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Unit 1: History of Psychology and Approaches
Figure 1:
The human body contains blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. These are the
things that make up its constitution and cause its pain and health. Health is
primarily that state in which these constituent substances are in the correct
proportion to each other, both in strength and quantity, and are well mixed
-Excerpt from the Hippocratic Corpus:
Figure 2:
“Let us suppose the mind [of a new born child] to be… white paper, void of all
characteristics…” -Excerpt from Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689),
John Locke
Figure 3: A Phrenology Map
Figure 4: Natural Selection
Figure 5: Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It, John Watson (1913)
Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective experimental branch of natural
science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior. Introspection forms
no essential part of its methods… The behaviorist, in his efforts to get a unitary scheme of
animal response, recognizes no dividing line between man and brute.
The time seems to have come when psychology must discard all reference to consciousness;
when it need no longer delude itself into thinking that it is making mental states the object
of observation.
I believe we can write a psychology… define it…and never go back upon our definition:
never use the terms consciousness, mental states, mind, content, introspectively verifiable,
imagery, and the like.
If psychology would follow the plan I suggest, the educator, the physician, the jurist and the
business man could utilize our data in a practical way, as soon as we are able,
experimentally, to obtain them.
What we need to do is to start work upon psychology, making behavior, not consciousness,
the objective point of our attack.
Figure 6:
Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring
them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become
any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes,
even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities,
vocations, and race of his ancestors. I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so
have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of
years.
-John Watson, Behaviorism, 1925
Figure 7:
“Musicians must make music, artists must paint, poets must write if they are
to be ultimately at peace with themselves. What human beings can be, they
must be. They must be true to their own nature. This need we may call selfactualization.”
-Motivation & Personality , Abraham Maslow, 1970
Figure 8:
No one who has seen a baby sinking back satiated from the breast
and falling asleep with flushed cheeks and a blissful smile can escape
the reflection that this picture persists as a prototype of the
expression of sexual satisfaction in later life.
The tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual
disposition in man... it constitutes the powerful obstacle to culture.
Figure 9:
A) Neurotransmitter synthesis and neurotransmitter receptor genes have been
considered as plausible candidate genes for alcoholism. In particular…dopamine is
thought to play a major role in central reward processes. In 1990, Blum et al.
proposed an association between the A1 allele of the DRD2 gene and alcoholism.
The DRD2 gene is the first candidate gene that has shown promise of an
association with alcoholism.
B) A study in Sweden followed alcohol use in twins who were adopted as
children and reared apart. The incidence of alcoholism was slightly higher
among people who were exposed to alcoholism only through their adoptive
families. However, it was dramatically higher among the twins whose
biological fathers were alcoholics, regardless of the presence of alcoholism
in their adoptive families.
C) An alcoholic parent’s influence can occur in at least three ways:
1) imitation or modeling, in which the child models itself after the
alcoholic parent;
2) interaction with the alcoholic parent or nonaffected parent (e.g.,
positive interactions when alcoholic parent drinking and negative
interactions when not drinking); and
3) bidirectional influences (e.g., family disruption affects child's school
behavior, school performance elicits further family disruption).
D) A commonly cited example is the near complete absence of drinking
and alcoholism in Muslim societies. The total or almost total
nonavailability of alcohol in these societies derives from religious
proscriptions against alcohol permeating all political, legal, and
social structures, thereby creating the extreme of a true abstinence
society. Deviations from the near-universal norm are treated harshly…