AP Psych Important People Review

Alfred Binet

tasked with coming up with a test to measure children's mental abilities in France; discovered the idea of mental age; aimed to identify children who may need extra help, not to label them

Mary Whiton Caulkins

studied psychology at Harvard under William James and was the first female president of the APA

Charles Darwin

created the theory of evolution and natural selection

Dorothea Dix

pointed out the horrible treatment of the mentally ill and was responsible for the establishment of psychiatric hospitals

Sigmund Freud

created the psychoanalytic perspective of psychology which emphasizes the influences of the unconscious and childhood experience on our behavior; created the psychoanalytic theory of personality and the psychosexual stages of development

G. Stanley Hall

established the first formal US psychological laboratory at Johns Hopkins University

William James

created functionalism; assumed that thinking was adaptive and that consciousness served as a function to help our ancestors survive

Carl Rogers

led the humanistic perspective and developed client-centered therapy

BF Skinner

along with John B Watson, created behaviorism and defined psychology as the scientific study of observable behavior; studied operant conditioning with rats using a Skinner Box

Jean Piaget

studied cognitive development in children

Paul Broca

discovered a brain area in the left frontal lobe (Broca's area) that is responsible for productive speech; studied Broca's aphasia

Carl Wernicke

discovered a brain area in the left temporal lobe that is responsible for receptive speech; studied Wernicke's aphasia

Roger Sperry

studied split-brain patients and discovered that the different halves of the brain have different functions

Michael Gazzaniga

studied split-brain patients and lateralization in the brain

Gustav Fechner

studied absolute threshold

David Hubel and Torsten Weisel

researched visual sensation and perception and received a Nobel Prize for the discovery of feature detectors

Ernst Weber

came up with the idea that two stimuli must vary by a constant minimum percentage in order for a difference to be perceived

Albert Bandura

studied observational learning in preschoolers using the Bobo Doll experiment; proposed the social-cognitive perspective of personality and believed in reciprocal determinism

Ivan Pavlov

pioneered the study of learning with his classical conditioning experiments

Robert Rescorla

contingency model; studied animals ability to determine the predictability of an event and learned that animals can often predict conditioned events

Edward Thorndike

discovered the law of effect; the idea that rewarded behaviors are more likely to occur and punished behaviors are less likely to occur

Edward Tolman

studied cognition by using rats in cages; discovered latent learning

John B Watson

created behaviorism; conducted the Little Albert Experiment to apply classical conditioning to people

John Garcia

studied taste aversion

Noam Chomsky

studied language development and that it is universal

Hermann Ebbinghaus

memorized nonsense syllables and tried to recall them later to study forgetting; created the forgetting curve

Wolfgang Kohler

insight learning

Elizabeth Loftus

false memory; misinformation effect

George Miller

short term memory has a capacity of 7 items +/- 2

Charles Spearman

believed in general intelligence - "g factor" - and used factor analysis

Howard Gardener

identified 8 relatively independent intelligences

Robert Sternberg

triarchic theory of intelligence - practical, creative, and analytical

Francis Galton

tried to find a simple intelligence measure but failed; coined the term nature or nurture; used psychometrics and factor analysis

Lewis Terman

created the Stanford Binet intelligence test

David Weschler

created the WAIS and the WISC which are more accurate than the Stanford Binet

Diana Baumrind

studied parenting styles

Konrad Lorenz

studied imprinting in ducks

Harry Harlow

discovered that touch is more important in forming attachment than providing nourishment

Mary Ainsworth

studied attachment styles; strange situation experiment

Lev Vygotsky

zone of proximal development

Erik Erikson

came up with the psychosocial stages of development

Carol Gilligan

pointed out that Kohlberg only studied men; she adjusted his theory to incorporate women; said that men are more justice-based and women are more care-based

Lawrence Kohlberg

stage theorist who studied moral development

Alfred Kinsey

first study of sexuality, created the scale of sexuality

Abraham Maslow

humanistic psychologist who created the hierarchy of needs

Stanley Schachter

created the two factor theory of emotion

Hans Selye

General Adaptation Syndrome

James-Lange Theory

emotional experience results from physiological arousal

Cannon-Bard Theory

physiological arousal and emotion occur simultaneously

Two Factor Theory

physiological arousal and conscious labelling of the emotion result in the emotional experience

Lazarus's theory

assessing whether something is a threat or not and then assessing one's perceived ability to cope with it

LeDoux Theory

some more intense emotions take a subconscious "low-road", while other emotions take a "high road" in which they are consciously assessed and labeled

Paul Ekman

universal facial expressions

Alfred Adler

psychodynamic theorist; we are not doomed by our childhood experience; inferiority and superiority complex

Paul Costa and Robert McCrae

created the "Big Five" model of personality traits

Carl Jung

psychodynamic theorist who came up with the idea of the collective unconscious

The Rosenhan Study

study in which healthy individuals were admitted into mental hospitals after saying they were hearing voices. Once in, they acted normally and stopped reporting symptoms, yet they were required to stay there; led to more ethical guidelines and rules being established for mental hospitals

Albert Ellis

father of rational emotive therapy

Mary Cover Jones

created desensitization

Joseph Wolpe

created behavioral therapy techniques

Leon Festinger

cognitive dissonance theory

Soloman Asch

studied social conformity

Stanley Milgram

social obedience

Phillip Zimbardo

Stanford Prison Experiment - role confomity