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Plato, who believed in
innate ideas, suggest
that the brain is the
seat of mental
processes
• Works in include the Republic- where he
suggests that Philosophers should be king
because of their logical thinking
• Wrote the Allegory of the Cave- this was to
illustrate how much Socrates was above the rest
of us in his understanding of the Mind
• As a pupil of Socrates, Plato and he both
thought that the mind was separable from the
body and that it went on after the body dies
More scientifically
based- rejects that we
have innate knowledge,
but ironically suggested
that all thought/mental
processes was seated in
the heart.
• Took a scientific approach
• Only what is observable counts
• Reversed Plato/Socrates
• “the soul is not separable from the body,
and the same holds so for particular parts
of the soul”
• Knowledge is not pre-existing, instead it
grows from the experiences stored in our
memories
Over the next 2000 years very little was put
forth to add to psychological theory.
The Romans did little to advance things and with
their fall, the Dark Ages brought with it a slow
down of any scientific approach
The Catholic Church dominates the landscape
during the Dark Ages and severely limits the
amount on knowledge allowed to reach the
public
It was not really until Copernicus and later Galilei
began to put out the renewed idea that the Earth
was not the center of the universe that science was
able to advance.
Both were threatened by the Inquisition and had to
have most of their works published posthumously.
French
philosopher/math who
proposed the mindbody interaction and
doctrine of innate ideas
Publishes A Discourse on
Method
• “I think, therefore, I am”
• Concluded the Socrates/Plato were correct in
that the mind was “entirely distinct from the
body”
• How do they communicate then?
• Fluid in the brain cavities contained “animal
spirits”
• These flow through nerves (which he thought
were hollow) to the muscles
• Memories opened pores in the brain that
allowed these return spirits to flow
• Descartes was more spiritual as well. He felt as
if these instincts were what proved God’s
existence.
Father of Empiricism
• One of the founders of modern science
• “the human understanding, from its peculiar
nature, easily supposes a greater degree of
order and equality in things than it really finds”
• “all superstition is much the same whether it be
that of astrology, dreams, omens, etc….in all of
which the deluded believers observe events
which are fulfilled, but neglect and pass over
their failure, though it be much more common”
Wrote An Essay
Concerning Human
Understanding
• Tabula Rosa-blank slate- we are born with
nothing, experience is what fills in the page
• There is nothing in-born it all is developed
• Experience driven memories make up the
human condition
• These are passed down and form the
framework of history/philosophy/thought
Mesmer’s Hydrobath
Franz Mesmer was an Austrian physician
He performed cures that he called “Animal
Magnetism” later called Mesmerism or Hypnosis
This took place in his hydrobath and involved him
passing magnets around the bath water.
Eventually he got rid of the bath and magnets and
said that he himself had the magnetism and would
perform the process with his hands
He was expelled from medicine in 1777
Franz Joseph Gall
Belief that the shape of
the head could explain
mental facilities and
personality
1834- Ernst Heinrich Weber publishes The Sense of
Touch, in which he discusses the just noticeable
difference (jnd) and what we now call Weber’s Law
1848 Phineas Gage suffers massive head trauma
when a tamping rod left in a hole with dynamite
explodes and goes through his head. It pierces his
brain. However, it left his intellect and memory
intact but changes his personality
Gage with the rod
Gage’s Skull
1859- Darwin publishes On the Origin of the
Species by Means of Natural Selection
1861- Paul Broca, a French physician, discovers
an area in the brain critical for the production of
spoken language
Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwin, publishes
Hereditary Genius 1869
• In his book, Galton claims that all
intelligence is inherited
• In 1876 he coined the phrase “Nature and
Nurture to correspond to “heredity and
environment”
• Basically all his research was done by
reading biographies and Autobiographies
on famous people. From this he determined
all his theories
• He will develop the first personality tests as
his lasting legacy in psychology. Although
his hereditary studies go on to be
embraced by such groups as the NAZI
party
In 1874, Carl Wernicke, finds that damage to a
certain area of the left temporal lobe (similar to
Broca’s earlier discovery) and now called the
Wernicke Area, disrupts the ability to comprehend
or produce spoken and written language.
We are getting close to the joining of anatomical
research with the study of behavior and mental
processes that we would call modern psychology.
1878- G. Stanley Hall
gets the first Ph. D in
Psychology in the US
1879- Dr. Wilhelm
Wundt establishes the
first Psychology Lab in
Leipzig, Germany
1883- Hall, who was a
student of Wundt
establishes the first US
lab
Dr. Wilhelm Wundt
Wundt will go on to establish the 1st School of
Psychology which is called the Structuralist School
The School will be taken over quickly by Wundt’s
students as he was of retirement age. EB Tichener
and Hall
They will study the basic structures of the brain and
very elementary skills like reaction time. It relied
heavily on introspection- but if a person was not
verbal/intelligent they could not accurately give
information.
William James of
Harvard publishes
The Principles of
Psychology
It is the first text on
psychology and he
establishes the US
psychology school
of fundamentalism
1890
• James felt a alternative view was needed to
Structuralism. To him it was like trying to
understand a car by looking at its disassembled
parts
• The nose smells and the brain thinks, but how do
these two function together to provide the process
of living.
• Focus on moment to moment streams of
consciousness and exploration of emotions,
memories, will power and habits
• Known for his outspoken views on women in the
field and his writings
James championed
Mary Calkins joining his
classes at Harvard.
Even though she
outperformed the male
students and passes the
Doctoral level exams,
Harvard denied her a
diploma.
She will become the first
female president of the
APA
• Because Calkins rejected her diploma from
Radcliffe, Mary Floy Washburn is the first
female to get Psychology degree from Cornell
in 1894.
• It will take time for females to become
respected in the field.
The “Big Daddy” Sigmund Freud
• Perhaps the most famous psychologist of all
time.
• Austrian born, will begin the school of
Psychoanalysis.
• An innovator of ideas for the study
Basic principles of Psychoanalysis
• Introspection
• Consciousness (Id, Ego, Superego)
• Freudian Slip
• Word Association
• Dream Analysis
• Stage Theorist (shaping during childhood)
• Anxiety
• Defense Mechanisms
• Oedipal/Electra Complex
• Most work revolves around the idea of sex being the
master motivator for human behavior
• 1900 published his work The Interpretation of Dreams,
this will be his major work dealing with Psychoanalysis
Neo-Freudians
Trained by Freud
but disagreed with
him over various
tenants of his
theories
Two major points of disagreement
1) They placed more emphasis on the
conscious mind’ role in interpreting
experience and in coping with
environment
2) They doubted that sex and aggression
were all-consuming motivations. Loftier
motivations and social interaction more
so.
Alfred Adler
Inferiority Complex
We struggle more to overcome feelings
of inferiority in childhood and that
drives us more than sexual tension or
aggression in our personality formation
Much of our behavior stems from
childhood desire to achieve superiority
and power
Emphasis on where (in what order) birth
occurs as well. Middle Child Syndrome
Karen Horney (Horn-eye) get you minds out of the gutters
Childhood anxiety plays powerful role. Feelings of helplessness
make us search for love and acceptance.
Countered Freud’s theory that women had “weaker” superegos and
suffered from “penis envy”
Erik Erikson
No he doesn’t have the same parents as Charlie Charles
Like Adler and Horney he
felt that social experience
played a more important
part.
Develops his Psychosocial
Stages of Development
which is more of a sliding
scale than Freud’s
Psychosexual Stages
Carl Jung
Agreed with Freud that the unconscious is the most powerful pull. But went
beyond to say that the unconscious held more than just the repressed thoughts
and feelings. He thought humans had a “Collective Unconscious”- a common
reservoir of images derived from our species’ universal experiences called
Archetypes.
1905 Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon produce
the first Intelligence Tests (IQ)
Ivan Pavlov 1905
The beginnings of Conditioning
Pavlov with one of
his famous dogs.
He will experiment
with dogs to work
on his idea of all
behavior being
learned. This will
form the basis for
the School of
Behaviorism
Behaviorists
• Discount the idea of mental
constructs/consciousness. Not that they don’t
exist but that they don’t count (like looking at
the car’s speedometer-it doesn’t make the car
go, it reflects what’s happening)
• Only measurable, observable is what matters
• Research and data driven
• Most famous early proponent John B Watson
Watson and his lab assistant/main squeeze Rosalie Rayner
Together they worked on one of the most famous
Behaviorist experiments- “Little Albert”. In this experiment
run amok, they conditioned a child to be afraid of white
rats.
However, they
inadvertently
discovered that
generalization
would take place
when Albert also
showed fear of
related objects and
animals
What do you think about this quote,
write a response fully explaining your
answer.
Practically all the psychologist trained the United States
during the first half of the 1900’s were Behaviorists. It is
still major school today although there are now competing
schools and the idea of consciousness has re-entered
psychology’s lexicon.
Still, Watson begat Stanley Milgram, Philip Zimbardo and
the man considered to be the greatest modern
psychologist BF Skinner. They each carried on the tradition
of Behaviorism.
Milgram’s electroshock experiments after WWII were groundbreaking.
He would have subjects administer shocks to “volunteers” who got
wrong answers on tests, based on authority figures telling them to do
it in increasing magnitudes.
Controversial considering that the Holocaust had just happened
Zimbardo was famous for his
Stanford Prison Experiment and
later writings on Why Good
People do Bad Things and the
Lucifer Effect
https://youtu.be/sZwfNs1pqG0
B F Skinner
Voted the most influencial
psychologist of modern times
1938 publishes The Behavior of
Organisms, which describes the
Operant Conditioning of
animals
Up to this time, all behaviorists operated on the
theory of Classical Conditioning, Skinner will
change this
Operant Conditioning takes place by learning
from the consequence of behavior.
A dog is wandering around the neighborhood, sniffing, looking,
checking- typical dog behavior. He goes by an neighbor’s house
and your neighbor throws out a soup bone to him. The next day,
the dog is likely to come back during his rounds if not go directly to
it. When this happens, your neighbor produces another bone and
your dog becomes an daily visitor.
How does this differ from Classical Conditioning?
Skinner Box
1948 Skinner comes out with a novel Walden Two
that describes a Utopian Society based on positive
reinforcement.
This becomes a clarion call for applying
psychological principles to everyday living and
advocates a communal lifestyle.
The idea of positive and negative reinforcement
becomes a dominant theme in psychology
1920
Francis Cecil Sumner 1st African-American to get
Doctorate in Psychology from Clark University
Watson and Rayner perform their “Little Albert”
experiment
Hermann Rorschach develops his ink blot test,
designed after Freud’s word association
1923 Jean Piaget publishes The Language and
Thought of the Child
Piaget had become interested in
the development of human
thought by watching his three
daughters playing in a park in
Paris.
This will lead to a lifetime of
research that today is referred to
the Cognitive/Developmental
School of thought
Noam Chomsky and Leon
Festinger will be major
proponents.
1927 Introduction to the
Technique of Child Analysis by
Anna Freud
Begins taking a look at using
psychoanalysis in helping
children
Anna and
Sigmund
Her father
approved but
didn’t really help
with her research
Wolfgang Kohler
1929 Gestalt
Psychology
Criticizes
Behaviorist
psychology and
outlines essential
Gestalt principles
Gestalt School
Perception is the biggest influence in behavior
Gestalt Principles of Perception
simplicity, closure, proximity, similarity,
continuity
Simplicity
Closure
Proximity
Similarity
Continuity
1936- Egas Moniz publishes his results on the first
frontal lobotomies. He will become the
inspiration for Dr. Walter Freedman, who will
introduce the procedure to the United States.
(look forward to The Lobotomist when we get to
our study of the brain in a later section)
1938 Cerletti and Bini use electroshock therapy
on a human for the first time.
1939- David Wechsler publishes the WechslerBellevue intelligence test. This is a forerunner for
the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children
(WISC) and later the Wechsler Adult Intelligence
Scale (WAIS)
1943- Starke Hathaway and J. Charnley McKinley
publish the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality
Inventory (MMPI)
1946- Dr. Benjamin Spock publishes The
Commonsense Book of Baby and Child Care
Alfred Kinsey and his
colleagues publish Sexual
Behavior in the Human
Male. Groundbreaking
for its straightforward
treatment of a taboo
subject like sexuality
Opens door for other researchers of human
sexuality like Masters and Johnson and Dr. Ruth
Westheimer.
1948- Earnest Hilgard publishes Theories of
Learning- it becomes the text for all educators
1949- Raymond Cattell publishes the Sixteen
Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF)- the
standard for hiring practices.
1952- The APA publishes the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).
This will become the official guide for all
psychologist to go to when looking at diagnosing
mental disorders.
1953- Janet Taylor’s Manifest Anxiety Scale
appears in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology
1954- Abraham Maslow proposes his hierarchy
of needs in Motivation and Personality
1969- Albert Bandura publishes Principles of
Behavior Modification
1971 – his Social Learning Theory
Many more in the 80’s and 90’s- time will tell their
contributions
Later Schools
Humanist, Biological
and Sociocultural
Abraham Maslow
Carl Rogers
Rollo May
Humanist Psychology developed as a reaction to
behaviorism. It described human psychology as
evolving and self-directed.
It differs from Behaviorism and Psychoanalysis in
that it does not view humans as being controlled
by event in the environment or by unconscious
factors. Instead, the environment and other
outside forces simply serve as background to our
own internal growth.
Each person is unique and potential to fully
develop.
This is basically the approach taken by modern
educators and is the emphasis used in movements
like No Child Left Behind and the Kentucky
Education Reform Act.
What do you think about the fully immersive,
everyone can achieve at a high level mentality of
today’s educational movements?
Write a paragraph response.
Biological
Too new to have any major proponents to picture
Basically a modern rehash of the Structural School.
Now they have the technological means to go
beyond what Wundt and Tichener had to work
with. The use of CAT scans, MRI, EEGs and EKGs
are common in this approach.
Socioeconomic School
Leonard W. Doob
Newest approachStudies the
relationship/influence of
cultural and ethnic
similarities and differences
on behavioral and social
functioning
Environment means much
more
Today’s perspectives:
Biological, Evolutionary, Cognitive, Humanistic,
Psychoanalytic, Learning, Sociocultural, Behavioral
Biological-biological processes influence behavior
and mental processes
Evolutionary-adaptive organisms survive and
transmit their genes to future generations
Cognitive-perceptions and thoughts influence
behavior
Humanistic-people make free and conscious
choices bases on their unique experiences
Psychanalytic- Unconscious motives influence their
behavior
Learning- personal experience and reinforcement
guide individual development
Sociocultural- sociocultural, biological, and
psychological factors create individual differences
Most Psychologists blend all of the above into their
practices today. There is not really AN accepted
view. However this does not mean that people do
not specialize in one or another area.