The Story of Psychology Flashcards

Vocabulary flashcards covering historical figures, foundational schools of thought, and key terms from the prologue on the story of psychology.

Psychology (Contemporary Definition)

The science of behavior and mental processes.

Psychology (Pre-1920s Definition)

The science of mental life.

Behavior

Anything an organism does—any action that can be observed and recorded, such as yelling, smiling, blinking, sweating, talking, and marking a questionnaire.

Mental Processes

The internal, subjective experiences inferred from behavior, including sensations, perceptions, dreams, thoughts, beliefs, and feelings.

Aristotle

Ancient Greek naturalist and philosopher who, before 300 B.C., theorized about learning, memory, motivation, emotion, perception, and personality.

Wilhelm Wundt

German philosopher and physiologist who established the first psychology laboratory in December 1879 at the University of Leipzig by measuring the speed of mental processes.

Structuralism

An early school of psychology that used self-reflective introspection to explore the structural elements of the human mind.

Introspection

The practice of looking inward to report immediate sensations, images, and feelings in response to stimuli, which waned because it required verbal subjects and produced unreliable results.

Edward Bradford Titchener

Student of Wilhelm Wundt who joined the Cornell University faculty in 1892 and introduced structuralism.

Functionalism

A school of psychology focused on how mental and behavioral processes function and how they enable an organism to adapt, survive, and flourish.

William James

American philosopher-psychologist who advocated functionalism, wrote the 1890 textbook Principles of Psychology, and mentored Mary Whiton Calkins.

Mary Whiton Calkins

Pioneering memory researcher tutored by William James who was denied a Harvard Ph.D. because of her gender and became the first female president of the American Psychological Association in 1905.

Margaret Floy Washburn

The first woman to receive a psychology Ph.D., author of The Animal Mind, and the second female president of the American Psychological Association in 1921.

Ivan Pavlov

Russian physiologist who pioneered the study of learning.

Sigmund Freud

Austrian physician who developed an influential theory of personality emphasizing unconscious thought processes and childhood emotional responses.

Jean Piaget

Swiss biologist recognized as the twentieth century's most influential observer of children.

Behaviorism

The view that psychology should be an objective science that studies observable behavior without reference to mental processes.

John B. Watson

American psychologist who championed behaviorism as the study of observable behavior and demonstrated conditioned responses on 'Little Albert' alongside Rosalie Rayner.

B. F. Skinner

A leading behaviorist who rejected introspection and studied how consequences shape observable behavior.

Humanistic Psychology

A perspective led by Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow that rejected behaviorism and Freudian psychology, emphasizing individual growth potential and needs for love and acceptance.

Cognitive Neuroscience

The interdisciplinary study of brain activity linked with mental activity, including perception, thinking, memory, and language.