Psych 210 Midterm 2

Broca's area

• Broca's area: Broca found that a portion of the left cortical hemisphere is implicated in speech articulation or production.

Phrenology

Analysis of the skull to determine the magnitude of one's faculties. ▪ Issue with it: those who followed it accepted shoddy evidence, and even manipulated evidence to fit their theory. ▪ Became famous due to Gall's considerable reputation, provided hope for an objective, materialistic analysis of the human mind, and appeared to offer practical information (for social engineers like asylum supervisors, educators, etc). ▪ Influenced psychology by arguing effectively the closeness of the brain and mind, stimulated intense research on the localization of brain functions, and showed the importance of furnishing practical information.

Herbert Spencer (1820-1903)

Applied notion of evolution to everything. Introduced term intelligence as ability to make more associations (intelligence is inherited). Spencer-Bain principle: That the frequency or probability that some behavior increases if it is followed by a pleasurable experience or decreases if followed by painful event. Survival of the fittest was introduced by Spencer • Social Darwinism: To Spencer, evolution meant progress, with the purpose of perfection. Best governmental policy is laissez-faire to provide for free competition among its citizens, because helping the poor and weak would only interfere with evolutionary principles and inhibit course of perfection. It is obvious how this applies to US society and economy.

Nomothetic

Approach that looks for generalized and common elements of the mind (Wundt, Titchener)

Edward Bradford Titchener (1867-1927)

Big believer that behavioral psychology was the only true psychology, and its purpose was to find just facts, not values. Very authoritarianist. 7. For Titchener, what were the goals of psychology? What did Titchener believe would be the ultimate "why" of psychology? • Goals: the determination of the what (learned through careful introspection, to catalog the basic mental elements that account for all conscious experience), how (how the elements combine), and why (search for the neurological correlates of mental events) of mental life. ○ Sought out a periodic table for mental elements. ○ To describe the is of mental life, and leave the is for for others to ponder

An Essay on the Principle of Population

Book that influenced Darwin. Argued that human pops grew faster than food, so that wars, diseases, etc, keep pop in check. (Darwin took that all organisms produce more offspring than the environment can support).

Stream of Consciousness

By William James, Believed 1) consciousness is personal, 2) that consciousness is continuous and cannot be divided up for analysis, 3) consciousness is constantly changing, 4) consciousness is selective, 4) consciousness is functional (the most important thing). Thought of consciousness as a stream rather than a chain. So, unlike Wundt, believed that consciousness could not be cut into bits, very different from Wundt's voluntaristic or the structuralistic views on consciousness as a chain or train.

Leta Stetter Hollingworth (1886-1939)

Concerned with developing educational strategies that would ensure developmental well-being of gifted students. • Challenged belief that intelligence was mostly inherited and that women were inferior to men (women did not reach positions of prominence because of intellectual inferiority, but because of social roles assigned to them) • Also found and advocated the idea that many individuals classified as defective were in reality manifesting social and personal adjustment problems. • Advocated better education for gifted students 12. What arguments were offered in opposition to the contention that intelligence tests were measuring one, innate, factor of intelligence (g)? • Performance on intelligence tests could be partially explained by experience and education. The more privileged a person was in life, the higher their scores would be.

Bell-Magendie Law

Created by Charles Bell and Francois Magendie, No longer possible to think of nerves as general conveyors of vibrations or spirits. A "law of forward direction": Sensory nerves carried impulses forward form sense receptors to brain, and motor nerves carried impulses forward from brain to muscles and glands. Demonstrated separate sensory and motor tracts in spinal cord and suggested separate sensory and motor regions in the brain.

Francis Galton (1822-1911)

Darwin's cousin. Lover of measuring things. Believed more sensory acuity meant more intelligence (because humans know world through senses), and that sensory acuity was passed through genes. Found that the children of illustrious individuals were far more likely to be illustrious than the offspring of nonillustrious people. (notice big focus on nature over nurture) • Eugenics: Selective breeding for the improvement of living organisms. Government should pay eminent people to breed and pay for their offspring's' education. • Nature-nurture controversy: Galton revised his position to believe that the potential for high intelligence was inherited but that it must be nurtured by a proper environment. • Galton was first to use questionnaires, first to use word association test (with himself), first to use twin studies, intelligence testing, among the first to study mental imagery, created anthropometry (human measurement) labs where he obtained vast sets of data, and created concepts of correlation, regression toward the mean, and use of mean in psychological studies.

Wernicke's area

Discovered by Carl Wernicke, area near Broca's area responsible for speech comprehension.

Charles Darwin

English naturalist. He studied the plants and animals of South America and the Pacific islands, and in his book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859) set forth his theory of evolution. Struggle for survival because reproductive capacity of all living organisms allows for many more offspring than can survive in a given environment. Those with characteristics most fit for the environment will survive. Natural selection of adaptive characteristics accounts for slow transmutation of a species over the eons. So evolution results from natural selection of those accidental variations among members of a species that prove to have survival value. Fitness: Organism's ability to survive and reproduce. Those organisms with adaptive features are fit. Those without are not. No order or purpose in evolution, it just happens. • Religion: Age of earth debate: Earth created 6000 years ago, or millions of years ago? Sparking creationism vs evolutionary theory. • Showed how humans were different from other animals only by degrees, thus opening door to animal and comparative psychology. • But also entertained ideas that primitive peoples were link between primates and Europeans, that women were inferior to men, etc.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829)

Environmental changes were responsible for structural changes in plants and animals. Theory called: Inheritance of acquired characteristics. Adult members of species who did not adjust adequately to the environment would not produce offspring, so characteristics of a species would change as traits necessary for survival changed.

William Stern (1871-1938)

First introduced concept of mental age, which is determined by performance on Binet-Simon tests. Mental age divided by chronological age yields intelligence quotient (IQ). • Binet opposed it because intelligence is too complex to be represented by a simple term or number. Need more on him

Inclusive Fitness

Fitness is determined by how successful one is at perpetuating one's genes but not necessarily how successful one is at producing offspring. Great emphasis on kin or genetic relationships, because helping kin survive and reproduce becomes an effective way of perpetuating one's genes. Sociobiologists attempt to explain love, altruism, warfare, religion, etc through this. Thus, fitness not just about survival and offspring, but helping your kin survive. Sociobiology now called evolutionary psychology.

Goal of behavhiorism

Goal: to predict and control behavior, not to analyze consciousness. Ascertaining such laws and data that, given the stimulus, psychology can predict which response will be, vice versa.

Ideographic

Individual differences (Cattell)

Alfred Binet (1857-1911)

Interested in individual differences. Proposed to study cognitive abilities directly instead of indirectly via sensory acuity (like Cattell and Galton). Also rejected Cattel and Galton's work for minimizing importance of differences between human and child minds. Work showed no correlation (like Cattell's), so his tests did not measure intelligence either. ○ With Simon, tested children of normal and subnormal intelligence. Binet-Simon scale of intelligence: Valid was of distinguishing between normal and subnormal children. Scale consisted of 30 tests of increasing difficulty. Binet believed that intelligence is not a single ability but several, and that most people function below their potential, so that all could grow intellectually. Potential was innate, but environmental factors could help all reach closer to that potential. Believed mental orthopedics could improve a child's will, attention and discipline--all necessary for effective classroom education. § Redid scale to measure intelligence of only normal children, which allowed one-fift of a year to be added to a child's score for every test passed beyond the child's norm for their age. Intellectual level could be expressed in terms of intellectual age.

Edwin Ray Guthrie: (1886-1959)

Neobehaviorism Behaviorist who disagreed with other behaviorists for unparsimonious ideas and too subjective theories. Believed all learning phenomena could be explained by Aristotle's laws of association ○ Law of contiguity: one law of learning, "a combination of stimuli which has accompanied a movement will on its recurrence tend to be followed by that movement." What you do last in a situation is what you will tend to do if the situation recurs (same as Watson's recency principle). § Rejected idea of law of frequency, that "practice does not make perfect," but that a stimulus patter gains its full associative strength on the occasion of its first pairing with a response. § One-trial learning: a stimulus patter gains its full associative strength on the occasion of its first pairing with a response § `How does practice improve performance? □ Movement: a specified response made to a specific configuration of stimuli (typing A on keyboard) □ Act: response made to varying stimulus configurations (typing A on a keyboard while slouching, sitting up, lying down, etc.) □ Skill: consists of many acts □ SO many S-R associations have to be learned so that performance improves with practice. § Reinforcement: Thorndike thought that a cat became more proficient at escaping from a puzzle box because each time they did so, they experienced a satisfying state of affairs □ Guthrie disagreed, believed reinforcement is from recency principal. For example, cats hit a pole, thus escaping from a maze, because it was the last thing they did in pre-escape conditions. If a cat hit the pole with its head, it would do the same thing next time. § Forgetting: when an old S-R association is replaced by a new one § Habit: act that has become associated with a large number of stimuli. Breaking the habit requires observing the stimuli that elicit the undesirable act and perform another act in the presence of those stimuli □ Punishment effectiveness not determined by pain but by if it elicits behavior incompatible with the undesirable behavior. • Maintaining stimuli: Can be either internal (hunger) or external (loud noise). When an act terminates the maintaining stimuli, that act becomes associated with the maintaining stimuli. ○ Drives: whatever provides maintaining stimuli. ○ Intentions: acts that appear to have as their goal the removal of maintaining stimuli.

John Broadus Watson (1878-1958)

Neobehaviorism Crazy life ○ Recognize for Watson, stimulus and responses were very broad terms. ○ 4 types of behavior (all types including thinking): § Explicit learned behavior (talking, playing baseball) § Implicit learned behavior (increased heart rate at sight of dentist's drill § Explicit unlearned behavior (grasping, blinking, sneezing § Implicit unlearned behavior (glandular secretions, circulatory changes) ○ 4 methods of studying behavior: § Observation (naturalistic or experimentally controlled) § Conditioned-reflex method (proposed by Pavlov and Bechterev) § Testing (meaning taking behavior samples and not measurement of capacity or personality) § Verbal reports ○ Would switch from a epiphenomenal view of mind-body relationship (that consciousness is by-product of bodily events) to a physical monist view (that consciousness does not exist). 3. Make the case that prior to Watson's formulations, behaviorism was very much "in the air" in the United States. • No other in America had rejected introspection, and no other had rejected explanation of behavior based on mentalism (that thoughts cause behavior). • First to make overt behavior the almost-exclusive subject matter of psychology 4. Describe the major experiences that steered Watson toward behaviorism. • Found a fancy for the study on tropism (behavior of simple organisms could be explained as being automatically elicited by stimuli, like plants moving with the sun--no mental effort needed, all biologically determined). Later, found that kinesthetic sensations (sensations from muscles) were much more important than vision, smell, taste, hearing, and whiskers in learning a maze. Showed dedication to behaviorism at a lecture in 1913 to the dismay of most other psychologists. After sex scandal, went on to work in advertising. Very successful from using findings in psychology to change people's behavior. 5. According to Watson, what was the goal of psychology? How did this differ from psychology's traditional goal? • Goal: to predict and control behavior, not to analyze consciousness. Ascertaining such laws and data that, given the stimulus, psychology can predict which response will be, vice versa. • So, changed major goal from description and explanations of states of consciousness to the prediction and control of behavior 6. Summarize Watson's explanation of thinking. • A type of behavior, nothing more. Speaking to ourselves (subvocal speech) is thinking, an objective act like playing baseball. Assumed minute movement of tongue and larynx accompanied thought. We go from speaking aloud to speaking in our heads due to learned social conventions. 7. What was Watson's final position on the role of instinct in human behavior? • At first, instincts were present in infants but that learned habits replaced them • Then, proposed there were a few simple reflexes (like sneezing) in humans, but no complex innate behavior patterns called instincts. • Radical environmentalism: That experience and not inheritance makes people what they are (thus no instinct, only learned behavior). But Watson did allow for heritable differences in structure (slender fingers vs short fingers). Still, it is the combo of structure and slanting (or experiential learning) that would account for a person's behavior patterns. 8. Summarize Watson's views on emotion. What emotions did Watson think were innate? How do emotions become associated with various stimuli or events? What research did Watson perform to validate his views? • Humans inherit emotions of fear, love, and rage. ○ Fear: elicited by loud noises and loss of support (such as falling) ○ Rage: elicited by restricting the infant's freedom of movement ○ Love: elicited by stroking or patting the infant. • Through learning, these emotions come to be elicited by stimuli other than those that originally elicited them. • All other emotions are derived from fear, rage, and love. • See for example Albert and the white rat. Stimulus of banging steel bar with a hammer when rat was near Albert caused Albert to end up fearing rat and all things that looked like rat. 9. Describe the procedure that Watson and Mary Cover Jones used to extinguish Peter's fear of rabbits. • Modeling: Showing other children playing fearlessly with a white rabbit (helped a little) • Second, presented rabbit in room with Peter very far. Then gradually, day by day, brought rabbit closer to Peter until Peter would eat with one hand and pet rabbit with other hand. • Behavioral therapy: Began here 10. Summarize the advice that Watson and Watson gave on child rearing. • Treat children as small adults (no hugging and kissing, no sitting on lap, kiss once on the forehead when they say goodnight, shake hands in morning, pat on head if they do a really good job at something difficult) 11. How did Watson explain learning? • Rejected Thorndike's law of effect for ancient principles of contiguity and frequency (think Aristotle). More similar to Pavlov and Bechterev's • In learning situation, trial always ends with animal making correct response, so correct response more frequent than incorrect, and that the more often a response is made, the more likely it will be made again. Final response an organism makes in a learning situation will be the response it will tend to make when it is next in the situation. • Law of recency: Animal will tend to give same response to stimuli as the last one given.

Ewald Hering (1834-1918)

Offered a nativistic explanation of space perception and a theory of color vision based on the existence of three color receptors: red-green, yellow-blue, black-white

3 Books by Darwin

On the Origin of Species: Brings idea of struggle for survival, fitness, evolution, natural selection The Descent of Man: Argument that humans are also products of evolution. Same ancestor as great apes The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals: That emotions in human are remnants of survival traits of earlier animals

Hugo Munsterberg (1863-1916)

Opposed Wundt's idea that will could be experienced as conscious element of the mind during introspection and that will was involved in voluntary behavior at all. Believed an idea follows behavior, like an after-epiphany (what he called an epiphenomenon). Positivist, so rejected James' liking of religious healing and psychoanalysis. Believed psychology should attempt to create info useful in the real world. • Reciprocal antagonism: Strengthening the thoughts opposite those causing problems. Munsterberg rejected Freud's belief of unconscious motivation. • Forensic psychology: Showed eyewitness testimony could be unreliable because sensory impressions could be illusionary, suggestion and stress could affect perception, and memory is not always accurate. Urged that psychological methods replace brutal interrogation of criminals, which could result in false confessions because of need of convict please interrogator, need to give into authority figures, and/or need of very depressed people to feel punished. • Industrial psychology: for aid in personnel selection, recommended defining skills necessary for performing a task and then determining the person's ability to perform that task. Also, take individual differences into consideration when selecting personnel and when making job assignments (what one may find boring, another may find interesting, etc.)

William James (1842-1910)

Opposed looking for elements of thought and the tedious "brass instrument psychology" seen in Germany. Believed 1) consciousness is personal, 2) that consciousness is continuous and cannot be divided up for analysis, 3) consciousness is constantly changing, 4) consciousness is selective, 4) consciousness is functional (the most important thing). Thought of consciousness as a stream rather than a chain. Came up with functionalism: • Opposed sterile search for elements of consciousness (opposite structuralists) • Wanted to understand the function of the mind rather than provide a static description of its contents. Believed mental processes serve to aid organism in adapting to environment. "That is, they were interested in the 'is for' of the mind rather than the 'is,' its function rather than its structure (315). • Wanted psych to be a practical, not pure, science. Sought to apply findings to improvement of personal life, education, industry, etc. • Broadening of psych to include animals, children, abnormal humans. Also accepted an eclectic methodology, from mazes to mental tests • Their interest in the why of mental processes and behavior led directly to concern with motivation. Because an organism will act differently in same environment as its needs change, these needs must be understood before the organism's behavior can be understood • Accepted both mental processes and behavior as legitimate subject matter for psych. Viewed introspection as one of many valid methodologies • Tended to be more ideographic than nomothetic: what made organisms different rather than what made them similar. • Pragmaticism: The belief that if an idea works, it is valid. The ultimate criteria for judging an idea should be the idea's usefulness. With pragmaticism, truth is not out there as static form waiting to be discovered, but is instead something that must be gauged by effectiveness under changing circumstances. What works is true, and because circumstances change, truth must be forever dynamic. We see it in the fact that any aspect of human experience that cannot be measured empirically cannot be thrown out, but instead must be looked at subjectively, philosophically, or through some other method. Also in use of any methodology that sheds light on psychological information. § Ideo-motor theory of behavior: Idea of certain action causes that action to occur. In most cases, ideas of actions flow immediately and automatically (habitually or reflexively) into behavior. Voluntary action and mental effort are inseparable. What holds attention determines action, and the effort of attention is the essential phenomena of will. So, by controlling ideas of behavior, we control actual behavior. Believed that bodily events cause thoughts and thoughts cause behavior. Thus, James was an interactionist, but not sure how they interact. ○ Habits: Learned patterns of behavior (like instincts, but instincts are ad hominem). Habits are formed as an activity is repeated, which causes neural pathways to, from, and within the brain to become more entrenched, making it easier for energy to pass through pathways (a neurophysiological explanation). They are functional because they simplify the movements required to achieve a result, increase accuracy of behavior, reduce fatigue, and diminish the need to consciously attend to performed actions § 5 maxims to develop good habits and eliminate bad ones: □ Place yourself in circumstances that encourage good habits and discourage bad habits □ Do not allow yourself to act contrary to a new habit that you are attempting to develop. □ Do not attempt to slowly develop a good habit or eliminate a bad one. Engage in positive habits completely to begin and abstain completely from bad ones. □ It is not the intention to engage in good habits and avoiding bad ones that is important: it is actually doing so □ Force yourself to act in ways that are beneficial to you, even if doing so at first is distasteful and requires considerable effort. • Empirical Self: the "me" of personality which consists of everything that a person would or can call his or her own (from body to mind to reputation to family to material goods, etc.) ○ 3 components of empirical self: § Material self: everything material that a person could call their own. § Social self: The self known by others § Spiritual self: Person's state of consciousness (thoughts and emotions, the experience of one's subjective reality) • Self as knower: The "I" of personality, the subject, rather than object, of a person. Similar to older notions of soul and spirit. ○ Much easier to deal with the empirical self than the self as knower. • Self-esteem: Ratio of things attempted to things achieved. So, enhancing self-esteem comes from either achieving more or attempting less (like deciding that one does not want to be slimmer or more musically skilled) • James-Lange Theory of Emotion: Event-->Bodily reaction--->Feeling ○ The advice that stems from this is: Act the way you want to feel. Feel depressed? Go for a walk. Feel scared? Whistle a tune. • Tender-minded: Rationalistic (principle-oriented), intellectual, idealistic, optimistic, religious, dogmatic, and believe in free will. • Tough-minded: Empiricistic (fact-oriented), sensationalistic, materialistic, pessimistic, irreligious, skeptical, and fatalistic. • Pragmatism was way of compromising between the two worldviews by simply taking from each list whatever works best in the circumstances at hand. Nothing should be accepted or rejected except on basis of usefulness.

First Signal Theory

Pavlov As biologically neutral stimuli (CSs) are consistently associated with biologically significant stimuli (USs), the former come to signal the biologically significant events (so that animal is warned of something coming that is conductive or threatening to survival and can act accordingly). First-signal system are the VSs that come to signal biologically significant events (they are the warning stimuli)

second signal system

Pavlov Words that come to symbolize reality as signals of signals. Language consists of symbols of environmental and bodily experiences.

Ernst Heinrich Weber (1795-1878)

Physiology Physiologist interested in kinesthesis (muscle sense). Showed sense of touch includes senses of temperature, pressure, and pain. Provided evidence of a muscle sense. ○ Two-point threshold: the smallest distance between two points of pressure on skin that the subject reports as sensing two, not one, points. ▪ Smallest distance on tongue, largest on middle of back. Assumed this meant more receptors meant finer discrimination. ○ Just Noticeable Difference (JND): The smallest amount of difference between two weights so that they feel as two different weights and not the same. Showed that when kinesthesis and tactile sensations were involved (lifting hand with weight) and not just tactile sensations (hand resting on table with weight), subjects could detect smaller differences. ○ Weber's Law: That JNDs correspond to a constant fraction of a standard stimulus (for example, can note difference between 39 grams and 40 grams, but 156 grams and 160 grams). First quantitative law in psychology's history.

Law of Pragnaz

Pragnaz means "full of meaning" or "precise. The law states that psychological organization will always be as good as condition allows under the prevailing circumstances, just as with other physical forcefields. All cognitive experiences will tend to be organized, symmetrical, simple, and regular as they can be, given the patter of brain activity at any given moment. • Explains how the psychophysical isomorphism works. Also, shows that patterns of brain activity are often better

David Wechsler (1896-1981)

Resolved some of the psychometric issues that had been identified in the original Stanford-Binet and the Army Alpha and Army Beta scales by no longer producing a score linked to age. Average score was set at 100, and higher and lower performances were evaluated against deviations from the standard. Produced the WIAS and WISC (Wechsler (Adult) Intelligent Scale (for Children)) • Believed that confident declarations are not permissible in the debate about intelligence.

Oskar Pfungst

Stumpf had graduate student ___________ investigate performance of Clever Hans (a horse famous for solving arithmetic problems by moving head or stomping foot correct number of times). Found that when questioner was out of sight, the performance of Clever Hans fell to chance level. Was obviously responding to subtle cues by questioner. Pfungst replicated these subtle cues and so had Clever Hans perform successes again. Replicated this in lab back in Berlin. Audience would come up with number. He would tap until came to correct number, knowing so by subtle body cues of audience (just like Clever Hans.

Robert Yerkes (1876-1956)

Suggested all people be given all questions on the Binet-Simon test and be given points for items passed. Thus, intelligence based on total points and not on IQ. Point norms could be established for each age. This made test more easily mass-given, and more easily statistically analyzable. Did testing on Army. Gave evidence to "deterioration" of intelligence, leading to eugenics proposals (along with Goddard and Terman)

Young-Helmholtz trichromatic theory

Three different types of color receptors on the retina, each with its own specific energy. Helmholtz speculated that they each corresponded to one of the primary colors (red, green, blue). If color is not primary, it would stimulate various combinations of the three receptors.

Structuralism

Titchener sought only to describe mental experience. Believed that the speculation of unobservable events had no place in science. That theorizing entered the world of metaphysics. So focused on observable (via introspection) conscious events. Called his psychology structuralism because wanted to describe the structure of the adult, normally functioning human mind • Wundt, on the other hand, wanted to explain conscious experience in terms of unobservable cognitive processes. Declined due to: • Inevitable for its reliance on introspection. Introspection led to different results depending on who was using it and what they were seeking. Lack of agreement among highly trained introspectionists about the correct description of a given stimulus display. Also, to introspect is to change what is being observed. • Structuralism also under attack for focus on understanding the normal, adult, human mind so excluded developments outside the school were finding (like in animal behavior, etc.). No focus on abnormal behavior, so not helping the mentally ill. Structuralism ignored personality, learning, psychological development, and individual differences. Refusal to seek practical applications.

Paul Broca (1824-1880)

Used clinical method. Observations of patients in asylums (full examination of body faculties, of intelligence, etc.) then autopsy. • Broca's area: Broca found that a portion of the left cortical hemisphere is implicated in speech articulation or production. • Wernicke's area: Discovered by Carl Wernicke, area near Broca's area responsible for speech comprehension. • Supported the idea that of localizaiton in the brain, thus weakening the idea that the brain acted as a unit. Also that brain size correlated to increased intelligence (even though had shoddy evidence).

Theodore Simon (1873-1961)

Worked as intern at large institution for children with mental retardation. Did dissertation under Binet. helped create Binet-Simon scale of intelligence

Ladd-Franklin Theory of Vision

ased on evolutionary theory. Assumed achromatic vision appeared first in evolution, then color vision came later. Assumed that the human eye had vestiges of its earlier evolutionary development. Most highly evolved part is the fovea, where (in daylight) visual acuity and color sensitivity are greatest. Moving from the fovea to the periphery of the retina, acuity is reduced and ability to distinguish colors is lost. BUT in periphery, night vision and movement perception are better than in fovea. She assumed that peripheral vision (produced by rods of the retina) are more primitive than the foveal vision (provided by cones of the retina) because night vision and movement detection are necessary for survival. Believed color vision evolved in three stages: Achromatic vision first, then blue-yellow sensitivity, then red-green sensitivity. That the last to evolve is the most fragile explains the prevalence of red-green color blindness.

Kurt Lewin (1890-1947)

distinguished between Aristotelian causation (objects have essences that dictate what they are to become, and external forces can interfere with and distort individual growth tendencies) and Galilean causation (causation springs from physical forces actin on an object). ○ Believed psych was still too Aristotelian. Evident by the search for inner determinants of behavior and attempt to place people in distinct categories (normal/abnormal). ○ The switch from Aristotelian to Galilean would mean deemphasizing such notions as instincts, types, averages and emphasizing the complex dynamic forces acting on an individual at any given moment. These dynamic forces, and no inner essences, explain human behavior. • Life space: Consists of all influences acting on a person at a given time ○ Psychological facts: The influences acting on a person at a given time. Consists of an awareness of internal events (hunger, pain, etc.), external events (restaurants, other people etc.), and recollection of prior events (knowing that a restaurant has good food). § Must exist in a person's awareness at the moment to be a psychological fact. ○ Principle of contemporaneity: only those facts that are currently present in the life space can influence a person's thinking and behavior. ○ Can include imaginary events and subjective reality (for subjective reality governs behavior, nor physical reality). • People seek cognitive balance, and biological and psychological needs cause tension in the life space, which can only be reduced though satisfaction of need. ○ Quasi need: psychological needs (desire to buy a car, to go to a movie, etc.) • His work on groups called Action research. A group can be viewed as a physical system just like the brain can. In both cases, the behavior of the individual elements is determined by the configuration of the existing field of energy. The nature of the group will strongly influence its members. • Among members of a group, there exists a dynamic interdependence • Group dynamics • Zeignarik effect: tendency to remember uncompleted tasks better than completed ones (because uncompleted task creates psychological need that keeps person cognitively unbalanced. 1. Approach-approach conflict: when a person is attracted to two goals at the same time. 2. Avoidance-avoidance conflict: when a person is repelled by two unattractive goals at the same time. 3. Approach-avoidance conflict: Involved only one goal which one has mixed feelings about

Charles Spearman (1863-1945)

found that measures of sensory acuity correlated highly among themselves and with cleverness in school. Laid groundwork for factor analysis: complex statistical technique based on correlation. Begin with measuring an individual/group in a variety of ways, then all measures are intercorrelated to find which vary together in systematic ways, assuming that measures that are correlated measure same thing, final step is to examine matrix of correlations to find which measures vary together and how many factors need to be postulated to account for the intercorrelations observed. ○ Found that intelligence could be explained by two postulated factors: specific factors (s) and general factor or general intelligence (g). g is determined almost exclusively by inheritance. ○ Thus, general intelligence is inherited, and tests like Binet's studied that implicity.

Intervening Variables (Tolman)

unobserved and inferred factors within the organism that are the actual determinants of behavior Independent variables (environmental event)-->intervening variables (purpose and cognition)-->Dependent variable (behavior). Neobehavioristic. Kept intervening variables operationally defined.

Wilhelm Wundt (1879)

• Wundt's focus on elementary structures and processes was very empirical, but his goal was to understand consciousness as it is experienced and also the mental laws that govern it, which kept him in with the German rationalistic approach. Opposed materialism because believed consciousness was more than just from physical qualities of atoms, etc. Opposed empiricist idea that mind is passive, creating ideas through laws of association. Wundt loved the idea of will: that humans can decide what to attend to and what to perceive, and that behavior and selective attention are for a purpose. Thus, he called it voluntarism because of the emphasis on will, choice and purpose. • Mediate experience: What all sciences apart from psychology were based on (according to Wundt). It is the experience scientist have as they use measuring tools and recording devices to analyze the physical world. Not direct. Example given is a physicist using a spectrometer to measure sound waves, then using that data. • Immediate experience: What psychology was to be based on. Human consciousness as it occurred. A human saying yes or no about experiencing a sensation • Wundt used experimental introspection (made use of laboratory instruments to vary conditions and hence make the results of internal perception more precise) rather than pure introspection (relatively unstructured). Used experimental introspection mostly to determine whether a person is experiencing a specific sensation or not. • Elements of thought: There are 2: ○ Sensation-occurs whenever a sense organ is stimulated and resulting impulse reaches the brain. Can be described by modality (visual, auditory, taste, etc) and intensity (how loud, how bright). Modality can be further analyzed to determine qualities (hue, saturation, or pitch and timbre, or saltiness and sweetness, etc) ○ Feelings: All sensations are accompanied by feelings. § Tridimensional Theory of Feelings: Any feeling can be described by three attributes: pleasantness-unpleasantness, excitement-calm, and strain-relaxation • Perception: When many elements of thought are experienced together. Passive process governed by the physical stimulation present, the anatomical makeup of the individual, and the individual's past experiences. These three influences interact and determine an individual's perceptual field at any given time. • Apperception: Term borrowed from Herbart, the part of the perceptual field that the individual attends to. Unlike perception, apperception is active and voluntary. • Creative synthesis: Phenomena in which an individual attends to certain elements and arranges and rearranges them according to their will (not passive, like in JS Mill's mental chemistry) • Volkerpsychologie: Folk or cultural psychology. Wundt believed that the higher mental processes, which are reflected in human culture, could be studied only through historical analysis and naturalistic observation. Believed nature of higher mental processes could be deduced from study of religion, social customs, myths, history, language, morals, arts, and the law. Big focus on language. Anthropological, sociological, historical approach to studying humans to understand psychological rules governing elements of thought. His ideas were distorted. His introspective methods were not understood and ridiculed.

Functionalism

• Opposed sterile search for elements of consciousness (opposite structuralists) • Wanted to understand the function of the mind rather than provide a static description of its contents. Believed mental processes serve to aid organism in adapting to environment. "That is, they were interested in the 'is for' of the mind rather than the 'is,' its function rather than its structure (315). • Wanted psych to be a practical, not pure, science. Sought to apply findings to improvement of personal life, education, industry, etc. • Broadening of psych to include animals, children, abnormal humans. Also accepted an eclectic methodology, from mazes to mental tests • Their interest in the why of mental processes and behavior led directly to concern with motivation. Because an organism will act differently in same environment as its needs change, these needs must be understood before the organism's behavior can be understood • Accepted both mental processes and behavior as legitimate subject matter for psych. Viewed introspection as one of many valid methodologies • Tended to be more ideographic than nomothetic: what made organisms different rather than what made them similar. • In some way influenced by William James

Weber's Two-Point Threshold

○ Two-point threshold: the smallest distance between two points of pressure on skin that the subject reports as sensing two, not one, points. ▪ Smallest distance on tongue, largest on middle of back. Assumed this meant more receptors meant finer discrimination. ○ Just Noticeable Difference (JND): The smallest amount of difference between two weights so that they feel as two different weights and not the same. Showed that when kinesthesis and tactile sensations were involved (lifting hand with weight) and not just tactile sensations (hand resting on table with weight), subjects could detect smaller differences. ○ Weber's Law: That JNDs correspond to a constant fraction of a standard stimulus (for example, can note difference between 39 grams and 40 grams, but 156 grams and 160 grams). First quantitative law in psychology's history.

Henry Herbert Goddard (1866-1957)

Became leading proponent of Binet's approach to measuring intelligence, but accepted the Galton-Cattell-Spearman (hereditarian) view of the nature of intelligence ○ Studied the "Kallikak" family, finding connections between heredity and feeble-mindedness (which was associated with immorality and criminality). ○ Proposed that the feeble-minded should be sterilized or segregated from the rest of society. 20 states passed sterilization laws. ○ Performed Binet tests on immigrants, finding about half were morons, leading to a huge increase in deportation. ○ Remember, to him, all intelligence was hereditary.

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1849-1936)

Began studying dogs' digestion using surgery that allowed him to view digestion while dog was still alive. Saw more stomach secretions when meat powder or something associated with meat powder was sensed. During conditional reflex, found conditional reflex (that dog secreted more fluids in stomach when something associated with meat powder was sensed. Believed all central nervous behavior could be characterized as either excitation or inhibition. All behavior is reflexive. ○ Unconditioned reflex: Innate and triggered by unconditioned stimulation (watering of mouth to taste of food) ○ Unconditioned Response UR: Bodily response to unconditioned stimulation. Derived from biology, not experience. ○ Conditioned Stimulus (CS): Object or event learned through experience to be associated to an unconditioned stimulus. Causes conditioned response ○ Cortical mosaic: pattern of excitation and inhibition that characterizes the brain at any given moment--determines how an animal will respond to its environment at any given time. ○ Extinction: Point when CS no longer accompanied by US leads to complete diminishing of CR. ○ Spontaneous recovery: If CS again presented, will again elicit CR (showing that extinction does not lead to elimination of CR but only inhibits it) ○ Disinhibition: After extinction, presenting a strong, irrelevant stimulus to the animal causes the CR to return. Assumption was that the fear caused by the strong stimulus displaces inhibitory process, allowing return of CR. ○ Experimental Neurosis: Moment when a CS and non-CS become indistinguishable (like a bell sound and tapping sound are same pitch) leading to deterioration of behavior. Some animals during this neurosis become violent, some depressed, etc. Showed that response to conflict is to a large extent determined by type of nervous system one possesses. ○ First-signal system: As biologically neutral stimuli (CSs) are consistently associated with biologically significant stimuli (Uss), the former come to signal the biologically significant events (so that animal is warned of something coming that is conductive or threatening to survival and can act accordingly). First-signal system are the VSs that come to signal biologically significant events (they are the warning stimuli) ○ Second-signal system: Words that come to symbolize reality as signals of signals. Language consists of symbols of environmental and bodily experiences.

Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828)

Believed that the faculties of the mind acted on and transformed sensory information, but made three additional claims: 1) Mental faculties do not exist to the same extent in all humans; 2) the faculties are housed in specific areas of the brain; 3) if a faculty is well developed, a person would have a bump or protrusion on the corresponding part of the skull. Similarly, if a faculty is underdeveloped, a hollow or depression would be on the corresponding part of the skull. ○ Phrenology: Analysis of the skull to determine the magnitude of one's faculties. ▪ Issue with it: those who followed it accepted shoddy evidence, and even manipulated evidence to fit their theory. ▪ Became famous due to Gall's considerable reputation, provided hope for an objective, materialistic analysis of the human mind, and appeared to offer practical information (for social engineers like asylum supervisors, educators, etc). ▪ Influenced psychology by arguing effectively the closeness of the brain and mind, stimulated intense research on the localization of brain functions, and showed the importance of furnishing practical information. Gall also found correlation between cortical development and mental functioning, and distinguished the functions of gray and white matter.

Granville Stanley Hall (1844-1924)

Enamored with evolutionary theory. ○ Recapitulation theory of development: Hall believed the development of the individual could be explained by evolutionary theory--each individual reenacted all evolutionary stages of the human species. "Every child, from the moment of conception to maturity, recapitulates very rapidly at first, and then more slowly every stage of development through which the human race from its lowest beginnings has passed. ○ Hall believed that if primitive impulses were not given expression in childhood, they would be carried into adulthood. ○ Masturbation to him was evil ○ Believed religious conversion was normal for adolescents. ○ Hall's work on development was chock full of errors, masturbation, and Jesus, but he was also first to show prevalence of depressed mood in adolescence, adolescence at peak time for crime, as a time of high sensation seeking, time of high susceptibility to media influences, characteristics of peer relations in adolescence, and biological development during puberty ○ Sex-segregated schools led to enhanced sexual sublimation and so facilitated social progress. Believed inhibiting sexual desire led to social progress. ○ Viewed females as vital for future evolution of human species. Adolescence was time for women to train to be mothers. ○ Three main arguments for sex-segregation: 1. Adolescence is critical period for development of female reproductive organs 2. adolescent male needed freedom to engage in cathartic expression of his savage impulses 3. natural sexual differentiation during adolescence was basis for later attraction between the sexes. unambiguously against coeducation and believed that primary role for women was motherhood. But at the same time, his academic programs were the most open for women, and were highly supportive of female graduate students in psych and other fields.

Lewis Madison Terman (1877-1956)

Found that when the Benet-Simon scale was administered to US children, the results were uneven. Deleted existing items and added new items to the scale until the average score of a sample of children was 100 no matter the age. Became known as Stanford-Binet. ○ Believed intelligence was mostly inherited and that low intelligence was cause of most antisocial behavior. ○ Did longitudinal study of gifted individuals to evaluate his belief that those with high IQs are more successful in life than those with lower IQ, to show that the gifted individuals needed to be identified to be encouraged to reach their full potential and become societal leaders. § Identified genius as score of 135 or higher on his test. Found connections between their IQ and other factors (like parents' education, age learned to read, etc.) § Found that they continued excelling academically, on average, later in life. Gifted children made gifted adults.

Edward Lee Thorndike (1847-1949)

Liked to measure things and believed intelligence was mostly inherited. Big on animal experiments ○ Puzzle box: if animal performed certain response, door opened, animal could escape, and would be given a reward. Drew conclusions that: § Learning is incremental (occurs a little bit at a time) § Learning occurs automatically (not mediated by thinking) § Same principles of learning apply to all mammals ○ Connectionism: Believed that sense impression and responses are connected by neural bonds, that probability of a response to a stimulus is determined by strength of neural connection. His focus was on how these neural connection became strengthened. ○ Early version of theory of learning § Law of exercises: Law of use (more neural connection is practiced, stronger it becomes) and law of disuse (opposite of use). § Law of effect: If association Is followed by satisfying state of affairs, it will be strengthened (opposite if bad) ○ Found later that practice alone did not strengthen association and that passage of time alone did not weaken it. Also found that reinforcement modifies behavior but punishment does little ○ Identical elements theory of transfer: extent to which info learned in one situation will transfer to another situation is determined by the similarity between the two situations (so schools should teach real-world skills). 13. Explain why Thorndike is viewed as a transitional figure between the schools of functionalism and behaviorism. • Thorndike is a functionalist because he believed that only useful associations are selected and maintained (those that help animal survive), and behaviorist because insisted that learning occurs without ideation

B.F. Skinner (1904-1990)

Neobehaviorism Positivist, acknowledged Bacon and Mach in his works. Job of science is to do functional analysis (if x occurs, y tends to occur) ○ Completely positivist (ignoring possibility of conscious events for environmental events and behavior). Skinner was physical monist (materialist) Because we cannot know at present to which internal events people are responding when they use mentalistic terminology (like thinking, choosing, etc.), we must be content simply ignoring such terms. "A completely independent science of experience would have no more bearing on a science of behavior than a science of what people feel about fire would have on the science of combustion" • Respondent behavior: behavior elicited by a known stimulus ○ Elicited by known stimulus • Operant behavior: behavior that operates on the environment in such a way as to produce consequences. Simply emitted by the organism. The causes are unimportant. The important aspect is that it is controlled by its consequences. operant behavior is controlled by its consequences: deals with reinforcement. An organism performs an operant response that leads to a reinforcement, and the rate of response increases. Thus, the responses an organism makes that result in reinforcement are more likely to recur when the organism is next in that situation. Its like a cat that hits a lever and a door opens, and it hits the lever the next time it is by it. For Skinner, what constitutes a reinforcer? • Anything (not just drive reduction, satisfying state of affairs, etc.) that, when made contingent on a response, changes the rate with which that response is made. 14. Why did Skinner argue that behavior should be controlled by reinforcement contingencies rather than by punishment? • Reinforcement strengthens behavior, and punishment does not weaken behavior once the punitive contingencies are withdrawn. • Punishment occurs only because it is reinforcing to the punisher (short run pause of the behavior, but it does not eliminate the behavior in long run) • Punishment causes negative by-products like fear, aggression, pain, etc. • How do get rid of undesirable behavior? Ignore it (negative reinforcement). 15. Summarize Skinner's argument against the use of theory in psychology. • Skinner accepted operationism but not theoretical aspects of logical positivism. • Descriptive behaviorism: Performing functional analysis (changing environment and noting change in behavior) and just explaining it. Not looking under the skin for explanations of relationships. Also called "empty organism approach". Nothing is lost ignoring mental events because the overt behavior occurs regardless of our understanding of the inside. 16. State the general rule that Skinnerians follow in modifying behavior. Give an example of how this rule could be applied in treating a behavior disorder. • "Change reinforcement contingencies, and you change behavior". ○ Has been very effective.

Christine Ladd-Franklin (1847-1930)

Physiology First woman to be noted in the book. • Ladd-Franklin's Theory: Based on evolutionary theory. Assumed achromatic vision appeared first in evolution, then color vision came later. Assumed that the human eye had vestiges of its earlier evolutionary development. Most highly evolved part is the fovea, where (in daylight) visual acuity and color sensitivity are greatest. Moving from the fovea to the periphery of the retina, acuity is reduced and ability to distinguish colors is lost. BUT in periphery, night vision and movement perception are better than in fovea. She assumed that peripheral vision (produced by rods of the retina) are more primitive than the foveal vision (provided by cones of the retina) because night vision and movement detection are necessary for survival. Believed color vision evolved in three stages: Achromatic vision first, then blue-yellow sensitivity, then red-green sensitivity. That the last to evolve is the most fragile explains the prevalence of red-green color blindness.

Hermann Von Helmholtz (1821-1894)

Physiology Believer in materialism Principle of conservation of energy: While studying metabolistic processes of frogs, demonstrated that food and oxygen consumption were able to account for the total energy that an organism expended. Energy just changed from one form to another. Also showed that nerve conduction was not instantaneous, but rather slow. Thus showing that humans (or living things) were not inhabited by a special vital life force, but just by physical-chemical processes that are involved with our reaction with the environment. • Helmholtz thought that past experience of an observer converts a sensation into a perception. Sensations are raw elements of conscious experience, and perceptions are sensations after they are given meaning by one's past experiences. ○ Notion of unconscious inference: to label a visual experience "chair" requires applying a great deal of past experience, as does looking at a railroad track in the distance and insisting they are parallel and not converging. Moving pictures appear to be moving because of prior experience. The inference of an object, or depth, or an understanding of the world, comes from an unconscious application of past experience. Showed this by giving people glasses that displaced the visual field several inches to the right or left, and saw that in a few minutes, they adapted. Perceptual adaptation. Similar to Kant's reasoning of the innate categories of thought, but Helmholtz showed they derived from experience, not the innate faculties fo the mind. • Resonance Place Theory of Auditory Perception: Auditory system contains thousands of types of nerve fibers, each with its own specific nerve energy. Different fibers along the basilar membrane are sensitive to differences in the frequency of a soundwave. Short fibers respond to the higher frequencies, and the longer fibers to the lower frequencies. A wave of a certain frequency causes the appropriate fiber of the basilar membrane to vibrate, thus causing the sensation of sound corresponding to that frequency. Process called sympathetic vibration. was empirical and scientific, and believed in an active mind. Found with experimental rigor the mechanisms that allowed us to commerce with the physical world-mechanisms explained with objective, physical laws. Brought psychology, physiology, chemistry, and physics closer together. Paved way for experimental psychology. • Young-Helmholtz theory of color vision (or the trichromatic theory): Three different types of color receptors on the retina, each with its own specific energy. Helmholtz speculated that they each corresponded to one of the primary colors (red, green, blue). If color is not primary, it would stimulate various combinations of the three receptors.

Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801-1887)

a panpsychist: that all things are physical and also conscious. Physical and mental were simply two aspects of the same fundamental reality. Speculated that for mental sensations to change arithmetically, the physical stimulus would have to change geometrically. • Thus created psychophysics • Stated mathematically Weber's law. As a stimulus gets larger, the magnitude of the change must become greater and greater. But not just for simple stimuli, but for the complex realm of human values (a dollar to a rich man compared to a poor, etc.) (see page 237 for the mathematics of the relationship between mind and body. • Absolute threshold: Lowest intensity at which a stimulus can be detected • Negative sensations: sensations below the absolute threshold, but cause unconscious reactions (like petites perceptions) • Differential threshold: How much a stimulus magnitude needs to be increased or decreased before a person can detect a difference. • Method of limits: Determine the range of stimuli that the subject considers to be equal to the standard. • Method of constant stimuli: Pairs of stimuli are presented, one remains same, other varies. Subject reports whether variable stimulus appears greater than, less than, or equal to standard • Method of adjustment: Subject has control over variable stimulus and adjusts magnitude so that stimulus appears equal to standard stimulus. After adjustment, average difference between variable stimulus and standard stimulus are measured.