Exam 1 Flashcards
1
Q
What is history?
A
History is not what happened in the past. It is what historians tell us happened in the past.
Also, “the branch of knowledge that attempts to analyze and explain events of the past.”
A product of selection and interpretation.
2
Q
Who created the history of psychology as a research field?
A
Psychologists shifting to historical research, and historians of science shifting to psychology.
3
Q
Are historians engaged in experimental or empirical work?
A
Empirical
4
Q
True or false: historians and psychologists share similar research approaches and intellectual pursuits.
A
True. Both generate hypotheses and seek evidence to confirm or deny. Both seek to answer the “why” of human behavior.
5
Q
What is different about historical and psychological research?
A
The research methods and the time frame of events. Psychology: contemporary events, History: distant past
6
Q
Define “historiography.”
A
The philosophy and methods of doing history.
7
Q
Is history a science?
A
No.
8
Q
Is a “fact” an un-disputably true event?
A
No. It is information “presented” as objectively real.
9
Q
Who determines what historical facts are important?
A
Monarchs, governments, cultures, historians. It is a selective process, often used to promote a way of thinking. SELECTIVITY is the historians main concern with objectivity.
10
Q
How is bias manifested in history?
A
Subject choice, selectivity of facts, nationalistic perspective, data, oral history
11
Q
What is the difference between presentism and historicism?
A
Presentism: interpret the past in terms of attitudes and values of the present (emphasizing glorification of the present)
Historicism: understanding the past in its own context and for its own sake
12
Q
How did historical philosophy change in the 20th century?
A
A recognition that standard historical accounts were incomplete, and an emphasis on social history and the history of science.
13
Q
What is one of the earliest instances of a psychologist being hired for psychological research in court?
A
The Coca Cola court trials of the early 1900s. Being sued for unknown effects of caffeine.
14
Q
Contemporary research in the history of psychology makes great use of _________________.
A
Archival Research. Not a methodology, but is related to research goals, nature of archival materials, finding aids, and search strategies employed.
15
Q
Define Oral History:
A
An autobiographical account, a personal history, usually in response to an interview and recorded. Used if events are historically recent (a first person account).
16
Q
True or False: The oral historian requires little preparation before conducting the interview.
A
False. Should be very familiar with facts surrounding the content to be taken, often an outline with topics and subtopics is required, and specific conduct for the interview is necessary.
17
Q
What is a criticism and praise of oral history?
A
Criticism: Poor reliability. Ability to recall information may be suspect, the informant may be biased or self-serving.
Praise: May be the only data available in some cases. Reveals personal info. about emotions, motives, self-awareness, and personality.
18
Q
True or False: Quantitative methods are the dominant research method used in historical fields.
A
False. Have become part of historiography of psychology in the last 35 years.
19
Q
Name the two most popular quantitative research methods in historical fields.
A
Content analysis and citation analysis.
20
Q
Define content analysis:
A
A method that converts verbal, written, or other kinds of symbolic material into categories and numbers in order that statistical operations might be performed on the material. Quantifying qualitative material.
21
Q
Define citation analysis:
A
Also called “indexing,” the study of relationships of published material through an analysis of citation networks. Can determine influence of a particular publication.
22
Q
Define historiometry:
A
The use of quantitative techniques to test hypotheses about the behavior of historical individuals. Goal: discover general principles that are descriptive of a certain class of individuals (Nobel prize winners, U.S. presidents, etc.).
23
Q
What changes were made during the “New History of Psychology” in the mid-1970s?
A
- More critical history that investigates the myths of psychology.
- More objective evaluation of individuals and events.
- Utilization of archival and primary source documents.
- Focus on intellectual history (less about great personalities of psychology, more about developmental history of ideas)
- Adoption of an externalist approach vs. the old internalist work
- Use of post-modernism/deconstructionism
24
Q
What is the “externalist approach” of the new history of psychology?
A
Histories that move outside of the narrow confines of the discipline to recognize the broader socio-cultural context in which psychology has emerged. Includes context of social, cultural, political, economic, and geographic factors.
25
Describe "postmodernism"/"deconstructionism"
A philosophy of history that emphasizes context and evidences a critical attitude towards the aims of science.
(Assumption that science is guided by political or social or economic goals, vs. honest and objective search for truth)
Some historians argue that it is a bias within itself.
26
What question does the Rosenhan article ask regarding distinguishing the sane from the insane?
Do the salient characteristics that lead to diagnoses reside in the patients themselves or in the environments and contexts in which observers find them?
27
What was the context of the Rosenhan experiment?
Eight “sane” people gained secret admission to 12 different hospitals
28
(Rosenhan) True or false: when the pseudo-patients were admitted to the psychiatric ward, they continued exhibiting symptoms of abnormality.
False
29
(Rosenhan) What was the discharge diagnosis for all eight pseudo-patients?
Schizophrenia, “in remission”
30
(Rosenhan) What strong bias do physicians tend to be vulnerable to?
Type 2 error; they are more inclined to call a healthy person sick than a sick person healthy
31
(Rosenhan) What types of stigmas do psychiatric diagnoses carry with them?
Personal, legal, and social stigmas
32
(Rosenhan) In what way is assigning a psychiatric label dangerous?
Once a label is assigned it never goes away, coloring others’ perceptions of that person and his/her behavior
33
(Rosenhan) When reviewing a case summary of one of the pseudo-patients, how did the doctor skew the details?
The facts of the case were unintentionally distorted by the staff to achieve consistency with a diagnosis. The report is colored by perceived pathological circumstances, when in fact the patient’s history was entirely un-pathological.
34
(Rosenhan) What is one activity that all of the pseudo-patients engaged in regularly and that was seen as an aspect of their pathological behavior?
Note taking
35
(Rosenhan) What is one tacit characteristic of psychiatric diagnosis?
It locates the sources of aberration within the individual and only rarely within the complex of stimuli that surrounds him
36
(Rosenhan) In what way can a psychiatric diagnoses become dangerous to a patient?
It can act as a self-fulfilling prophecy
37
(Rosenhan) What happens when the origins and stimuli of a behavior are unknown?
Trait labels are put on the person who is exhibiting that behavior, rather than the behavior itself
38
(Rosenhan) What is the structure of the typical psychiatric hospital?
Staff and patients are strictly segregated
39
(Rosenhan) What is the hierarchical organization of the psychiatric hospital?
Those with the most power have least to do with the patients
40
(Rosenhan) What were the two main negative consequences of being a patient that were perpetuated in almost every way?
Powerlessness and depersonalization
41
(Rosenhan) True or false: hospital attendants at times delivered verbal and occasionally serious physical abuse to patients in the presence of other patients.
True
42
What are two of the origins of depersonalization mentioned by the Rosenhan article?
1. the attitudes held toward the mentally ill
| 2. the hierarchical structure of the psychiatric hospital
43
According to the Rosenhan article, are we in fact capable of distinguishing sanity from insanity?
No
44
What are two solutions the Rosenhan article suggests to alleviate consequences of hospitalization?
1. the proliferation of community mental health facilities, crisis intervention centers, the human potential movement, and behavior therapies that avoid psychiatric labels, focus on specific problems and behaviors, and retain the individual in a non-pejorative environment
2. increase the sensitivity and knowledge of mental health workers and researchers to the Catch 22 position of psychiatric patients
45
What does this article claim were achievements of Wilhelm Wundt?
First handbook of experimental psychology
First formal laboratory for experimental psychology
46
What is the goal of the Blumenthal article?
Wundt has historically been either portrayed incorrectly or has been
forgotten in the course of history, so this article is recognizing Wundt’s achievements and correcting misconceptions.
47
What is the basic premise in Wundtian psychology?
The only certain reality is immediate experience
48
What was Wundt’s goal for science and psychology?
The construction of explanations of experience, and the development of techniques for objectifying experience. Communicating and reproducing experiences in standardized ways
49
Explain the misconception about Wundt being a “mind-body dualist”
Wundt rejected mind-body dualism. His phrase “psychophysical parallelism” referred to the separate orientations of physiology and psychology, with separate methodologies, separate types of observations, that run in parallel
50
Explain the misconception about Wundt and introspection
Wundt claimed that progress in psychology had been slow because of reliance on casual, unsystematic introspection, which had led to unsolvable debates
51
What was one draw back to Wundt’s adherence to experimental psychology?
He was so strict that it limited his use of experiments. He felt that true experiments were not feasible for “higher mental processes” (like language).
52
Did Wundt only rely on experimental psychology?
No, a large part of his work is not experimental
53
Explain the misconception that Wundt opposed an active volitional agent (free will and choosing) in psychology
Volition-motivation is a central, primary theme in Wundt’s psychology. His studies on volition led to an elaborate analysis of selective and constructive attentional processes (which he localized in the brain’s frontal lobes). Emotions and affects held an important place in Wundt’s system because they were postulated as the constituents of volition.
54
How does Wundt claim psychology and physics differ?
In physics, actions and events obey inviolable laws; in psychology, actions are made by an active agent with reference to rule systems
55
Explain the misconception about Wundt turning to chemistry for his mental chemistry model
• Although Wundt did reference Mill’s “chemistry analogy”, he later pointed out that this analogy does not go far enough. It is in fact a false analogy because chemical synthesis is wholly determined by its elements, and the psychological synthesis is “truly a new formation”
56
What did Wundt believe was a major part of scientific methodology?
The emphasis on process, analysis of a system into component processes. He believed elemental processes would never actually be observed in pure isolation.
57
What are the six trends that appeared after Wundt that could be viewed as reconstructions of Wundtian psychology?
1. Wundt’s emphasis on volitional processes are similar to modern work on “cognitive control”
2. Wundtian psycholinguistics at the turn or the century can be compared to the development of psycholinguistics in the 1960s
3. Wundt’s student’s explanation of schizophrenia as abnormalities of the attention-deployment process and the modern attentional theory of schizophrenia
4. Wundt’s three-factor theory of affect (pleasant versus unpleasant, high arousal versus low arousal, and concentrated attention versus relaxed attention), and when factor analysis became available, statistical studies of affective and attitudinal behavior yielded factors that parallel those of Wundt’s closely
5. Wundt’s prominence of attention as central, and the study of selective attention later became the core of much work on human information processing
6. Wundt’s 10-volume book (and “deepest interest”) Cultural Psychology: An Investigation of the Developmental Laws of Language, Myth, and Morality, and Werner’s book Comparative Psychology of Mental Development (they both describe organismic psychology in opposition to mechanistic psychology)
58
What three conclusions did Wundt come to regarding perception of extremely brief stimuli?
1. the effective duration of a percept is not identical with the duration of the stimulus – but rather reflects the duration of a psychological process
2. the relation between accuracy of a perception and stimulus duration depends on pre and post exposure fields
3. central processes, rather than peripheral sense organ aftereffects, determine these critical times
59
What was the most frequently employed technique in Wundt’s laboratory?
Reaction time
60
What was Wundt’s theory on central mental processes?
They have emerged as the highest evolutionary development and set men above other animals. Selective attention enabled man to advance mentally and develop human culture.
61
What is rationalism?
A philosophy that sought knowledge through reason and common sense.
(Rene = reason = rationalism)
62
What is empiricism?
A philosophical viewpoint whose chief tenet was that knowledge should be acquired through observation and experimentation. This was in opposition to rationalism.
63
Which philosophical viewpoint signaled the beginning of the scientific method?
Empiricism
64
What is mechanism?
A viewpoint from Galileo in which the universe was composed of matter in motion; minute particles of one object would come into contact with particles of another object, causing movement or change in the second object.
65
How did Decartes view the human body?
A material entity that functioned as a machine, whereas the mind was nonmaterial and free to carry out the functions of consciousness.
66
According to Decartes, the mind is comprised of two ideas; what are they?
innate ideas and derived ideas
67
What was Decartes’ meditation technique?
This was an introspective approach that looked inward towards the mind. He stressed reason over perception and innate ideas over experience. This made Decartes both a rationalist and mechanist.
68
What is Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica?
Book by Sir Isaac Newton in which he developed a mechanist view of the word using rationalist methods.
69
Who were the British empiricists?
A group of philosophers who spanned a period of approximately 200 years, beginning with John Locke.
70
What notion did Johnn Locke reject?
He rejected the notion of innate ideas and argued that all ideas were derived from experience.
71
What is tabula rasa?
Idea (originally from Aristotle) that experience would write on the blank slate of the mind, thus filling the mind with the sum total of its ideas.
72
What was Locke more interested in compare to Decartes?
More interested in the how the mind works; how it acquires knowledge than
what it actually knows.
73
What is An Essay Concerning Human Understanding?
A book by John Locke describing his understanding of the human process and how it acquires knowledge.
74
What are the two qualities and two ideas that Locke describe in his book?
Simple and complex ideas & primary and secondary qualities.
75
What are simple and complex ideas?
Simple ideas are derived from either sensory experience or reflection. Complex ideas are the product only of reflection.
76
What are primary and secondary qualities?
Primary qualities are sensory qualities that exist in an object (e.g. the thorny shape of a rose stem or the whiteness of a feather).
Secondary qualities exist in the experiencing individual and are not part of the object itself (e.g. the pain experienced from the rose thorn or the tickle from a feather).
77
Why was the distinction between the qualities important to Locke’s teachings?
It recognized experience that was independent of physical object of the world. The secondary qualities were products of the mind, and were the basis of psychological study.
78
What is the main premise of John Stuart Mill’s teachings?
He acknowledged that psychology was an inexact, and also precise as astronomy. He called for an empirical approach to psychology. He called for a breaking down , complex mind into its component elements.
79
What is the Bell-Magendie law?
The nerves in the dorsal region of the spinal cord carried information from the senses of the brain (thus afferent processes), whereas those in the ventral region of the spinal cord carried information from the brain to the motor effectors (efferent processes)
80
What is the law of specific nerve energies?
The nerves of the five different sensory systems carry only information specific to a single sensory system, regardless of the nature of simulation of the sensory nerve.
81
What is speed of nerve conduction?
This was the notion that nerve specificity was instantaneous, and that nerve impulses could not be measured.
82
Who proved that the speed of nerve conduction by Mueller was wrong? What was actually concluded?
Hermann Helmholtz proved him wrong. He found that impulses could travel 90 feet per second, thus proving the impulses could be measured. This gave rise to the study of reaction times - motor responses to sensory stimuli.
83
What is the cortical localization function?
The notion that cortical differences are associated with different functions.
84
What did Broca study?
Studied the brains of people with expressive aphasias. He suspected that right-side paralysis would indicate brain damage in the left hemisphere. Furthermore, he found that a large lesion in the left frontal lobe was also the location for speech production.
85
What is Broca’s area?
The left frontal lobe region responsible for speech production.
86
What are Locke’s original ideas?
1. Ideas is the object of thinking
2. All ideas come from sensation and reflection
3. The object of sensation is one source of ideas
4. The operations of our minds have multiple sources
5. All of our ideas are either one experience or multiple experiences
6. Our thinking pattern is observable in children
7. People experience their thoughts differently based on their experience and environment
8. Tendency to reflect later after having an experience. We require attention to our thoughts.
9. We start to have ideas when we start to think and process
87
What are the simple ideas?
1. Uncompounded appearances
2. The mind can neither make nor destroy its ideas
3. We have five senses that allow us to experience the world around us.
88
What are the complex ideas?
1. Ideas that are made after understanding multiple simple ideas
2. Ideas that are made voluntarily
3. Ideas that are either modes, substances or relations:
a. modes
b. simple and mixed modes: modes that are singular or modes that can be combined together
c. substances single or collective: ideas are combinations of simple ideas
d. relation: comparing one idea to another
89
What do modern social theorists believe in the context of tabula rasa?
Man’s inner nature is a tabula rasa which is fully dependent for its development on the process of social interaction and socialization.
90
What was Locke’s main understanding of Tabula Rasa?
He explained that from birth, rather than being characterized by a number of innate attributable divine will, we are a blank slate upon which experience and reflection derived from the senses. He understood that human knowledge was not completely divine will, but our ability to interpret our individual experience.
91
True or False: Contribution acknowledgments of mental philosophers have been neglected in the history of psychology?
True
92
Mental health philosophers helped influence and transition into Western psychology by:
A) Establishing a place in the cirriculum for mental philosophy --> new psychology
B) Identifying topics for laboratory methods to address
C) Pursuing an empirical, inductive, and scientific approach to the study of the mind
D) Their tradition of functional analysis
93
Dugald Stewart's "Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind" and John Locke's essay "Concerning Human Understanding" were the most commonly used texts for the basis of courses labeled "Intellectual Philosophy" or "Mental Philosophy"?
True
94
Most of the founders of Western psychology in America were influenced by whom?
Mental philosophy laboratories throughout Europe (Germany).
95
Who began the tradition of "new" psychology in the U.S. in 1929?
Cattell
96
Who wrote the first book on experimental psychology in 1929?
E.G. Boring
97
True or False: The first generation of new psychologists found the beginning of psychology to be revolutionary rather than evolutionary?
True
98
What is the Clash of Cultures?
A confrontation between the German tradition of Leibnitz and the British tradition into an American tradition, and was considered an attempt at understanding and joining American mental philosophy and German experimental psychology to produce the new discipline that became "new" psychology in America.
99
True or False: Seminaries provided the only graduate education in America during the pre-Civil War period?
True
100
What other study was intertwined with that of psychology in the early 1800's?
Theology; theology was a part of undergraduate and seminary education. Natural philosophy (natural or physical sciences) was concerned with the study of nature and the natural world - which was also connected with the study of natural science.
101
The first category of Wayland's mental processes and the 5 human senses was referred to as what?
Intellectual; which included cognitive processes such as attention, memory, reasoning, imagination, etc.
102
True or False: Haven, Hickok, and Upham added to Wayland's intellectual cognitive properties with "the sensibilities" (emotions, feelings, motives, desires, etc.)?
True
103
What were mental processes of the mind categorized as?
Functional Properties
104
Who wrote The Principles of Psychology that was influenced by new beginnings after the Civil War and the Darwinian era?
William James
105
True or False: Post Civil War, Hall and Ladd began to separate psychology from theology?
True
106
When did mental philosophy establish a place in colleges and academic settings?
Throughout the 19th century
107
Who were the major three “players” in American scientific psychology at the end of the 1800’s?
G. Stanley Hall
William James
James Cattell
108
What was Hall’s contribution to American psychology?
Created first psychology laboratory
Created first American psychology journal
Started Child Study Movement – developmental psych
Founded APA
109
What was William James’s major contribution to psychology?
The book, “Principles of Psychology”
Psychology of religion
Psychology as related to teaching
110
What type of testing did Galton develop that influenced Cattell?
Anthropometric testing
| Tested: physical characteristics, motor performance, and sensory functioning
111
What type of testing did Cattell try to develop?
Mental tests
112
Why did Cattell fail at developing mental testing?
The correlation of his mental tests and student performance was essentially zero, indicating no relationship. His tests were not valid.
113
What journal did Cattell edit that guaranteed psychology a forum?
“Science”
114
What “school of thought” was Hall?
Empiricist
115
What “school of thought” was William James?
He was a rationalist in that he continued philosophical tradition, but was also an empiricist because he collected data and endeavored to change views/understanding based on data he collected.
116
What “school of thought” was James Cattell?
Empiricist
117
What were William James’s 5 characters of thought?
- Every thought tends to be part of a person consciousness
- Within each personal consciousness thought is always changing
- Within each personal consciousness thought is sensibly continuous
- It always appears to deal with objects independent of itself
- It is interested in some parts of these objects to the exclusion of others and welcomes or rejects – chooses from among them, in a word – all the while (In other words: you make meaning by how you differentiation and how you do that is by what you pay attention to).
118
What was William James influenced by?
Art and perception as art
119
True or false: William James thought of art as primary and science as secondary?
True
120
What did William James mean with the metaphor of a sculptor working on a block of stone?
He was explaining the role of consciousness in selectivity that has adaptive significance for each unique individual.
121
What did William James mean when he spoke of 4 men taking a tour of Europe?
- A man’s thought depends on the things he has experienced, but what he experiences is to a large extent determined by his habits of attention.
- If a man sees something a million times but fails to notice it, it can’t be said to be a part of his experience
122
What did William James mean when he discussed the splitting of the universe into two halves?
- The two halves are “me” and “not me.” We can know our own “me” and “mine” but there is no way we can know someone else’s “me.”
- As James stated, “no mind can take the same interest in his neighbor’s ‘me’ as in his own.
- We each divide the universe in a different place.
123
What did David E. Learly discuss in his thesis, “William James and the Art of Human Understanding?”
- That James’s artistic sensibility and experience were critically important in the development of his psychological and philosophical thought and in the articulation of a view of human understanding that was fundamental to his psychology and philosophy.
124
What was James’s portrait of philosophy?
The full truth of the universe cannot be known until all aspects have been created. Philosophies are only pictures of the world, which have grown up in the minds of different individuals.
125
What was James’s portrait of human understanding?
- He believed that information learned through scientific research is only one angle and place of vantage from which arguments are made. Whenever scientific theory is taken as “definitive,” it cuts off other vantage points and becomes “perspectiveless and short”
- He believed that humans can only understand things, events and experiences from and through the viewpoint of other things, events, and experiences.
- He believed that creative individuals are the ones who further human understanding by noting analogies that others could never “cogitate alone.”
126
What are two major features in James’s portrait of human understanding?
- Analogies, comparisons, or metaphors that provide the means of human understanding are partial and temporary in their utility
- They should be changes as newer aspects of reality come to the fore in the stream of experience.
127
How was James’s portrait of human understanding developed?
- “The whole drift of his education.”
- Apprenticeship with Hunt and learning from LaFarge (another apprentice of Hunt’s)
- Reading, writing, and painting
- Entering Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard University
128
What was James’s “art of human understanding?”
- The art of grasping similarities among phenomena and forging perceptual patterns and conceptual categories out of the flux and chaos of experience
129
What was James’s definition of “interest?”
Interest is different for every person; “My experience is what I agree to attend to and only those items that I notice are what shape my mind.”
Interest alone, is what gives intelligible perspective.
130
What did James mean when he said the “perception of likeness?”
The perception of analogies or metaphors.
131
What were the two areas that Cattell concentrated on?
Physiological characteristics
| Psychological characteristics
132
What was Cattell’s primary argument?
Internal states are finite, predictable things. Brains operate in very predictable ways. The brain is a material object; therefore, you can measure it.
133
What are naïve theories?
Looking in the past and creating a model based on it. This is circular reasoning, where you can create a theory and then fit anything into that.
134
What is Cattell’s legacy?
Mostly in his advocacy work and positioning himself fairly powerfully in the psychology community. He advocated for human testing and was a bridge for experimental psychology (even though in his own experiments, he failed).
135
What is the Baconian method?
1. a description of facts
2. a tabulation, or classification, of those facts into three categories—instances of the presence of the characteristic under investigation, instances of its absence, or instances of its presence in varying degrees
3. the rejection of whatever appears, in the light of these tables, not to be connected with the phenomenon under investigation and the determination of what is connected with it.
136
The APA created a committee to consider the feasibility of cooperation among psych labs in collecting mental and physical characteristics. In this committee, who argued that physiological tests had received too great a place in a schedule developed by APA?
- James Mark Baldwin
| - He thought higher mental processes were more important to test than physiological ones
137
Who compared Cattell’s work with Binet’s and what were here conclusions?
- Stella Emily Sharp (YAY for women!)
- She concluded that the American theory of “individual psychology” was founded upon no explicit theory and that mental anthropometry could not yield results of any value.
138
How was anthropometric mental testing used successfully?
- specialized tests designed for specialized uses (i.e. using them to study sense of hearing and techniques for evaluating it)
139
How was anthropometric mental testing used unsuccessfully?
- Eugenic implications in Cattell’s goals
- Using them to demonstrate proper spheres of activity for the sexes
- Using them to justify “proper” relations between races
- Vocational guidance based on touch, nerve, sight, and hearing reactions
- Using them with developmentally disabled children to obtain estimates of children’s abilities
140
What marks the transition of psychology from philosophy to science?
- The establishment of the psychology laboratory
141
What changed the nature of graduate education for American psychology students at the turn of the century?
- The American laboratory; rather than graduate students heading to a university in Europe, all but 15% of graduate students were earning degrees in American universities
142
What “instrument” has replaced diverse brass instruments in the laboratory?
The computer!
143
Why did psychologists want instruments in their laboratories around the turn of the century?
- psychologists were attempting to duplicate the success of experimental physiology and physics earlier in the century
144
What were the three uses of psychological instruments in the 1900s?
- scientific research
- classroom demonstrations
- undergraduate instructional laboratories
145
What did the chronoscope measure?
- Reaction times
146
What was the memory drum?
- It allowed lists of words or other stimuli to appear for a fixed amount of time so they could be viewed individually
147
What did most of the instruments used in psychology have to do with?
- Human sensation
- Perception
- Action
- Emotion
148
With regard to standard instruments in the laboratory, what is meant by “standard?”
- One that was found in most laboratories and was considered an essential part to the laboratory
- To guarantee that the stimulus would be the same from place to place, it was thought better to use the identical instrument, preferably made by the same maker.
149
What was Fechner’s contribution to scientific psychology?
- developed the approach of psychophysics, recording an individuals reactions to known changes in physical stimulation allowed comparison of psychological world to physical
- demonstrated no one–to-one correspondence between change in stimuli and perception
- stimuli and perception related in non linear yet predictable way
- published Elements of Psychophysics
150
Why was Elements of Psychophysics, such important foundational work?
- some consider Fechner as scientific psychology (most though, consider Wundt)
- Elements.. laid out conceptual issues, set of methods, and own psychophysical work on stimulus-perception relationships
- this work influenced Wundt, others in Germany and the US (George Trumbull Ladd)
151
Why was Wilhelm Wundt considered the father of scientific psychology?
- established earliest psych lab in in Leipzig Germany in 1879
- visionary, wedded experimental ideas, physiology, and psychology to make experimental psychology “brand”, established
- wrote books Contributions to the Theory of Sense Perception(1862) and Principles of Physiological Psychology (1874)
- transformed classes from physiology to physiological psychology
- established another lab in Zurich University (1874)
- taught Munsterberg, Titchener, and Kraepelin, and Americans: Witmer, Dill Scott, Scripture, Cattell
152
What were Wundt’s two different fields of study?
- Voluntarism: experimental psychology
| - Volkerpsychologie: empirical but non-experimental study of art, religion, language, law, morality, and culture.
153
What were the crucial elements of voluntarism/experimental psychology for Wundt?
- Analysis of the elements of consciousness
- apperception: process that gives clarity to consciousness; willful use of mental focus to complexity; clarifies and synthesizes psychical elements into experience
- mediate experience vs. immediate experience: mediate experience was study of physical events that could be measured. Immediate experience domain of psych, because conscious experience of the stimulus
154
What is a psychical element?
- The absolutely simple and irreducible components of psychical phenomena
- products of analysis and abstraction
- two kinds of immediate experience: objective experience of sensations and effective elements, feelings
155
What is a psychical compound?
-when psychical elements combine to include sensational and affective dimensions so that the character of the compound is not only composed of each specific element, but is unique and relatively independent.
156
How does Schmidgen’s interpretation of Wundt differ from Blumenthal’s?
- Argues that Wundt did conceptualize psychology according to a chemistry model, saw psychology as a decomposition of conscious phenomena into its elements
- early study of chemical analysis was influential to Wundt and his method (salt and urine analysis example given) and the study of input and outputs as reactions that could be deduced about was taken from chemistry and applied to psychology
157
What "school of thought" was Locke?
Empiricist
158
What "school of thought" was Descartes?
Rationalist and Mechanist
