trait of the child.

Answer 12

Henry Goddard, the director of research at the Vineland Training School for Feeble-Minded Girls and Boys, took an interest in Binet’s measure. Though he appears to have been genuinely concerned about his charges, his interest largely concerned morons (a term he coined, and that used to be a technical term in psychology, not an insult). He thought imbeciles and idiots (also technical terms in psychology at the time) were obviously unfit to live on their own, but that morons were high functioning enough that they often did live by themselves, with allegedly pernicious consequences (petty crime for the men, prostitution for the women). He was very concerned about immigration, and went out to test new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. He claimed that a large majority of them were morons.

Answer 13

James McKeen Cattell studied with both Wundt and Galton. He first coined the term “mental test”.

Answer 14

He is famous for taking the Binet instrument, adding lots of extra items, renorming it for Americans, and asserting that it measured a stable characteristic of the individual. The resulting test is called the Stanford-Binet.

Answer 15

like Goddard, was very concerned about the “menace of the feeble-minded.” He recommended that people with low IQs should be placed under close surveillance, and that the reproduction of such individuals should be restricted.

Answer 16

He is also famous for running the longest-running longitudinal study in history. He tracked a large cohort of high-IQ children for decades. The last I heard, their children and grandchildren are still being tracked.

Answer 17

Prior to the war, Robert Yerkes was best known for studying nonhuman primates. When the US entered the war in 1917, Yerkes saw this as an opportunity for psychology to raise its profile in the US by contributing to the war effort. He assembled a team that took on the task of identifying the new recruits who were most likely to succeed as officers.

Answer 18

His assumption was that the primary qualification for officers was high intelligence. Accordingly, his team developed the world’s first group intelligence tests, Army Test Alpha (intended for literate recruits) and Army Test Beta (intended for nonliterate recruits).

Answer 19

It did not go well. Yerkes and his coworkers underestimated the number of illiterate recruits, and therefore did not print enough copies of Army Test Beta. Therefore, many illiterate recruits obtained a raw score of zero on Army Test Alpha, even though the protocol said that this should automatically lead to them being retested with Army Test Beta. Tests were often administered in large tents with up to 200 soldiers in them. Those in the back often failed to hear the instructions. Instructions for Army Test Beta were yelled with few explanations but many exhortations to hurry. Worst of all, the tests did a poor job of identifying potential officers. The Army wound up considering Yerkes and his colleagues a nuisance.

Answer 20

After the war, it was revealed that the average mental age of the recruits was 13; the cutoff for being considered a moron was 12. Walter Lippmann, a very famous journalist, had to point out that an average is what it is. The almost 2 million young men who took the test were presumably a far more representative sample of the population of American young adults than the few hundred affluent Californians who served as the standardization sample.

Answer 21

Yerkes, Terman, and Goddard

Answer 22

It was also found that white people whose ancestors had arrived in the US prior to 1890 (when most immigration was from northern and western Europe) scored better than those whose ancestors arrived after 1890 (when a lot of immigrants arrived from southern and eastern Europe). The conclusion that was drawn was that the racial stock of northern Europe was superior to that of southern Europe. Since the tests of the time were not remotely culture-fair, there is an obvious alternative explanation relating to acculturation.

Answer 23

In 1924, the United States restricted the proportions of immigrants from different countries to the proportions that had arrived in 1890. State after state also enacted compulsory sterilization laws for the feeble-minded. The constitutionality of such laws was tested by the Supreme Court and upheld with only one dissenting vote. Brigham (a subordinate of Yerkes) and Goddard eventually recanted, but by then it was too late.