AP Psychology Important People

Important people and what they did from all AP Psychology units.

Alfred Adler

• neo-Freudian

• Emphasizes the interconnectedness of individuals and the importance of social interaction in shaping personality.

• stressed importance of striving for superiority and power

• believed social factors not sexual factors are more important in child development

• birth order, inferiority, and superiority complex, compensation.

Mary Ainsworth

• development

• designed “strange” experiment to study infant attachment I which children were left alone in a playroom.

• Secure attachment children played comfortably when mom was present, were distressed when mom left and would seek contact when mom returned.

• insecure attachment children were less likely to explore their surroundings, became upset

  when mom left and showed indifference when mom returned

Solomon Asch

• Studied conformity and how group pressure distorted judgment

• subjects conformed in their perception of line lengths when confederates in the group purposely gave the incorrect answers

Albert Bandura

• Social-cognitive perspective (Social learning)

• suggested people learn through observation and modeling

• researcher of observational learning by studying children imitating adults hitting a “bobo doll”

• suggested observers experience vicarious reinforcement and vicarious punishment when

  observing others

• propose the social cognitive perspective in which behavior is influenced by the interaction

  between people’s traits and their social context

• reciprocal determinism; the interacting influences of behavior, internal cognition, and

  the environment

Diana Baumrind

• Studied authoritarian, authoritative, and permissive parenting styles.

• children with authoritarian parents usually have less social skill and self-esteem

• children with authoritative parents usually have high self-esteem, self-reliance, and

  social competence

• children with permissive parents are usually more aggressive and immature

Aaron Beck

• Developed a cognitive therapy for depression in which patient’s irrational and distorted thinking is questioned.

Alred Binet

• Developed the first modern intelligence test for the French school system measuring a child’s mental age (Stanford-Binet test adapted and expanded it.)

• assumed intelligence increases with age.

Paul Broca

• Discovered Broca’s area in the left side of the brain was responsible for muscle movements in speech.

Mary Whiton Calkins

• First women to complete the requirements for a PhD in psychology but was denied the degree by Harvard

• Became first female president of the American PSychological Association (APA)

Walter Cannon / Philip Bard

• Developed the Cannon-Bard theory of emotions in which emotions and physiological changes happen simultaneously.

Noam Chomsky

• Studied innate language development and universal grammar.

Paul Costa / Robert McCrae

• Developed BIg Five Trait theory of conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, openness and extraversion

Mary Cover Jones / Joseph Wolpe

• Helped develop exposure therapies including “systematic desensitization” using progressive relaxation to reduce phobias.

Charles Darwin

• studied species variations

• explained diversity in animals by proposing the evolutionary process of natural selection

• believed that nature selects traits that best enable an organism to survive and reproduce in a particular environment

Dorothea Dix

• advocated for more humane treatment of the mentally ill and the construction of mental hospitals

Hermann Ebbinghaus

• developed the forgetting (retention) curve by learning nonsense syllables

Albert Ellis

• creator of rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT) - a confrontational cognitive therapy the challenges people’s self-defeating attitudes and assumptions that cause emotional problems

Erik Erikson

developed eight stages of psychosocial development in which each stage centers around a task

or conflict

• trust versus mistrust (birth to 1) child learns to trust the world or not dependent upon

whether their needs are met

• autonomy versus shame (1 to 3) child learns to do things for themselves or to doubt

their abilities

• initiative versus guilt (3 to 6) child learns to carry out plans or feels guilty about their efforts

to be independent

• competence versus inferiority (6 to puberty) child learns the pleasure of applying themselves

or feeling inferior

• identity versus role confusion (teens into 20s) teens learn to form a personal identity or

become confused about who they are

• intimacy versus isolation (20s to early 40s) person learns to form close relationships or

feels isolated

• generativity versus stagnation (40s to 60s) person learns to discover a sense of contributing

to the world or feels a lack of purpose

• integrity versus despair (late 60s and up) after reflecting on their life, the persons feels a

sense of satisfaction or failure

Gustav Fechner

• developed the field of psychophysics

• studied the concept of absolute thresholds ( minimum amount of stimulation needed for a person to detect a stimulus 50% of the time)

Leon Festinger

• developed the cognitive dissonance theory where we act to reduce the discomfort (dissonance)

Margaret Floyd Washburn

• first female to officially receive a PhD in psychology

• second female president of the APA

Sigmund Freud

• father of the Psychoanalytic School of Psychology

• divided the mind into the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious mind

• emphasized the way our unconscious thought processes and our emotional responses to childhood experiences affect our behavior.

• Divided personality into the id, ego, superego

• Proposed 5 psychosexual stages

• Developed how the ego protects itself through the use of defense mechanisms

• Developed psychoanalysis

• assumed many psychological problems are the result of repressed impulses and conflicts in

  childhood

  • goal of treatment is to release energy previously devoted to id-ego-superego conflicts

  • Freudian slips: unintentional statements that Freud believed expressed repressed thoughts or

  feelings

  • free association; patients are encouraged to say out loud whatever comes to mind

  • resistance; the blocking of consciousness of anxiety-laden materials

  • transference; the patient’s transfer to the analyst of emotions linked to other relationships

  • suggested anxiety is “free-floating”

Francis Galton

• believed intelligence was purely hereditary

• developed a rudimentary intelligence test

Howard Gardner

• proposed eight distinct intelligences: naturalistic, linguistic, logical mathematical, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, body kinesthetic, and spatial

William James / Carl Lange

• Developed the James-LAnge theory of emotions suggesting emotions are the result of physiological changes.

Wolfgang Kohler

• co-founder Gestalt psychology

• studied insight in a chimp (Sultan) who used a stick to reach food

Konrad Lorenz

• studied imprinting in ducklings

• studied instinctive behavior in animals

• critical periods

Elizabeth Loftus

• studied how eyewitness memories can be influenced by questioning

• researched how information can be incorporated into one’s memory (misinformation effect)

Abraham Maslow

humanist

• overall need to fulfill one’s potential

• believed psychology should study healthy and creative people rather than troubled ones

• developed a hierarchy of needs theory (physiological, safety, belongingness and love,

esteem, self-actualization, and self-transcendence needs)

• drew attention to ways the current environmental influences can nurture or limit our growth

potential

Stanley Milgram

• Studied obedience where subjects, following the orders of an experiments, “shocked” a confederate

George Miller

Proposed short-term memory is limited to seven ± two bits of information

Ivan Pavlov

discovered classical conditioning in his studies of the digestion in dogs

Jean Piaget

used case studies to research children’s thinking

• studied cognitive development in children

• developed concepts of:

• schema - concept or framework that organizes and interprets information

• assimilation - interpreting our new experiences in terms of our existing schemas

• accommodation - adapting our current understandings (schemas) to incorporate new

information

developed four stages of cognitive development:

• sensorimotor (birth - 2) experience the world through senses and actions

  • object permanence; the awareness that things continue to exist even when not perceived

• preoperational (2 - 6/7) representing things with words and images; using intuitive rather than logical reasoning.

  • egocentrism; taking another’s point of view

• concrete operational (7 - 11) thinking logically about concrete events, grasping concrete analogies and performing arithmetical operations

  • conservation; understanding properties such as mass, volume, and number remain the same despite changes in forms of objects

• formal operational; abstract reasoning

Carl Rogers

humanist

• believed people are basically good and endowed with self-actualizing tendencies

• developed person centered perspective (also called client centered perspective)

• a growth promoting climate requires three conditions

• genuineness; people are genuine and open with their feelings

• acceptance; people show unconditional positive regard towards others (an attitude of total

acceptance towards another person)

• empathy; they share an mirror others’ feelings and reflect their meanings

• drew attention to ways the current environmental influences can nurture or limit our growth

potential

• stressed the importance of having our needs for love and acceptance satisfied

• develop client centered therapy which focuses on the person’s conscious self-perceptions

• a nondirective therapy in which the therapist listens without judging or interpreting