AP Psych Important People

Mary Whiton Calkins

first female president of the APA

Dorothea Dix

advocate for the mentally ill who created the first generation of American mental asylums

Sigmund Freud

founder of psychoanalysis, free association, transference (when someone redirects their feelings about one person onto someone else), theory of the unconscious

G. Stanley Hall

earned the first psychology doctorate at Harvard, began the first journal dedicated to psychology, first president of the APA, believed in selected breeding and forced sterilization

William James

first educator to offer a psychology course in the U.S., father of American psychology, developed functionalism, James-Lange theory of emotion

Ivan Pavlov

discovered classical conditioning

Jean Piaget

theory of children’s cognitive development (four stage model)

Carl Rogers

pioneered humanistic psychology, client centered therapy

B.F. Skinner

behaviorist who developed theories on operant conditioning (behavior is controlled by its consequences), coined the terms positive and negative reinforcement, punishment, schedules of reinforcement

Margaret Floy Washburn

first woman to be granted a PhD in psychology

John B. Watson

established behaviorism, Little Albert experiment

Wilhelm Wundt

founder of experimental psychology, set up the first laboratory experimental psychology

Paul Broca

researched Broca’s area and conditions in which language is affected

Carl Wernicke

conducted research on Wernicke’s area and sensory aphasias

Roger Sperry

split brain research

Michael Gazzaniga

split brain research, leading researcher in cognitive neuroscience

Gustav Fechner

one of the founders of modern experimental psychology and psychophysics

David Hubel

discoveries concerning information processing the visual system

Ernst Heinrich Weber

just-noticeable difference, Weber’s law, one of the founders of experimental psychology

Torsten Wiesel

discoveries in the visual system

Albert Bandura

Bobo doll experiment (observational learning), social learning theory, self-efficacy

Robert Rescorla

role of cognitive processes in classical conditioning focusing on animal learning and behavior, Rescorla-Wagner model of conditioning (element of surprise can progress learning in an animal)

Edward Thorndike

Law of Effect

Edward C. Tolman

purposive behaviorism, latent learning, cognitive map

John Garcia

taste aversion

Noam Chomsky

father of modern linguistics, proposed that language development is innate

Hermann Ebbinghaus

pioneered the experimental study of memory, forgetting curve, spacing effect

Wolfgang Kohler

Gestalt psychology, insight

Elizabeth Loftus

human memory, misinformation effect and eyewitness testimony, false memories

George A. Miller

one of the founders of the cognitive psychology field, short-term memory

Alfred Binet

invented the first practical IQ test, contributions to intelligence

Sir Francis Galton

statistical concept of correlation, regression towards the mean, pioneer in eugenics, nature versus nurture, psychometrics

Howard Gardner

theory of multiple intelligences

Charles Spearman

pioneer of factor analysis, correlation coefficient, g factor of intelligence

Robert Sternberg

triarchic theory of intelligence

Lewis Terman

revision of Stanford-Binet intelligence scales, eugenicist

David Wechsler

WAIS and WISC

Diana Baumrind

research on parenting styles

Konrad Lorenz

investigated imprinting

Harry Harlow

research on social isolation

Mary Ainsworth

attachment theory, strange situation experiment

Lev Vygotsky

sociocultural theory, social interaction plays a critical role in children’s learning

Erik Erikson

identity crisis, eight life stages of psychosocial development

Carol Gilligan

criticized Kohlberg’s male-oriented theory of moral development

Lawrence Kohlberg

theory of moral development

Alfred Kinsey

research on human sexuality

Abraham Maslow

hierarchy of needs

Stanley Schachter

two factor theory of emotion

Hans Selye

research on biological response to stress and general adaptation syndrome (GAS)

Richard Lazarus

cognitive-mediational theory of emotion- stress is a two-way process

Joseph LeDoux

survival circuits’ impacts on emotion

Paul Ekman

pioneer in the study of emotions and universality of facial expressions

Alfred Adler

individual psychology, inferiority, birth order

Paul Costa Jr

five factor model of personality

Robert McCrae

five factor theory of personality

Carl Jung

founded analytical psychology, individuation, collective unconscious

David Rosenhan

experiment which challenged the validity of psychiatric diagnoses

Aaron T. Beck

father of cognitive therapy

Albert Ellis

rational emotive behavior therapy

Mary Cover Jones

pioneer in behavioral therapy, desensitization

Joseph Wolpe

developed systematic desensitization

Leon Festinger

cognitive dissonance theory

Soloman Asch

Gestalt psychologist, pioneer in social psychology, conformity experiments

Stanley Milgram

experiment on obedience

Philip Zimbardo

Stanford prison experiment

Rene Descartes

dualism- reality is composed of two entirely distinct entities (mind and body)

Hans Eysenck

personality is composed of two components (introversion vs extroversion and emotionality vs stability)

Philippe Pinel

major reformer who insisted madness had nothing to do with demon possession but rather a sick mind