Applied Psychology

Question 1

How long have therapies for psychological disorders been present?

Answer 1

Therapies for psychological disorders predate the creation of modern psychology by about a hundred years.
“Lunatic asylums” were founded in the US in the late 18th century, and in Quebec in 1845.

Around 200 years ago humane treatment for psych disorders and therapy for such problems became an idea
The thinking initially was that asylums would be a refuge/less stressful

Question 2

What was the program called in the “lunatic asylums” in the 1800s? What did it include?

Answer 2

The program in such asylums was called “moral therapy.”
This included gardening, music, painting, exercise, occupational therapy, religious training, and so on.

Question 3

Asylums that were built for approximately 250 people eventually housed how many?

Answer 3

Such asylums eventually became huge, with as many as 6,000 patients in a single facility.

Question 4

What did Lightner Witmer create? How did this come about?

Answer 4

The first psychological clinic

He got into clinical work without intending to, when a former student of his who was now a schoolteacher brought in a student who was having a very hard time learning to spell.
Witmer appears to have treated this case successfully, which led to more cases, mostly also of children having trouble in school.

Question 5

What was Witner’s approach to treatment?

Answer 5

the clinical approach which involved interdisciplinary teams, usually Witmer, a physician, and a social worker

Question 6

What journal did Witner found?

Answer 6

The Psychological Clinic.

Question 7

Witner was the first person to call himself a clinical psychologist but much of what he was doing looked like what?

Answer 7

Much of what Witmer was doing looked like modern school psychology, so he is often credited with founding that, too.

Question 8

What was happening in the US around the turn of the 20th century? What did this create?

Answer 8

Around the turn of the 20th century, the US was rapidly urbanizing, industrializing, and commercializing. This created the impetus for industrial psychology.

Question 9

What started to become important after the Civil War? When was this?

Answer 9

1861-1865 American Civil War - after that industrialization picked up and advertising started to become important

Question 10

Who was the first psychologist to try to get involved in advertising? What was his method? What was the result?

Answer 10

The first psychologist to try to get involved in advertising was Harlow Gale, who sent 200 massive questionnaires to businesses. Only 20 came back, and Gale gave up.

Question 11

Who was the first psychologist to have success in advertising? How did he study or apply his psychological knowledge to advertising?

Answer 11

Walter Dill Scott was more successful. He seems to have done little empirical work on advertising, but he thought he could make valid inferences about how it worked based on what he knew about perception, memory, attention, and so on.

Question 12

What was Walter Dill Scott’s theory on advertising? What techniques did he use?

Answer 12

His theory was based on the premise that the consumer is a “nonrational, suggestible creature under the hypnotic influence of the advertising writer.”
His preferred techniques were the direct command and the return coupon.

Question 13

Was Walter Dill Scott’s theory of advertising valid and effective? How did his techniques work?

Answer 13

–his theory is wrong – advertising influences are real but subtle (not at all as direct and influential as he thought)

Used the power of suggestion in his techniques:
–direct command “Buy Ford trucks.”
–return coupon – cut out coupon and mail it in

Must have been somewhat successful, however, because his career in advertising was prolonged.

Question 14

Who was Frederick Winslow Taylor and what did he do?

Answer 14

Frederick Winslow Taylor was the guru of industrial efficiency at that time, but Taylorism (a.k.a. scientific management) was only concerned with which actions within the factory were most efficient; it ignored the human element.

Taylorism - efficiency (minimize waster motion and maximize output) - small tasks done by many workers on the production line (e.g., Ford factories)

Question 15

How did Münsterberg change the industrial approach of Taylorism? What lasting impact did this have?

Answer 15

Münsterberg’s approach was to look at the skills, talents, and predispositions of the workers, and to try to match them up with appropriate jobs.
Thus, assessment was (and remains) a big part of industrial psychology.

Question 16

What landmark book did Münsterberg write?

Answer 16

Psychology and Industrial Efficiency

was a landmark in industrial psychology

Question 17

Münsterberg’s ideas of using psychology for personnel selection was not new - who had been doing this previously?

Answer 17

Walter Dill Scott had already been doing it for almost ten years, including in the First World War.

Question 18

Who was Lilian Gilbreth? What was her approach? What sub-field of psychology did she create?

Answer 18

Lilian Gilbreth was also an industrial psychologist, but her emphasis was very different.

She and her husband conducted many time-motion studies in which she looked at how workers did their work, and then analyzed the task to figure out how it could be done more efficiently.
This included changing the design of machines and workspaces.

• invented subfield of psychology (human factor analysis)

Question 19

How did Lilian Gilbreth apply her techniques? How was she recognized for her work?

Answer 19

She also applied these same techniques to improving work in the kitchen (e.g., Invented foot pedal for garbages) and wrote popular books on the topic.
She and her husband had 12 children and applied the same principles to raising them efficiently.

only psychologist featured on postage stamp

Question 20

What is usually required for an occupation to be considered a profession?

Answer 20

Professions normally require extensive knowledge and skill.
In addition to a prescribed course of training (with a more-or-less standardized curriculum) prior to undertaking a profession, there is normally a continued commitment to professional development.

Professions also tend to be self-governing; that is, while governments often make it illegal to practice a profession without a license, the licensing body is run by members of the profession rather than government bureaucrats.
The licensing body usually pays attention to not only skill but also ethics.

Question 21

What were the two groups of applied psychologists that tried to make themselves useful to the US Armed Forces during WWI? What services did they provide? Which was the most useful to the army?

Answer 21

One group, led by Robert Yerkes, strove to administer intelligence tests to all new recruits in the hopes of identifying suitable candidates for officer training.

The other group was led by Walter Dill Scott. They administered a wide range of aptitude tests to recruits in the hopes of identifying suitable candidates for wide range of occupations (over 80 in all). The army found this much more useful.

Question 22

How were applied psychologists involved in treatment after WWI?

Answer 22

Psychologists were also involved in treating psychiatric cases after the war, especially cases of “shell shock” (what we would now call PTSD).

Question 23

What happened to applied psychology during and after WWII?

Answer 23

During and after the Second World War, applied psychologists became much more specialized.

Around the same time as WWII the APA was told to organize better with the applied psychologists
CPA founded in 1939 before WWII but knew war was in the future

Psychology really became big during WWII and then continued afterwards to deal with clinical work in the general public (and returning soldiers)

Question 24

When and where was clinical psychological training formalized? What was developed?

Answer 24

Clinical training was formalized at the Boulder Conference (1949), where a model variously called the Boulder Model or the Scientist-Practitioner Model was developed.

Question 25

How did WWII affect the practice of clinical psychology?

Answer 25

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.

Question 26

How did I/O psychology change during and after WWII?

Answer 26

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

Question 27

Where does counselling psychology have its roots?

Answer 27

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.

Question 28

What happened at the Vail Conference?

Answer 28

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

Question 29

Who was the first person to try to develop an intelligence test? How? Results?

Answer 29

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).

Question 30

How did Galton recruit participants for his “intelligence tests”? What were his motives?

Answer 30

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.

Question 31

Why and when did Binet develop intelligence testing?

Answer 31

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

Question 32

What was Binet’s approach to developing intelligence testing?

Answer 32

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.

Question 33

How did Binet decide if a child was ready to enter school?

Answer 33

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

Question 34

What was Binet’s theory? What was his prognosis for children whose mental age was lower than their chronological age?

Answer 34

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.

Question 35

Who was the first person to divide mental age by chronological age in order to obtain IQ? What was the importance of this?

Answer 35

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.

Question 36

Which American took interest in Binet’s measures of intelligence testing? How did he use these measures?

Answer 36

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.

Question 37

Who did Cattell study with? What was the term that he coined?

Answer 37

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

Question 38

What was Lewis Terman’s contribution to intelligence testing?

Answer 38

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.

Question 39

What were Terman’s beliefs about intelligence testing?

Answer 39

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.

Question 40

Terman is famous for running what study?

Answer 40

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.

Question 41

How did WWI change the study/practice of Robert Yerkes?

Answer 41

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.

Question 42

What was Robert Yerkes’ assumption for identifying recruits who would be most likely to succeed as officers? What did he (and his team) develop based on this assumption?

Answer 42

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).

Question 43

How did the Army Test Alpha and Army Test Beta program go for Yerkes and his team? Why? What were the results?

Answer 43

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.

Question 44

After WWI, it was revealed that the average mental age of the recruits was what? What was the cutoff at that time for being considered a moron?

What did the journalist Walter Lippmann point out about this?

Answer 44

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.

Question 45

Who remained very vocal about the menace of the feeble-minded after the war?

Answer 45

Yerkes, Terman, and Goddard

Question 46

What was discovered about the intelligence tests that had been conducted on immigrants before and after the war? What conclusion was drawn? What is the problem with this?

Answer 46

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.

Question 47

What consequences were there for the biased intelligence testing on immigrants?

Answer 47

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.