Exam 1 Flashcards
What is history?
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.
Who created the history of psychology as a research field?
Psychologists shifting to historical research, and historians of science shifting to psychology.
Are historians engaged in experimental or empirical work?
Empirical
True or false: historians and psychologists share similar research approaches and intellectual pursuits.
True. Both generate hypotheses and seek evidence to confirm or deny. Both seek to answer the “why” of human behavior.
What is different about historical and psychological research?
The research methods and the time frame of events. Psychology: contemporary events, History: distant past
Define “historiography.”
The philosophy and methods of doing history.
Is history a science?
No.
Is a “fact” an un-disputably true event?
No. It is information “presented” as objectively real.
Who determines what historical facts are important?
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.
How is bias manifested in history?
Subject choice, selectivity of facts, nationalistic perspective, data, oral history
What is the difference between presentism and historicism?
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
How did historical philosophy change in the 20th century?
A recognition that standard historical accounts were incomplete, and an emphasis on social history and the history of science.
What is one of the earliest instances of a psychologist being hired for psychological research in court?
The Coca Cola court trials of the early 1900s. Being sued for unknown effects of caffeine.
Contemporary research in the history of psychology makes great use of _________________.
Archival Research. Not a methodology, but is related to research goals, nature of archival materials, finding aids, and search strategies employed.
Define Oral History:
An autobiographical account, a personal history, usually in response to an interview and recorded. Used if events are historically recent (a first person account).
True or False: The oral historian requires little preparation before conducting the interview.
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.
What is a criticism and praise of oral history?
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.
True or False: Quantitative methods are the dominant research method used in historical fields.
False. Have become part of historiography of psychology in the last 35 years.
Name the two most popular quantitative research methods in historical fields.
Content analysis and citation analysis.
Define content analysis:
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.
Define citation analysis:
Also called “indexing,” the study of relationships of published material through an analysis of citation networks. Can determine influence of a particular publication.
Define historiometry:
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.).
What changes were made during the “New History of Psychology” in the mid-1970s?
- 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
What is the “externalist approach” of the new history of psychology?
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.
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.
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?
What was the context of the Rosenhan experiment?
Eight “sane” people gained secret admission to 12 different hospitals
(Rosenhan) True or false: when the pseudo-patients were admitted to the psychiatric ward, they continued exhibiting symptoms of abnormality.
False
(Rosenhan) What was the discharge diagnosis for all eight pseudo-patients?
Schizophrenia, “in remission”
(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
(Rosenhan) What types of stigmas do psychiatric diagnoses carry with them?
Personal, legal, and social stigmas
(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
(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.
(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
(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
(Rosenhan) In what way can a psychiatric diagnoses become dangerous to a patient?
It can act as a self-fulfilling prophecy
(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
(Rosenhan) What is the structure of the typical psychiatric hospital?
Staff and patients are strictly segregated
(Rosenhan) What is the hierarchical organization of the psychiatric hospital?
Those with the most power have least to do with the patients
(Rosenhan) What were the two main negative consequences of being a patient that were perpetuated in almost every way?
Powerlessness and depersonalization
(Rosenhan) True or false: hospital attendants at times delivered verbal and occasionally serious physical abuse to patients in the presence of other patients.
True
What are two of the origins of depersonalization mentioned by the Rosenhan article?
- the attitudes held toward the mentally ill
2. the hierarchical structure of the psychiatric hospital
According to the Rosenhan article, are we in fact capable of distinguishing sanity from insanity?
No
What are two solutions the Rosenhan article suggests to alleviate consequences of hospitalization?
- 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
- increase the sensitivity and knowledge of mental health workers and researchers to the Catch 22 position of psychiatric patients
What does this article claim were achievements of Wilhelm Wundt?
First handbook of experimental psychology
First formal laboratory for experimental psychology
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.
What is the basic premise in Wundtian psychology?
The only certain reality is immediate experience
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
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
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
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).
Did Wundt only rely on experimental psychology?
No, a large part of his work is not experimental
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.
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
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”
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.
What are the six trends that appeared after Wundt that could be viewed as reconstructions of Wundtian psychology?
- Wundt’s emphasis on volitional processes are similar to modern work on “cognitive control”
- Wundtian psycholinguistics at the turn or the century can be compared to the development of psycholinguistics in the 1960s
- Wundt’s student’s explanation of schizophrenia as abnormalities of the attention-deployment process and the modern attentional theory of schizophrenia
- 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
- Wundt’s prominence of attention as central, and the study of selective attention later became the core of much work on human information processing
- 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)
What three conclusions did Wundt come to regarding perception of extremely brief stimuli?
- the effective duration of a percept is not identical with the duration of the stimulus – but rather reflects the duration of a psychological process
- the relation between accuracy of a perception and stimulus duration depends on pre and post exposure fields
- central processes, rather than peripheral sense organ aftereffects, determine these critical times
What was the most frequently employed technique in Wundt’s laboratory?
Reaction time
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.
What is rationalism?
A philosophy that sought knowledge through reason and common sense.
(Rene = reason = rationalism)
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.
Which philosophical viewpoint signaled the beginning of the scientific method?
Empiricism
