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Welcome to AP Psychology!!. Ms. Juretic. History of Psychology. “Psychology has a long past, but only a short history.” Hermann Ebbinghaus (1902?) Psychology ( Ψ) The scientific study of the behavior and mental processes of humans and other animals. Rene Descartes (1596 – 1650).
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Welcome to AP Psychology!! Ms. Juretic
History of Psychology • “Psychology has a long past, but only a short history.” • Hermann Ebbinghaus (1902?) • Psychology (Ψ) • The scientific study of the behavior and mental processes of humans and other animals.
Rene Descartes (1596 – 1650) Oui! Oui! I am a French philosopher!! • Dualism: mind and body are separate • Conarium = the pineal gland? • voluntary & involuntary behavior • Reflexes (no more pigs on trial!) • Nativism • We know certain stuff at birth • thought sensory and motor nerves the same • He was wrong!!
John Locke (1632 – 1704) Empiricism is one of your vocab terms for this unit! • Tabula rasa • Latin for “blank slate” • Empiricism • Knowledge comes from sensory experiences • Science should rely on observation and experimentation • British Empiricists • Locke’s little club
Thomas Hobbes (1588 – 1679) • Mind can produce voluntary behavior but can work like reflexes • How is this different from Descartes? • You can override your reflexes. • Hedonism = the pleasure principle • If something feels good, you do it again.
Psychology’s Big Three to Remember! • Wilhelm Wundt – Father of Ψ • First psych lab in Leipzig, Germany in 1879 • E.B. Titchener – Brought Ψ to the U.S. • Was Wundt’s star student (and an American!) • Introduced structuralism: used introspection to discover the way the way the mind works • Can you see any problems here? • William James – Father of American Ψ • Functionalism: study how mental and behavioral processes function and enable the organism to adapt and survive
Pierre Flourens (1794 – 1867) Hmm. I wonder what would happen if I damaged a puppy’s brain? • Lesion method (ablation) • Lesion = a destructive change in body tissue, such as a wound. • This method is still a powerful way to learn about the brain. • Ethical problems today?
Paul Broca (1824 – 1880) You will learn more about me in our unit on neuroscience!! • Broca’s area • Controls speech • Located in left hemisphere of frontal lobe • Clinical method • Learning about the brain through case studies of patients with brain damage
Ebbinghaus (1850 – 1909) Studied memory and the “forgetting curve” using nonsense syllables: CAZ, KIB, BLE
E. L. Thorndike (1874 – 1949) • An early American learning researcher • Cats in puzzle boxes and maze-running chicks • Law of Effect • Basically a restatement of the pleasure principle
Ivan Pavlov (1849 – 1936) • Studied his drooling dogs • You can create new reflexes! • Classical Conditioning
John B. Watson (1878 – 1958) • Behaviorism • Studies observable behavior • Does “Little Albert” study with Rosalie Reynolds and gets fired from Johns Hopkins University. • Why?
B. F. Skinner (1904 – 1990) You will learn more about me and my studies of rats in our unit on learning. BTW, I am also a behaviorist!
Margaret Washburn PhD 1894 • First woman to get PhD in psychology from Cornell • Was a student of Titchener
Inez Beverly Prosser PhD 1933 Cincinnati University Francis C. Sumner PhD 1920 Clark University
Kenneth Clark PhD 1940Mamie Clark PhD 1944 • Their “doll studies” influenced the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954.
Agree or Disagree? • People are born smart – the types of schools they attend and parents they have don’t really matter. • People are born with their personalities intact. You will have the same personality at 40 that you had at 5. • It’s perfectly fine to use animals in psychological research. • Homosexuality is biologically determined. • Media violence causes children to behave violently. • All humans are capable of extreme violence (such as in Rwanda and Nazi Germany) if they are placed in the “right” situations.
Issues in Contemporary Psychology • Stability versus change • Do our traits persist over time or do we become different people as we age? • Rationality versus irrationality • In some ways, we can outsmart computers; at others, we are prone to error and bias. • Nature versus nurture • Are we born the way we are or are we products of our environments? • Darwin’s natural selection: the idea that genotypes in a population that are best adapted to the environment increase in frequency over a number of generations