Applied Psychology Flashcards
Who was Wundt (1832-1920) ?
- took psychology from a mixture of philosophy and biology and made it a unique field of study.
- Used the scientific method to study mind and behaviour
- Basic research should precede applied research/applications
What were some conceptual underpinnings of early applied psychology ?
- Functionalism (e.g., William James)
- Mind is for adaptation to the environment
- Psychology as pragmatic
- Contrast with goals of Structuralism (e.g., Titchener)
Essentialism vs Pragmatism?
- Essentialism – Analysis of behaviour/performance in a setting/task into essential underlying mental capacities (allied to structuralism)
- Pragmatism – Analysis of mental processes involved in the given setting/task itself (allied to functionalism)
Who was Hugo Münsterberg (1863-1916)?
- Context: German ideology
- American society characterized by lack of respect for authority
- Offered German culture + new science of psychology
- Psychology in place of a monarchy
What did Hugo Münsterberg (1863-1916) believe about eye witness testimony?
- Argued against reliance on eye witness testimony
- Staged demonstrations of assaults during classes
- “warned against the blind confidence in the observations of the average man”
How did Münsterberg (1863-1916) help with Legal procedures ?
- On the Witness Stand (1908)
- “The lawyer and the judge and the juryman are sure that they do not need the experimental psychologist . . . They go on thinking that their legal instinct and their common sense supplies them with all that is needed and somewhat more . . .”
How did Münsterberg (1863-1916) Contribute to Psychotherapy?
- Mental illness
- Saw patients
- Wrote book: Psychotherapy (1909)
- To dispel myths about mental illness
- To challenge psychoanalysis (cf. Freud)
What approach did Telephone switchboard Operators lead to?
Analytic approach (cf. essentialism)
What approach did Boston Street Railway Motormen lead to?
Synthetic approach (cf. pragmatism)
Were these early applications of psychology too early?
- “Dr. Munsterberg has the fatal gift of writing easily—fatal especially in science, and most of all in a young science where accuracy is the one thing most needful” (Titchener, 1891, p. 594)
- “…he turned to fields for the application of psychology before they had a research basis on which to operate” (Watson, 1978, p. 410, cited in Bootzin, 2007)
The experimental study of Vigilance?
- The capacity to sustain attention
- Decrement in the ability to detect rare signals over time
- Problems detecting faulty gun cartridges during WW1 (e.g., Wyatt & Langdon, 1932)
What are Radar operators (WWII – Mackworth, 1948)?
- -Targets difficult to discriminate from background noise
- Very few targets
- Long periods of isolated work in darkened rooms
- Efficiency could drop 80% over a 40-min watch
What is The Clock test?
– Monitor for rare “double-jumps” of a rotating black pointer
Different measures of vigilance performance?
- Early studies focused on detection rate (or/and reaction time) – “False alarm” rates only sometimes reported (and separately)
- Not dissociating different measures – important evidence being lost? For example: – Parallel decline of detection + false alarms = Support for ‘increasing conservatism’ account
- Decline in detection + stable or increasing false alarms = Support for deterioration of perceptual sensitivity
Vigilance research and signal detection theory (SDT)
-Two scores could now be derived:
–d’ (or d-prime) reflecting a person’s sensitivity to a signal
–B (or beta) reflecting the level of evidence at which the observer is willing to report a signal (reflects person’s confidence/conservatism)
The Cambridge Cockpit: Key findings (e.g., Bartlett, 1943, Drew, 1940)
-Performance of skilled pilots in a simulator for >2 hrs:
-Control of aircraft deteriorated 50% over the 2hrs
-Deterioration in the timing and sequencing of actions
-Decrease in aspirations
-Marked attentional lapses for peripheral activities relying on working memory
-Loss of task integration
-Impairment of skills occurred in the reverse order to that in which they were learned
-Subjective (not just performance) changes
The legacy of early human factors
-Theoretical and conceptual: > Practical utility of SDT > Insight into nature of sustained, selective and divided attention; working memory > Pre-empted cognitive psychology
-Impact in the ‘real world’: > Air traffic control > Aviation > Transport > Medicine
Impact of World War I (1914-18)
- > 25% of members of the American Psychological Society (APA) served in World War I
- 12 committees of APA dedicated to helping the war effort, e.g.,
(a) Evaluation of perception in prospective air servicemen mental states under low oxygen pressure
(b) Personnel selection: Intelligence and aptitude testing
(c) Diagnosis and treatment of “war psychoses/shellshock” - Sudden need for more clinical psychologists
- New fighting techniques of World War I put immense mental strain on soldiers
- The impact of “shellshock”
- US joins WW II - offers intensive course in treatment of mental disorders to all medical officers; clinical psychologists also recruited
Impact of World War II
- Beginning of client-centred psychotherapy
- Rising demand for psychological help due to WW II catalysed new therapies
- Psychoanalysis – required many sessions; effectiveness unclear
- Client-led searching for solutions by talking through problems with a sympathetic, supportive therapist
1942: Carl Rogers publishes Counselling and Psychotherapy
- Introduction was telling:
- “There are a great many professionals who spend a large portion of their time in interviewing, bringing about a constructive change of attitude on the part of their clients through individual face-to-face contacts. Whether such individuals calls himself a psychologist, a college counselor…or by some other name, his approach to the attitudes of his client is of concern to us in this book…” (p. 3)
Context: The struggle between medical Doctors (psychiatrists) and psychologists regarding right to practice psychotherapy
-For Rogers, a good therapist needed only:
– Unconditional positive regard
– Empathic understanding
– Congruence; genuine understanding
Post-World War II
-Three key developments after WW II that facilitated the rise of clinical psychology:
– Anti-psychiatry
– Input from scientific research into psychotherapy
– Development of psychoactive drugs
What as Anti-psychiatry?
- 1960s-1970s: Cultural movement (revolution?) against the establishment (cf. hippies; Greenpeace; AntiVietnam war protests)
- Psychiatry began to be criticised as a thief of individual expression; to be demeaning and dangerous
- Previous decades had seen psychiatry adopting invasive physical treatments…
(Some of the reasons for) Anti-psychiatry ?
- The lobotomy – Severing of nerve fibres connecting the frontal and pre-frontal cortex to the rest of the brain
- Ice-pick lobotomy - Ice-pick inserted under local anaesthetic – No need for hospitalisation – ‘Production line’ lobotomies - 1939 -1951: 18,000 lobotomies performed
Anti-psychiatry (reasons for)?
-Electroshocks (Electroconvulsive therapy; ECT)
– 100 volts through electrodes placed bilaterally or unilaterally (front or back)
– 3 times a week for 2 to 7 weeks
– Muscle relaxants (now) used to prevent physical Injury
-Still used today for severe and otherwise incurable depression – Effective treatment
-But its use for a long time was much wider and used in absence of empirical support
Anti-psychiatry in fiction ?
- Use of lobotomy and electroshocks exposed through literature: One flew over the cuckoo’s nest – Book (1962) – Ken Kesey – Oscar-winning film (1975)
- “ECT stands practically alone among the medical/surgical interventions in that its goal was not to cure but to control the patients for the benefits of the hospital staff” (David Rothman, 1985)
Anti-psychiatry by psychiatrists?
-Anti-psychiatry movement
-Pressure group that called psychiatry into question
-Psychiatry seen as a political tool
-Rebellion came also from within the ‘establishment’: – 1960:
-Thomas Szasz: ‘The Myth of Mental Illness’ R.D. Laing: ‘The divided self: An existential study of sanity and madness’
– 1973: David Rosenhan: ‘On being sane in insane places
Anti-psychiatry Hits the Streets?
- Anti-psychiatry movement –Things have to change!
- More respect for the rights of patients
- Hospitalisation to be as short as possible
- Measures to prevent hospitalisation
Input from science
- Empirical (i.e., scientific) evaluation of efficiency of therapies
- 1952 – A wake-up call: Eysenck’s review of efficacy of ‘talking cures’ for non-psychotic patients not encouraging
- Psychotherapy vs. those on waiting list for psychotherapy (control group) = 2/3 had improved in both groups 2 years later
- But – led to therapies being used only if grounded in psychological research and…
- Gave rise to more efficacy research; results in the 60s+70s more favourable
Development of psychoactive drugs
- 1950-60s: Psychiatrists lowered their resistance to non-psychiatrists (e.g., clinical psychologists) treating patients through psychotherapy
- Why? Psychology pressure groups
- Psychiatrists increasingly turned to medicines to treat mental disorders, e.g., chlorpromazine
- Only medical practitioners could prescribe them
Social management and individualisation ?
- Since 16th century, authorities increasingly replacing family for the control of social deviants or those not able to maintain themselves
- 20th century: The welfare state – taxed-based state services
- Reliance on mental health services grew because – People wanted professional help – Social mobility led to social relationships being limited to workplaces and hence non-confiding
- Growing individualism
Increased knowledge of clinical psychology in the population ?
- Late 20th to present-day: Knowledge of clinical psychology pervasive in society
- Integrated into mainstream professional training
- Becoming part of common knowledge via popular media and manifest in day-to-day language:
- “extrovert”, “neurotic”, “depressed”, “paranoid”, “addicted”, “deluded” “traumatized”, “stressed”
