Unit 3 - Chapter 9 - Early Approaches to Psychology Flashcards
School
a group of individuals who share common assumptions
Describe Wilhelm Wundt’s (1832–1920) early experiment with his thought meter.
involved a pendulum clock that would swing and hit a bell at the same time that the pendulum would reach the very end of its swing.
found that participants were unable to determine exactly where the pendulum was at the exact time of the bell being struck.
stressed the concept of selective attention in psychology.
Briefly describe Wilhelm Wundt’s work, including the nature of voluntarism.
through the process of apperception, individuals could direct their attention toward whatever they wished.
Will
reflects attention and volition
Summarize Wilhelm Wundt’s contributions with respect to the goals of psychology
Two major goals;
1) understand simple conscious phenomena using experiments
2) understand complex phenomena using observation/historical analysis
Summarize Wilhelm Wundt’s contributions with respect to the nature of mediate and immediate experience
psychology is based on immediate experience: direct subjective experience as it occurs.
Summarize Wilhelm Wundt’s contributions with respect to the role of introspection
used experimental introspection
Summarize Wilhelm Wundt’s contributions with respect to the two elements of mental experience
two basic types of mental experience; 1) sensations and 2) feelings.
According to Wundt, sensation;
occurs whenever a sense organ is stimulated and the resulting impulse reaches the brain.
- described in terms of modality (ex; taste) & intensity
According to Wundt, feeling;
are the basic elements of emotion that accompany each sensation.
Tridimensional theory of feeling:
any feelings can be described in terms of the degree to which they possess three attributes;
1) pleasantness-unpleasantess
2) excitement-calm
3) train-relaxation.
Summarize Wilhelm Wundt’s contributions with respect to perception
passive process governed by;
the physical stimulation present,
the anatomical makeup of the individual,
the individual’s past experiences.
- is passive and automatic
Summarize Wilhelm Wundt’s contributions with respect to apperception
the part of the perceptual field the individual attends to is apperceived
- is active and voluntary
Summarize Wilhelm Wundt’s contributions with respect to creative synthesis
arrangement and rearrangement of mental elements according to the individuals will that can result from apperception.
- differentiates psych from other sciences.
Summarize Wilhelm Wundt’s contributions with respect to mental chronometry and use of Franciscus Donders Methods;
found that Donder’s reaction times was too complicated.
provided a mental chronometry –> the measurement of the time required to perform various mental acts.
Franciscus Donders
conducted a series of experiments involving reacting time.
- discrimination time = simple reaction time - reaction time that involved discrimination.
- choice reaction time = (simple + discrimination reaction times) - choice reaction time.
Summarize Wilhelm Wundt’s contributions with respect to psychological versus physical causation
physical events could be predicted on the basis of antecedent conditions and psychological events could not.
- three principles explain why cannot predict psychological events
Factors that makes the prediction of psychological events impossible according to Wundt;
1) principle of the heterogony of ends
2) principle of contrasts
3) principle toward the development of opposites
Summarize Wilhelm Wundt’s contributions with respect to Völkerpsychologie.
laws of mental activity can be deduced only after the fact through historical analysis/natural observation.
discussed stages of verbal communication
What are Wundt’s three stages of communication
1) speaker must apperceive their own general impression.
2) speaker chooses words and sentence structures to express the general impression.
3) listener must apperceive the speaker’s general impression.
Describe the general problem of the misunderstanding of Wundt’s work.
popular view is that he focused on search for cognitive and emotional elements of a static mind.
in reality, he viewed the mind as active and dynamic.
Describe the following aspects of Edward Bradford Titchener’s work: his behaviour toward women colleagues and students
excluded women from his organization
viewed as a chauvinist
Margaret W. was his first doctoral candidate
Taught Celestia P who established a psych lab
hired women when they were the best candidate for the job
Describe the following aspects of Edward Bradford Titchener’s work: his view of Structuralism’s goals and methods
involves introspection, nonmetaphysical
describe conscious experience
accepted positivism
determine basic elements –> laws leading to complex experience –> neurophysiological events + mental phenomena
Structuralism
school of psychology whose goal was to describe the structure of the adult, normally functioning, human mind.
Describe the following aspects of Edward Bradford Titchener’s work: his use of introspection
- untrained observers describing their phenomenological experience.
- report sensations.
- describe elements, focused on attributes.
- avoid stimulus error
Stimulus error
letting perception influence an introspective report.
Describe the following aspects of Edward Bradford Titchener’s work: mental elements
elemental processes of consciousness consists of;
sensations (elements of perceptions)
images (elements of ideas)
affections (elements of emotions).
Elements - Tichener
can only be known by listing attributes, ex: quality, intensity, duration.
Extensity
impression that a sensation or image is more or less spread out in space.
What did Tichener say about feelings?
occur along only one dimension (pleasantness-unpleasantness).
Attributes of sensation and images are:
quality, intensity, duration, clearness and extensity.
Attributes of affections are:
quality, intensity, and duration
Describe the following aspects of Edward Bradford Titchener’s work: the law of combination
Used law of contiguity to determine how elements of thought combine to form more complex mental processes.
Describe the following aspects of Edward Bradford Titchener’s work: the context theory of meaning
a sensation is given meaning by the images it elicits, determined by the law of contiguity.
- vivid sensations form a core.
- elicited images form a context that gives the core meaning.
Describe the following aspects of Edward Bradford Titchener’s work: neurological correlates of mental events
nervous system doesnt cause mental events, but can be used to explain some of their characteristics.
neurophysiological processes are the why of mental life.
Describe the following aspects of Edward Bradford Titchener’s work: Decline of Structuralism
caused by;
- unreliability of introspection
- excludes important developments outside the school
- not interested in abnormal behaviour
- ignored personality, learning, individual differences
- refusal to seek practical applications
What did the decline of structuralism lead to?
functionalism, concerned with ‘what for’ rather than ‘what is’.
Briefly describe the life and work of Franz Clemens Brentano, including his work in act psychology.
focused on mental operations or functions.
- involves intentionality & phenomenological methods
Intentionality
the fact that every mental act incorporates something outside itself.
act and objects are inseperable.
Phenomenological methods
study of intact, meaningful experiences.
active mind
Briefly describe the life and work of Carl Stumpf (1848–1936) and his influence on Gestalt psychology.
stance that the proper object of study for psychology was mental phenomena, not conscious elements led to methods that become cornerstone of Gestalt psychology.
Who is Clever Hans and how is he related to Stumpf?
- horse that seemed to solve math problems.
- uncovered that he was being given clues unintentioanlly.
- clever hans phenomenon and experimenter bias.
Clever Hans phenomenon
creation of apparently high-level intelligent feats by nonhuman animals by furnishing them with subtle cues that guide their behavior.
Experimenter bias
experimenter may provide subtle cues that unwittingly convey the expectations of the experimental outcome to the experimental participants, influencing the outcome of the experiment.
Briefly describe the life and work of Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), including his views on the appropriate methodology for psychology
two types of methods:
1) focused on intentionality.
2) focused on whatever processes a person experiences subjectively. (referred to as pure phenomenology).
Briefly describe the life and work of Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), including his goal.
Husserls goal was to use pure phenomenology to create a taxonomy of the mind.
Brentano, Stumpf, and Husserl all insisted that the proper subject matter for psychology was
intact, meaningful, psychological experiences.
Briefly describe the life and work of Oswald Külpe (1862–1915), including his concepts of imageless thought
believed that some thoughts were imageless.
ex; searching, doubting, confidence, and hesitation.
- used systematic experimental introspection
Systematic experimental introspection
involved aubjects;
- solving a problem
- reporting on the mental operations they engaged in
- describing types of thinking involved before, during and after.
Briefly describe the life and work of Oswald Külpe (1862–1915), including his concepts of mental sets.
mental set is a problem-solving strategy that can be induced by instructions or by experience and that is used without a person’s awareness.
- came out of Wurzburg school
Describe the other findings of the Würzburg school.
- showed that problem solving has motivational properties.
- demonstrated that higher mental processes could be studied experimentally.
- claimed that associationism was inadequate for explaining operations of the mind.
- challenged narrow use of introspective method.
- made the important distinction between thoughts and thinking.
Briefly describe the life and work of Hermann Ebbinghaus especially his methods of studying memory
- first to study memory as it occured.
- series of syllables, looked at each for a fraction of a second, pause 15 seconds and repeat till mastery.
- after mastery, recorded number of exposures to relearn then subtract from original number, difference called savings.
Briefly describe the life and work of Hermann Ebbinghaus and the basic findings of this work.
- forgetting was most rapid in first few hours
- overlearning increased retention
- ten times more exposure if meaningless
any number of spread out repetitions better than cramming
Summarize the work of Muller
‘third pillar’ of experimental psychology.
followed in the tradition of rationalism.
taught one of the first African American researchers (Jones)
supported Herings views regarding color vision.
Summarize Muller’s findings on memory.
- subjects spontaneously organize materials to be remembered into meaningful patterns.
- first to document retroactive inhibition (new learning can cause forgetting of previously learned items)
Briefly describe the life and work of Hans Vaihinger (1852–1933) and his “as if” philosophy.
societal living requires that we give meaning to our sensations, and we do by inventing terms, concepts, and theories, and the acting “as if” they were true.
