Exam 2 Flashcards
Rationalism
- Rationalists believed in an active mind. The mind adds something to sensory data rather than passively organizing it and storing it in memory.
- Rationalists believed in innate mental processing ability and the necessity of understanding the processing ability. The rationalists emphasized deductive reasoning.
- Rationalists believed that there are truths about the world which cannot be grasped from experience. These truths must be discovered through such processes as logical deduction, analysis, and argumentation.
- Many of the rationalists were continental Europeans, especially German.
Spinoza’s Emotions: Double aspectism
The idea that mind and body are one and the same but display different facets, like the two sides to the same coin.
Spinoza denied the existence of free will. In his cosmology, God=Nature=Humans;
therefore human thoughts and behavior are lawful.
Spinoza was one of the first Western philosophers to look at emotions in detail. He divided passions (not tied to thoughts) from emotions (tied to thoughts). Spinoza also placed human emotions along a continuum anchored by pleasure and pain. Some 48 different emotions could be derived along this continuum from the varying mixtures of pleasure and pain.
Leibniz and Monads
the ultimate units of reality are not material particles in motion, but an infinitude of energy-laden and soul-invested units
Rational Monads
rational monads (closest to God and corresponding to the rational souls of humans, these monads are key to the process of apperception by which an object is focused on and understood)
Sentient Monads
sentient monads (which make up the souls of living but nonhuman beings, they possess capacities for conscious pleasure and pain and the voluntary focusing of attention)
Simple Monads
simple monads (which make up the body of all organic and inorganic matter; they have little if any conscious perception)
Leibniz and Apperception
Leibniz believed that there are ‘insensible perceptions or petites perceptions which are not experienced. These are the elemental components of conscious perceptions in the same way that atoms are the elemental components of material objects.
As petites perceptions accumulate, their combined force causes conscious awareness, or what Leibniz called apperception. There exists a continuum between the conscious and unconscious mind. When the mass of petites’ perceptions crosses the limen (threshold It enters conscious awareness through the process of apperception. This notion of the Limen will encourage the work of Johann Friedrich Herbart and later German experimentalists.
Immanuel Kant and Rationalism
Kant did agree with Hume that nothing in experience proves causation; however, we can be certain of its existence. Kant argued that there are the a priori categories of thought; that is, ways of thought that are not reliant on experience. Sensory data might provide information on the world, but through the categories of thought the mind added something to the data so that knowledge could be obtained.
Hegel and the Dialectical Movement
Hegel’s version of the dialectic process involved a thesis (one point of view), an antithesis (the opposite point of view), and a synthesis (a resolution between the thesis and the antithesis). When a cycle is completed, the previous synthesis becomes the thesis for the next cycle, and the process repeats itself continually. In this manner, both human history and the human intellect evolve toward the Absolute.
Herbart’s Dynamic View of the Mind
Psychic Mechanics: Herbart believed in what has been labeled psychic mechanics. He dismissed the idea of laws of association as inadequate and believed that ideas have the power to attract or repel other ideas, depending on their compatibility. This was a twist on Leibniz’s view of the monad possessing energy. Ideas compete to find expression in the consciousness and in doing so expend energy. Ideas in the consciousness are bright and clear, while those ideas in the unconsciousness are dark and obscure. Each idea struggles to become clear, what Herbart called self-preservation. Ideas are not destroyed, but sink into the unconscious when they lose vitality. Herbart agreed with the empiricists that ideas are derived from experience, but once they came into being they had a life of their own.
Apperceptive Mass: Herbart drew Leibniz with his idea of an apperceptive mass. Herbart believed that at any given moment, compatible ideas gather in the consciousness and form an apperceptive mass. The mass is what we are paying attention to at the moment. If an idea is compatible with the apperceptive mass, it will be admitted. But if it is not, repression on the part of the mass will keep it out. The repressed idea will continue to exist and look for an opportunity to join the apperceptive mass.
Limen: Herbart accepted Leibniz’s idea of the limen to describe the threshold between the unconscious and conscious mind. Herbart’s take would influence the work in physio-psychology by other Germans
Educational Psychology
He developed methods of teaching and retention.
Romanticism
Romantics believed certain truths were outside the province of reason. They appealed to the human desire for faith and emotional feeling. Humanity was an abstract concept, and national and cultural identity was unique. Romanticism rejected Christianity and looked for meaning within nature and pantheism. Romantics looked for the laws of nature through intuitive comprehension
Germany was the country most affected by romanticism. German romantics also looked at history, religion, art, mythology and science as being bound together in any given age. Together they not only expressed culture, but also the spirit or geist of the times. In this grand unity, both the internal world of the man and the external world of nature were ONE. The mind through intuition could grasp the totality of the whole. This was a secularized pantheism.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Considered the father of romanticism and wrote The Social Contract.
The Social Contract
He saw society as an artificial creation which denied basic human nature. For this reason, people acted from selfish motives and engaged in anti-social activity. They also were unable to realize their full potential.
He believed in a state in which the government was supreme and upheld the conditions that allowed the people to reach their full potential and express their free will.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
He is considered the originator of Sturm und Drang literature, a genre which sank deep roots in German culture. Through this literature Goethe expressed his belief that life consisted of opposing forces such as life and death, love and hate. One should embrace all and live life with passion and an eye toward continuous growth.
Schopenhauer’s Philosophy
The Will
In humans, this force manifests itself in the will to survive, which causes an unending cycle of needs and need satisfaction. For Schopenhauer, the powerful drive toward self-preservation—not the intellect and not morality—accounts for most human behavior. Most human behavior, then, is irrational. To satisfy our will to survive, we must eat, sleep, eliminate, drink, and engage in sexual activity. The pain caused by an unsatisfied need causes us to act to satisfy the need. When the need is satisfied, we experience momentary satisfaction (pleasure), which lasts only until another need arises, and on it goes.
Schopenhauer and Sexuality
Sex is the ultimate goal of almost all human effort and The genitals are the focus of the will. It is the will that drives people to reproduce, and it is a force that takes precedence over reason.
Existentialism
Existentialists prized free will and encouraged others to embrace their personal freedom as a way of finding meaning in the here and now. They also held that personal experience and feeling are the most valid guides for behavior. The goal of life should be personal achievement and fulfillment. To do so, all components of experience, the good and the bad, should be embraced.
The Love Affair with God
For Kierkegaard a love affair is at once passionate, happy, and painful. He believed one should read the Bible as one should read a love letter. The words of the Bible should touch the reader emotionally and personally. The meaning of the Bible should evoke feelings (you would not apply a dictionary to a love letter). Truth for Kierkegaard is subjectivity, your subjectivity.
The Apollonian and the Dionysian Sides
Nietzsche believed that there were two slides to the human mind: the Apollonian and the Dionysian.
The Apollanian represents the human rational side and reflects our desire for predictability, tranquility and order.
The Dionysian reflects the human irrational side with our attraction to creative chaos and passionate dynamic experiences.
The Death of God
God was dead and that humanity had killed him. Humans had relied on God for meaning and morality, but the scientist and philosophers of the 19th century had discredited that notion of deity. Darwin had shown that Humans are just a kink on the evolutionary chain, and that we share the fate of death like every other creature.
The will to power
Will to Power: Humans needed to acknowledge their freedom and use it to find meaning. Humans are basically irrational, but irrationality needed to be expressed. You need to act as you truly feel, even aggressive tendencies need to be displayed. Nietzsche believed that Christian morality had dampened this elemental human feature with its emphasis on protecting the weak and engaging in charity.
Materialism
Their interest will be in the material of the body and how it might account for the phenomenal world of the individual.
Charles Bell and Francois Magendie
White and grey matter
Sensory nerves carried impulses forward from the sense receptors to the brain, and motor nerves carried impulses forward from the brain to the muscles and glands. The Bell-Magendie law demonstrated separate sensory and motor tracts in the spinal cord and suggested separate sensory and motor regions in the brain.
The Doctrine of Specific Nerve Endings - Müller
There are different types of sensory nerves, each containing a characteristic energy. When stimulated, nerves convey a particular sensation to the brain. Each sense organ is maximally sensitive to a particular type of stimulation (the eye is the most stimulated by the light energy, the skin by pressure, and so forth). As we examine the environment, sensory acuity provides a range of sensations and perceptions. Some people are more sensitive than others and this is a reflection of sensory acuity.
The ‘Helmholtz Oath’
They views that all processes could be explained in ordinary chemical and physical terms.
No other forces than the common physical-chemical ones are active within the organism. In those cases which cannot at the time be explained by these forces one has either to find the specific way or form of their activity by means of the physical mathematical method, or to assume new forces equal in dignity to the physical-chemical forces inherent in matter,
reducible to the force of attraction and repulsion.
We are not going to except any explanation for anything that is not rooted in chemistry or physics
Ewald Hering
Hering accounted for gray by explaining that there are three receptors in the eye. One accounts for red-green, one accounts for yellow-blue, and one accounts for white-black. In terms of energy, red, yellow, and white have a catabolic effect, while that of green, blue, and black have an anabolic effect. If the catabolic and anabolic processes happen simultaneously, gray is perceived.
Christine Ladd-Franklin
Ladd-Franklin noted that some animals see only in monochrome (black and white) and assumed that this form of chromatic vision appeared first in evolution, color vision came later.
She further assumed that the human eye carries the vestiges of its earlier evolutionary era.
Ladd-Franklin observed that the most highly evolved part of the eye is the fovea, where, at least in daylight, visual acuity and color sensitivity are greatest.
She noted that peripheral vision (provided by the rods of the retina) was more primitive than foveal vision (provided by the cones of the retina) because night vision and movement detection are crucial for survival
Phrenology - Franz Joseph Gall
He argued that there was dedicated portions of the brain that does specific functions.
Gall believed in faculty psychology and argued that different regions of the brain were responsible for different emotional, intellectual, and behavioral functions.
His partner, Spurzheim believed there were 21 emotional faculties and 14 intellectual ones in the brain.
Paul Broca and Carl Wernicke
Paul Broca discovered that damage to the left frontal lobe (Broca’s area) impairs speech production, leading to non-fluent aphasia.
Carl Wernicke identified that damage to the left temporal lobe (Wernicke’s area) impairs language comprehension, resulting in fluent aphasia with impaired understanding of speech.
Ernst Weber
He found that the sense of touch was not one but several senses. Developed Weber’s Law, the first quantitative law in psychology
Fechner’s Law
He believed that it was possible to measure the mental processes of perception as well as the physical intensities of sensory stimuli. Taking the two, one could determine the mathematical relationship between the two measures. The relationship should be harmonious and indicative of the underlying unity between the physical and psychological worlds.
Wundt and Principles of physiological Psychology
Explained that psychology and physiology must be conjoined.
Voluntarism
The power of the will to organize the mind’s content into higher-level thought processes.
Tridimensional Theory of Feeling
Consciousness was composed of various combinations of sensations and feeling. He believed sensations could be categorized as to their modes (hearing, tasting, etc), qualities (colors, shapes, sizes if visual), and durations. He placed feelings on a tridimensional scale with the basic dimensions of pleasant-unpleasantness, tension-relaxation, and activity-passivity
Volkerpsychologie
A concept developed by Wilhelm Wundt that focused on studying the collective aspects of human psychology, such as language, culture, religion, and social behaviors.
Edward Bradford Titchener
Edward Titchener’s interest was in consciousness (a product of his time with Wundt) which he defined as the sum total of mental experience at any given time. He defined the mind as the accumulated experiences of a lifetime. He was interested in the observable mental events.
Titchener’s Structuralism
Titchener concluded that consciousness was composed of three elemental states: sensations (elements of perception), images (elements of ideas), and affections (elements of emotions). An element can only be known by listing its attributes. The attributes of sensations and images are quality, intensity, duration, and clearness. Affections could have the attributes of quality, intensity and duration, but lacked clearness.
Act Psychology
COME BACK
Act Psychology because he believed mental processes are directed toward some function. The human mind acts toward something.
Edmund Husserl
mental acts are functional in that they are directed outside the individual. For Brentano this is how people make contact with the physical world. For Husserl, this leads to only one type of knowledge – that of the individual acting with the environment. It ignores the equally important knowledge of the person turned inward, or what can be called the subjective experience. This breaks down accordingly: we have intentionality (the outside) and subjectivity (the inside). In the former we ask what external object the seeing intends. In the later we concentrate on the pure experience of seeing. Both methods are key components of the phenomenological experience. Husserl referred to it as pure phenomenology. When the term phenomenon is used to describe a mental event, it refers to the whole intact meaningful experience and not to the fragments of sensations.
Herman Ebbinghaus
Ebbinghaus made use of nonsense syllables and measured retention based on time and the serial position effect. His work moved memory into the realm of experimental psychology.
Natural Selection
you better know this by now
Malthus
Evolution is not linear.
observed that the world’s food supply
increased arithmetically, whereas the human popu-
lation tended to increase geometrically. He con-
cluded that food supply and population size were
kept in balance by such events as war, starvation,
and disease.
Wallace
a theory of evolution almost identical to his own.
Wallace, too, had been influenced by Malthus’s essay,
as well as by his own observations in the Amazon and
in the Malay Archipelago.
Origin of Species
Species evolve overtime
Descent of Man
focuses on the evolution of humans and the idea that humans share a common ancestry with other species, particularly primates, like apes.
Spencer
Herbert Spencer coined the term survival of the fittest.
Social Darwinism: Spencer argued that societies, like individuals and species, evolve over time. He believed that social progress was a natural consequence of competition and that the strongest individuals and groups would naturally rise to the top.
Galton
Galton was the start of the eugenics movement as he believed that intelligence was inherited.
James Mckeen Cattell
He saw psychology as a tool by which people and their abilities could be assessed. His mental tests were precursors to intelligence testing and he was an influential advocate for eugenics.
Alfred Binet
His research focused on individual differences and rudimentary intelligence testing.
The 1905 Binet-Simon Scale of Intelligence
Was one of the first formalized methods of measuring human intelligence.
This scale was groundbreaking because it provided a systematic way to assess the intellectual abilities of children, particularly in the context of education. It marked the beginning of what would later become the field of psychometrics, or the measurement of mental abilities.
Charles Spearman
Spearman proposed the g factor theory, which holds that an underlying factor of general intelligence exists that forms the foundation out of which all intellectual abilities rise. Spearman also felt that levels of general intelligence could predict levels of specific abilities.
Goddard’s Interest in the ‘Feebleminded’
Goddard proposed definitions for a system for classifying individuals with intellectual disability based on intelligence quotient (IQ). Goddard used the terms moron for those with an IQ of 51-70, imbecile for those with an IQ of 26-50, and idiot for those with an IQ of 0-25 for categories of increasing impairment.
Morons, according to Goddard, were unfit for society and should be removed from society either through institutionalization, sterilization, or both.
Goddard and the Kallikak Family
On the ‘normal’ side of the Kallikak family tree, the children Martin had with his wife and their descendants all ended up prosperous, intelligent, and morally upstanding. They were lawyers, ministers, and doctors. None were ‘feeble-minded.’ Goddard concluded from this that intelligence, sanity, and morality were hereditary, and every effort should be undertaken to keep the ‘feeble-minded’ from procreating, with the overall goal of potentially ending ‘feeble-mindedness’ and its accompanying traits. The damage from even one dalliance between a young man and a ‘feeble-minded’ woman could create generations worth of crime and poverty, Goddard argued.
Goddard recommended segregating the ‘feebleminded’ in institutions, where they would be taught how to work various forms of menial labor.
Terman and the Stanford-Binet Test
He is perhaps best known for his revision of the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales, which became one of the most widely used IQ tests in the world.
Terman and the ‘Quiz Kids’
One of Terman’s key ideas was that children with high IQs needed special educational support to ensure they reached their full potential. Many of the Quiz Kids, by virtue of their high intelligence, would have benefitted from such specialized education. However, Terman also cautioned against putting too much pressure on gifted children or assuming they would necessarily become successful adults—something that would later be debated by other psychologists who studied giftedness.
Robert Yerkes
In World War I, Yerkes and others developed tests to assess Army recruits. Out of this effort came the ‘alpha’ and ‘beta’ tests.
Wechsler
Wechsler is best known for his intelligence tests. The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) was developed first in 1939. From these he derived the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC) in 1949 and the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence (WPPSI) in 1967.
Stage four: U.S. Functionalism
One = Functionalists opposed what they considered the sterile search for elements of consciousness.
Two = The Functionalists wanted to understand the function of the mind rather than merely describe its contents. They believed mental processes had a function and that key among them was the adaptation to the environment.
Three = The Functionalists wanted psychology to be a practical science, not a pure science. They wanted to apply what they had learned to the improvement of personal life, education, and industry.
Four = The Functionalists urged the broadening of psychology to include the study of animals, children, and psychopathology.
Five = The Functionalists were interested in the ‘why’ of mental processes and behavior; this led them to studies in motivation.
Six = The Functionalists accepted both mental processes and behavior as legitimate subject matter for psychology. They also views introspection as a legitimate tool for research.
Seven = The Functionalists were more interested in what made organisms different, than in what made them similar.
Eight = The Functionalists were influenced by William James and by extension, Charles Darwin.
William James
He attacked much of Wilhelm Wundt’s approach to psychology, especially Wundt’s interest in experimentalism. He decried experimentalism as dull and businesslike. He also attacked those who pushed for ‘brass knob psychology’ (experimentalists) as orthodoxers. James opened psychology to a range of topics outside of the laboratory.
Consciousness
James viewed consciousness as having the following characteristics: one, it is personal – it is yours alone and not part of any greater consciousness; two, it is ever changing – James would have agreed with Heraclitus; three, it is continuous, it cannot be chopped into bits and pieces as Titchener and Wundt sought to do; and four, it is selective, we choose where to direct our attention.
Habits
James believed habits are formed as activities are repeated. Repetition causes the neural pathways to become more efficient. Habits are functional because they simplify the movements required to achieve a result. Habits also increase the accuracy of behavior and diminish the need to consciously attend to a task.
James offered five maxims to develop good habits and eliminate bad ones. One: Place yourself in circumstances where you eliminate bad habits and keep good ones. Two: Do not allow yourself to act contrary to a new habit you are trying to develop. Three: Do not attempt to slowly develop a good habit or eliminate a bad one. Four: You must do so, rather than merely intend to develop a good habit or eliminate a bad one. Five: Force yourself to act in ways beneficial to yourself, even if it is distasteful.
Self
The material self which consists of everything you own including your body and property
The social self which consists of the self known by others
The spiritual self which consists of your own states of consciousness.
Emotions
James believed that if we see the bear, we run, and then we are frightened. In his view, the perceptions we have of bodily reactions is how we experience emotions. In other words, the nervous system makes certain innate and reflex adjustments in the face of external stimuli. Our emotions are based on how we label our physiological reactions. Became the foundation of such therapeutic practices as relaxation therapy.
Hugo Munsterberg
We consciously experience bodily preparedness (a physical symptom) when we prepare to act and confuse it with ‘the Will.’ He believed that there is no conscious ‘will’ and therefore no voluntarism.
Believed behavior caused thoughts.
Clinical, Industrial, and Forensic psychology.
Biography of Mary Whiton Calkins
Self-psychology, the experience of consciousness. She hoped her interest would reconcile James’s Functionalism with Titchener’s Structuralism. Her work in self-psychology proved to be her major contribution to psychology. She was elected the first female president of the American Psychological Association in 1905.
Granville Stanley Hall
Heavily influenced by darwin
Hall and Psychology
- Comparative psychology (tied to Darwinism), concerned with whether instinct was innate or a ‘fallen Intelligence,’ or a genetically inspired reflex.
- Experimental psychology: he believed american psych needed to move from introspection and into experimentation.
- Historical psychology: wanted an evolutionary psychohistory of culture.
Hall and Recapitulation theory
Hall held that each individual in their life reenacted all the stages humans had passed through to reach the current civilized state. Hall believed that every child reenacts the cruelty, impulsiveness, and immorality through which the human race has passed. It was essential that these impulses be given free rein. If suppressed, the child will carry them into adulthood and become a criminal.
Hall and Adolescence
Hall saw adolescence as a time of storm and stress, a time where the adolescent challenged parental authority and was often moody and prone to antisocial behavior.
Hall believed girls should be prepared for motherhood, while boys should be prepared for vocation. To facilitate this, he advocated for gender separated classrooms. The basis for this was in his view of recapitulation: one, adolescence was a critical period in the development of the female reproductive organs; stress in the classroom might prevent normal development. Two, the adolescent male needed the freedom to engage in the expression of his savage impulses. Three, the natural sexual differentiation during adolescence was necessary for the sexes to be attracted to each other later.
Biography of Francis Cecil Sumner
Father of black psychology
An area of Sumner’s focus was in investigating how to refute racism and bias in the theories used to conclude the inferiority of African Americans. Sumner’s work opened approached outside of the traditional Eurocentric methods of psychology.
John Dewey and the Reflex arc
The reflex arc is the idea that a stimulus produces a sensation which triggers a response. There is a purpose in the sequence of events which provides a survival advantage. Child sees flame, grasp it, pain, removes hand.
James Rowland Angell and Functionalism
- Functional psychology is interested in mental operations rather than conscious elements.
- Mental processes mediate between the needs of the organism and the environment. The mental functions of the organism help the organism survive.
- The mind and body cannot be separated; they act as a unit in an organism’s struggle for survival
George Romanes
He believed that animals can make choices, that they also have a form of consciousness. Animal thought process is similar to those of humans.
Edward Lee Thorndike
The Puzzle Box
Law of Effect
Thorndike placed a cat into a “puzzle box” that it would have to figure out a series of events in order for it to escape. After repeat exposure to the box, the cat eventually learned that it needed to pull on the bar in order to escape.
Simply put, this means that once the stimulus and response are associated, the response is likely to occur without the stimulus being present. It holds that responses that produce a satisfying or pleasant state of affairs in a particular situation are more likely to occur again in a similar situation. Conversely, responses that produce a discomforting, annoying or unpleasant effect are less likely to occur again in the situation.
Ubermensch = superman
Nietzsche argued that humans cannot have a substantial self that operates independently of their environment. Impulses, emotions, and memories shape perceptions, which in turn are shaped by socio-historical conditions. Most people are condemned to mediocrity and conformity with a corrupt society. The übermensch is the man or woman who has reached his or her full potential.
Behaviorism
the study of observable behavior rather than internal mental processes such as thoughts, feelings, or motivations. It posits that all behaviors are acquired through conditioning and that the environment plays a key role in shaping behavior.
Ivan Sechenov
He insisted that external stimulation causes all behavior. Sechenov believed that all human behavior could be explained through the excitation and inhibition of reflexes. His work inspired others to look for reflexive mechanisms in the brain.
Ivan Pavlov
Classical conditioning.
Vladimir Bechterev and Reflexology
Reflexology: Bechterev was a proponent of objective psychology as he believed that all behavior can be explained by objectively studying reflexes. Behavior should be studied through observable traits. This approach contrasted with the more subjective consciousness studies of psychology which allowed for the use of tools such as introspection to study inner thoughts about personal experiences.
John Watson
Watson described psychology as a ‘purely objective branch of natural science.’ Its intent was to predict and control behavior.
John Watson and infants
infants the basic emotional reactions belonging to the original and fundamental nature of humans. He labeled these reactions fear, rage, and love. He found that fear could be instilled by dropping the infant, making loud noises, and startling the sleeping infant. Rage was engendered by thwarting the infant, while love was the response of stroking or manipulating an erogenous zone. Conditioned responses (habits) were connected to these basic emotions and could be controlled. These three emotional reactions would be part of the infamous little Albert’ experiments.
