Famous Contributors Assignment - AP Psych

Albert Bandura

"Bo-Bo Doll" Experiment to demonstrate how children imitate anti-social behavior. He is a contemporary psychologist specializing in developmental psychology and educational psychology. Much of his work centers around social learning theory. His best-known study is the Bobo Doll Experiment. This study exposed children to adults behaving aggressively toward a doll; it demonstrated that children behave aggressively when aggression is modeled by adults. However, if the adult was punished for hitting the doll, children were less likely to hit the doll. Bandura emphasized that children learn in a social milieu and often imitate the behavior of others—a process known as social learning theory. He emphasized that behavior is guided by a combination of drives, cues, responses, and rewards. Bandura argues that people have two choices: to act humanely or inhumanely. Bandura also developed the theory of self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is a person's belief in his or her own ability.

Martin Seligmans

"Learned Helplessness Experiment" with dogs. Showed the external locus effect in animals (generalized to depression with humans). The idea behind the theory of learned helplessness is that animals can be conditioned to think that they have no control over the outcome of a situation that they are in, even though they actually do have the power to help themselves. The theory can also be applied to humans beings who think that they cannot change a situation and/or miss opportunities that make them feel helpless. Seligman discovered that when people feel they have no control over their situation, they tend to give up rather than fight for control. His research on helplessness and pessimism had important implications in the prevention and treatment of depression. Rather than focus on what ails us, he wanted mental health to be about more than just the absence of illness. Instead, Seligman strove to usher in a new era of psychology that also concentrates on what makes people feel happy and fulfilled.

Solomon Asch

"line-test" to show group conformity. Solomon Asch is considered a pioneer of social psychology and Gestalt psychology. His conformity experiments demonstrated the power of social influence. While Asch's work illustrated how peer pressure influences social behavior (often in negative ways), Asch still believed that people tended to behave decently towards each other. Asch's research demonstrated that participants were surprisingly likely to conform to a group, even when they personally believed that the group was incorrect.

Elizabth Loftus

"misinformation effect" shown in memory studies. Loftus has close experience with the frailty and fallibility of human memory. At a family gathering for her 44th birthday, Loftus's uncle told her that she had been the one to find her mother's body floating in the pool after a drowning accident. A few days later, she discovered that her uncle had been mistaken and that it was actually her aunt who discovered her mother after the drowning. All it took to trigger false memories was a simple comment from a family member, illustrating how easily human memory can be influenced by suggestion.Loftus's research has demonstrated the malleability of memory, and her work has had a particular influence on the use of human memory in criminal testimony and other forensic settings.

Eysenck and Myers-Briggs

All did personality tests to validate the trait perspective. Myers and Briggs - mother and daughter - developed a personality test based on Jung's temperaments called the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory, or MBTI. It has gone on the become the most famous personality test of all time. Hans Eysenck was the first psychologist to make this trait or temperament business into something more mathematical: He gave long lists of adjectives to hundreds of thousands of people and used a special statistics called factor analysis to figure out what factors - trait dimensions - carry the most weight. He took the results of this work and created a test called the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ).

Muzafer Sherif

Co-operation among divisive groups when they had subordinate (shared) goals. Mr. Sherif calls ''the most successful field experiment ever conducted on intergroup conflict.'' In the experiment, Mr. Sherif showed how prejudice can develop and how it can be changed. In the experiment, 22 boys at a summer camp were split into two competing groups. After a week of competition, the boys in each group saw the others with resentment and hostility. At that point, the groups were combined and all worked together on common projects. Once they began to share a sense of accomplishment, their hostility disapeared. The study, known as the ''Robber's Cave'' experiment became a model for social psychologists seeking to break patterns of hostility in intergroup relations.

Aaron Beck

Cognitive therapy approach. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a talking therapy that focuses on changing negative thought patterns to effect changes in behavior. This goal-oriented approach is an effective treatment for many psychological issues. A person's core beliefs, according to Beck, can affect mood and overall mental health. Beck developed the Beck Hopelessness Scale, which consists of twenty statements with which a person can agree or disagree. The scale measures feelings about the future and is sometimes used to evaluate suicide risk. The Beck Depression Inventory, which is often used in conjunction with the Hopelessness Scale, consists of 21 multiple-choice questions that evaluate depression. It remains one of the most widely used diagnostic tests for depression.

Stanley Milgram

Conformity test to show the power of an authority figure. Milgram conducted a series of psychological experiments to gauge the level of obedience that a participant would display to an authority figure when that figure assigned them tasks that conflicted with their moral and ethical codes. The experiment is often cited as evidence of the power of peer pressure, and the results of the study were used to evaluate abhorrent behavior, such as the atrocities of the Holocaust. Milgram also conducted studies to determine how many "degrees of separation" there were between any two people; in other words, how many people did it take to create a link between two strangers? He attempted to demonstrate that media played a role in aggressive and anti-social behavior by exposing subjects to popular media, then offering them an opportunity to engage in unethical behavior.

Wolfgang Kohler

Demonstrated use of "insight" in apes when they used sticks to reach a banana that was out of reach. German psychologist and a key figure in the development of Gestalt psychology, which seeks to understand learning, perception, and other components of mental life as structured wholes. Köhler conducted experiments on problem-solving by chimpanzees, revealing their ability to devise and use simple tools and build simple structures. Another major work, Die physischen Gestalten in Ruhe und im stationären Zustand (1920; "Physical Gestalt in Rest and Stationary States"), was based on an attempt to determine the relation of physical processes in nervous tissue to perception.

Cannon and Bard

Emotions and cognitive appraisal at the same time. Cannon-Bard theory states that we feel emotions and experience physiological reactions such as sweating, trembling and muscle tension simultaneously. More specifically, it is suggested that emotions result when the thalamus sends a message to the brain in response to a stimulus, resulting in a physiological reaction. The Cannon-Bard theory differs from other theories of emotion such as the James-Lange theory of emotion.

Ivan Pavlov

Famous for his classical conditioning experiments.Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was an eminent Russian physiologist and psychologist who devised the concept of the conditioned reflex. He conducted a legendary experiment in which he trained a hungry dog to drool at the sound of a bell, which had previously been related to the presentation of food to the animal. Pavlov formulated a conceptual theory, highlighting the significance of conditioning and associating human behavior with the nervous system. He was awarded the 1904 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his groundbreaking research on digestive secretions. He conducted neurophysiological experiments with animals for years after receiving his doctorate at the Academy of Medical Surgery. He became fully convinced that human behavior could be understood and explained best in physiological terms rather than in mentalist terms.

B. F. Skinner

Famous for the "Skinner Box" to demonstrate operant conditioning in low level animals. B. F. Skinner was an American psychologist best-known for his influence on behaviorism. Best known for: Operant conditioning, Schedules of Reinforcement, Skinner Box, Cumulative Recorder,Radical Behaviorism. He developed the theory of operant conditioning -- the idea that behavior is determined by its consequences, be they reinforcements or punishments, which make it more or less likely that the behavior will occur again.

John B. Watson

Famous for the controversial Little Albert classical conditioning experiment. He was a pioneering psychologist who played an important role in developing behaviorism. Watson believed that psychology should primarily be scientific observable behavior. He is remembered for his research on the conditioning process, as well as the Little Albert experiment, in which he demonstrated that a child could be conditioned to fear a previously neutral stimulus. His research also revealed that this fear could be generalized to other similar objects. Watson set the stage for behaviorism, which soon rose to dominate psychology.

Hans-Selye

General Adaptation Syndrome (stress responses). In 1936 Selye wrote about a stress condition known as general adaptation syndrome (GAS). He first observed the symptoms of GAS after injecting ovarian extracts into laboratory rats, an experiment he performed with the intent of discovering a new hormone. Instead, however, he found that the extract stimulated the outer tissue of the adrenal glands of the rats, caused deterioration of the thymus gland, and produced ulcers and finally death.He eventually determined that these effects could be produced by administering virtually any toxic substance, by physical injury, or by environmental stress. Selye was able to extend his theory to humans, demonstrating that a stress-induced breakdown of the hormonal system could lead to conditions, such as heart disease and high blood pressure, that he called "diseases of adaptation."

Konrad Lorentz

Imprinting studies. Showed how baby animals would follow the first object they saw after birth. Believed to be a built-in survival mechanism. Konrad Zacharias Lorenz was an Austrian zoologist, ethologist, and ornithologist. He is regarded as one of the founders of modern ethology and is best known for his work on instinctive behavior in animals.Those others had noticed the behavior, Lorenz was the first to discover the mechanism that limited perception makes the animal attach to the first moving object it sees. He developed the theory that animal behavior is largely instinctual but is triggered by environmental stimuli. He believed that the laboratory setting changed animal behaviors and carried out much of his research in the field. In 1973 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Tinbergen.

Stanford-Binet

Modern IQ formula. Mental age/chronological age x 100. Alfred Binet was a French psychologist best-remembered for developing the first widely used intelligence test. Best known for: Simon-Binet Intelligence Scale and Stanford-Binet IQ Test. According to Binet, an individual's score can vary. He also suggested that factors such as motivation and other variables can play a role in test scores.

David Wechsler

Modern IQ tests with specialized subtests and use of factor analysis. American psychologist and inventor of several widely used intelligence tests for adults and children. He produced a battery of intelligence tests known as the Wechsler-Bellevue Intelligence Scale. The original battery was geared specifically to the measurement of adult intelligence, for clinical use. He rejected the idea that there is an ideal mental age against which individual performance can be measured, and he defined normal intelligence as the mean test score for all members of an age group; the mean could then be represented by 100 on a standard scale.Wechsler developed yet another adult intelligence test, the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS), with the same structure as his earlier scale but standardized with a different population, including 10 percent nonwhites to reflect the U.S. population. Wechsler developed yet another adult intelligence test, the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS), with the same structure as his earlier scale but standardized with a different population, including 10 percent nonwhites to reflect the U.S. population.

James and Lange

Physical before cognitive when appraising an emotional situation. The James-Lange theory of emotion suggests that emotions occur as a result of physiological reactions to events. In other words, this theory proposes that people have a physiological response to environmental stimuli and that their interpretation of that physical response then results in an emotional experience. There is a lot of criticism to their theory. For ex: The Cannon-Bard theory, directly challenges the James-Lange theory. Cannon and Bard's theory instead suggests that our physiological reactions, such as crying and trembling, are caused by our emotions.

Erik Erikson

Proposed eight stages of SOCIAL development (know these!!). Erik Erikson was a 20th century psychologist who developed the theory of psychosocial development and the concept of an identity crisis. Erikson impacted psychological theories by expanding upon Sigmund Freud's original five stages of development. Pioneering the study of the life cycle, Erikson believed that each person progressed through eight stages of development. Erikson emphasized that the environment played a major role in self-awareness, adjustment, human development, and identity.Each of Erikson's stages of psychosocial development focus on a central conflict. In Erikson's theory of development, children don't automatically complete each stage on a predetermined schedule. Instead, people face generalized challenges throughout life, and the ways in which they answer these challenges determine whether they develop further or stagnate at a particular stage of development.

Jean Piaget

Proposed four stages of COGNITIVE development. (Remember the acronym Socks Pulled Over Cold Feet to remember these in order.) Sensorimotor, Preoperational, Concrete, and Formal Stages.Jean Piaget was a Swiss developmental psychologist. His studies of learning in young children led to the development of the constructivist theory of knowledge. This linking of human experience, behavior patterns and learning has had a major impact on education theory. HIs research led him to believe that the process of intellectual development is based on assimilation and accommodation. While grading tests, Piaget noticed that young children consistently made certain types of mistakes that older children and adults didn't make.This led him to theorize that young children's cognitive processes are different from those of adults.He proposed a theory of cognitive developmental stages with individuals displaying patterns of cognition common to each age group.

Robert Rescorla

Proposed that there is a conscious connections between the CS and the UCS in classical conditioning experiments. (A smoker is aware that a nausea-producing drug will affect his behavior). Robert Rescorla showed that in classical conditioning, pairing two stimuli doesn't always produce the same level of conditioning. He found that conditioning works better if the conditioned stimulus acts as a reliable signal that predicts the appearance of the unconditioned stimulus. The fact that classical conditioning depends on the predictive power of the conditioned stimulus, rather than just association of two stimuli, means that some information processing happens during classical conditioning. He also found that cognitive processes are also involved in operant conditioning.

Lawrence Kohlberg

Proposed three stages of MORAL development (all framed around the word conventional.) This theory was criticized as it only tested young children by framing hypothetical situations for them and their responses to these. It did not test cross-culturally and between the genders. He expanded upon and modified Jean Piaget's work to form a theory that clearly explained the development of moral reasoning. He was able to identify six stages of moral development. He was of the opinion that correct moral reasoning was the key factor in moral decision making. He also believed that people progress through these stages the same way they progress through stages of cognitive development. Kohlberg's theory had three levels and six stages.

Albert Ellis

Rational emotive therapy (RET is a form of cognitive therapy). Rather than focusing on early childhood experiences, psychoanalysis, dream interpretation, or a client's relationship with family and parents, REBT aims to directly address problematic beliefs that lead to self-defeating behaviors. He was a member of several prestigious psychological institutions and contributed to dozens of scientific journals. He won accolades and awards from multiple organizations for his impact on the field of psychology. Ellis's work was truly part of the cognitive revolution and he helped found and pioneer the cognitive-behavioral therapies

Mary Ainsworth

Secure infants have good bonds with mothers. Reverse is also true.Ainsworth, in collaboration with colleague Sylvia Bell, developed a technique called the Strange Situation Test, used to examine the pattern of attachment between a child and the mother or caregiver. This method of measuring the child's specific attachment characteristics is highly respected and well established, and it is still used today. Ainsworth's Strange Situation test demonstrated that, for young children, the primary caregiver serves as a secure base from which to explore the world. Children with secure attachments are upset when their caregivers leave, but comforted by their presence in stressful situations. Children with insecure attachments, however, are much less comforted by their parents and do not have the "secure base" that securely attached children have. The results of Ainsworth's research challenged traditional notions regarding the mother-child bond.

Harry Harlow

Showed importance of physical touch over nourishment in infant monkeys. Harlow's experiments on primates remain controversial, and most are seen as inhumane by today's standards. He was interested in the effects of stress, isolation, and abandonment on humans, and because of their psychological similarity to human beings, primates made ideal subjects. He found that maternal attachment is about comfort and safety rather than just food.Harlow found that primates reared without their mothers were psychologically maladapted.Harlow also discovered that monkeys reared in isolation and by artificial surrogate mothers were socially incompetent and had fewer parental skills than those raised around peers or by real mothers, indicating a strong learning component to primate parenthood.

Schachter-Singer Experiment

Showed that emotions have both a physical and a cognitive component. They took account of the physiological-based theories such as the James-Lange Theory and the Cannon-Bard Theory, and came with a conclusion that the various visceral or physiological patterns do not match the wide variety of emotional states of individuals.In a 1962 experiment, Schachter and Singer put their theory to the test. A group of 184 male participants was injected with epinephrine, a hormone that produces arousal including increased heartbeat, trembling, and rapid breathing.The results of the experiment suggested that participants who had no explanation for their feelings were more likely to be susceptible to the emotional influences of the confederate.

Hawthorne Effect

Showed that factory workers had improved work performance with both improved and poor lighting. Conclusion was that they had improved simply because they were being observed in the experiment. The Hawthorne Effect is a phenomenon in which individuals alter their behavior in response to being observed, and usually refers to positive changes.The term "Hawthorne Effect" originated during a study in the 1920s in which researchers investigated the effects of illumination, financial incentives, and frequent breaks on worker productivity at the Hawthorne Plant of the Western Electric Company. There were a lot of critiques on the Hawthorne effect for ex: some people say individuals participating in a study feel singled out and special and therefore subtly alter their behavior or that fear and uncertainty about the purpose of a study may alter worker productivity, etc. Therefore not everyone agree with this theory.

Carol Gilligan

Studied gender differences. Males value accomplishments and women value relationships. Gilligan is a pioneer in the field of gender difference psychology, which argues that the sexes tend to think differently, particularly when it comes to moral problems. Gilligan argues that these differences are likely a product of social influences and gender conditioning and emphasizes that women's ways of thinking are often undervalued compared to men. Gilligan's emphasis on gender difference, however, has been criticized by some feminists. Gilligan's work on moral development outlines how a woman's morality is influenced by relationships and how women form their moral and ethical foundation based on how their decisions will affect others.

Ernest Hilgard

Studies showing that a hypnotic trance includes a "hidden observer" suggesting that there is some subconscious control during hypnosis. Known for contributions to understanding learning processes. Conducted "startle reflex" experiment. Made notion of unconscious mental life relevant again. The Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility scale he made is still used today. The Neo-dissociation theory he came up with is a possible explanation for many phenomenon with affects of hypnosis and consciousness.

Jerome Kagan

Studies to indicate that in-born temperament may explain many behaviors. Kagan's research led him to believe that environment wasn't the sole determining factor of a child's personality, and he began to examine the influence of biological factors. He followed his test subjects from infancy through adulthood, evaluating specific traits at different periods. While Kagan emphasized the role of biology in the development of temperament, his work points to a combination of biological and environmental factors. Kagan determined that the first two years of a child's life are critical in the development of self-consciousness, memory, sense of morality, and symbolism. Kagan studied how biological conditionals increased a child's vulnerability to emotions, like fear and apprehension. He posited that emotion is the result of specific brain states combined with context and temperament.

Hubel and Weisel

Studies with monkeys to show that they had specific FEATURE DETECTORS to aid them in visual processing (some for lines, bards, edges, shapes, etc.). They recorded from neurons in the visual cortex of a cat, as they moved a bright line across its retina. During their recordings, they noticed a few things: (1) the neurons fired only when the line was in a particular place on the retina, (2) the activity of these neurons changed depending on the orientation of the line, and (3) sometimes the neurons fired only when the line was moving in a particular direction. The classic experiments by Hubel and Wiesel are fundamental to our understanding of how neurons along the visual pathway extract increasingly complex information from the pattern of light cast on the retina to construct an image. Their work determined that neurons in the visual cortex are arranged in a precise architecture. Cells with similar functions are organized into columns, tiny computational machines that relay information to a higher region of the brain, where a visual image is formed. Their work revealed how visual cortical neurons encoded image features, the fundamental properties of objects that help us build our perception of the world around us.

Eleanor Gibson

The "visual cliff" experiment. Showed that depth perception cues are innate. American psychologist whose work focused on perceptual learning and reading development. Gibson saw perceptual learning as the differentiation of stimuli. Gibson held that the environment provides sufficient information for the sensory system to develop increased discrimination of stimuli and that, with development, perception increasingly corresponds with the world. The "visual cliff" experiment involved a specially constructed glass tabletop designed to give the appearance of a sharp drop-off. Gibson and Walk used the experiment to test visual depth perception.

Roger Sperry

The first to propose "spilt-brain" surgery to help epileptic patients. One way Roger Sperry studied functions was by examining patients whose hemisphere-connecting nerves had been severed to alleviate serious epilepsy. By the 1960s, he could reveal that the left hemisphere is more geared toward abstract and analytical thought, calculation, and linguistic ability, while the right hemisphere is more important for comprehending spatial patterns and complex sounds like music. He got The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1981.

Maslow and Rogers

The humanistic perspective and therapy approach. For Rogers the focus of psychology is not behavior (Skinner), the unconscious (Freud), thinking (Wundt) or the human brain but how individuals perceive and interpret events. Rogers is therefore important because he redirected psychology towards the study of the self. While some of Maslow's ideas have been criticised by academic psychologists as lacking empirical (research) proof, his ideas along with others have remained popular and have even gained ground in recent years with the emergence of therapies such as solution focussed therapy and mindfulness thinking.