Exam2 Flashcards
List and explain three contributions Helmholtz made to the field of psychology.
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1. Theory of color vision – “we perceive color in terms of how certain color receptors in the eye pick up on certain colors” he developed the Young-Helmholtz theory of color vision (Thomas young). Three types: Red, blue and green color receptors, other colors are perceived by activating a combination of two of the cone types. Helmholtz expanded Mülers understanding of specific nerve energies by postulating three different types of color receptors on the retina. Instead of One specific nerve energy, Helmholtz claimed it involved three separate receptors (cones) each with its own specific energy. The young-Helmholtz theory was helpful to explain forms of color blindness. If a person lacks one or more of the receptor systems corresponding to the primary colors, he or she will not be able to experience certain colors subjectively, even though the physical world has not changed. Found out the senses actualize elements of the physical world that otherwise exist only as potential experiences.
- Rate of Nerve conduction – Helmholtz rejected Müller’s idea that nerve conduction was too fast to measure. Helmholtz isolated the nerve fiber leading to a frog’s leg muscle, and then stimulated the nerve fiber at various distances from the muscle to note how long it took the muscle to respond. Helmholtz showed that nerve impulses are measurable, and that they are also relatively slow. This further showed that physical chemical processes are involved with our interactions with the environment and not mysterious processes unable to be scientifically studied.
- Conservation of Energy – He studied metabolic processes in the frog and demonstrated food and oxygen consumption were able to account for the total energy that an organism expounded. this law of conservation of energy says that the amount of energy in a system never changes. No new energy is created, and no old energy is destroyed.Through Helmholtz’s conservation of energy, he brought physics, chemistry and physiology closer together and paved the way for the emergence of experimental psychology.
Franz Gall, Pierre Flourens, and Paul Broca all conducted early research on brain functioning. Explain the research of each man and how it influenced psychology.
-Franz Gall felt the best way to examine the shape and size of the regions without a patient having to have his or her head cut open was to examine the shape of the skull. Examining the skull to better understand the brain is calledphrenology (started in 1810, lasted 30 years).Today, Phrenology is now seen as pseudo science. However, even though his theories weren’t completely accurate, Gall is considered to be an important part in the evolution of neurology. He was one of the first to place primary importance on the brain in explaining a person’s behavior and character.Phrenology was a precursor to the field of neurology. Dr. Gall was one of the first people to place primary importance on the brain in explaining a person’s behavior and character.
Dr. Gall had the correct notion that different areas of the brain are responsible for different aspects of a person’s behavior and personality.
Dr. Gall correctly understood that the under and over-development of different areas in the brain can lead to different psychological and physiological attributes or deficiencies respectively.
- Pierre Flourens was the first person to show conclusively that our thoughts and ability to move around is controlled in the brain and not from the heart. He used the method of ablation (sucking out parts of the brain on animals) and noting the behavioral consequences of the loss.
- Paul Broca (French surgeon) named Broca’s areas. Credited with determining signifance and function of this part of the brain. It is responsible for the production of words in speech. Paul Broca worked with individuals who had disabilities in communication. He found those with the communication issues had issues with the area of the brain known now as Brocas. Brocas area is responsible for producing language and controls motor function involved with speech production. People who have damage to this area can understand words but have trouble putting them together in speech. But sometimes struggle with comprehension. Recent studies show brocas plays a significance role in language comprehension. Brocas allows us to communicate and understand communications of others. Broca cast doubt on Flouren’s conclusion the cortex acted as a whole, using the clinical method.
Wundt is often placed in the School of Structuralism with Titchener.
However, Wundt is more accurately described as starting the school of psychology called Voluntarism.
Describe Wundt’s Voluntarism and compare it to Titchener’s Structuralism.
Voluntarism was the process of organizing the mind. Wundt’s goal was to understand consciousness. Voluntarism had an emphasis on will, choice and purpose. Psychology’s first school was Voluntarism, not structuralism. Wundt believed humans decide what is attended to, and thus what is believed. He also believed much of behavior and selective attention are taken for a purpose and have a motivation behind them. Wundt ‘s psychological goal was to understand simple and complex conscious phenomena. He believed simple mental phenomena could be understood through experimentation but complex could not. Wundt used introspection to study the basic mental processes involved in immediate experience. Wundt distinguished between self-observation and internal perception.
He distinguished between pure introspection (self-observation) and experimental introspection (internal perception). He emphasized experimental introspection (internal perception) could be used to investigate certain psychology phenomena. He mostly focused on sensation and perception. His Introspection focused on of sensation and perception. Reports size, intensity, duration of stimuli. He also said that perception is a passive process whereas apperception is an active process and part of the perceptual field the individual pays attention to.
Titchener defined introspection mainly as observation, in contrast to Wundt, he believed that it allowed us to identify elementary sensations, which when put together make up complex experience. Titchener would ask you to look at a duck and ask what you see. If your answer is a duck, you are wrong. You would need to identify it’s features. It’s white, smooth texture, arouses feeling of pleasantness. In a good introspection there would be no meaning whatsoever. It is not the external object that produces behavior being investigated through Titchener’s introspection, our interest is in the sensations, images and feelings an external object produces. Wundts subjects woud mainly report whether an experience was triggered by external even or stimulus but Titcheners subjects had to search for the elemental ingredients of their experience. But his subjects had to report the raw elemental experiences and avoid reporting the meaning of a stimulus. Naming the object of an introspective analysis was the worst thing to do. If a subject called an apple and apple, Titchener called this error the Stimulus Error.
Titchener Applied introspection to areas Wundt didn’t. Such as memory, thought and feelings. Wundt criticized Titchener for expansion of introspective method, and for recording feelings a subject experienced when presented with a stimulus.
One thing they both agreed on was experimental psychology with Titchener and Wundt agreeing on the emphasis of laboratory work on introspection but didn’t agree on how far introspection should expand for the new experimental psychology.
Structuralism – all thoughts can be broken down into basic elements (specifically, sensations)
All thoughts structured by basic elements.
Voluntarism: the power of the will to organize the mind’s content into higher-level thought processes.
Structuralism was eventually replaced by functionalism (The study of the functions of the mind)
Though structuralism mostly gives way to functionalism and other theories, Titchener laid the foundation for psychology as an experimental science.
Ebbinghaus contributed much to psychology. His research papers adopted the introduction, methods, results, discussion format that we still use today. He even developed a sentence-completion task for measuring intelligence that was later incorporated into the Binet-Simon scale of intelligence.
However, he is best known for studying what aspect of human cognition?
With regard to this area of human cognition, explain at least three of the concepts he studied (and coined some of the terms that we still use today)
Ebbinghaus is famous for his work in experimental psychology research on Sensation, Perception and Memory. Most importantly, he made a huge impact on Memory. Three examples of concepts he studied are the Spacing Effect, the Serial Position Effect and the Forgetting Curve.
The Spacing effect says that we retain more information when studying a little bit at a time every day rather than a lot at once. In other words, distributed practice works better than mass practice.
The Serial Position Effect means we have a tendency to remember best the first or last items on a list.
The Forgetting Curve shows that the rate at which we forget is rapid at first and then levels out. Information is forgotten rapidly at first, whatever information is left after initial decay tends to stay in memory.
In contrast to Wundt and Titchener, Brentano, Stumpf, and Husserl are considered phenomenologists. Explain phenomenology and why Brentano, Stumpf and Husserl are considered phenomenologists while Wundt and Titchener are not.
Phenomenology is a method to describe things as they appear in consciousness/ the study of that which naturally appears in consciousness. Looks at first person lived experiences for information. (116/437) Phenomenologyis the belief that an individual is formed from the way he or she reacts to the phenomena they encounter every day.The subjective experience an individual has when they experience an internal or external stimuli
Edmund Husserl (german philosopher in late 1800s/early 1900s/logical philosopher) – considered founder of phenomenological movement. He described everyday approach as natural attitude, going about business as though there are separate things that exist outside our consciousness. Natural attitude is typical view the world around us simply exists separately from us, We think of external things existing as fact. Husserl found that diff approach was needed to understand human consciousness rather than the scientific method. Each person sees their world a certain way, by describing each person’s view point we see patterns and the essence of things. According to Husserl if we put our experiences together we will have a more accurate picture than relying on data that comes from outside of ourselves.
Franz Brentano - Franz Brentano was an early psychologist who had a great many students, including Carl Stumpf, who went on to make their own marks on psychology. Stumpf learned the value of empirical observation and research from Brentano. The difference is thatanecdotal evidenceis based on opinion whereasempirical evidenceis gained through many observations during controlled circumstances in which the observer only reports what is seen and not what the observer thinks about what they have seen. Franz Brentanowas a priest, philosopher, and psychologist who was one of the first who tried to legitimize psychology as a science. He adoptedempirical evidenceas a method for research rather than use the oldanecdotal evidencemethod. Brentano had two great additions to psychology: his theory of act psychology and his students.Act psychologydescribed the actions of the mind rather than the structure usingintentionality,perception, andjudgmentas its central precepts. His students included many luminaries among which was Sigmund Freud.
Carl Stumpf (empirical psychologist) - Stumpf both influenced and was influenced byEdmund Husserl, who argued for a transcendental understanding of phenomena. He was also under influence of Franz Brentano, one of the first individuals trains as a philosopher who began using the scientific method to quanity thoughts of philosophy. Brentano encouraged Stumpf to use empirical methods, results obtained from observing experiements, rather than rely on anecdotal method popular within philosophy. Stumpf became convinced that treating phenomenology as a psychological construct rather than a philosophical one was the correct approach. Since phenomenology is the subjective experience an individual has when they experience internal or external stimuli, every person becomes an individual, unique, because of the way that they experience events. Stumpf studied how different sounds and other sensations shaped a person's subjective experience. He realized that every person heard something different when they heard a tone, and he wanted to understand why this was. Many view Carl Stumpf's work with phenomenology as his primary contribution to psychology, but he also was influential in other ways. He founded a laboratory dedicated to experimental psychology, continuing the work he began with Franz Brentano. This school eventually became the renownedGestalt school of psychology, which ushered in a new era. Stumpf was instrumental in training a group of psychologists who are still influencing psychology and how the theory of phenomenology is studied today. Carl Stumpfwas an influential psychologist who started as a philosopher and took phenomenology, which had largely been treated as a philosophical concept, and adapted it to psychology. Rather than rely on the anecdotal method popular within philosophy, Stumpf relied on empirical methods, or results obtained from observing experiments, to guide his investigation. Stumpf's school of experimental psychology became the school of Gestalt psychology Stumpf was an empirical psychologist. Husserl was a logical philosopher. Stumpf studied people's reaction to individual tones. Stumpf's school of experimental psychology became the school of Gestalt psychology. Brentano convinced him to use empirical methods rather than anecdotal
Husserl, Brentano and Stumpf all followed the view of a subjective experience to understand thoughts. Even Though Brentano, and even more so, Stumpf, believed in using empirical methods and results from observing experiments rather than the anecdotal method popular within philosophy, they were not the same as Wundt and Titchener.
Wundt and Titchener were interested in measuring the elements of reaction to external stimuli, and neither of them (especially Titchener) were interested in the how or any other explanation other than the what. So the subjective experience aspect would rule them out of phenomenology.
Herbert Spencer was the primary proponent of Social Darwinism. Alfred Russell Wallace, who developed a theory of evolution at the same time as Darwin (Zeitgeist!), was not a proponent of Social Darwinism as Spencer saw it. Given Spencer’s and Wallace’s differing views of Social Darwinism, what would each say about the current Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare?) Give a detailed explanation of each man’s point of view.
Darwin wrote survival of the fit, to imply those who were fit would live long enough to pass on their genes.
Spencer wrote survival of the fittest implying those who were most fit would survive the social world due to some biological mechanism that made them superior. Unfortunately, this idea was taken by leaders of capitalist industries as an excuse to exploit others, or even to remove genetic material due to failure to thrive. Spencer most likely didn’t mean it to get that bad.
To Spencer, evolution meant progress. That is, evolution has a purpose. The mechanism by which perfection is approximated. Darwin did not believe that. Spencer’s application of survival of the fittest became to be known as social Darwinism. He believed government to allow free competition among its citizens. Spencer’s ideas were compatible with U.S. capitalism and individualism.
However, Wallace was one of the most outspoken opponents of social Darwinism. Wallace believed that humans could, and should, guide their own evolution. Wallace would suggest to create government programs to help people less able to compete in society.
Therefore, Spencer would be against the Affordable Care Act and say that the government should not help those who are less fit. But, Wallace would support the Affordable care act, because he would believe in government programs to help the less able.
Sir Francis Galton may have contributed a greater variety of ideas, concepts and research to psychology than any other single person.
List and explain four contributions he made to the field of psychology.
- Fingerprint Classification system: enabled police to identify criminals through fingerprints for personal identification
- Measurement of intelligence and Eugenics.
Reaction time tests: to measure intelligence. Unfortunately fits with controversial theory of Eugenics (selective breeding) Galton believed eugenics was important because human characteristics were thought to be innate or biologically based and only allowing those most intelligence healthy and strong to breed would improve human race in long run. Eugenics was taken way farther than intended by the Nazis who used it to justify genocide. - His study of the Nature-Nurture controversy (p290). Galton’s extreme nativism was challenge, and in response to this challenge in a book by a man named Candolle who suggested nurture as being part of what produced scientists, Galton responded with his own book about nature and nurture. Galton actually did acknowledge the importance of the environment and his revised position was that the potential for high intelligence was inherited but that it must be nurtured by a proper environment.
- The concept of correlation (p292). Galton actually came up with the notion of correlation which is widely used in statistical methods. He said two variable organs are said to be co-related when the variation on one is accompanied on the average by more or less of the other, and in the same direction. The length of the arm is said to be co-related with that of the leg. Such as a person with a long arm has usually a long leg, and conversely. In the definition, the word tend is very important. He found the phenomenon of regression towards the mean. He also introduced median as a measure of central tendency. He found mean overly influenced by extreme scores in a distribution and preferred to use the middle most score of median in a distribution instead.
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Contributed to many fields including anthropology, psychology and statistics.
Discuss Goddard’s study of the “Kallikak Family.” What did Goddard reportedly find in his study and why was it important in the nature-nurture controversy in both psychological and political/legal arenas? Also, discuss how his study influenced eugenics in America.
Goddard became director of research at a new jersey training school intended for education and care of the “feeble minded” children, a term Goddard created. Goddard decided to investigate the relationship between family background and intelligence. He chose a woman named Deborah Kallikak, who he gave a fictitious name “Kallikak” from greek words kalos (meaning good) and kakos (meaning bad). Under the Binet-Simon scale, Deborah’s chronological age was 22 but her performance was at a mental age of 9. He traced back her history and found someone had a relationship with a feeble minded person. He found a Martin Kallikak that had relations in his early years with an “unworthy” barmaid, but in his older years with a “worthy” woman. He found that descendants of the worthy woman didn’t produce offspring with feeble mindedness, whereas the offspring of the unworthy woman did. He reported his findings in the Kallikak study. (Kallikak family: a study in the heredity of the feeble-mindedness) His research supported the Galtonian research that intelligence was genetically determined. Unfortunately, this led to many scientists and other people of the day urging those with mental deficiencies to be sterilized or segregated from the rest of society. Sterilization laws spread everywhere and enforced until the 1870s, although Dr. Calvert said that sterilization has still been carried out even recently.
This idea that who we are was entirely due to nature over nurture and the ideas of those being lesser than others needing to be sterilized or separated was the eugenics that poisoned the minds of many people and led to disturbing forces of genocide and violence.
Note: In Goddard’s time, people believed that feeble-mindedness was the cause of most criminal, immoral and antisocial behavior.
The early study of individual differences often focused on intellectual functioning.
Most of the early pioneers in intelligence testing (e.g., Binet, Burt, Goddard, Terman), as well as Darwin and Spencer before them,
believed that intelligence was _____.
Why did they believe this?
However, this woman (?) challenged these men’s ideas on the origin of intelligence.
Who is she?
What was her argument against these men’s views of intelligence?
Many of these men believed intelligence was innate, by nature. Leta Hollingsworth (p307, 317,318) challenged the widely accepted beliefs that intelligence is largely inherited and that women are intellectually inferior to males. Hollingsworth believed women reached lower levels not because of their intellectual inferiority but because of the social roles assigned to them. She found that many individuals found as “defective” were in reality manifesting social and personal adjustment problems. Hollingsworth attempted to correct this and related problems. Leta also attempted to specify optimal educational experiences for the gifted and tried to improve the education of “subnormal” individuals. She challenged many of the beliefs about women that were prevalent at the time, such as the belief women were intellectually inferior to men.
Items:
Letta Hollingsworth
William James, often known as the father of American Psychology,
developed a theory of emotions.
At about the same time Carl Lange in Denmark developed essentially the same theory (Zeitgeist!).
Their theory came to be known as the James-Lange Theory of Emotion.
Almost as soon as soon as the theory was published, Willhelm Wundt and physiologist Walter Cannon criticized it as being wrong.
Explain the James-Lange Theory of Emotion,
the competing Cannon-Bard theory,
and how those fit with Schacter’s research on emotion in 1962.
These theories discuss the relationship between our subjective thoughts and feelings and the outward physiological or behavioral response to emotional stimuli.
- James-Lang Theory of Emotion. According to the James-Lange theory of emotion, our physiological (bodily) reaction occurs first, followed by an emotional reaction – we are afraid because we run. Proposed in the mid 1880s. Rather than being the cause of physiological events, emotions happen as a cause of physiological events. Such as muscular tension, heart rate, dry mouth and running. According to James-Lange, observing something leads to a physiological reaction, and the way your brain interprets your body’s physical reaction impacts your emotional response. If you enter a party and your stomach is in knots the james-lange theory proposed your brain interprets your physical reaction stomach in knots to determine your emotion; nervous. It states we are happy because we smile, not that we smile because we are happy.
- Cannon-Bard Theory posits that we simultaneously experience emotions and physiological reactions. We have a conscious feeling of fear influencing feeling of ear and simultaneously run.
- Schacter-Singer theory research on emotion – experiencing emotions requires both body responses and an interpretation of the body’s response by taking into considering the situation the person is in at the time. You run from the bear and look back again realizing bear is bigger than you thought, followed by conscious feeling of fear.
Functionalism in the U.S. is commonly attributed to John Dewey.
What is functionalism?
Describe common themes or elements to Functionalism.
What and/or who are important immediate (within the previous 10-50 years or so) precursors to the development of Functionalism?
Wundt founded the first psychology lab to carry out structuralism experiments relying mostly on introspection. Structuralism sought to understand the building blocks of psychological experience. William James (functionalism) at Harvard thought Wundt’s (structuralism) method of understanding complex mental processes by subject self-reports was futile. He wanted to understand behavior by its function in our lives. How it helps or hurts and why certain behaviors are more common than others. James’ functionalism gave rise to evolutionary psychology and how they improve Fitness. James functionalism sought to explain behavior in evolutionary terms to understand why certain behaviors were helpful to survival and evolutionary fitness and others were not. Nevertheless, both Wundt and William James changed the study of human behavior by looking at it from a scientific point of view.
However, Functionalism was never a well-defined school of thought with one recognized leader or singular methodology. Current themes existed though. (p322) Functionalists opposed what they considered the sterile search for the elements of consciousness in which the structuralists engaged. They wanted to understand the function of the mind rather than provide a static description of its contents. They wanted to apply psychology to improve personal life, education, industry and so on, as a practical science and not a pure science. They wanted to broaden the study to research on animals, children and abnormal humans. They had an interest in the “why” of mental processes and behavior which led to a concern with motivation. According to Functionalists, an organism will act differently in the same situation as its needs change so its needs must be understood before the organism’s behavior can be understood. Tended to be more ideographic than nomothetic, interested in what made organisms different from one another than what made them similar. They saw both mental processes and behavior as legitimate subject matter for psychology and viewed introspection as just one of many valid research tools. Most all functionalists were directly or indirectly influenced by William James.
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John Dewey: To summarize, John Dewey was an innovative thinker and educator who focused on achild-centered, democratic approach to schooling. He is firmly rooted in a pragmatist paradigm that focused on the importance of a learner’s interaction with the environment. He believed ininterdisciplinaryideas, student input, and the importance of a well-trained, forward-thinking teacher. His ideas were revolutionary at the time and they continue to push educators today.
Thorndike is often considered to be the psychologist who provides the transition from Functionalism to Behavioralism.
Discuss his research using the “puzzle box” and the conclusions he reached following this research.
Make sure to fully explain his Law of Exercise (law of use and law of disuse) and the Law of Effect.
The tendency to modify our behavior due to the consequences of that behavior is the basic foundation for the behavioral perspective in psychology.
Edward Thorndike was the first psychologist to formally study the consequences of behavior back in late 1800s.
- puzzle box – Thorndike (p354) conducted an experiment with cats in puzzle boxes. The cats had to figure out a series of behaviors to escape the box – pushing levers with paws, biting string with teeth, swishing tail to open door. When escaping box the cats were rewarded with food. Thorndike measured how quickly they did series of behaviors each time. From the research he learned even if they did accidental behavior the first time, if it was rewarded they were more likely to do it again. Thorndike said the behavior had been Reinforced (or made stronger) due to the reward of escaping the box and getting food.
- law of exercise - Thelaw of exercise stated that behavior is more strongly established through frequent connections of stimulus and response.
Thorndike also stated in his law of exercise that practice reinforces learning. This puts importance on drill, repetition, and review. - law of effect – 1. If a particular behavior is followed by a desirable consequence or reward, that behavior is more likely to happen again in the future because the behavior was reinforced. (The behavior of buying a lottery ticket would be reinforced if you won money, you’d be more likely to buy more lottery tickets) 2. If a behavior is followed by an undesirable consequence or a punishment that behavior is less likely to happen again in the future. (if you lost money from buying lottery ticket you’d be less likely to buy another because you’d assume you might lose money again). Thorndike’s law of effect has been extended by many such as B.F. Skinner and John Watson. The ideas of law of effect can be applied to almost any situation. If a student asks a question and teacher answers the student’s behavior is rewarded. If the teacher punishes student by making him or her embarrassed that student will be less likely to ask for help in the future.
Thorndike and his experiments with cats and puzzle boxes was the foundation for all of behavioral psychology. His law of effect says behaviors followed by reward/reinforcement are more likely in future whereas behaviors followed by punishment less likely in future. This basic principle is foundation for many ideas techniques in behavioral perspective within educational psychology.
