AP Psych-Key People

Rene Descartes

Rene Descartes

agreed with Socrates and Plato's ideas; was interested in how the physical body and non-physical mind work together; trying to figure out the body-mind connection, he dissected animals to view their brains and nerves

Francis Bacon

developed the scientific method; known as the father of modern science

Gustav Theodor Fechner

doctor, philosopher, and physicist; father of psychophysics

investigated the mathematical relationship between environmental stimuli (physical event) and sensations (psychological event) through experimental procedures, as those outlined in his 1960 book entitled Elemente der Psychophysik

John Locke

English philosopher; wrote that people are born with minds that are a "blank slate" and everything we know has been learned since - birth of empiricism (knowledge comes from experiences)

Wilhelm Wundt

father of psychology,

established the first psychology laboratory and psychology research lab

conducted experiment where participants listened to a metronome and reported the sensations they experienced

Mary Whiton Calkins

First elected female president of the APA

studied psychology under Williams James

denied PhD at Harvard

worked with the little Albert experiment

Charles Darwin

Came up with the theory of evolution

established the idea of "natural selection" continue to influence evolutionary perspective today

British naturalist

Dorothea Dix

American activist who successfully pressured lawmakers to construct & fund asylums for the mentally ill

Sigmund Freud

One of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century; founded the "psychoanalytic" school of psych emphasizing the role of the unconscious (studied dreams) and how childhood experiences influence adult personality

father of “psychoanalysis”

also established psychosexual stages and studied the ideas of such area

G. Stanley Hall

Studied under William James

First psych lab in the U.S.

First president of the APA

William James

Harvard philosopher-psychologist who introduced the school of functionalism by considering the functions of our thoughts and feelings.

Wrote the textbook Principles of Psychology and tutored Mary Calkins

key role in establishing psychology in the US

James-Lang Theory of emotion

Ivan Pavlov

known for Classical Conditioning

through his study of digestion in dogs, he observed that the dogs salivate at the mere sight of food

famous experiment in which he conditioned dogs to salivate in response to the sound of a bell by building an association between the bell and food

laid the foundation for behaviorism

Jean Piaget

Swiss biologist; focused on cognitive development

Established Stage Theory of Development - describes how infant, children, and adolescents use different cognitive abilities

Carl Rogers

Humanisic; self-concept and unconditional positive regard drive personality - founder of client-centered therapy

B.F. Skinner

known for Operant Conditioning

uses reinforcers or consequences to change behavior

according to this theory, the rate at which a certain behavior occurs is determined not by what precedes it, but by the consequences that follows it

famous experiments involving the Skinner Box which was used to study rats and pigeons

Margaret Floy Washburn

First female to be awarded a PhD in psychology; 2nd president of the APA (1921)

First American psychologist who focused on "observable behaviors" rather than subjective mental processes

one of the founders of behaviorism

John B. Watson

Father of Behaviorism

emphasizes objective and observable data such as people's behavior and reactions, as opposed to internal processes that cannot be observed like mental states or thought processes

Known for Little Albert Experiment: trained 9-month old Albert to fear a white rat by pairing it with a loud sound; the fear was then generalized to other furry white objects

Edward Titchener

studied elements of consciousness at his Cornell University lab\

studied under Wundt, created structuralism

Alfred Adler

Neo-Freudian; introduced concept of "inferiority complex" and stressed the importance of birth order; believed that the core motive behind personality involves striving for superiority, or the desire to overcome challenges and move closer toward self-realization

Heinz Kohut

psychodynamic psychologist

Abraham Maslow

Humanistic psychologist known for his "Hierarchy of Needs" and the concept of "self-actualization"

Phil Zimbardo

Stanford Prison Experiment; students role-playing prisoners and guards and the experiment had to be stopped die to the violent results

Stanley Milgram

obedience to authority; had participants administer what they believed were dangerous electrical shocks to other participants; wanted to see if Germans were an aberration or if all people were capable of committing evil actions

Gustav Fechner

• German philosopher and psychologist

• founder of psychophysics

• discovered Fechner Color Effect (observation of different colors when black and white patterns are moving at high speed)

• first to study synesthesia, a condition in which the stimulation of one sensory system leads to the involuntary response by another sensory system

David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel

Two Harvard University researchers who received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries about information processing in the visual system. By recording impulses from individual brain cells of cats and monkeys, Hubel and Wiesel demonstrated that specialized cells in the mammalian brain respond to complex visual features of the environment.

Ernest Weber

Weber's law is related to the Just Noticeable Difference (difference threshold), which is the minimum difference in stimulation that a person can detect 50% of the time but he noted that fro people to really perceive a difference, the stimuli must differ by a constant "proportion" not a constant "amount"

Albert Bandur

known for Social Learning Theory

learning happens by observing others and modeling their behaviors

occurs from a combination of environmental and psychological factors

famous aggression experiment using a Bobo doll

Robert Rescorla

expanded on Pavlov's work; focused on Contingency Theory

interested in the frequency or the number of times an association was made

Edward Thorndike

known for Learning Theory

studied how cats learned to escape from a puzzle box

developed the Law of Effect

his work later leads to the development of Operant Conditioning

concluded it escape was a process of learning / trial and error, rather than mere insight

Edward Tolman

known for Latent Learning

• states that learning occurs even if there is no reward

• demonstrated this in an experiment where rats were trained to run a maze without a reward. After a few days, a reward was introduced and the rates began to run faster

• concluded that the rats had developed a "mental map" of the maze when they were not being rewarded

John Garcia

known for Conditioned Taste Aversion

aversion or distaste for a certain taste or smell that was associated with a negative reaction

discovered while studying the effects of radiation on mice

"Garcia Effect" occurs in patients undergoing treatment for cancer ho are exposed to radiation as treatment or when humans have a bad reaction occur as a result of ingesting a particular food or drink

Wolfgang Kohler

Gestalt psychologist that first demonstrated INSIGHT through his chimpanzee experiments. He noticed the solution process wasn't slow, but sudden and reflective.

Mary Cover Jones

used classical/direct conditioning to unlearn fear

helped Little Peter overcome his fear of rabbits by systematically pairing the animal with his favorite food (exposure therapy + desensitization)

Noam Chomsky

a linguist who believed that humans have an inborn or "native" ability to develop language (language acquisition device - LAD

all humans share a universal grammar

childhood is a critical period for learning to speak or sign fluently

Hermann Ebbinghaus

the first person to study memory scientifically and systematically; suggested that learned information tends to be forgotten after days or weeks but can be retained from review

identified the forgetting curve

Elizabeth Loftus

studied human memory

Misinformation Effect causing False Memories: shows this through her study where subjects are shown footage of an automobile accident and were later asked to estimate the speed of the collision (testing if the wording changed their answer)

George A. Miller

a founder of cognitive psychology recognized that human minds can be understood through an information-processing model

made famous the phrase: "the magical number 7, plus or minus 2" when describing human memory

Robert Sternberg

• intelligence; devised the Triarchic Theory of Intelligence (academic problem-solving, practical, and creative)

• created the five components of creativity

• developed triangular theory of love

Francis Galton

interested in link between heredity and intelligence; founder of the eugenics movement

Alfred Binet

Field: testing; designed test to identify slow learners in need of remediation-not applicable in the U.S. because too culture-bound (French)

William Terman

supported eugenics; encouraged low-scoring groups to become sterilized, first to adopt IQ scores, revised Binet's test, and created the Stanford-Binet Test that was to measure intelligence.

David Wechsler

Developed WAIS and WISC (IQ tests); believed in a broad view of intelligence

Jerome Kagan

identified a number of temperamental patterns

ex: "bold" babies are less easily frightened and more socially responsive than "shy" babies

Alexander Thomas and Stella Chess

conducted a major longitudinal study that identified three basic styles of children's temperament

Diana Baumrind

developed the different types of parenting styles:

authoritarian, authoritative, permissive, (neglectful)

Konrad Lorenz

researcher who focused on critical attachment periods in baby birds, a concept he called imprinting

Harry Harlow

development, contact comfort, attachment; experimented with baby rhesus monkeys and presented them with cloth or wire "mothers;" showed that the monkeys became attached to the cloth mothers because of contact comfort

Mary Ainsworth

developmental psychology; compared effects of maternal separation, devised patterns of attachment (secure/insecure); "The Strange Situation": observation of parent/child attachment

Renee Baillargeon

used visual tasks to demonstrate that infants as young as 2.5 months are capable of displaying object permanence

Lev Vygotsky

placed greater emphasis upon the role of social and cultural factors in influencing cognitive development

Erik Erickson

psychoanalyst and developmental psychologist that developed a theory of eight stages of psychosocial development; Neo-Freudian who modified and updated Freud's work to make it his own: less focus on sex drive and unconscious, more optimistic about human behavior

David Elkind

Came up with the theories of imaginary audience and personal fable during the adolescence stage; adolescent egocentrism

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

Psychologist who theorized the terminally ill progress through sequence of 5 stages of grief: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance

Kohlberg

theorist who claimed individuals went through a series of stages in the process of moral development.

Carol Gilligan

moral development studies to follow up Kohlberg, criticizing him for failing to include women in his research

studied girls and women and found that they did not score as high on his six stage scale because they focused more on relationships rather than laws and principle

suggests that the ways boys and girls are raised in society lead to differences in moral reasoning

Alfred Kinsey

his research described human sexual behavior and was controversial; created the Kinsey scale of sexual orientation

Stanley Schachter

developed two-factor theory of emotion; stated that in order to experience emotions, a person must be physically aroused and know the emotion before you experience it

Hans Seyle

The father of "modern stress theory." Defined eustress and distress. Stated that stress is a mutual action of forces in the body

General Adaptation Syndrome

Richard Lazarus

American psychologist who concluded that some emotional responses do not require conscious thought; our emotional experience depends on our interpretation of the situation we are in

Paul Costa & Robert McCrae

developed the Big Five Trait Theory (CANOE: conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, openness to experience, and extraversion)

Carl Jung

founder of Analytic Psychology; neo-Freudian who created concept of "collective unconscious" and wrote books on dream interpretation; developed theory of personality

Karen Horney

neo-Freudian, psychodynamic; criticized Freud, stated that personality is molded by current fears and impulses, rather than being determined solely by childhood experiences and instincts, neurotic trends; concept of "basic anxiety"

George Kelly

he believed (personal construct theory) our personality consists of our thoughts about ourselves, including our biases, errors, mistakes, and false conclusions

Julian Rotter

Developed internal/external locus of control; researched how differences in personality were related to an individual's perceived control over the environment

Gordan Allport

the father of the trait perspective of personality; developed descriptive adjectives, traits, and dispositions

Raymond Cattell

a psychologist interest in personality, who used factor analysis with hundreds of surface traits to identify which traits were related to each other. By this process, he identified sixteen source traits, and by factor analysis reduced fifteen of these into five global factors: extroversion, anxiety, receptivity, accommodation, and self-control

David Rosenhan

did study in which healthy patients were admitted to psychiatric hospitals and diagnoses with schizophrenia; showed that once you are diagnosed with a disorder, the label, even when behavior indicates otherwise, is hard to overcome in a mental health setting

Aaron Beck

father of Cognitive Therapy - cognitive behavioral therapy

believed that a person's behavior, thoughts, and feelings are interrelated and that his core beliefs influence how he sees himself, others, and the future.

Albert Ellis

developed Rational-Emotive Therapy (RET), focuses on altering client's patterns of irrational thinking to reduce maladaptive behavior and emotions

Joseph Wolpe

Psychiatrist who refined Jones' technique into the behavior therapy called exposure therapy

helped those diagnosed with PTSD through reciprocal inhibition and systematic desensitization