Psychology Chapter 1

Wundt conceded that James was a topflight writer but disapproved of his approach:

"It is literature, it is beautiful, but it is not psychology"

In 1867, at the University of Heidelberg, Wundt taught what was probably the first course in physiological psychology, which led to the publication of his book Principles of Physiological Psychology, in 1874. Wundt called the book

"an attempt to mark out [psychology] as a new domain of science"

The French physicians Jean-Martin Charcot and Pierre Janet reported striking observations when they interviewed patients who had developed a condition known then as hysteria

, a tempormy loss of cognitive or motor functions, usually as a result of emotionally upsetting experiences

Humanistic psychologists focused on the highest aspirations that people have for themselves

. Rather than regarding people as prisoners of events in their remote pasts, humanistic psychologists viewed people as free agents who have an inherent need to develop, grow, and attain their full potential

This movement reached its peak in the

1960's

Cultural psychology began to emerge as a strong force in psychology only during the ________ and _______ when psychologists and anthropologists began to communicate with each other about their ideas and methods

1980s and 1990s,

The pioneering efforts of Wundt's laboratory launched psychology as an independent science and profoundly influenced the field for the remainder of the

19th century many psychologists journeyed to study with Wundt including Edward Titchener

these seven men decided that it was time to form an organization that represented psychology as a profession, and on that day the

American Psychological Association (APA) was born

Because the APA is no longer so focused on academic psychology as it once was, the_----------------- was formed in I 988 by 450 academic psychologists who wanted an organization that focused specifically on the needs of psychologists carrying out scientific research

American Psychological Society (APS) was eventually renamed Association for Psychological Science

Skinner recognized that in everyday life, animals don't just stand there-they do something!

Animals act on their environments in order to find shelter, food, or mates, and Skinner wondered if he could develop behaviorist principles that would explain how they learned to act in those situations.

From this perspective, James reasoned, mental abilities must have evolved because they were adaptive, that is, because they helped people solve problems and increased their chances of survival. Like other animals, people have always needed to avoid predators, locate food, and attract mates.

Applying Darwin's principle of natural selection, James (1890) reasoned that consciousness must serve an important biological function and that the task for psychologists was to understand what those functions are.

Broadbent was among the first to study what happens when people try to pay attention to several things at once

Broadbent observed that pilots can't attend to many different instruments at once and must actively move the focus of their attention from one to another

_________ and __________, then, were the first to demonstrate that the mind is grounded in a material substance, the brain

Broca and Flourens

French surgeon Paul Broca worked with Lous Leborgne his patient, who has suffered brain damage to a small part of the left side of his brain, he could not speak

Broca concluded that damage to a specific part of the brain impaired a specific mental function, clearly demonstrating that the brain and mind are closely linked

Jame's thinking was inspired by

Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection

The rest of the world did not agree, and James's functionalist psychology quickly gained followers, especially in North America, where ______ ideas were influencing many thinkers.

Darwin's

Rene Descartes

French Philosopher

_________________ became the first woman to serve as president of the APA

Mary Whiton Calkins (1863-1930) she claimed that the self is a single unit that cannot be broken down into individual parts.

In the early 1900s, Freud and a growing number of followers formed a psychoanalytic movement. Carl Gustav Jung and Alfred Adler were prominent in the movement, but both were independent thinkers, and Freud apparently had little tolerance for individuals who challenged his ideas

Freud broke off his relationships with both men so that he could shape the psychoanalytic movement himself

Freud's observations of hysteric patients

Freud theorized that many of the patients' problems could be traced to the effects of painful childhood experiences that the person could not remember, and he suggested that the powerful influence of these seemingly lost memories revealed the presence of an unconscious mind

French Physician Franz Joseph Gall also thought that

He examined the brains of animals and of people who had died of disease, or as healthy adults, or as children, and observed that mental ability often increases with larger brain size and decreases with damage to the brain

His findings

Helmholtz found that people generally took longer to respond when the toe was stimulated than when the thigh was stimulated, and the difference between these reaction times allowed him to estimate how long it took a nerve impulse to travel to the brain

William James was drawn to the work of two physiologists named

Hermann von Helmholtz ( 1821-1894) and Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920)

Example

His research participants were instructed to press a button as soon as a tone sounded. Some participants were told to concentrate on perceiving the tone before pressing the button, whereas others were told to concentrate only on pressing the button. Those people who concentrated on the tone responded about one tenth of a second more slowly than those told to concentrate only on pressing the button

During World War II, the military turned to psychologists to help understand how soldiers could best learn to use new technologies, such as radar. Radar operators had to pay close attention to their screens for long periods while trying to decide whether blips were friendly aircraft, enemy aircraft, or flocks of wild geese in need of a good chasing

How could radar operators be trained to make quicker and more accurate decisions? The answer to this question clearly required more than the swift delivery of pellets to the radar operator's food tray. It required that those who designed the equipment think about and talk about cognitive processes, such as perception, attention, identification, memory, and decision making

Psychology is an attempts to use scientific methods to address fundamental questions about mind a behavior such as

How do we experience the electrical and chemical activity) in our brains as things like thoughts, feelings, and behaviors? How do our minds respond to, and learn from, the world around us so quickly, and in ways that ensure our survival? What leads the mind to function so ineffectively in some people, such as in those who experience hallucinations, dramatic mood swings, or intense urges to end their own lives?

Humanistic therapists sought to help people realize their full potential; in fact, they called them clients rather than patients.

In this relationship, the therapist and the client (unlike the psychoanalyst and the patient) were on an equal footing. The development of the humanistic perspective was one more reason that Freud's ideas eventually became less influential.

In the real world of forests, sewers, and garbage cans, nausea is usually caused by spoiled food and not by lightning, and although these particular rats had been born in a laboratory and had never left their cages, millions of years of evolution had prepared their brains to learn the natural association more quickly than the artificial one.

It was not only the rat's learning history but also the rat's ancestors' learning histories that determined the rat's ability to learn

The efforts of ______________ and _______ set the stage for functionalism to develop as a major school of psychological thought in North America

James and Hall

The first member of a minority group to become president of the APA was __________________________), who was elected in 1970. he worked extensively on the self-image of African American children and argued that segregation of the races causes severe psychological harm

Kenneth Clark ( 1914-2005

birth can be traced back to

Norman Triplett who noticed that cyclists seemed to ride faster when they rode with others

Pavlov noticed something interesting in about the dogs he was studying

Not only did the dogs salivate at the sight of food; they also salivated at the sight of the person who fed them the feeders were not dressed in Alpo suits, so why should the mere sight of them trigger a basic digestive responses in the dogs?

Piaget gave 3-year-olds a large and a small mound of clay and told the child to make the two mounds equal. Then Piaget broke one of the clay mounds into smaller pieces and asked the child which mound now had more clay. Although the amount of clay remained the same, of course, 3-year-olds usually said that the mound that was broken into smaller pieces was bigger, but by the age of 6 or 7, they no longer made this error

Piaget theorized that younger children lack a particular cognitive ability that allows older children to appreciate the fact that the mass of an object remains constant even when it is divided. For Piaget, errors such as these provided key insights into the mental world of the child

During psychoanalysis, patients recalled past experiences ("When I was a toddler, I was frightened by a masked man on a black horse") and related their dreams and fantasies ("Sometimes I close my eyes and imagine not having to pay for this session").

Psychoanalysts used Freud's theoretical approach to interpret what their patients said.

Lashley hoped to find the precise spot in the brain where learning occurred. Alas, no one spot seemed to uniquely and reliably eliminate learning (Lashley, 1960).

Rather, Lashley simply found that the more of the rat's brain he removed, the more poorly the rat ran the maze

Rat example

The box has a lever and a food tray, and a hungry rat could get food delivered to the tray by pressing the lever. Skinner observed that when a rat was put in the box, it would wander around, sniffing and exploring, and would usually press the bar by accident, at which point a food pellet would drop into the tray. After that happened, the rate of bar pressing would increase dramatically and remain high until the rat was no longer hungry.

Darwin proposed the principle of natural selection:

The features of an organism that help it survive and reproduce are more likely than other features to he passed on to subsequent generations

phrenology

The idea that different parts of the brain are specialized for specific psychological functions turned out to be right; as you'll learn later in this textbook, a part of the brain called the liippocampus is intimately involved in memory, just as a structure called the amygdala is intimately involved in fear. But phrenology took this idea to an absurd extreme. Gall asserted that the size of bumps or indentations on the skull reflected the size of the brain regions beneath them and that by feeling those bumps, one could tell whether a person was friendly, cautious, assertive, idealistic, and so on.

To learn about the relationship between brain and behavior, behavioral neuroscientists observe animals' responses as the animals perform specially constructed tasks, such as running through a maze to obtain food rewards.

The neuroscientist can record electrical or chemical responses in the brain as the task is being performed or later remove specific parts of the brain to see how performance is affected.

We need to turn our attention back a few decades to understand some other important developments

The schools of psychological thought that had developed by the early 20th centurystructuralism, functionalism, and psychoanalysis-differed substantially from each other. But they shared an important similarity: Each tried to understand the inner workings of the mind by examining conscious perceptions, thoughts, memories, and feelings or by trying to elicit previously unconscious material, all of which were reported by participants in experiments or patients in a clinical setting

Bartlett found that research participants often remembered what should have happened or what they expected to happen rather than what actually did happen.

These and other errors led Bartlett to suggest that memory is not a photographic reproduction of past experience and that our attempts to recall the past are powerfully influenced by our knowledge, beliefs, hopes, aspirations, and desires

Later scanning studies showed that people who are deaf from birth, but who learn to communicate using American Sign Language (ASL), rely on regions in the right hemisphere (as well as the left) when using ASL. In contrast, people with normal hearing who learned ASL after puberty seemed to rely only on the left hemisphere when using ASL (Newman et al., 2002).

These findings suggest that although both spoken and signed language usually rely on the left hemisphere, the right hemisphere also can become involved-but only for a limited period (perhaps until puberty)

During our ordinary conscious experience we are only aware of a single "me" or "self," but the aberrations described by Charcot, Janet, and others suggested that the brain can create many conscious selves that are not aware of each other's existence

These striking observations also fueled the imagination of a young physician from Vienna, Austria, who had studied with Charcot in Paris in 188 5. His name was Sigmund Freud

non human animals, much like human ones, have conscious mental experiences

Washburn says

Miller showed that we can

We can pay attention to, and briefly hold in memory, about seven (give or take two) pieces of information

Consciousness encompasses a broad range of subjective experiences.

We may be conscious of sights, sounds, tastes, smells, bodily sensations, thoughts, or feelings.

It was in these times that psychologists such as Abraham Maslow ( 1908-1970) and Carl Rogers ( 1902-1987) pioneered a new movement called humanistic psychology,

an approach to understanding human nature that emphasizes the positive potential of human beings

Introspection

an attempt to measure consciousness the subjective observation of one's own experience

example

When you move your hands in front of your eyes, you don't feel your hands move a fraction of a second before you see them

In a famous and controversial study, Watson and his student Rosalie Rayner taught an infant known as "Little Albert" to have a strong fear of a harmless white rat (and other white furry animals and toys) that he had previously not feared.

Why would they do such a thing? You'll learn more about this study in the Learning chapter, but the short answer is this: Watson believed that human behavior is powerfully influenced by the environment, and the experiments with Little Albert provided a chance to demonstrate such influence at the earliest stage of life. Neither Watson nor later behaviorists believed that the environment was the only influence on behavior (Todd & Morris, 1992), but they did think it was the most important one. In

historians generally credit the official emergence of psychology to Helmholtz's research assistant,

Wilhelm Wundt

Oddly enough, one of the first psychologists to pay attention to the influence of culture was

Wilhelm Wundt who is recognized today for his pioneering development of experimental psycholOg)

One of the most prominent skeptics was someone you've already met: a young man with a bad attitude and a useless medical degree named

William James

But ____________ believed they had important implications for understanding the nature of the mind

William James He thought it was important to capitalize on these mental disruptions as a way of understanding the normal operation of the mind

The seven men were

William James G. Stanley Hall 5 others

Most historians consider Freud to be one of the two or three most influential thinkers of the 20th century, and the psychoanalytic movement influenced everything from literature and history to politics and art.

Within psychology, psychoanalysis had its greatest impact on clinical practice, but that influence has been considerably diminished over the past 40 years.

His conclusion

Wundt reasoned that both fast and slow participants had to register the tone in consciousness, but only the slower participants also had to interpret the significance of the tone and press the button.

But Gall went far beyond his evidence to develop a psychological theory known as phrenology,

a now discredited theory that specific mental abilities and characteristics, ranging from memory to the capacity for happiness, are localized in specific regions of the brain

Wundt believed that scientific psychology should focus on analyzing consciousness,

a person's subjective experience of the world and the mind.

Wertheimer's interpretation of the illusion led to the development of Gestalt psychology,

a psychological approach that emphasizes that we often percei1,e the whole rather than the sum of the parts. In other words, the mind imposes organization on what it perceives, so people don't see what the experimenter actually shows them (two separate lights); instead, they see the elements as a unified whole (one moving light).

this field of psychology remains dedicated to understanding the brain as

a social organ, the mind as a social adaptation, and the individual as a social creature.

Is Psychology a science?

a type of science yes

In I 892, the APA had 3 I members, all of whom were White and all of whom were male. Today,

about half of all APA members are women, and the percentage of nonWhite members continues to grow.

Culture can be nationality and ethnic groups as well as

age gender sexual orientation religion occupation and other of the many dimensions on which people differ

Plato and Aristotle were

among the first to struggle with questions about how the mind works

In Pavlov's experiments, the sound of the tone was a stimulus (sensory input from the environment) that influenced the salivation of the dogs, which was a response:.

an action or physiological change elicited by a stimulus

This idea led Freud to develop psychoanalytic theory,

an approach that emphasizes the importance of unconscious mental processes in shaping feelings, thoughts, and behaviors.

They developed a research area called physiological psychology. Today, this area has grown into behavioral neuroscience,

an approach to psychology that links psychological processes to activities in the nervous system and to other bodily processes

in the late 1980s, technological breakthroughs led to the development of noninvasive brain scanning techniques that made it possible for psychologists to watch what happens inside a human brain as a person performs a task such as reading, imagining, listening, or remembering

an invaluable tool because it allows use to observe the brain in action and to see which parts are involved in which operations

For example,

an observer pre!',ented with this page would not report seeing words on the page (which counts as an interpretation of the experience), but instead might describe a series of black marks, some straight and others curved, against a bright white background

These results were

astonishing because, at that time, just about everyone thought that mental processes occurred instantaneously

James taught the first course at an American university to draw on the new experimental psychology developed by Wundt and his German followers

at Harvard

For instance, whereas Wundt emphasized the relationship between elements of consciousness, Titchener focused on identifying the

basic elements themselves.

The goal of scientific psychology, according to Watson, should be to predict and to control

behavior in ways that benefit society.

Skinner developed a new type of

behaviorism

Psychologists now being led away from

behaviorism due to 3 developments 1. the renewed interest in mental processes 2. the growing interest in the brain 3. experiments by John Garcia

Today, most cultural psychologists fall somewhere

between these two extremes

Descartes argued that

body and mind are different things, that the body is made of a material substance, whereas the mind (or soul) is made of an immaterial or spiritual substance

even the simplest cognitive processes depend on the

brain

ex: the emotion of jealousy

can be a powerful and overhwleming emotion it exists today because it once served an adaptive function those who experienced it might have been more likely to guard their mates and aggress against their rivales and thus may have been more likely to reproduce and pass on their "jealous genes" to the next generation

Pavlov

carried out pioneering research on the physiology of digestion

evolutionary psychology has its roots in

charles darwin's thoery of natural selection: features of an organism that help it survive and reproduce are more likely than other features to be passed on to subsequent generations

They began to realize that one can often understand how something works by examining how it breaks, and their observations of mental disorders influenced the development of

clinical psychology

At about the same time that some psychologists were developing structuralism and functionalism, other psychologists working in hospitals and outpatient health care clinics were beginning to study people with psychological disorders (psychologists and other mental health professionals working in outpatient clinics are referred to as

clinicians

it seems likely that the most universal phenomena are those that are

closely associated with the basic biology that all human beings share.

damage to a particular part of the brain causes a person to lose a specific

cognitive ability damage to other parts of the brain can also result in syndromes that are characterized by the loss of specific mental abilities or by the emergence of bizarre behavior or beliefs

the name of this area of research is

cognitive neuroscience

If the brain was analogous to a software program, than

cognitive psychologists to begin writing computer programs to see what kinds of software could be made to mimic human speech and behavior (

Although depression is observed in nearly every culture, the symptoms associated with it vary dramatically from one place to another. For example, Western cultures place greater emphasis on

cognitive symptoms such as worthlessness, whereas Eastern cultures place greater focus on somatic symptoms such as fatigue and body aches

Evolutionary psychologists think of the mind as a

collection of specialized "modules" that solve the human problems our ancestors faced as they attempted to eat, mate, and reproduce over millions of years

Skinner build what he called a

conditioning chamber aka a skinner box

By analyzing the relation between feelings and perceptual sensations, Wundt and his students hoped to uncover the basic structure of

conscious experience

Skinner saw evidence for what he called the principle of reinforcement, which states that the

consequences of a behavior determine whether it will be more or less likely to occur again.

Psychoanalytic theory became quite ____________________________because it suggested that understanding a person's thoughts, feelings, and behavior required a thorough exploration of the person's early sexual experiences and unconscious sexual desires

controversial (especially in America) In those days these topics were considered far too racy for scientific discussion

Absolutism holds that

culture makes little or no difference for most psychological phenomena, that "honesty is honesty and depression is depression, no matter where one observes it" as any world traveler knows, cultures differ in exciting, delicious, and frightening ways, and things that are true of people in one culture are not necessarily true of people in another

counseling psychologists, who assist people in

dealing with work or career issues and changes or help people deal with common crises such as divorce, the loss of a job, or the death of a loved one

the only way to determine whether a phenomenon is variable or constant across cultures is to

design research to investigate these possibilities, and cultural psychologists do just that

Science requires replicable observations; we could never determine the structure of a cell or the life span of a dust mite if every scientist who looked through a microscope saw something

different

However, when the patients were put into a trancelike state through the use of hypnosis (an altered state of consciousness characterized by suggestibility), their symptoms

disappeared. Blind patients could see, paralyzed patients could walk, and forgetful patients could remember After coming out of the hypnotic trance, the patients forgot what had happened under hypnosis and again showed their symptoms. Each patient behaved like two different people in the waking versus hypnotic states.

Wundt used reaction times to examine a ____________ between the perception and interpretation of a stimulus

distinction

functionalism became more influential than structuralism had ever been. By the 1920s, functionalism was the

dominant approach to psychology in North America.

Chomsky showed that children

don't learn language solely be reinforcement Chomsky provided a clever, detailed, and thoroughly cognitive account of language that could explain many of the phenomena that the behaviorist account could not

Behaviorism was a __________ departure from previous schools of thought

dramatic

But if the mind and the body are different things made of different substances, how do they interact? How does the mind tell the body to put its foot forward, and when the body steps on a rusty nail, why does the mind say "ouch"? This is the problem of

dualism, or how mental activity can be reconciled and coordinated with physical behavior.

the advent of computers had enormous practical impact and an

enormous conceptual impact on psychology

Hall believed that as children develop, they pass through stages that repeat the evolutionary history of the human race. Thus, the mental capacities of a young child resemble those of our ancient ancestors, and children grow over a lifetime in the same way that a species evolves over

eons

Max Wertheimer focused on the study of illusions,

errors of perception, memory; or judgment in which subjective experience differs from objective reality

the brain is not an all-purpose computer that can do or learn one thing just as easily as it can do or learn another, rather it is a computer that does a few things well and everything else not at all, according to a

evolutionary psychologist It is a computer that comes with a small suite of built-in applications that are designed to do the things that previous versions of that computer needed to have done.

This paved the way for a new kind of psychology

evolutionary psychology

evolutionary psychology

explains mind and behavior in terms of the adaptive value of abilities that are preserved over time by natural selection

human beings are fundamentally social animals who are part of a vast network of

family, friends, teachers and coworkers

John Garcia and his colleagues showed that rats can learn to associate nausea with the smell of food much more quickly than they can learn to associate nausea with a

flashlight

school psychologists, who offer

guidance to students, parents, and teachers.

G. Stanley Hall's work focused on development and education and was strongly influenced by evolutionary thinking

he studied with both Wundt and James set up a lab a John's Hopkins

he conducted an experiment that showed that children reeled in a fishing line faster when tested in the presence of other children than when tested alone

he was trying to show that the mere presence of other people can influence performance on even the most mundane kinds of tasks

Watson applied Pavlov's techniques to

human infants

people wondered if the computer might be a useful model for the

human mind

Freud did not have an optimistic view of

human nature

scanning technology used to

identify the parts of the brain in the left hemisphere that are involved in specific aspects of language, such as understanding or producing words

These peculiar disorders were_______ by Wundt, Titchener, and other laboratory scientists, who did not consider them a proper subject for scientific psychology

ignored

The presence of evolutionary thinking is steadily

increasing

In 1879, at the University of Leipzig, Wundt opened the first laboratory exclusively devoted to psychological studies, an event that marked the official birth of psychology as an

independent field of study

The faster research participants, focusing only on the response they were to make, could respond automatically to the tone because they didn't have to engage in the additional step of

interpretation

At any given moment, all sorts of things are swimming in your stream of consciousness. Wundt tried to analyze them in a systematic way using the method of

introspection

The influence of the structuralist approach gradually faded, due mostly to the

introspective method

trying to understand people in the absence of that fact

it like trying to understand an ant or a bee without considering the function and influence of the colony or hive

begin with the assumpion that if an adaptation has been favored by atural selection than

it should be possible to find some evidence of this in the numbers of offspring that are produced by the trait's bearers

Lewin argued that a person's behavior in the world could be predicted best by understanding the person's subjective experience of the world

it was not the stimulus but rather the person's constrzial of the stimulus, that determined the person's subsequent behavior.

Wundt believed that a complete psychology would have to combine a

laboratory approach with a broader cultural perspective

Watson did not

like this claim, Watson decided that the only way to understand how animals learn and adapt was to focus solely on their behavior, and he suggested that the study of human beings should proceed on the same basis.

Behaviorism wouldn't dominate the field for much

longer

Skinner got a lot of backlash for this idea because

many people thought he was taking away their free will

cognitive psychology, focused on the study of

mental or cognitive processes such as perception, memory, subjective experience, attention, and language.

Their work jump-started the scientific investigation of

mental processes

In contrast to structuralism, which examined the structure of mental processes, functionalism set out to understand the functions those

mental processes served

Behaviorism ignored the

mental processes that had fascinated psychologists and found itself unable to explain some very important phenomena such as how children learn language it also ignored the evolutionary history of the organism it studied and was thus unable to explain why, for example, a rat could learn to associate nausea with food much more quickly than it could learn to associate nausea with a tone or a light

Psychology is the scientific study of

mind and behavior

noninvasive brain scanning techniques unravel

mysteries

Plato argued in favor of

nativisim

the desire to understand ourselves is not

new

We all know that the brain and the body are physical objects that we can see and touch and that the subjective contents of our minds-our perceptions, thoughts, and feelings-are

not

what can we say about the hardwire of the brain?

not much at this point

Behavior refers to

observable actions of human beings and nonhuman animals the things that we do in the world, by ourselves or with others

He recorded his participants' reaction time,

or the amount of time taken to respond to a specific stimulus, after applying the stimulus

Skinner claimed that

our subjective sense of free will is an illusion and that when we think we are exercising free will, we are actually responding to present and past patterns of reinforcement We do things in the present that were rewarding in the past, and our sense of "choosing" to do them is nothing more than an illusion

In America, the years after World War II were positive, invigorating, and upbeat: Poverty and disease were being conquered by technology, the standard of living of ordinary Americans was rising sharply, and people were landing on the moon. The era was characterized by the accomplishments-not the foibles-of the human mind, and Freud's viewpoint was

out of step with the spirit of the times.

Another example with people

people are reasonably adept at learning to drive a car, but nobody would argues that such an ability is the result of natural selection, the learning abilities that allow us to become skilled car drivers must have evolved for purposes other than driving cars

nativism is the

philosophical view that certain kinds of knowledge are innate or inborn Is the propensity to learn language "hard-wired" (something that children are born with)? Or does the ability to learn language depend on the child's experience?

Hysteric patients became blind, paralyzed, or lost their memories, even though there was no known

physical cause of their problems

Freud's influence diminished partly because his vision of human nature was a dark one, emphasizing limitations and problems rather than

possibilities and potentials he saw people as hostages to their forgotten childhood experiences and primitive sexual impulses

Watson thought that a focus on behavior would put a stop to the endless philosophical debates among psychologists and that it would foster

practical applications in such areas as business, medicine, law, and education

Phrenology, in the end, amounted to a series of strong claims based on

weak evidence it was quickly discredited

From a _______________perspective, it is important to uncover a person's early experiences and to illuminate a person's unconscious anxieties, conflicts, and desires.

psychoanalytic

Karl Lashley

psychologist who conducted a famous series of studies in which he trained rats to run mazes, surgically removed parts of their brains, and then measured how well they could run the maze again.

behaviorism didn't explain these striking findings, so

psychologists looked elsewhere for clues, outside the lab

the ability to test a theory is the cornerstone of the scientific approach and the basis for

reaching conclusions in modern psychology.

Wundt tried to provide objective measurements of conscious processes by using ___________________________ similar to those first developed by Helmholtz.

reaction-time techniques

However, many current traits of people and other animals probably evolved to serve different functions than those they currently serve. For example, biologists believe that the feathers of birds probably evolved initially to perform such functions as

regulating body temperature or capturing prey and only later served the entirely different function of flight

Skinner laid out his vision of a utopian society in which behavior was controlled by the judicious application of the principle of

reinforcement

The concept of _____________ became the foundation for Skinner's new approach to behaviorism

reinforcement

social psychologists address a

remarkable variety of topics

James returned from his European tour inspired by the idea of approaching psychological issues from a

scientific perspective

This type of experimentation broke new ground by showing that psychologists could use ______________________ to disentangle even subtle conscious processes. In fact, as you'll see in later chapters, reaction-time procedures have proven extremely useful in modern research

scientific techniques

Helmholtz trained his human participants to respond when he applied a stimulus, a

sensory input from the environment to different parts of the leg

James agreed with Wundt on some points, including the importance of focusing on immediate experience and the usefulness of introspection as a technique, but he disagreed with Wundt's claim that consciousness could be broken down into

separate elements

Tichener

set up a lab at Cornell University, bringing some parts of Wundt's approach to America, also made some changes

the development of social psychology began in 1930s and was driven by

several historic events 1. the rise of Nazism 2. the Holocaust 3. the Civil Rights Movement

the two areas of psychology that most strongly emphasize these facts are

social and cultural psychology

Physiologists had developed methods that allowed them to measure such things as the

speed of nerve impulses, and some of them had begun to use these methods to measure mental abilities

Although few modern psychologists believe that either nativism or empiricism is entirely correct, the issue of just how much "nature" and "nurture" explain any given behavior is

still a matter of controversy

Watson and other behaviorists made these two notions the building blocks of their theories, which is why behaviorism is sometimes called

stimulus-response (S-R) psychology.

cultural psychology is the

study of how culture reflect and shape the psychological processes of their members

The biologist Marie Jean Pierre Flourens was appalled by Gall's far-reaching claims and sloppy methods, so he conducted experiments in which he

surgically removed specific parts of the brain from dogs, birds, and other animals and found (no surprise!) that their actions and movements differed from those of animals with intact brain

Aristotle believed that the child's mind was a

tabula rasa, a blank slate on which experiences were written, and he argued for philosophical empiricism

Skinner developed

teaching machines, inspired by his daughter's 4th grade classroom

Freud's ideas were also difficult to

test and a theory that can't be tested is of limited use in psychology and or other sciences

this kind of study provides evidence that allows evolutionary psychologists to

test their ideas not every evolutionary hypothesis can be tested, but evolutionary psychologists have become very inventive in their strategies

British philosopher Thomas Hobbs argued

that the mind and body aren't different things at all; rather the mind is what the brain does

Most psychological phenomena can be influenced by culture, some are completely determined by it, and others seem to be entirely unaffected. For example

the age of a person's earliest memory differs dramatically across cultures, whereas judgments of facial attractiveness do not

As Wundt tried to figure out a way to study consciousness scientifically, he noted that chemists try to understand the structure of matter by breaking down natural substances into basic elements. His students built on this approach, which later came to be known as structuralism,

the analysis of the basic elements that constitute the mind. This approach involved breaking down consciousness into elemental sensations and feelings

James believed that trying to isolate and analyze a particular moment of consciousness (as the structuralists did) distorted

the essential nature of consciousness.

cognitive neuroscience

the field of study that attempts to understand the links between coginitve processes and brain activity

Broadbent showed that

the limited capacity to handle incoming information is a fundamental feature of human cognition and that this limit could explain many of the errors that pilots (and other people) made

In so doing, he also demonstrated that reaction time could be a useful way to study

the mind and the brain

This was important in the 19th century because at that time many people still accepted Descartes' idea that

the mind is separate from, but interacts with, the brain and the body

psychologists can now use scanning techniques to observe people with varies kinds of cognitive capacities and use their observations to unravel

the mysteries of the mind and the brain

Such studies revealed practices-some bizarre from a North American perspective-that served important functions in a culture, such as

the painful ritual of violent bod) mutilation and bloodletting in mountain tribes of New Guinea, which initiates young boys into training to become warriors

According to Freud, the unconscious is

the part of the mind that operates outside of conscious awareness but influences conscious thoughts, feelings, and actions.

From Hobbes's perspective, looking for a place in the brain where the mind meets the body is like looking for

the place in a television where the picture meets the flat panel display.

Mind refers to

the private inner experience of perceptions, thoughts, memories, and feelings, an ever-flowing stream of consciousness

To understand psychology in the 21st century we need to become familiar with

the psychology of the past

The emergence of the computer led to a reemergence of interest in mental processes all across the discipline of psychology, and spawned a new approach called cognitive psychology

the scientific study of mental processes, including perception, thought, 111emorJ\ and reasoning.

Helmholtz had developed a method for measuring

the speed of nerve impulses in a frog's leg that he then adapted to the study of human beings

In the middle of the 19th century, psychology benefited from the work of German scientists who were trained in the field of physiology,

the study of biological processes, especially in the human body.

Consciousness, James argued, was more like a flowing stream than a bundle of individual components. So James decided to approach psychology from a different perspective entirely and developed an approach known as functionalism,

the study of how mental processes enable people to adapt to their environment

social psychology

the study of the causes and consequences of sociality

To answer this question, Pavolve developed a procedure in which he sounded a tone every time he fed the dogs and after a while he observed that the dogs would salivate when they heard

the tone alone

philosophical empiricism

the view that all knowledge is acquired through experience

North Americans and western Europeans are sometimes surprised to realize that most of the people on the planet are members of neither culture

there is nonetheless considerable diversity within the human species in social practices, customs, and ways of living

ex: men tent to have deeper voices than women because women prefer to mate with baritones rather than sopranos

to test this, researchers studied a group of modern hunter-gatherers in Tanzania and found that the pitch of a man's voice DID indeed predict how many children he would have, but the pitch of a woman's did not

Lewin used a special kind of mathematics called_______ to model the person's subjective experience, and although his topological theories were not particularly influential, his attempts to model mental life and his insistence that psychologists study hm, people construe their worlds had a lasting impact on psychology. �

topology

Margaret Mead (1901-1978) and Gregory Bateson (1904-1980) attempted to understand the workings of culture by

traveling to far-flung regions of the world and carefully observing child-rearing patterns, rituals, religious ceremonies, and the like

Rather, he argued that an

understanding of the principles by which behavior is generated could be used to improve the social welfare, which is precisely what happens when a government launches advertisements to encourage citizens to drink milk or quit smoking

Culture refers to the

values, traditions, and beliefs that are shared by a particular group of people

the least universal phenomena are those rooted in the

varied socialization practices that different cultures develop.

Relativism holds that psychological phenomena are likely to

vary considerably across cultures and should be viewed only in the context of a specific culture

The real world doesn't appear like one of those late-night movies in which the video and the audio are off by just a fraction of a second. Scientists assumed that the neurological processes underlying mental events must be instantaneous for everything to be so nicely synchronized, but Helmholtz showed that this

wasn't true.

how can evolutionary hypotheses be tested?

we don't know our ancestor's thoughts and feelings, it's challenging but not impossible

people are the most important and most complex organisms that

we ever encounter so our behavior is strongly influenced by their presence, or absence

Watson proposed that psychologists focus entirely on the study of behavior, meaning

what people do, rather than what people experience-because behavior can be observed by anyone and it can be measured objectively

As the 20th century unfolded, a new approach developed as psychologists challenged the idea that psychology should focus on mental life at all. This new approach was called behaviorism,

which advocated that psychologists restrict themselves to the scientific study of objectively observable behavior

Psychoanalytic theory formed the basis for a therapy that Freud called psychoanalysis,

which focuses on bringing unconscious material into conscious awareness to better understand psychological disorders.

they seek to understand

which of these phenomena are universal and which vary from place to place and time to time

cultural psychologists study a

wide range of phenomena, ranging from visual perception to social interaction

(The word hysteria, by the way, comes from the Latin word hyster, meaning

womb