Download Alfred Adler

Psychologists to Know
Alfred Adler
 Neo-Freudian but disagreed with Freud’s emphasis on the unconscious, instinctual drives,
and the importance of sexuality and had a more positive view
 Believed we are social creatures governed by social urges, we strive for superiority
 Talked about how people attempt to compensate for their shortcomings
Mary Ainsworth
 “Strange Situation” Experiment
 Secure attachment- stable and positive
 Anxious-Ambivalent- desire to be with a parent and some resistance to being reunited
 Avoidant- tendency to avoid reunion with parent
Gordon Allport
 Trait Theorist
 Central- the core traits that characterize an individual personality
 Secondary- traits that are inconsistent or relatively superficial
 Cardinal- so basic that all of a person’s activities relate to it
Gordon Allport & Leo Postman
 Experiment about rumor transmission, the results of which have been altered to fit legal
interpretations about eyewitness testimony
 Actual experiment: One subject saw the slide (white man pulling a straight-edge razor on
a black man), then told another subject about it, who told another subject and so on.
After 6 or 7 subjects, the knife had migrated from the white to the black hand
 NEVER tested the memory of the subjects who actually viewed the slide. Here's
something interesting though: the specifics of A & P's experiment were distorted over
time, as the results were passed from one person to the next, being interpreted instead
as: "In a classic study of this phenomenon, Gordon W. Allport of Harvard had his subjects
take a brief look at a drawing of several people on a subway train, including a seated
black man and a white man standing with a razor in his hand...After a brief look at a
drawing such as this one, half of the observers reported having seen the razor, a
stereotyped symbol of violence in blacks, in the black man's hand". Scientific American,
1974
Solomon Asch
 Studied conformity- subjects were shown lines of different lengths and asked which of the
lines matched an example line that they were shown, his accomplices gave the wrong
answer to see how the actual subject would react to finding that their opinion differed
from the group opinion, subjects conformed in about 1/3 of the trials
John William Atkinson
 Pioneered the study of human motivation, achievement, and behavior
Albert Bandura
 Studied observational learning in children using a Bobo Doll
Frederic Bartlett
 Had college students view a picture, & describe it from memory to one another
 Identified reconstructive memory (confabulation), serial reproduction, role of schemas
Diana Baumrind
 Parenting styles & resulting child behavior
 Authoritarian, permissive, authoritative
Sandra Bem
 Bem Sex Role Inventory to study femininity, masculinity, androgyny
 Rigid gender stereotypes greatly restrict behavior
 Studied gender roles
Eric Berne
 Transactional Analysis- has elements of cognitive, humanist, and psychoanalytic
approaches
Alfred Binet
 Designed the first intelligence test made up of “intellectual” questions and problems,
results were based on average scores for children in each age group
 His test was revised by Lewis Terman and others at Stanford and made into the StanfordBinet Intelligence Scales, which were used in North America
John Bowlby
 Child development
 Attachment theory
James Cattell
 First professor of psychology in the United States, helped establish psychology as a
legitimate science
Raymond Cattell
 16 Trait Personality Inventory
 Surface traits appear in clusters, 16 source traits
 Factor analysis
Jean-Martin Charcot
 Known as the founder of modern neurology, taught and influenced Freud
Noam Chomsky
 Proposed an innate language acquisition device
John Darley & Bibb Latané
 Diffusion of responsibility & helping behavior
 Altruism
 Experiment of emergency situations
John Dollard & Neal Miller
 Habits make up the structure of personality and are governed by drive, cue, response
and reward
Hermann Ebbinghaus
 Forgetting curve
Paul Ekman
 Pioneer of the study of emotions and their relation to facial expressions
 Developmental psychologist
Jane Elliott
 “blue eyes/brown eyes” 3rd grade classroom & segregation/prejudice
Albert Ellis
 Cognitive therapist
 founder of rational emotive behavioral therapy which attempts to change irrational
beliefs that cause emotional problem
Erik Erikson
 Proposed that development occurs in stages, each stage confronts a person with a new
developmental task
 Trust v. Mistrust; autonomy v. shame and doubt; initiative v. guilt; industry v. inferiority;
identity v. role confusion; intimacy v. isolation; generativity v. stagnation; integrity v.
despair
Hans Eysenck
 Trait theorist
 Big 3- melancholic, choleric, phlegmatic
Leon Festinger
 Cognitive dissonance
 Attitude change
 Being paid 1$ or 20$ to say boring task was exciting
James Flynn
 Flynn effect, IQ, influence of environment
 Long-term increase in IQ has been occurring since early 1900s
Viktor Frankl
 Existential therapist
 1946 book Man's Search for Meaning chronicles his experiences as a concentration
camp inmate and describes his psychotherapeutic method of finding a reason to live
 Logotherapy- emphasized the need to find and maintain meaning in life
Anna Freud
 Neo-Freudian
 Disagreed with Freud’s (father) theories about women
 Child development & defense mechanisms
Sigmund Freud
 Founder of psychoanalysis
 Id, Ego, Superego theory of personality
 Psychosexual stages - Oedipus/Electra complex
 Many of our behaviors are driven by unconscious motives/desires
John Garcia
 Studied taste aversion in rats with radiation, decided there was an evolutionary element
to taste aversion
 Some animals are predisposed to taste aversion
Howard Gardner
 Theorized that there are actually eight different kinds of intelligence
 Linguistic, logic and math, visual and spatial thinking, music, bodily-kinesthetic skills,
intrapersonal skills, interpersonal skills, naturalist skills
E.J. Gibson & R.D. Walk
 Visual cliff experiment
 Depth perception in babies
Carol Gilligan


Created a theory of moral development in women because male psychologists were
overly focused on defining moral maturity in terms of justice and autonomy
She pointed out that there is also an ethic of caring about others that is a major element
of moral development
Daniel Goleman
 Emotional quotient
 Learning how to handle people & own emotions
G. Stanley Hall
 Founded the American Journal of Psychology
Harry Harlow
 Separated baby rhesus monkeys from their mothers at birth, placed with surrogate
mothers either made of wire/metal or cloth, studied mother-infant relationships &
identified “contact comfort”
Fritz Heider
 Austrian psychologist whose work was related to the Gestalt school
 In 1958 he published The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations, which systematized and
expanded upon his creation of balance theory and attribution theory
Gestalt Theory
 German: Gestalt - "essence or shape of an entity's complete form"
 Gestalt effect refers to the form-forming capability of our senses, particularly with respect
to the visual recognition of figures & whole forms instead of just a collection of simple
lines and curves
 In psychology, gestaltism is often opposed to structuralism and Wundt
 The phrase "The whole is greater than the sum of the parts" is often used when explaining
Gestalt theory
Ernest “Jack” Hilgard
 Researched hypnosis and its effectiveness as an analgesic
 “hidden-observer” effect - created in the mind while hypnosis is taking place
Karen Horney
 Neo-Freudian
 Among the first to challenge the obvious male bias in Freud’s theories
 Disagreed with his cause of anxiety- believed that people feel anxious because they feel
isolated and helpless in a hostile world, believed causes are rooted in childhood
James Allan Hobson & Robert McCarley
 Activation-synthesis theory of dreaming
 States that dreams are a random event caused by firing of neurons in the brain. This
random firing sends signals to the body's motor systems, but because of a paralysis that
occurs during REM sleep, the brain is faced with a paradox. It synthesizes a narrative by
drawing on memory systems in an attempt to make sense of what it has experienced.
Clark L. Hull
 Drive theory
 sought to explain learning and motivation by scientific laws of behavior
 formula for determining motivation, was sEr = sHr * D, where:
sEr = excitatory potential (likelihood that the organism would produce response r to stimulus s)
sHr = habit strength (derived from previous conditioning trials),
D = drive strength (determined by, e.g., the hours of deprivation of food, water, etc.)

Later, a variety of other factors were gradually added to the formula to account for
results not captured by this simple function. Eventually the formula became: sEr = V x D x
K x J x sHr - sIr - Ir - sOr – sLr, where:
V = stimulus intensity
K = incentive motivation (size or quality of the reinforcer)
J = incentive based on the delay of reinforcement,
Ir = reactive inhibition (i.e., fatigue),
sIr = conditioned inhibition (due to previous non-reinforcement of r),
sLr = reaction threshold (smalles reinforcement that will produce learning),
sOr = momentary behavioral oscillation (error)
Carroll E. Izard
 Believes the infants can express several basic emotions as early as 10 weeks of age
William James
 Wrote Principles of Psychology and helped establish psychology as a serious discipline
 regarded consciousness as a stream or flow of images and sensations
Mary Cover Jones
 Pioneer of behavior therapy
 Unconditioned a fear of rabbits in a three year old named Peter
Carl Jung
 People are either introverts or extroverts
 Collective unconscious- mental storehouse for unconscious ideas and images shared by
all humans, such universals create archetypes
 Anima (female principle) & Animus (male principle) exist in everyone
Jerome Kagan
 Showed face masks to 2-yr-olds and found they were fascinated when they saw faces
with features in the wrong places
 Inhibited v. Uninhibited temperaments
Grace Helen Kent
 Kent-Rosanoff free association test - psychiatric screening tool using objective scoring
and norms
Alfred Kinsey
 Studied human sexuality
Kurt Koffka
 Co-founder of Gestalt psychology
Wolfgang Kohler
 Co-founder of Gestalt psychology
 Studied insight learning in chimpanzees – “Sultan” & the bananas
Lawrence Kohlberg
 Studied moral development in men
 PreconventionalStage 1: punishment orientation
Stage 2: pleasure-seeking orientation
 ConventionalStage 3: Good boy/ good girl orientation

Stage 4: Authority orientation
PostconventionalStage 5: social-contract orientation
Stage 6: Morality of individual principles
Elizabeth Kubler-Ross
 Thanatologiest- one who studies death
 Reactions to impending death- denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression,
acceptance
Karl Lashley
 Neural connection of memory
 Searched for engram by teaching a rat a task & then systematically slicing away its brain
Kurt Lewin
 Often called “founder of social psychology”
 Group dynamics & organizational behavior
Elizabeth Loftus
 Along with John Palmer showed people a filmed automobile accident, asked how fast
cars were going when they smashed or bumped or contacted, asked if they had seen
broken glass in the film (there was none) to study the tendency of people to construct
memories based on how they are questioned
Konrad Lorenz
 Discovered the principle of imprinting
 Studied instinctive behavior in animals
James Marcia
 Studied adolescent psychological development
 elaborated on Erikson’s theories theory of identity achievement
Abraham Maslow
 Humanist
 Self-Actualization was important
 Hierarchy of human needs- physiological needs, safety and security, love and belonging,
esteem and self-esteem, self-actualization
William Masters & Virginia Johnson
 Directly studied sexual intercourse and masturbation in nearly 700 males and females
 Sexual response can be divided into four phases: excitement, plateau, orgasm & resolution
David McClelland
 Believes that IQ is of little value in predicting real competence to deal effectively with
the world
 IQ predicts school performance, not success in life
 Achievement motivation/Need for Achievement
Margaret Mead
 Anthropologist who observed the Tchambuli people of New Guinea, where gender roles
are the opposite of those in America
Franz Mesmer
 Austrian physician who believed he could cure disease with magnets
 His treatments were based on the power of suggestion, not really magnetism and he was
later rejected as a fraud
 The term “mesmerize” comes from his name, his treatments sparked interest in hypnosis
Wolfgang Metzger
 Gestalt psychologist
Stanley Milgram
 Studied obedience
 Two subjects (“teacher” and “learner”) but the “learner” was actually an actor
 The teacher was told to shock the learner every time they answered a question
incorrectly to see how far they were willing to go
 65% go to highest shock level
George Miller
 Determined storage capacity of STM
 Magical number 7 + 2
Walter Mischel
 Showed that study after study failed to support the fundamental traditional assumption
of personality theory, that an individual’s behavior with regard to a trait (e.g.
conscientiousness, sociability) is highly consistent across diverse situations
 Instead, analyses revealed that the individual’s behavior, when closely examined, was
highly dependent upon situational cues, rather than expressed consistently across
diverse situations that differed in meaning
Ivan Pavlov
 Studied classical conditioning
 Paired a bell with food to make dogs salivate
 UCS, UCR, CS, CR
Fritz Perls
 Originator of Gestalt therapy
 Core of the process is enhanced awareness of sensation, perception, bodily feelings,
emotion and behavior, in the present moment
 Relationship is emphasized, along with contact between the self, its environment, and
the other
 Considered most dreams a special message about what’s missing in our lives, what we
avoid doing, or feelings that need to be “re-owned”
 Believed that dreams are a way of filling in gaps in personal experience
 Method of analyzing dreams involved speaking for characters and objects in your dreams
Jean Piaget
 Child development occurs in stages
 Sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, formal operations
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
 pursued two parallel careers:
(a) one in the study of visual perception, using the methods of psychophysics, which
permit clear inferences about what someone is seeing, based on what they report,
(b) the other in neurology, and in particular towards a number of neurological
syndromes
 Credited with introducing the use of visual feedback as a treatment for phantom limb
pain (the mirror box), rehabilitation after stroke, and RSD (complex regional pain
syndrome)
 Also known for his experiments and speculations (together with Edward Hubbard and
David Brang) in the field of synesthesia
 More recently his work has focused on the cause of autism
Robert Rescorla
 Stated that the predictive value of a conditioned stimulus is critical
 Contingencies are important
Carl Rogers
 Humanist
 Emphasized the human capacity for inner peace and happiness
 People need ample amounts of love and acceptance from others
 Unconditional positive regard
 Congruence of self
Hermann Rorschach
 Created the Rorschach inkblot test, a projective test of personality
David Rosenhan
 Stigmas & labeling
 Misdiagnosis by trained doctors of patients “hearing voices”
Robert Rosenthal & Lenore Jacobsen
 Pygmalion effect, or Rosenthal effect, refers to the phenomenon in which the greater the
expectation placed upon people, often children or students and employees, the better
they perform
 Posited that biased expectancies can essentially affect reality and create self-fulfilling
prophecies as a result
Julian Rotter
 Locus of control (internal v. external)
Daniel Schacter
 Research has focused on psychological and biological aspects of human memory and
amnesia, with a particular emphasis on the distinction between conscious and
nonconscious forms of memory and, more recently, on brain mechanisms of memory
distortion
 Also studied the effects of aging on memory
 Seven “sins” of memory
Stanley Schachter
 Emotion occurs when we apply a particular label to general physical arousal- we have
to interpret our feelings
Roy Schafer
 Emphasised a psychoanalytic concept of narrative
 An important purpose of the analytic process is that the client regains agency of her own
story and of her own life
 Psychoanalyst and client each have a role in telling and retelling the client’s lifestory: the
analyst helps the client by elevating subjectivity as awareness of multiple interpretations
Muzafer Sherif
 Robbers Cave Experiments took boys from intact middle-class families, who were
carefully screened to be psychologically normal, delivered them to a summer camp
setting (with researchers doubling as counselors) and created social groups that came
into conflict with each other.
 Group formation, group conflict, conflict resolution
 Showed that superordinate goals (goals so large that it requires more than one group to
achieve the goal) reduced conflict significantly more effectively than other strategies
(e.g., communication, contact).
Margaret Singer
 Studied and aided hundreds of former cult members
 Cults use a powerful blend of guilt, manipulation, isolation, deception, fear, and
escalating commitment
Martin Seligman
 Preparedness fear theory- we are prepared by evolution to readily develop fears to
certain biologically relevant stimuli, such as snakes and spiders
 Learned helplessness
Hans Selye
 Studied stress- the body responds in the same way to any stress (infection, failure,
embarrassment, a new job, trouble at school etc.)
 General Adaptation Syndrome (G.A.S.) - a series of bodily reactions to prolonged stress
(alarm, resistance, exhaustion)
B. F. Skinner
 Studied operant conditioning with rats and pigeons
 Created a Skinner Box
Charles Spearman
 A pioneer of factor analysis
 Did work on models for human intelligence, including his theory that disparate cognitive
test scores reflect a single general factor and coining the term g factor
George Sperling
 Sensory memory, storage
 Matrix briefly exposed for subjects to recall
Roger Sperry & Michael Gazzaniga
 Split-brain studies
 Lateralization - studies demonstrated that the left and right hemispheres are specialized
in different tasks
 Nobel Prize in Physiology 1981
Robert Sternberg
 Triangular theory of love- love is made up of intimacy, passion and commitment which
can combine to produce seven types of love (romantic, liking, fatuous, infatuation,
companionate, empty, consummate)
 Believed insight involved selective encoding, selective combination, and selective
comparison
 Triarchic theory of intelligence- analytical intelligence, creative intelligence, practical
intelligence
Thomas Szasz
 The myth of mental illness: "Mental illness" is an expression, a metaphor that describes an
offending, disturbing, shocking, or vexing conduct, action, or pattern of behavior, such
as schizophrenia, as an "illness" or "disease"
 Disease can only mean something people "have," while behavior is what people "do"
 Criticized psychiatry for actively obscuring the difference between (mis)behavior and
disease, in its quest to help or harm parties to conflicts. By calling certain people
"diseased", psychiatry attempts to deny them responsibility as moral agents, in order to
better control them.
Lewis Terman

Revised Binet’s intelligence test to help create the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales for
use in North America, appropriate for people ages 2-90
Edward L. Thorndike
 Learning theorist
 Law of Effect- the probability of a response is altered by the effect it has, acts that are
reinforced tend to be repeated
L. L. Thurstone
 Work in factor analysis led him to formulate a model of intelligence center around
"Primary Mental Abilities" (PMAs), which were independent group factors of intelligence
that different individuals possessed in varying degrees
 Opposed the notion of a singular general intelligence
Edward Titchener
 Carried Wundt’s ideas into the United States and called them structuralism
E.C. Tolman
 Studied latent learning in rats with mazes
Endel Tulving
 made the distinction between episodic and semantic memory
 encoding specificity principle
 explicit v. implicit memory
Lev Vygotsky
 Sociocultural theory
 Children’s thinking develops through dialogues with more capable persons, children
actively seek to discover new principles
 Zone of proximal development- range of tasks a child cannot yet master alone but that
she or he can accomplish with the guidance of a more capable partner
John B. Watson
 Behaviorist
 Objected to the study of the mind or conscious experience
 Thought introspection was unscientific
 Observed stimuli and response, adopted Pavlov’s concept of conditioning
 Emotions can be learned – “Baby Albert”
David Wechsler
 Intelligence testing
 WISC, WAIS
Max Wertheimer
 First to advance the Gestalt viewpoint
 Thought it was a mistake to break psychological experiences down into smaller pieces to
analyze
Benjamin Lee Whorf
 Widely known for his ideas about linguistic relativity, the hypothesis that language
influences thought
Joseph Wolpe
 Identified PTSD
 Reciprocal inhibition & systematic desensitization
Wilhelm Wundt


Father of psychology- set up the first psychological laboratory to study conscious
experience
Introspection
Yerkes & Dodson
 Yerkes Dodson law- the ideal level of arousal depends on the complexity of a task: If the
task is more complex your performance will be better at lower levels of arousal
 If the task is simple it is best for arousal level to be high
Philip Zimbardo
 Stanford prison experiment
 Students volunteered to play the roles of prisoners and guards, experiment had to be
called off after 6 days, rather than the planned 2 weeks because the guards had
become so sadistic that four of the ten prisoners suffered severe emotional issues
 Power of the situation