Chapter 9 - Who's On the Test
Wundt - set up 1st experimental psychology laboratory in 1879; Voluntarism was the first
school of psychology; Wundt's "introspection" was more experimental (such as his
thought meter); experimentation can be used to study the basic mental process (but not
higher cognitive functions); higher cognitive functions can be deduced using
Völkerpsychologie; the most important mental law - will; Goals of psychology are to
discover the basic elements of thought and the laws that combine them into more
complex mental experiences; 2 basic types of mental experience - (1) sensations
(described in terms of its modality and intensity), and (2) feelings; Tridimensional theory
of feelings (emotions); perception is a passive automatic experience of many elements
simultaneously, whereas apperception (attention) is an active and voluntary focus on part
of the perceptual field; this active arrange and rearranging what one attends to is called
creative synthesis; proposed several principles for why psychological events could not be
predicted (aside from the fact that they are voluntary) - (1) principle of creative resultants
(a psychical combination is not just the sum of its individual components), (2) principle
of the heterogony of ends (a goal-directed activity does not only achieve its goal but also
has other effects), (3) principle of contrasts (opposite experiences intensify one another),
& (4) principle toward the development of opposites (after a prolonged experience of one
type there is an increased tendency to seek the opposite type of experience); verbal
communication (speaker has general impression of what he wants to communicate, then
he chooses the words for communication; the listener hears the words and from the words
deduces the general impression or message being conveyed).
Titchener - wanted to discover the structure of consciousness - the school of structuralism;
studied under Wundt in Leipzig; taught at Cornell University; started "The
Experimentalists" group in 1904; many of his doctoral graduate students (19 of 56) were
women, however, women were not allowed into "The Experimentalists"; psychology
should study consciousness (the sum total of mental experience at any given moment);
mind is the accumulated experiences of a lifetime; used introspection; introspectors were
trained to report only their experience (no meaning); if any meaning was reported that
was a stimulus error; believed that sensations were the elements of perceptions & he
identified some 40,000 sensations; one dimension theory of emotions (pleasantness
unpleasantness); no such thing as the phenomenon of attention - attention was just a clear
sensation.
Criticisms of introspection as Titchener used it - introspection was really retrospection; the
process of introspection would change your mental phenomena; different results with
different introspectors and training.


Chapter 10 - Who's On the Test
Lamarck - inheritance of acquired characteristics (Lamarckian evolution).
Spencer - the Spencer-Bain principle (evolutionary associationism); associations between
thoughts occurs through the principle of contiguity; introduced the word "intelligence" to
psychology, and coined the phrase "survival of the fittest"; applied survival of the fittest
to societies, called social Darwinism.
Darwin - the Beagle voyage; Malthus' observations on population; theory of natural selection
(collected massive amount of data supporting theory); survival is a struggle for survival
& organisms that fit the environment the best will survive; fitness (the ability to survive
and reproduce); adaptive features; emotional expressions; humans & animals differ in
degree (not qualitatively); expanded animal & comparative psychology, developmental
psychology, study of emotions & interest in individual differences.
Sir Francis Galton - important link between Darwinian theory & American psychology;
intelligence determined by sensory acuity (antrhopometry laboratory); studied fraternal
vs. identical twins; intelligence is inherited (nativism), however, only a potential was
inherited, then environment could nurture the individual to a certain extent; compared
"illustrious" families to "nonillustrious" families - found that children of illustrious
parents also tended to be illustrious themselves; humans should engage in selective
breeding (Eugenics) - couples should be scientifically matched & government should pay
them to marry and educate their children; identified regression towards the mean;
introduced the median as a measure of central tendency
Cattell - first to use the term "mental test"; also believed intelligence to be related to sensory
acuity; believed in eugenics & offered each of his own 7 children $1,000 if they married
the child of a college professor; later found that his tests of acuity did not predict
academic performance.
Goddard - translated the Binet-Simon scales of intelligence from French into English;
administered the test to 2,000 students in New Jersey & found that many public school
children performed below normal for their ages; traced the "Kallikak" family & coined
the term "moron" to refer to feebleminded people; argued that the intelligent members of
society had to take control & segregate &/or sterilize mental deficients; administered tests
to incoming immigrants and claimed 40-50% of them were "morons"; so, incoming
morons started to be identified and turned away; later in life he accepted Binet's belief
that those that score low should receive special education & not be segregated or
sterilized.
Hollingworth - moved to New York with husband, but could not teach (NYC had a policy of no
married school teachers - it was improper to have a woman that had known sex to teach
children); she fought against the belief that women were intellectually inferior to men,
instead emphasizing the importance of the environment, such as social roles &
expectations (and may have helped change Thorndike opinion on this subject); her
dissertation for her master's at Columbia studied "functional periodicity" (the notion that
during menstruation women were psychologically impaired) - she found no evidence for
this; fought against myths concerning "mental defectives" - found that many actually had
social and personal adjustment problems; proposed educational strategies for promising
or gifted children.


Chapter 11 - Who's On the Test
Stages of psychology in America
Functionalism
James - pragmatism; stream of consciousness (personal, can't be divided for analysis, constantly
changing, is selective, & is functional); instincts & habits; advice for developing good
habits (5 things to do); empirical self divides into 3 components - material self, social
self, & spiritual self; self-esteem (ratio of things attempted to things achieved); James-
Lange theory of emotion (action or physiological reaction first, then the subjective
experience of the emotion); ideo-motor theory of behavior; 2 types of personalities
(tender-minded & tough-minded).
Calkins - attended graduate courses at Harvard (but not "officially" enrolled); Harvard would
not awarded her Ph.D.; pioneered the paired-associate technique to study learning &
memory (subject learns a set of paired/associated words, the subject is later tested by
presenting one of the items and the subject responding what the other item was); pioneer
of personality psychology; 1st woman president of the APA in 1905; 1st woman president
of the American Philosophical Association in 1918; awarded an honorary Ph.D. from
Columbia University in 1909.
G. Stanley Hall - recapitulation theory; adolescents operate on instinct giving the psychologist
the clearest picture of what humans are really like (discarded habits of childhood & adult
habits were not formed yet); stimulated much research in educational & developmental
psychology; president of Clark University; first president of the American Psychological
Association; founded the first journal of psychology in America - the American Journal
of Psychology.
Edward L. Thorndike - laid the foundations for animal experimentation in psychology;
anthropomorphizing (Romanes); Morgan's Canon; used puzzle box to study trial-and
error learning in cats; concluded (1) learning is incremental, (2) learning occurs
automatically, & (3) the same learning principles apply to all mammals; proposed a
theory of connectionism (neural connections between sense impressions and responses, &
probability of response depends on strength of this neural connection); law of exercise
(psychology's 1st major theory of learning) with 2 parts - (1) law of use & (2) law of
disuse; law of effect; identical elements theory of transfer.


Chapter 12 - Who's On the Test
Behaviorism
Russian behaviorist psychology
Ivan M. Sechenov - a positivist; wanted to explain all psychological phenomena in terms of
associationism & materialism; all behavior is caused by external stimulation; discovered
the process of inhibition in the brain - saw inhibition as an explanation for voluntary
control over normally involuntary behavior; believed that inhibition could also explain
discrepancies between the strength of a stimulus and the intensity of a response; saw
human development as the slow establishment over time of inhibitory control over
reflexive behavior; objective psychology.
Ivan P. Pavlov - awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology in 1904 for his research on digestion;
somewhat reluctantly delved into psychology, but he approached it from a scientific
(physiological) point of view; the role of serendipity in science - in his digestion research
noticed that dogs started salivating before the food was presented to them; Classical
Conditioning - US (food) produces an automatic/unlearned response (UR), a neutral
stimulus (CS) is paired with the US, after repeated pairings the CS alone produces a
response (CR) similar to the UR; all activity in the CNS (central nervous system) can be
characterized as either excitatory or inhibitory - so over time and through classical
conditioning stimuli will come to elicit excitation or inhibition in the CNS; a wide variety
of stimuli are in the environment (some stimuli excite and some inhibit) - it is the overall
effect of all these on the brain at any given moment that is called the cortical mosaic (the
combination of all the stimuli present determine behavior); demonstrated the phenomena
of extinction, spontaneous recovery, disinhibition, & experimental neurosis; proposed 4
types of nervous systems to explain individual differences in experimental neurosis; no
reference to mental phenomena were permitted in Pavlov's lab - if someone used mental
terminology s/he would be fined; Lenin proclaimed Pavlov a "Hero of the Revolution".
John B. Watson - influenced by the physiologist Loeb's findings on tropism (behavior of
simple organisms can be explained by eliciting stimuli); Watson was the 1st psychologist
to experiment extensively with the white rat as the subject; Watson also was influenced
by ethology (he accompanied Lashley on some studied to Key West, Florida); elected
president of the American Psychological Association in 1914; Radical Behaviorism;
Watson rejected introspection and consciousness (physical monism) - so called
consciousness is just an epiphenomenon (a side effect of physiological reactions that had
been caused by stimuli); 4 types of behavior - (1) explicit (overt) learned behavior, (2)
implicit (covert) learned behavior, (3) explicit unlearned behavior, & (4) implicit
unlearned behavior; speech was just overt behavior, and thinking was implicit (or
subvocal) speech; 3 basic emotions present at birth - fear, rage, & love; Watson &
Rayner's experiment with little Albert; Watson & Cover Jones' work to extinguish fear in
Peter with behavior therapy (using what today are referred to as modeling & systematic
desensitization); his affair with Rayner ended his career in academia; Watson began a
successful career in advertising; Watson & Rayner wrote books with advice on how to
raise children that became popular; Watson was largely responsible for switching
psychology's major goal from explanations of consciousness to the prediction & control
of behavior (even today psychology is defined as the study of the human mind &
behavior).