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his psych

Terms in this set (59)

Zeitgeist
The intellectual and cultural climate or spirit of the times.
Historiography
The principles, methods, and philosophical issues of historical research.
Personalistic Theory (person makes the times)
The view that progress and change in scientific history are attributable to the ideas of unique individuals.
Naturalistic theory (times make the person
The view that progress and change in scientific history are attributable to the Zeitgeist, which makes a culture receptive to some ideas but not to others.
Have an understanding of Lost or Suppressed Data,
The formal reason for this restriction is to protect the privacy of Freud's patients and their families, and perhaps also the reputation of Freud and his family.
Data Distorted in Translation
Another problem with the data of history relates to information that comes to the historian through faulty translation from one language to another.
Self-Serving Data.
Data is subject to the biases of people who report it
Mechanism,
The doctrine that natural processes are mechanically determined and capable of explanation by the laws of physics and chemistry.
Determinism,
The doctrine that acts are determined by past events.
Reductionism,
The doctrine that explains phenomena on one level (such as complex ideas) in terms of phenomena on another level (such as simple ideas).
Empiricism,
The pursuit of knowledge through the observation of nature and the attribution of all knowledge to experience.
Positivism,
The doctrine that recognizes only natural phenomena or facts that are objectively observable.
Materialism.
The doctrine that considers the facts of the universe to be sufficiently explained in physical terms by the existence and nature of matter.
Understand People as Machines
Not only was the universe a clockwork machine, so too were its people，People might be better and more efficient machines than the ones the clockmakers built, but they were machines nonetheless
Understand Rene Descartes' Mind-Body Problem
The question of the distinction between mental and physical qualities.how the mind (the soul or spirit) could be distinguished from the body and all other physical qualities。 It was thought that the body and mind were related in the same way that a puppet and its puppeteer were joined.
Understand John Locke's blank slate,
humans are born without any knowledge whatsoever. Aristotle had held a similar notion centuries before, that the mind at birth was a tabula rasa, a blank or clean slate, on which experience would write.
view of how the mind acquires knowledge,
the mind acquired knowledge through experience.
Theory of Association,
The notion of combining or compounding ideas and the reverse notion of analyzing them marks the beginning of the mental-chemistry approach to the problem of association.simple ideas may be linked or associated to form complex ideas.
Primary and Secondary Qualities.
Primary qualities are characteristics such as size and shape that exist in an object whether or not we perceive them. Secondary qualities such as color, odor, sound, and taste exist not in the object but in a person's perception of the object.
Understand George Berkeley's perception is the only reality and God as the permanent perceiver.
Berkeley argued that there were no primary qualities. There were only what Locke called secondary qualities.all knowledge was a function of or depended on the experiencing or perceiving person.all experience is within ourselves, relative to our own perception, we can never know precisely the physical nature of objects. We can rely only on our own unique perception of them.God functioned as a kind of permanent perceiver of all the objects in the universe.
Understand James Mill view on The Mind as a Machine.
His stated goal was to destroy the illusion of all subjective or mental activities and to demonstrate that the mind was nothing more than a machine.The mind was a machine; it functioned in the same predictable, mechanical way as a clock.the mind is a totally passive entity that is acted on by external stimuli. We respond to these stimuli automatically; we are incapable of acting spontaneously.the mind had no creative function because association is a totally automatic, passive process. The
Be familiar with Socrates statement, "the unexamined life is not worth living", Plato's academy, Aristotle's lyceum and his student Alexander the Great.
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Understand Hermann von Helmholtz's work on Vision.
Helmholtz investigated the external eye muscles and the mechanism by which internal eye muscles focus the lens.
Understand Ernst Weber's Just Noticeable Differences
The smallest difference that can be detected between two physical stimuli.
Know Gustav Fechner's term Psychophysics.
The scientific study of the relations between mental and physical processes.between the mental [psycho-] and material [physics] worlds
Know the contributions of Mesmer (father of Hypnosis),
Mesmer believed that the human body contained a magnetic force that operated like the magnets used by physicists. This animal magnetism was capable of penetrating objects and acting on them from a distance. Animal magnetism could also cure nervous disorders by restoring the equilibrium between the patient's magnetic levels and the levels prevalent in the environment.Mesmer claimed to reverse mental illness by having patients hold magnetized iron bars. Later, he decided that all he needed to do was touch or stroke the patient's' hands and his own magnetic force would be transmitted into their bodies
Janet (Dissociation),
Janet rejected the opinion that hysteria was a physical problem and conceived of it as a mental disorder caused by memory impairments, fixed ideas, and unconscious forces.
Braid (Hypnosis and Hypnotism),
the trancelike state neurohypnology, from which the term hypnosis was eventually derived. Braid's careful work and disdain for exaggerated claims earned for hypnosis some scientific respectability
Charcot (Hysteria/Saltpetiere Hospital)
Charcot had some success treating hysterical patients by means of hypnosis. More important, he described the symptoms of hysteria and the use of hypnosis in medical terminology, making them more acceptable to the French Academy of Science
Know Wilhelm Wundt as the Father of Modern Psychology.
Wundt was the founder of psychology as a formal academic discipline. He established the first laboratory, edited the first journal, and began experimental psychology as a science. The areas he investigated—sensation and perception, attention, feeling, reaction time, and association—became basic chapters in textbooks yet to be written.
Why was Wundt given the title Father of Modern Psychology?
Wundt's contribution to the founding of modern psychology stems not so much from any unique scientific discovery as from his vigorous promotion, or selling, of the idea of systematic experimentation.set out deliberately to found a new science
Consciousness was the subject matter of psychology.
Wundt did not agree with the idea that the elements of consciousness were static (so-called atoms of the mind), which were passively connected by some mechanical process of association. Instead, Wundt believed that consciousness actively organized its own content. Hence, the study of the elements, content, or structure of consciousness alone would provide only a beginning to understanding psychological processes.
What year did he establish his laboratory?
1879
Define the term Voluntarism.
The idea that the mind has the capacity to organize mental contents into higher-level thought processes.
Sensation and Feelings as the elementary forms of experience.
Sensations are aroused whenever a sense organ is stimulated and the resulting impulses reach the brain.Feelings are the other elementary form of experience. Sensations and feelings are simultaneous aspects of immediate experience. Feelings are the subjective complements of sensations but do not arise directly from a sense organ. Sensations are accompanied by certain feeling qualities; when sensations combine to form a more complex state, a feeling quality will result.
Know Hermann Ebbinghaus' focus of study related to his research on memory with Nonsense Syllables.
Syllables presented in a meaningless series to study memory processes.Ebbinghaus wanted to use material that would be uniformly unassociated, completely homogeneous, and equally unfamiliar, material with which there could be few, if any, past associations. The nonsense syllables he created, typically formed of two consonants with a vowel in between (as in lef, bok, or yat), satisfied these criteria Ebbinghaus designed several studies using his meaningless series of syllables to determine the influence of various experimental conditions on human learning and retention.
Know Carl Stumpf's view on Phenomenology
Stumpf's introspective method that examined experience as it occurred and did not try to reduce experience to elementary components. also, an approach to knowledge based on an unbiased description of immediate experience as it occurs, not analyzed or reduced to elements.Stumpf believed that to analyze experience by reducing it to mental contents or elements is to make that experience artificial and abstract and thus no longer natural.
Know Oswald Kulpe's view on Imageless Thought
Külpe's idea that meaning in thought can occur without any sensory or imaginal component.Külpe's research had identified a nonsensory aspect of consciousness.
Know about E. B. Titchener's life.
was an English psychologist who studied under Wilhelm Wundt for several years. Titchener is best known for creating his version of psychology that described the structure of the mind: structuralism. He created the largest doctoral program in the United States (at the time) after becoming a professor at Cornell University,a man could not hope to become a psychologist until after he had learned to smoke
Titchener was a disciple of who?
wundt
He worked at which University?
Cornell University
Know about "stimulus error".
Confusing the mental process under study with the stimulus or object being observed.When observers focus on the stimulus object instead of on the conscious content, they fail to distinguish what they have learned in the past about the object (for example, that it is called an apple) from their own direct and immediate experience.
What was the contribution of Structuralism to the field of psychology?
A significant contribution of structuralism was its service as a target of criticism. Structuralism provided a strong, established orthodoxy against which newly developing movements in psychology could array their forces. These newer schools of thought owed their existence in no small measure to their progressive reformulation of the structuralist position. We noted that advances in science require something to oppose.
Know about Titchener's Experimentalists.
Titchener continued to exclude women from the Experimentalists' meetings, he encouraged and supported their advancement in psychology.
Be familiar with Charles Darwin's Life,
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On the Origin of Species,
Darwin's pioneering book about evolution, On the Origin of Species (1859), was published a year before Fechner's Elements of Psychophysics (1860) and 20 years before Wundt established his laboratory at the University of Leipzig.
Natural Selection,
In nature, a process of natural selection results in the survival of those organisms best suited for their environment and the elimination of those not fit. A continuing struggle for survival takes place, and those life forms that do survive are the ones that have made successful adaptations or adjustments to the environmental circumstances to which they are exposed. In brief, species that cannot adapt do not survive.
Darwin's influence on Psychology through comparative psychology and functionalism.
Functionalism was not merely 'influenced' by Darwinian theory, but constituted a radical attempt to start over by establishing a new scientific basis for psychology。Psychologists came to realize that the study of animal behavior was vital to their understanding of human behavior, and they focused their research on the mental functioning of animals, thus introducing a new topic into the psychology laboratory.
Know about Francis Galton's study about Individual Differences and Eugenics.
Francis Galton's work on mental inheritance and the individual differences in human capacities effectively brought the spirit of evolution to bear on the new psychology. Before Galton, the phenomenon of individual differences had rarely been considered an appropriate subject for study. Eugenics: namely, good in stock, hereditarily endowed with noble qualities Galton wanted to improve the inherited qualities of the human race. He argued that humans, not unlike farm animals, could be improved by artificial selection.
Define Neurasthenia (a fashionable disorder during William James' era),
He listed a variety of symptoms: depression, anxiety, insomnia, hypochondria, headache, skin rash, nervous exhaustion, and something called brain collapse (Lutz, 1991; Schuster, 2011). James called the syndrome "Americanitis。Neurasthenia was, literally, a lack of nerve force—an immobilizing depression, a loss of will. The most educated and self- conscious were among the most likely to succumb.
Know about Herbert Spencer's Social Darwinism.
survival of the fittest；Spencer's idea was that by ensuring that only the best survived, society could eventually achieve perfection.
Understand William James' Stream of Consciousness and Habits.
William James's idea that consciousness is a continuous flowing process and that any attempt to reduce it to elements will distort it.He believed that consciousness must have some biological utility or it would not have survived over time. The function of consciousness is to enable us to adapt to our environment by allowing us to choose. Pursuing this idea, James distinguished between conscious choice and habit; he believed habits to be involuntary and nonconscious. When we encounter a new problem and need to choose a new way of coping, consciousness comes into play. This emphasis on purpose- fulness reflects the impact of evolutionary theory.
Be familiar with John Dewey and the Reflex Arc.
Dewey continue his work applying psychology to educational and philosophical problems, thus providing another example of the practical orientation of many functional psychologists. Dewey was brilliant, but he was not a good teacher.Reflex arc: The connection between sensory stimuli and motor responses.Dewey was arguing that neither behavior nor conscious experience could be reduced to elements, as Wundt and Titchener claimed to do. Thus, Dewey was attacking the core of their approaches to psychology.
Be familiar with G. Stanley Hall's life, establishing the first US psychology lab,1883
and Recapitulation Theory Recapitulation theory: Hall's idea that the psychological development of children repeats the history of the human race.
Know that James Cattell's is known for Mental Testing.
Tests of motor skills and sensory capacities; intelligence tests use more complex measures of mental abilities.Cattell's tests, like Galton's, dealt primarily with elementary sensorimotor measurements, including dynamometer pressure, rate of movement (how quickly the hand can move 50 cm), two-point skin sensitivity threshold, amount of pressure on the forehead necessary to cause pain, just noticeable differences in judging weights, reaction time for sound, and time forForensic psychology deals with psychology and the law. Münsterberg wrote magazine articles on such topics as crime prevention, using hypnosis to question suspects, administering mental tests to detect guilty persons, and the questionable trustworthiness of eyewitness testimony naming colors
Be familiar with the Psychological Testing Movement with a focus on Lewis Terman's work on the Stanford-Binet and knowing the difference between the army Alpha and Beta Tests.
many of the old-line psychologists regarded the whole test movement with scorn。The Beta is a version for non-English-speaking and illiterate people; instead of oral or written directions, instructions are given by demonstration or pantomime
Know Walter Dill Scott's textbook The Theory and Practice of Advertising,his views on Advertising.
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Know about the Hawthorne Studies sparking the field of Organizational Psychology.
The Hawthorne studies led psychologists to explore the social-psychological climate in the workplace, including the behavior of leaders, informal work groups, employee atti- tudes, communication patterns between workers and managers, and other factors capable of influencing motivation, productivity, and job satisfaction. Business leaders soon came to recognize and accept the impact of these forces on job performance. Recognizing the importance of organizational variables, the APA's Division of Industrial Psychology was renamed the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology.
Know about Hugo Munsterberg's life. Be familiar with his views on Forensic Psychology.
Forensic psychology deals with psychology and the law. Münsterberg wrote magazine articles on such topics as crime prevention, using hypnosis to question suspects, administering mental tests to detect guilty persons, and the questionable trustworthiness of eyewitness testimony.
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