History of Psychology Flashcards
What is ‘Psychology’?
Scientific study of mind and behaviour
What is ‘Mind’?
Private inner experience of perceptions, thoughts, memories, and feelings
What is ‘Behaviour’?
Observable actions of human beings and nonhuman animals
Who was René Descartes?
- Argued for dualism of mind and body
- Dualism: The mind and body are fundamentally different things
Who was Thomas Hobbes?
- Argued that the mind is what the brain does
- Philosophical Materialism: All mental phenomena are reducible to physical phenomena
Who was John Locke?
- Argued that there is a real-world
- Philosophical Realism: Perceptions of the physical world are produced entirely by information from the sensory organs.
Who was Immanuel Kant?
- Suggested that Locke’s theory was too simplistic
- Philosophical Idealism: Perceptions of physical world are brain’s interpretation for sensory organ information
What is ‘Philosophical Empiricism’?
The view that all knowledge is acquired through
experience
What is ‘Philosophical Nativism’?
The view that some knowledge is innate
rather than acquired
Who was Hermann von Helmholtz?
Studied human reaction time; estimated
the length of nerve impulse
What is ‘Stimulus’?
Sensory input from the environment
What is ‘Reaction Time’?
Amount of time taken to respond to a specific stimulus
Who was Wilhelm Wundt?
- Opened the first psychological laboratory
What is ‘Consciousness?
Person’s subjective experience of the world
and the mind
What is ‘Structuralism’?
Analysis of the basic elements that
constitute the mind
Who was Edward Titchener?
- Pioneered introspection
- The analysis of subjective experience by trained
observers
What is the problem with Introspection?
- Each person’s inner experience was an
inherently private event - No way to tell if a person’s description of her experience was accurate, or if their experience
was the same/different from someone
else’s
Who was Timothy Wilson?
- Believed psychology is a science
- Posits that much of psychology is based on carefully controlled experimentation using randomization procedures
Who was Charles Darwin?
Natural selection: Theory that features of an
organism that help it survive and reproduce
are more likely than other features to be
passed on to subsequent generations
Who was Charles Darwin?
Natural selection: Theory that features of an
organism that help it survive and reproduce
are more likely than other features to be
passed on to subsequent generations
Who were Jean-Martin Charcot and Pierre Janet?
Studied hysteric patients through hypnosis
What is ‘Hysteria’?
- Temporary loss of cognitive or motor functions
- Usually as a result of emotionally upsetting experiences
Who was Sigmund Freud?
- Psychoanalysis
- Believed hysteria caused by painful unconscious
experiences
Who was John Watson?
- Developed behaviourism
- Approach to psychology that restricts scientific
inquiry to observable behaviour - Goal was to predict and control behaviour
through the study of observable behaviour
Who was Ivan Pavlov?
- Studied the physiology of digestion
- Founded classical conditioning (stimulus–response)
What is ‘Response’?
Action or physiological change elicited by a stimulus
Who was B.F. Skinner?
- Developed the Skinner Box/Conditioning Chamber to explain learning and founded operant conditioning
- Principle of Reinforcement
- Free will was an illusion
What is ‘Reinforcement’?
Consequences of behaviour that determine
whether it will be more likely that the behaviour
will occur again
What is the ‘Principle of Reinforcement’?
Any behaviour that is rewarded will be repeated and any behaviour that isn’t won’t
Who was Max Wertheimer?
Founded induced motion phenomena
What are illusions?
Errors of perception, memory, or judgment in
which subjective experience differs from objective reality
What is ‘Gestalt Psychology’?
We often perceive the whole rather than the sum of the parts
Who was Jean Piaget?
Studied perceptual and cognitive errors in children
Who was Kurt Lewin?
- Social psychology
- Behaviour is not a function of the environment, but of the person’s subjective construal of the environment
- Responses do not depend on stimuli, as the behaviourists claimed; rather, they depend on how people think about those stimuli.
Who was Solomon Asch?
- Early studies of the ‘primacy effect’
- Influenced by Gestalt psychology
- Early information about a person changes the interpretation of later information, which is why first
impressions matter so much
Who was Noam Chomsky?
Pointed out that even young children
generate sentences they have never heard
before, and therefore could not possibly be
learning language by reinforcement
What is Cognitive Psychology?
- Study of mental processes
- Including perception, thought, memory, and reasoning
What is Evolutionary Psychology?
Explains mind and behaviour in terms of the
adaptive value of abilities that are preserved over
time by natural selection
What is Cognitive neuroscience?
- Study of the relationship between the brain and the
mind - Especially in humans
What is Behavioural neuroscience?
- Study of the relationship between the brain and
behaviour - Especially in nonhuman animals
Who was Paul Broca?
- Damage to a specific part of the brain impaired a specific mental function
- Demonstrating the brain and mind are closely linked
Who was Karl Lashley?
Concluded from surgically altered rat brains that learning is not “localized” or tied to a specific brain area in the same way that language seemed to be
What is cultural psychology?
Study of how cultures reflect and shape the psychological processes of their members
What is absolutism?
Culture makes little difference for
most psychological phenomena
What is relativism?
Psychological phenomena likely
to vary considerably across cultures
What do technologies such as fMRI allow cognitive
neuroscientists to determine?
Which areas of the brain are most and least active when people perform various mental tasks, such as reading, writing, thinking, or remembering
