History of Psychology 2008

1. History of Psychology 2008 Lecture 11 Professor Cupchik Office: S634 Email: cupchik@utsc.utoronto.ca Office hours: Wed 1-2; Thurs 12-1 Course website: www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~cupchik TA: Michelle Hilscher Office: S142C Email: hilscher@utsc.utoronto.ca Office hours: Wed 12-2 pm Textbook: Benjafield’s History of Psychology

2. Reminder about the Final Paper • 20 pages double-spaced including title page and references. • APA style + written in 3rd person. • Due on Monday December 1st by midnight. Please email a copy to hilscher@utsc.utoronto.ca AND cupchik@utsc.utoronto.ca • I will send comments and your paper mark back by email. • 5. For more information about the marking scheme, etc… check the website (www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~cupchik) • Good luck!

3. Psychoanalysis The stage was set by late 18th century reform of (dungeon-like) madhouses and decent treatment of mentally ill people simultaneously in England and France. Pinel set the stage for this development in 1793 when he took over an asylum in Paris and removed the chains of his patients. He gave them freedom and good living conditions. An improvement was found in the patients. Pinel in 1793

4. Pinel related mental disorders to: (1) environmental (i.e., upbringing) and (2) physical (head injury) factors. He examined disturbances of emotional reactions related to extreme rage or fear and excessive grief or remorse. Insanity was therefore related to medicine and not to prisons. He assumed that patients were sick people. He studied them regularly and methodically. These were the first case histories.

5. J. M. Charcot (1825-1895) was a neurologist who isolated “hysteria” as a paralysis or convulsion not related to organic disease. Psychiatry expanded from the study of psychosis, insanity requiring hospital care, to neurosis. Pierre Janet (1859-1947) found that hypnosis helped patients recall memories of repressed experiences. If the physician suggested that recall would also occur in waking states, the neurotic symptoms disappeared — catharsis. * He therefore distinguished a neurotic mechanism whereby memory of unpleasant consequences or events became dissociated from normal consciousness. * There were a variety of types of neurotic reactions – hysteria, depression, compulsive reactions, obsession, phobias. * But he regarded these as a product of a lack of energy, fatigue or exhaustion. The degeneration of the total bodily system explains why people could not carry out normal adaptive behaviour.

6. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) He lived most of his life in Vienna until driven out by the Nazis in 1938 and died of cancer in London in 1939. He was influenced by the ideas of Brentano who taught the dynamic ideas of Leibniz and he was also Freud’s Couch influenced by Goethe who sought a deep understanding of nature through science. He adopted a mechanistic view through the influence of Helmholtz. He adopted an anti-vitalistic view based on the idea that there were no forces in living bodies not found in non-living bodies. There was no unique energy unaccounted for within the organism (this refers to psychic energy).

7. Freud came to view dreams and fantasies, wit and errors, as determined (or overdetermined) and not accidental. His notion of determinism came from reading Darwin. So he was influenced by both the Romantic & mechanistic traditions.

8. Freud studied the role of hypnotism for treating hysterics (with Charcot in 1885). He modified the technique where hypnosis could not be used and developed free association as a means to finding the origins of symptoms. He came to stress the sexual origins of symptoms but discovered that they were unreliable. He also emphasized the importance of unconscious processes in the etiology of neuroses since symptoms reflected unremembered events. This led to an account of the unconscious and repression as a defence mechanism. Accordingly, undesirable impulses and memories are pushed in the unconscious and are forgotten and unavailable to the conscious mind. This material would have to uncovered and resolved in order for a cure to take place. In a quest for the origins of symptoms, he went further back into childhood. He also developed the notion of transference whereby the patient transfers to the therapist feelings originally attached to other people, especially parents. Transference permits people to express these feelings.

9. Cognitive Psychology • Rooted in Gestalt psychology: • Wertheimer + productive thinking • Köhler + hungry, insightful chimps • - not just trial-and-error • - “aha moment” leads to willful action • Piaget also a major influence due to his description of children’s cognitive development. • Early cognitive psychologists interested in studying internal mental events – problem-solving, language, memory. • Consciousness and will are emphasized.

10. Cognitive Psychology • This “movement” in psychology was a product of a time when psychology, anthropology and linguistics were redefining themselves and computer science and neuroscience were coming into existence as disciplines. • Based on the human information-processing approach… the idea that theories can be developed to describe how information about overt stimuli and responses are represented and processed by human and nonhumans. • This description can be very basic – about neural events, or about processing underlying high-level plans. • Two independent “movements” – one involving attention and short-term memory, the other to do with computational models of thought.

11. The Computer Metaphor • Mind = Computer • Why this metaphor? • Lets psychology get tied in with language – Noam Chomsky’s mathematical linguistics. • 2. This metaphor favors an interdisciplinary approach. • 3. Laboratory rat can be replaced by the human-computer system as main source of data.

12. Alan M. Turing (1912-1954) • Took off from Bertrand Russell and A.N. Whitehead’s (1913) Principia Mathematica which argued that a system of mathematics is reducible to Boolean (true-false) algebra. • Introduced the idea of the Turing Machine in 1936 – it can perform any operation or process that can be described exhaustively and unambiguously. • The Turing Machine is the “Holy Grail of artificial intelligence”. • “Analytical engine”  • In his later life Turing was arrested and charged with homosexuality.

13. Jerome S. Bruner • Born in 1915 in New York, attended Duke University. • During WWII, studied propaganda and popular attitudes. • Served as the cofounder and director of the Centre for Cognitive Studies at Harvard. • How do “mental sets” affect perception? • “New Look” approach – perception is self-sufficient and can be considered apart from the world around it. • Worked with children, showed that children would see toys as bigger than blocks, even when both were the same height. Also toys seemed to increased in size when they weren’t available to the children. • Early use of the tachistoscope to show familiar and novel playing cards. People didn’t see the abnormal cards. • Also well known for his work on the cognitive development of children, and education… ‘so long as the proper teaching method is applied, every child can study any topic at any age.’

14. George A. Miller (born 1920) • Started out as a behaviorist. • Early work for US military during WWII sought a mathematical explanation for language and communication. • Harvard had separate and warring psychology and “social relations” departments… a fundamental problem for Miller who felt that in studying language he was being kept apart from his “natural allies”. • Language and Communication (1951) – Covered: (a) physical attributes of human communication system, (b) how sounds are transmitted through air. Also described the probabilistic nature of language – how using one word makes it more likely that you will use some other word. • Spoke of brain as a switchboard and nerves as transmitters and receivers. • Early work on memory – “immediate memory is like a purse that can only hold seven coins, but that does not care whether they are seven pennies or seven silver dollars”

15. Donald O. Hebb (1904-1985) • Born in Nova Scotia, graduated from Dalhousie in 1925. • Lashley’s graduate student, received his PhD in 1936. • Early career spent studying intelligence and IQ tests. He noted that environment is more important than usually assumed in determining performance on IQ tests. • Worked in Yerkes Lab of Primate Biology and published The Organization of Behavior:  A Neuropsychological Theory in 1948. • Basics of his theory: (a) Repeated neuron firing causes metabolic changes in the synapse so it is more efficient in the future (consolidation theory); (b) Hebb cell assembly - interconnected groups of neurons which will continue to be active for some period of time after the stimulus is gone; and c) Phase sequence – thinking happens when many cell assemblies are activated. • This was Hebb’s version of connectionism.

16. Ulric Neisser • Born in Germany, 1928. • A physics major at Harvard before switching to psychology. • Gave cognitive psychology its name in his book, Cognitive Psychology in 1967 • Defined people as dynamic information-processing systems whose mental activities might be considered computationally. • “Cognition refers to all processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used. It is concerned with these processes even when they operate in the absence of relevant stimulation, as in images and hallucinations.” • Published Cognition and Reality in 1976 in which he begins to criticize cognitive psychology’s excessive reliance on laboratory work as compared to real-life situations.