Unit 4 Flashcards
Describe the four stages of early American psychology. Specify the eight characteristics of functionalistic psychology
Stage 1: moral and mental philosophy (1640-1776)
- initially psychology and religion were taught together
- Locke had a great influence and caused a period of enlightenment
Stage 2: intellectual philosophy
- influenced by Scottish common sense philosophy
- changed so that stimuli and the senses could be trusted
-psychology started to leave philosophy
Stage 3: the US renaissance
- empirical science
- first American psychology journal
Stage 4: US functionalism
- functionalism took root, which emphasized evolution, science, and the individual
- research tools involved anything that was informative
Eight characteristics of functionalist psychology:
- Opposed searching for the elements of consciousness
- Understand the function of the mind rather than description of it’s contents
- Practical science, not pure
- Urged for broader topics in psychology, such as animals and abnormal humans
- Want to understand an organisms motivation
- Accepted both mental processes and behaviour as legitimate subjects
- Ideographic rather than nomothetic (what made them different?)
- All directly or indirectly influenced by William James
Briefly describe the life and work of William James (1842–1910). Describe (a) his crisis, (b) his book, (c) his view of Wundt’s approach to psychology, and his (d) concept of stream of consciousness, (e) treatment of habits and instincts, (e) concepts concerning the self, (f) theory of emotions, (g) position with respect to free will and voluntary behaviour, and (h) pragmatic philosophy. Summarize his contributions to psychology.
Wanted to be an artist but his father threatened suicide if he chose that career.
A) He became depressed after realizing that if materialism was true then it applied to him as well and so he has no control in anything that happens to him. The theory of evolution did not help his depression. After reading an essay by Renouvier he became highly productive. He also came up with his concept of pragmatism— that if an idea works then it is valid.
B) James wrote a textbook that would revolutionize psychology, but he didn’t really care for the book. It contained themes of practicality and individualism, but entertained a very wide range of topics.
C) Everything in his book can be seen as a critical evaluation of Wundt’s psychology. He did not like Wundt’s experimentalism, but if he had looked at his voluntarism then he would have seen great similarity between Wundt and himself.
D) He thought that the stream of consciousness was more important than elements of thought because they are more personal and better reflect the individual. James also believed that consciousness is continuous and can not be divided into smaller parts for analysis. Another aspect was that consciousness is constantly changing. Lastly, consciousness is selective and not all events are selected for further consideration.
E) He believed that much of behaviour is governed by instinct, and that habits are learned patters of behaviour that develop within a lifetime.
F) empirical self— the “me” of personality, everything that is their own (can be broken down into the material self, social self, and spiritual self)
Self as knower— like the spirit that watches over the empirical self
G) believed that emotions came after the action, such as seeing a bear so we run away, and because we ran away we get scared— the James-Lange theory of emotion
H) James did not solve the question of free will but he came to a conclusion that he was comfortable with. Science required determinism (and so psychology did as well) but in some cases free will might work. His idea-motor theory of behaviour says that the idea of an action causes that action, which is voluntary behaviour.
I) He believed that every behaviour must be judged by it’s consequences, and behaviours that create a better life are worth continuing. For example, believing in free will lead to a more satisfying life.
William James helped to incorporate evolutionary theory into psychology and took psychology away from the pure ways of the past. He also lead to more research techniques by saying that anything that lead to useful information is a valid technique, which included introspection. Lastly, he expanded the subjects that could be studied within psychology to include abnormal humans, animals, etc.
Briefly describe the life and work of Hugo Münsterberg (1863–1916). Describe his work in the applied fields of clinical psychology, forensic psychology, and industrial psychology. Briefly describe the life and work of Mary Whiton Calkins (1863–1930), including the sex discrimination she faced, her invention of the paired-associate learning technique, and her work in self-psychology
Munsterberg’s parents died before he turned 20 and he was a child prodigy in a lot of areas of art and literature.
A) Munsterberg treated mental ill people for free because he was using them for scientific reasons. His treatment was mostly just getting them to believe they will improve, but not for psychosis which he believed was a deterioration of the nervous system. Also used reciprocal antagonism which involved strengthening the thoughts opposite of the problem. He was also the first to apply psychological principles to legal matters, thus creating forensic psychology. Munsterberg was also the beginnings of industrial psychology because he wrote of methods for personnel selection, work efficiency, etc.
B) Calkins was a student of Munsterberg. She faced much discrimination because schools didn’t want to let her in and when she was admitted all of her male classmates dropped the courses she was in, so she had an entire seminar with just the professor, William James. James even considered her the most spectacular student Harvard had ever had after she completed an unofficial doctoral exam, but Harvard still refused to give her an official PhD. Her invention of the paired-associate technique has long been used to study the influence of frequency, recency, and vividness on memory. She would pair a number and colour in a set of associations and then eventually just show the colour and ask the participant to name the number, which found that frequency had a greater influence than recency or vividness did. Calkins turned to self-psychology after finding that experimental psychology was just too impersonal, and she promoted self-psychology until her death.
Briefly describe the life and work of Granville Stanley Hall (1844–1924), including his (a) work at Clark University (b) interest in developmental psychology, (c) opposition to coeducation, and (d) interest in psychology and religion.
A) Hall became the first president of Clark University which allowed him to help shape American psychology. He used this position to invite many prominent psychologists to meet and form the APA, where he was the first president. Hall also founded several American psychological journals.
B) Hall was a huge fan of the theory of evolution that he used it to explain how humans change throughout their lifetime. This idea is called recapitulation theory of development (started by Haeckel).
C) He was for keeping schools segregated by sex because it enhanced sexual sublimation and facilitated social progress. He thought that adolescent women should be training for motherhood to further the human race and adolescent men need to satisfy primitive impulses so they should be separated.
D) Hall did not support any religious dogma and instead thought that, in adolescence, it is important to convert from a self-love to a love of others. In modern times we would not consider becoming less selfish as a religious or spiritual concept, but Hall did.
Briefly describe the life and work of Francis Cecil Sumner (1895–1954) and his student, Kenneth Clark (b. 1914). Summarize Hall’s legacy at Clark University
Sumner was a Black man and Hall’s last graduate student, born only 30 years after the abolishment of slavery. He was rejected by many programs before he wrote to Hall. During his doctoral program he was drafted and saw combat, but after being discharged he returned to his program. He was the first Black man to obtain a PhD in psychology, and at only 24 years old.
Clark was one of Sumner’s students at Howard University. Both he and his wife obtained PhDs from Columbia University. They did great work on the developmental effects of prejudice, discrimination, and segregation on children. This research was cited in the Brown v. Board of Education case that desegregated schools.
Hall’s legacy lead Clark university to being a strong competitor of Harvard. He also had Freud speak at Clark, which helped to get Freud’s theory more widely known.
Briefly describe the life and work of John Dewey (1859–1952), including his position with respect to the role of reflexes, his concept of progressive education, and his pragmatist philosophy. Briefly describe the life and work of James Rowland Angell (1869–1949) and of Harvey Carr (1873–1954).
Dewey was the founder of functionalism. He was adamant that separating a reflex into smaller pieced, such as sensory processes, brain processes, etc. defeated the point. It is a stream of behaviour directed towards a goal and should not be divided into elements. Seeing reflexes in the broken down way takes away what we learn from the reflex itself, such as touching a hot pan that makes you pull you hand away teaches you about the pan.
Dewey believed that education should be student-oriented rather than simply getting them to memorize a set of facts, education should instead be for developing the given knowledge and further human knowledge. Dewey was not actually seen as a good teacher.
Pragmatism is the idea that things should have a practical and useful value.
Angell was one of Dewey’s students and when Angell eventually became president of the APA he made a very famous address. In this he spoke of functionalism, the goals of mental processes, and how the mind and body can not be separated. This speech established functionalism as a growing school, and by association promoted evolutionary theory.
Carr described his concept of the adaptive act, which was broken down into a motive (stimulus) for behaviour, the environment/setting, and a response that satisfies the motive. Adaptive act was used as a way of explaining the functionalist’s view of learning. He later studied other topics, such as the nervous system and space.
Describe the work of James McKeen Cattell (1860–1944) in applied psychology. Describe the life and work of Robert Sessions Woodworth (1869–1962) and dynamic psychology. How was functionalism at Columbia different from functionalism at Chicago?
Cattell believed that there should be great experimentation in psychology because science is an ever developing field of study. He was also a pragmatist, though, so methods and ideas should be evaluated on their level of usefulness. He thought that everything in everyday life involved applying psychological principles, such as education and the legal system.
Woodworth was interested in what people do and why they do it. This interest in motivation he called dynamic psychology. He gave more importance to the organism and how it interacts with the environment than other psychologists who were more interested in the stimulus-response relationship.
Functionalism was different at the two schools because Chicago favoured simply the reactions and relationships between stimuli and responses and Columbia favoured the organism more, and was more interested in motivation.
Describe the life and work of Edward Lee Thorndike (1874–1949). Describe (a) the state of animal research prior to Thorndike (including Morgan’s canon and Washburn’s work), (b) Thorndike’s puzzle box, (c) Thorndike’s connectionism, (d) the laws of exercise and effect (including the way they were later renounced and modified, respectively), and (e) his theory of transfer of training.
A) Much of the animal research prior to Thorndike involved giving human like attributes and motivations to the animals and then basing the findings off of these feelings. Morgan’s canon was created to stop this by stating that we should not try an attribute an action to a high mental process if a lower one works equally as well. Washburn worked to summarize the large quantity of experiments that were related to inferring consciousness in animals.
B) Thorndike’s puzzle box included putting a cat into a puzzle box and seeing how a cat goes through trial-and-error to figure out how to get out of the box. This was only possible by doing a certain thing, such as flipping a switch, and then the cat would be praised upon it getting out.
C) His Connectionism refers to how a strong neural connection between a stimulus and a response makes it more likely that that response will reoccur for the stimulus again later.
D) The law of exercise refers to a two part law, the first being the law of use which means that the more often a neural connection is practiced, the stronger it becomes. The second part of that law is the law of disuse, which means that the longer an association is not used, the weaker it becomes. His second law, the law of effect, says that if the consequence of an association leads to a pleasant outcome then the association is strengthened. Thorndike later abandoned his law of exercise and part of his law of effect because there was no evidence to support them.
E) He proposed that training can be transferred to different situations if the situations are similar enough— he called this identical elements theory of transfer
Describe the life and work of James Mark Baldwin (1861–1934). What happened to functionalism as a movement within psychology?
He was the APA’s president at one point and also confounded the Psychological review. Created the first psychology lab in Canada. Baldwin eventually went to Johns Hopkins to revitalize it’s psych lab but was then fired after being caught in a house of prostitution during a raid. He then went on to popularize psychology in Europe and Mexico.
Functionalism did not die out like structuralism, but instead it was absorbed into mainstream modern psychology.
Briefly describe the life and work of Ivan M. Sechenov (1829–1905), including his views regarding the concept of inhibition and the relationship between physiology and psychology.
Inhibition is arguably the most important contribution that Sechenov made as it was what caused him to conclude that psychology can be study in terms of physiology. He said that inhibition is what allows us to occasionally delay impulses that are involuntary, such as how we can sometimes suppress a sneeze. He used frogs to determine that when certain areas of the brain are inhibited then reflexes are inhibited, such as the frog’s reflex to take their leg out of acid.
Sechenov disproved of the previous use of introspection and instead thought that objective methods of physiology would be more worthwhile in psychology.
Briefly describe the life and work of Ivan Petrovitch Pavlov (1849–1936). Describe (a) Pavlov’s work in studying the digestive process, (b) his discovery of the conditioned reflex, (c) his personality, (d) the process of formation of a conditioned reflex (using the technical terms), (e) the processes of excitation and inhibition, (f) the processes of extinction, spontaneous recovery, and disinhibition, (g) experimental neurosis, (h) the first- and second-signal systems, and (i) his view of psychology.
A) Pavlov was interested in the digestive system but found the current methods of using dead or traumatized animals to not be effective. He found a man who had an open (but healed) gunshot wound that allowed Pavlov to watch what was happening in his digestive tract. This gave him the idea of having a channel lead from a dog’s digestive organs to outside the body which allowed for the dog to recover and still let them see inside to look at digestion. This research won him the Nobel Prize in physiology
B) He discovered the conditioned reflex during his digestion research with the dogs, as he found that any objects or events that were related to the meat powder instigated the gastric juices to start flowing.
C) Pavlov was seen as tough but fair by his students and he encouraged Jewish people and women to study in his lab, but he had absolutely no tolerance for mentalism. Outside of the lab he was impractical and kind of an air-head.
D) a conditioned reflex is formed when an unconditioned stimulus and neutral stimulus are associated while responding to an unconditioned response. The neutral stimulus is now a conditioned stimulus, and it triggering this response now is referred to as a conditioned response, as it is learned to be associated with the originally neutral stimulus.
E) Pavlov believed that all neural activity can be characterized as either excitation or inhibition. Certain stimuli excite a response, and we are able to inhibit some automatic responses, although he believed that all behaviour is reflexive.
F) When a conditioned stimulus is continually presented without the unconditioned stimulus then the conditioned response will eventually stop, this is extinction. Spontaneous recovery happens when, after a while, the conditioned stimulus is presented again and the conditioned response is elicited. Disinhibition is the explanation of extinction by saying that it is an inhibitory process because presenting the conditioned stimulus without the unconditioned stimulus causes the animal to inhibit the conditioned response.
G) Experimental neurosis is the deterioration of behaviour brought about in the laboratory during experimentation.
H) Pavlov referred to stimuli that signal biologically significant events the first-signal system, and the second-signal system refers to words that come to symbolize reality.
I) Pavlov did not like most psychologists, other than Thorndike. He was more into the physiological aspects of his work than the psychological.
Briefly describe the life and work of Vladimir M. Bechterev (1857–1927), including his concept of reflexology and his conflict with Pavlov. Describe the work of other Russian contributors during this time, including Alexander Luria (1902–1977) and Lev Vygotsky.
Bechterev— he created the first Russian experimental psychology lab in the tradition of Wundt. There are rumours that Stalin had him killed. Bechterev used the term reflexology to mean an objective study of human behaviour that seeks to understand the relationship between environmental influences and overt behaviour. He studied how behaviour (such as gestures) interacted with environmental or physical conditions. Bechterev and Pavlov were rivals and were very negative about each other’s work.
Luria— was internationally known for his work in neuropsychology, specifically for his work on brain damage (including of those who survive WW2)
Vygotsky— he had a short but brilliant career that studied topics like child and educational psychology and cultural differences
Describe the life and work of John B. Watson (1878–1958). Describe his (a) undergraduate experiences, (b) graduate school years at the University of Chicago, (c) professorship at Johns Hopkins University, (d) scandalous divorce, (e) work in advertising, (f) objective psychology, (g) view of the goals of psychology, (h) four types of behaviour and four methods for studying behaviour, (i) views concerning language and thinking, and (j) conception of the role of instincts and learning in behaviour.
A) he lived at home while doing undergrad and worked at a chem lab to pay tuition. Watson ended up graduating late because he accidentally handed his exam in backwards, which his teacher failed him for, but in that extra year he also earned a master’s degree. He ended up applying for further schooling after his mom died, and he worked as a waiter to pay for it. Watson’s whole undergrad experience is very similar to that of modern students.
B) At Chicago he studied under other famous psychologists like Hume and Dewey. Watson began doing research on developmental and learning processes in the white rat. He struggled with depression at this time. Watson also married one of his students.
C) Watson was nationally known for his work in animal psychology and he moved to work at Johns Hopkins because the pay was super good. It was at this time that Watson began to ponder a purely behaviouristic position regarding psychology. He is considered the father of behaviourism.
D) It was found that Watson was having an affair with his research assistant and his wife divorced him. Watson was then asked to resign from his position at the university.
E) Watson applied his knowledge of behavioural conditioning to advertising and made a ton of money, to the point that he would be making roughly a million dollars a year in today’s money. He always regretted not being able to continue his work in psychology.
F) Watson, like the Russian psychologists, arrived at an objective psychology free of introspection and mentalism, but he did not care about physiology the way they did.
G) Watson thought that the goal of psychology was the prediction and control of behaviour
H) The 4 types of behaviour are: explicit learned behaviour, implicit learned behaviour, explicit unlearned behaviour, and implicit unlearned behaviour. For studying behaviour there are 4 methods: observation, conditioned-reflex method, testing, and verbal reports.
I) He believed that language and thinking were simply behaviour and nothing more; language being an overt behaviour through speaking and thinking being covert
J) Watson completely rejected the idea of instinct in humans and said that all that we say are instincts are instead just simple reflexes, like sneezing
Describe the work of John B. Watson with respect to his (a) experiments (with Mary Cover Jones) with little Albert and Peter, (b) views on child rearing, (c) views on sex education, (d) view of the learning process, and (e) position regarding the mind-body problem. Summarize Watson’s influence on the development of psychology.
A) he believed that emotions of fear, rage, and love are reflexes because babies are automatically afraid of things like loud noises. Watson thought that you could displace feelings of fear from an inherited fear to a neutral thing. They did this experiment (which would be quite unethical now) by having a baby (they called little Albert for a anonymity) and showing him a rat, which he was not afraid of. Then while showing the rat they went up behind him and made a loud noise which scared little Albert. Every time Albert reached for the rat the noise was made, which scared him. He then started associating the rat with being scared, and became scared of the rat itself. They found that this fear eventually generalized to rabbits, dogs, basically all small furry objects. Before they could get rid of the baby’s fear of animals he was removed from the hospital he lived in, and so there might have been a grown man terrified of small animals without any idea of why he was scared of them. The experiment with Peter was done with Jones with the goal of getting rid of a fear in a child. They tried to use the technique of modeling behaviour to show that Peter didn’t need to be afraid, but he and his nurse were attacked by a dog and all progress they made was gone. They then tried counterconditioning by having Peter eat lunch in the same room as a rabbit but have the rabbit far away. Each day the rabbit was placed a little closer until eventually Peter ate while playing with the rabbit. The results generalized and all of this other fears were reduced or eliminated.
B) Watson was very interested in children and wrote a book about child psychology in which he stated that he thought children should be treated like small adults. It is said, though, that Watson was too clinical with his treatment of children and did not know how to express emotion or provide emotional support to his children after their mother died.
C) thought that children should be given objective information about sex and thought that Freud was good to break down the taboo nature of sex
D) Watson thought that in a learning situation the correct response will often dictate the end of the trial, and so this response is what will likely occur again, which is the law of recency
E) Watson had a physical monist view because he did not believe that consciousness could be proven, and therefore could not be used in science
He changed the goal of psychology to that of prediction and control of behaviour, and he made overt behaviour the almost-exclusive subject matter of psychology.
Briefly describe the life and work of William McDougall (1871–1938). Describe his (a) definition of psychology, (b) concept of purposive behaviour, (c) views regarding instincts, and (d) debate with Watson over behaviourism.
A) McDougall’s definition of psychology is the science of behaviour, and he was the first to reference to psychology as such.
B) Purposive behaviour is behaviour that is spontaneous, is not stimulated by the environment, varies, terminates when the goal is achieved, and becomes more effective with practice. He referred to his position as horrid psychology which means “urge” psychology.
C) McDougall believed that all purposive behaviour was inherently instinctual because it was not caused by a stimulus. He thought that instincts were inherited psycho-physical dispositions that determine the organisms actions, and that we are born with a number of instincts that motivate us to act in a certain way.
D) McDougall and Watson were entirely opposite in their opinion of instincts, because McDougall believed that much of our behaviour is instinctual and Watson believed that humans do not have instincts (and that we should get rid of the word in psychology). They also disagreed on learning processes. They actually had a formal debate on what behaviourism truly is which was published, in part, to allow those that did not attend to understand both sides. McDougall ended up narrowly winning the debate.
