Forty Studies That Changed Psychology (7th Edition) by Roger R. Hock

Reading 2: More Experience = Bigger Brain Authors: Rosenzweig, M. R.; Bennett, E. L.; & Diamond, M. C. Date: 1972 Title: Brain changes in response to experience

Theoretical Propositions: - Animals raised in highly stimulating environments will demonstrate differences in brain growth and chemistry when compared with animals reared in plain or dull circumstances

Reading 9: It's Not Just About Salivating Dogs Author: Pavlov, I. P. Date: 1927 Title: Conditioned reflexes

Theoretical Propositions: - Pavlov theorized that the dogs had learned from experience in the lab to expect food following the appearance of certain signals (signal stimuli); dogs associated the signals with food and thus, produced saliva - proposed that if a particular stimulus in the dog's environment was often present when the dog was fed, this stimulus would become associated in the dog's brain with food; it would signal the approaching food

Reading 13: What you expect is what you get Authors: Rosenthal, R.; & Jacobson, L. Date: 1966 Title: Teachers' expectancies: Determinants of pupils' IQ gains

Theoretical Propositions: - Pygmalion effect: the expectancy effect - Rosenthal suspected that when an elementary school teacher is provided with information that creates certain expectancies about students' potential (i.e. intelligence scores), whether strong or weak, the teacher might unknowingly behave in ways that subtly encourage or facilitate the performance of the students seen as more likely to succeed - self-fulfilling prophecy of actually causing those students to excel, perhaps at the expense of the students for whom lower expectations exist

Reading 6: To Sleep, No Doubt To Dream Authors: Aserinsky, E.; & Kleitman, N. Date: 1953 Title: Regularly occurring periods of eye mobility and concomitant phenomena during sleep

Theoretical Propositions: - Should dreaming be considered necessary in a psychological sense or a physiological sense or both? - Would it be possible for humans to continue to function normally if their dream life were completely or partially suppressed? - studied participants who were deprived of the chance to dream

Reading 11: Knock Wood! Author: Skinner, B. F. Date: 1948 Title: Superstition in the pigeon

Theoretical Propositions: - Skinner said that the reason people are superstitious (sometimes) is because they believe or presume a connection exists between the superstitious behavior in a certain setting and a reinforcing consequence, even though --- in reality --- it does not - this connection exists because the behavior was accidentally reinforced once, twice, or several times (noncontingent reinforcement: reward is not contingent on any particular behavior)

Reading 36: Picture This Author: Murray, H. A. Date: 1938 Title: Explorations in personality

Theoretical Propositions: - Thematic Apperception Test (TAT): consists of black-and-white drawings depicting people in various ambiguous situations; the client is asked to make up a story about the drawing and then the stories are analyzed - client would become less self-conscious and less concerned about being observed by the therapist - the person would become less defensive and reveal inner wishes, fears, and past experiences that might have been repressed

Reading 3: Are you a "natural"? Authors: Bouchard, T.; Lykken, D.; McGue, M.; Segal, N.; & Tellegen, A. Date: 1990 Title: Sources of human psychological differences: The Minnesota study of twins reared apart

Theoretical Propositions: - They wanted to see which characteristics appear to be determined primarily by genetic factors and which are modeled more by your environment. - used 56 monozygotic reared-apart (MZA) twins from the U.S. and were compared w/ monozygotic twins reared together (MZT)

Reading 8: Acting as if you are hypnotized Author: Spanos, N. P. Date: 1982 Title: Hypnotic behavior: A cognitive, social, psychological perspective

Theoretical Propositions: - all the behaviors commonly attributed to a hypnotic trance state are within the normal, voluntary abilities of humans - participants expect to relinquish control over their own behavior, and as the process of hypnotic induction develops, they begin to believe that their voluntary acts are becoming automatic, involuntary events

Reading 26: Masculine or Feminine... Or Both? Author: Bem, S. L. Date: 1974 Title: The measurement of psychological androgyny

Theoretical Propositions: - androgynous: andro=male, gyn= female; used to describe individuals who embrace both masculine and feminine characteristics - Bem believed that there is an advantage of greater behavioral flexibility if a person is androgynous - Bem Sex-Role Inventory (BSRI): a scale to assess gender, incorporating two separate scales; one measured masculinity and another measuring femininity - scale based on masculine and feminine traits that were perceived as desirable for men and women respectively - BSRI designed to differentiate among masculine, feminine, and androgynous individuals by looking at the difference in the score on the feminine section of the scale and the score on the masculine section - + score = femininity, - score - masculinity, close to 0 = androgyny

Reading 39: To Help or Not To Help Authors: Darley, J. M.; & Latane, B. Date: 1968 Title: Bystander intervention in emergencies

Theoretical Propositions: - bystander intervention: the behavior of helping others in emergencies - theorized that the large number of people who witnessed the violent event decreased the willingness of any one individual to step in and help - diffusion of responsibility: as the number of bystanders in an emergency increases, the greater is the belief that "Someone else will help, so I don't need to"

Reading 7: As a Category, It's A Natural Author: Rosch, Eleanor H. Date: 1973 Title: Natural categories

Theoretical Propositions: - categories do not necessarily arise from the language, but exist naturally on their own, in relation to humans' biological abilities of perception - all objects belong to a certain category, but some members of a category are perceived by people to be better examples of the category than others (prototypes) - we decide if an object fits into a category by comparing it to our category prototypes - believed that categories can exist and are psychologically real even when there are no words in a person's language with which to name them - she decided to teach the Dani (Stone Age culture) new words for either eight focal (prototype) colors or 8 nonfocal colors; she hypothesized that many more than two focal color categories were psychologically real for the Dani culture even though names for them had never existed in their language

Reading 34: Relaxing Your Fears Away Author: Wolpe, J. Date: 1961 Title: The systematic desensitization treatment of neuroses

Theoretical Propositions: - discovered that fear reactions in animals could be reduced by a simple conditioning procedure - proposed that "if a response inhibitory to anxiety can be made to occur in the presence of anxiety-provoking stimuli... the bond between these stimuli and the anxiety will be weakened - argued that human anxiety reactions are quite similar to those found in the animal lab and that the concept of reciprocal inhibition could be used to treat various human psychological disorders - the anxiety-inhibiting response was deep relaxation training - to treat your phobia, you must experience a response that is inhibitory to fear or anxiety (relaxation) while in the presence of the feared situation - relaxation training > construction of anxiety hierarchy > desensitization

(Reading 23: Watching Your Emotions? Author: Ross, P. Date: 2003 Title: Mind readers) (not legit one)

Theoretical Propositions: - functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) can reveal thinking processes - when the brain is being observed and the subject tells the truth, one part of the person's brain will light up; if the person lies, two parts of the brain will show up (the part creating the lie and the part holding the truth that the lie is covering up)

Reading 4: Watch Out for the Visual Cliff! Authors: Gibson, E. J.; & Walk, R. D. Date: 1960 Title: The "visual cliff"

Theoretical Propositions: - goal: to find out at what point in the early development process animals or people are able to perceive depth - put animals and people on the edge of a (visual) cliff to see if they are able to avoid falling off - Gibson and Walk believed that depth perception and the avoidance of a drop-off appear automatically as part of our original biological equipment; not by experience (nativist position) - visual cliff: presents the participant w/ what appears to be a drop-off, when no drop-off actually exists

Reading 40: Obey at any Cost? Author: Milgram, S. Date: 1963 Title: Behavioral study of obedience

Theoretical Propositions: - humans have a tendency to obey other people who are in a position of authority over them even if, in obeying, they violate their personal codes of moral and ethical behavior

Reading 30: You're Getting Defensive Again! Author: Freud, A. Date: 1946 Title: The ego and the mechanisms of defense

Theoretical Propositions: - id: is present at birth and contains your basic human biological urges and instincts such as hunger, thirst, and sexual impulses; operates on the pleasure principle - ego: operates on the reality principle; is conscious, and its job is to satisfy the id's urges, but to do so using means that are rational and reasonably safe - superego: requires the ego to find solutions to the id's demands that are moral and ethical, according to your own set of rules about what is good or bad; the conscience, can make you feel guilty - defense mechanisms ward off anxiety through self-deception and the distortion of reality so that the id's urges will not have to be acknowledged - 5 original defense mechanisms: repression, regression, projection, reaction formation, sublimation

Reading 10: Little Emotional Albert Authors: Watson, J. B.; & Rayner, R. Date: 1920 Title: Conditioned emotional responses

Theoretical Propositions: - if a stimulus automatically produces a certain emotion in you (such as fear) and that stimulus is repeatedly experienced at the same moment as something else, such as a rat, the rat will become associated in your brain with fear - you will eventually become conditioned to be afraid of the rat (- participant was named "Little Albert")

Reading 20: In Control and Glad of It! Authors: Langer, E. J.; & Rodin, J. Date: 1967 Title: The effects of choice and enhanced personal responsibility for the aged

Theoretical Propositions: - if the loss of personal responsibility for one's life causes a person to be less happy and healthy, then increasing control and power should have the opposite effect - predicted that the nursing home patients given control should demonstrate improvements in mental alertness, activity level, satisfaction with life, and other measures of behavior and attitude

Reading 35: Projections of Who You Are Author: Rorschach, H. Date: 1942 Title: Psychodiagnostics: A diagnostic test based on perception

Theoretical Propositions: - in the course of interpreting a random inkblot, attention would be drawn away from the person so that his or her usual psychological defenses would be weakened - would allow normally hidden aspects of the psyche to be revealed - inkblots were ambiguous and would allow for the greatest amount of projection from a person's unconscious

Reading 17: Discovering Love Author: Harlow, H. F. Date: 1958 Title: The nature of love

Theoretical Propositions: - infant monkeys have some basic need for close contact with something soft and comforting in addition to primary biological needs such as hunger and thirst - built different kinds of experimental, surrogate monkey mothers to test this theory

Reading 19: How Moral Are You? Author: Kohlberg, L. Date: 1963 Title: The development of children's orientations toward a moral order: Sequence in the development of moral thought

Theoretical Propositions: - morality is acquired in developmental stages - a child must reach a certain stage of intellectual ability in order to develop a certain level of morality - each stage is a uniquely different kind of moral thinking and not just an increased understanding of an adult concept of morality, the stages always occur in the same step-by-step sequence so that no stage is ever skipped and there is rarely any backwards progression, and the stages are prepotent, meaning that the children comprehend all the stages below their own and perhaps have some understanding of no more than one stage above - stages are universal and occur in the same order, regardless of individual differences in environment, experience, or culture

Reading 27: Racing Against Your Heart Authors: Friedman, M.; & Rosenman, R. H. Date: 1959 Title: Association of specific overt behavior pattern with blood and cardiovascular findings

Theoretical Propositions: - people exposed over long periods of time to chronic stress stemming from excessive drive, pressure to meet deadlines, competitive situations, and economic frustration are more likely to develop coronary heart disease (CHD)

Reading 25: Are you the Master of Your Fate? Author: Rotter, J. B. Date: 1966 Title: Generalized expectancies for internal versus external control of reinforcement

Theoretical Propositions: - predicted that a test could be developed to measure reliably the extent to which individuals possess an internal (own choices and personality) or an external (luck, fate, etc.) locus-of-control orientation toward life - hypothesized that people will display stable individual differences in their interpretations of the causes of reinforcement in the same situations - compared behavior of internals with that of externals in various contexts

Reading 16: Thanks for the Memories! Author: Loftus, E. F. Date: 1975 Title: Leading questions and the eyewitness report

Theoretical Propositions: - presupposition: a condition that must be true for a question to make sense - hypothesized that if eyewitnesses are asked questions that contain a false presupposition about the witnessed event, the new false information may be incorporated into the witness's memory of the event and appear subsequently in new testimony by the witness

Reading 5: Take a Long Look Author: Fantz, R. L. Date: 1961 Title: The origin of form perception

Theoretical Propositions: - proposed that human infants, from the moment of birth, are actually able to perceive various forms, and this can be demonstrated by observing how babies "analyze" the world--- that is, what they look at and for how long they look at it (preferential looking)

Reading 12: See Aggression ... Do Aggression Authors: Bandura, A.; Ross, D.; & Ross, S. A. Date: 1961 Title: Transmission of aggression through imitation of aggressive models

Theoretical Propositions: - proposed to expose children to adult models who behaved either in aggressive or nonaggressive ways to see the extent to which they would imitate the acts of aggression they had observed in the adult models - 4 predictions: 1) children who observed adult models performing the acts of aggression would imitate the adult and engage in similar aggressive behavior 2) children who were exposed to the nonaggressive models would not only be less aggressive than a control group of children who were exposed to no model at all 3) participants would "imitate the behavior of the same-sex model to a greater degree than a model of the opposite-sex" 4) boys should be more predisposed than girls toward imitating aggression

Reading 29: Who's Crazy Here, Anyway? Author: Rosenhan, D. L. Date: 1973 Title: On being sane in insane places

Theoretical Propositions: - questioned whether the characteristics that lead to psychological diagnoses reside in the patients themselves or in the situations and contexts in which the observers find the patients - if the established criteria and the training mental health professionals have received for diagnosing mental illness are adequate, then those professionals should be able to distinguish between the insane and the sane - proposed that one way to test mental health professionals' ability to categorize prospective patients correctly would be to have normal people seek admittance to psychiatric facilities to see if those charged with diagnosing them would see that, in reality, they were psychologically healthy

Reading 22: I Can See It All Over Your Face! Authors: Ekman, P.; & Friesen, W. V. Date: 1971 Title: Contacts across cultures in the face and emotion

Theoretical Propositions: - specific facial expressions corresponding to basic emotions are universal - members of a preliterate culture will be able to identify the same emotion concepts with the same faces as do members of literate Western and Eastern cultures

Reading 37: A Prison By Any Other Name... Author: Zimbardo, P. G. Date: 1972 Title: The pathology of imprisonment

Theoretical Propositions: - testing his belief that the environment around you, the situation, often determines how you behave more strongly than who you are--- that is, your internal, dispositional nature - powerful situations can overcome inherent behavioral tendencies and lead us to engage in behavior that are very different from our usual selves - randomly assigned participants as either "guards" or "prisoners" - believed that the random assignments would result in different reactions in the mock prison environment

Reading 15: Maps in your Mind Author: Tolman, E. C. Date: 1948 Title: Cognitive maps in rats and men

Theoretical Propositions: - the true nature and complexity of learning could not be fully understood without examination of the internal mental processes that accompany the observable stimuli and responses - even though internal cognitive processes could not be directly observed, they could be objectively and scientifically inferred from observable behavior (involved using mazes and rats)

Reading 24: Thoughts Out of Tune Author: Festinger, L.; & Carlsmith, J. M. Date: 1959 Title: Cognitive consequences of forced compliance

Theoretical Propositions: - theorized that normally what you publicly state will be substantially the same as your private opinion or belief - if you believe "X" but publicly state "not X", you will experience the discomfort of cognitive (thoughts, ideas) dissonance (out of tune) - changes in attitudes and opinions will be greatest when dissonance is large

Reading 18: Out Of Sight, But Not Out Of Mind Author: Piaget, J. Date: 1954 Title: The development of object concept

Theoretical Propositions: - theory of cognitive development: during childhood, humans progress through four stages of cognitive development (sensori-motor, preoperational, concrete operations, and formal operations) that always occur in the same sequence and at approximately the same ages

Reading 14: Just How Are You Intelligent? Author: Gardner, H. Date: 1983 Title: Frames of mind: The theory of multiple intelligences

Theoretical Propositions: - theory of multiple intelligences (MI Theory) - human brain is diverse in abilities and is also extremely specialized in its functioning - different regions of your brain have evolved to carry out specific tasks related to thinking and knowing - types of intelligence: linguistic, musical, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalist, and ("existential" was proposed)

Reading 33: Choosing Your Psychotherapist Authors: Smith, M. L.; & Glass, G. V. Date: 1977 Title: Meta-analysis of psychotherapy outcome studies

Theoretical Propositions: - to identify and collect all studies that tested the effects of counseling and psychotherapy - to determine the magnitude of the effect of therapy in each study - to compare the outcomes of different types of therapy - meta-analysis: takes results of many individual studies and integrates them into a larger statistical analysis so that the diverse evidence is combined into a more meaningful whole

Reading 21: A Sexual Motivation Authors: Masters, W. H.; & Johnson, V. E. Date: 1966 Title: Human sexual response

Theoretical Propositions: - to understand human sexuality by studying human sexual behaviors as they occur in response to sexual stimulation - proposed that the only method by which answers could be obtained was direct systematic observation and physiological measurements of men and women in all stages of sexual responding

Reading 23: Life, Change, and Stress Authors: Holmes, T. H.; & Rahe, R. H. Date: 1967 Title: The Social Readjustment Rating Scale

Theoretical Propositions: - wanted to develop a way to measure the size or magnitude of the stress caused by various life experiences - if such a measure could be developed, it would be possible to obtain people's life-stress scores and relate them to their health status - Social Readjustment Rating Scale (SRRS)

Reading 32: Crowding into the Behavioral Sink Author: Calhoun, J. B. Date: 1962 Title: Population density and social pathology

Theoretical Propositions: - wanted to explore the effects of high-density population on social behavior - Calhoun had an earlier project where he had confined a population of rats to a quarter acre of enclosed, protected, outdoor space; there was an extremely high infant-mortality rate; stress of social interaction among 150 rats - he wanted to find out why this happened

Reading 38: The Power of Conformity Author: Asch, S. E. Date: 1955 Title: Opinions and social pressure

Theoretical Propositions: - wanted to find out how powerful the need to conform is influencing our behavior - focused on perceptual conformity: the extent to which humans tend to conform with one another's perceptions of the world (what we hear, taste, touch, smell, and see) - if conformity is as powerful a force as Asch believed, then researchers should be able to manipulate a person's behavior by applying group pressure to conform

Reading 28: The One, The Many Authors: Triandis, H.; Bontempo, R.; Villareal, M.; Asai, M.; & Lucca, N. Date: 1988 Title: Individualism and collectivism: Cross-cultural perspectives on self-ingroup relationships

Theoretical Propositions: - when cultures are defined and interpreted according to the individualism-collectivism model, we can explain a large portion of the variation we see in human behavior, social interaction, and personality - collectivist culture: the individual's needs, desires, and outcomes are secondary to the needs, desires, and goals of he ingroup, the larger group to which the individual belongs - individualistic cultures: place higher value on the welfare and accomplishments of the individual than on the needs and goals of the larger ingroups

Reading 31: Learning to be Depressed Authors: Seligman, M. E. P.; & Maier, S. F. Date: 1967 Title: Failure to escape traumatic shock

Theoretical Propositions: - when dogs were exposed to electrical shocks they could neither control nor escape, they later failed to learn to escape from shocks when such escape was easily available - these dogs had learned from previous experience with electrical shocks that their actions were ineffective in changing the consequence of the shocks - they had learned to be helpless - wanted to study the effect of controllable versus uncontrollable shock on later ability to learn to avoid shock

Reading 1: One Brain or Two? Author: Gazzaniga, M. S. Date: 1967 Title: The split brain in man

Theoretical Propositions: - The researchers wanted to explore the extent to which the two halves of the human brain are able to function independently, as well as whether they have separate and unique abilities.