AP Psychology - Key People

Alfred Adler

-Neo-Freudian but disagreed with Freud's emphasis on the unconscious, instinctual drives, and the importance of sexuality and had a more positive view
-Believed we are social creatures governed by social urges, we strive for superiority
-Talked about how people attempt to compensate for their shortcomings

Mary Ainsworth

-Secure attachment - stable and positive
-Anxious-Ambivalent - desired to be with a parent and some resistance to being reunited
-Avoidant - tendency to avoid reunion with parent

Gordon Allport

-Trait Theorist
-Central - the core traits that characterize an individual personality
-Secondary - traits that are inconsistent or relatively superficial
-Cardinal - so basic that all of a person's activities relate to it

Solomon Asch

-Studied conformity - subjects were shown lines of different lengths and asked which of the lines matched an example line that they were shown, his accomplices gave the wrong answer to see how the actual subject would react to finding that their opinion differed from the group opinion, subjects conformed in about 1/3 of the trials

Albert Bandura

-Studied observational learning in children using a Bobo Doll

Sandra Bem

-Bem Sex Role Inventory to study femininity, masculinity, androgyny
-Rigid gender stereotypes greatly restrict behavior.
-Studied gender roles

Alfred Binet

-Designed the first intelligence test made up of "intellectual" questions and problems, results were based on average scores for children in each age group
-His test was revised by Lewis Terman and others at Stanford and made into the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales, which were used in North America

Bowlby

-Child development
-Attachment theory

Raymond Cattell

-16 Trait Personality Inventory
-Surface traits appear in clusters, 16 source traits
-Factor analysis

Noam Chomsky

-Proposed an innate language acquisition device

Hermann Ebbinghaus

-Forgetting curve

Paul Ekman

-Pioneer of the study of emotions and their relation to facial expressions
-Developmental psychologist

Albert Ellis

-Cognitive therapist, founder of rational emotive behavioral therapy which attempts to change irrational beliefs that cause emotional problem

Erik Erikson

-Proposed that development occurs in stages, each stage confronts a person with a new developmental task
-Trust v. Mistrust, autonomy v. shame and doubt, initiative v. guilt, industry v. inferiority, identity v. role confusion, intimacy v. isolation, generativity v. stagnation, integrity v. despair

Hans Eysenck

-Trait theorist
-Big 3 - melancholic, choleric, phlegmatic

Leon Festinger

-Cognitive dissonance

Anna Freud

-Neo-Freudian
-Disagreed with Freud's theories about women

Sigmund Freud

-Founder of psychoanalysis
-Id, Ego, Superego
-Many of our behaviors are driven by unconscious motives/desires

John Garcia

-Studied taste aversion in rats with radiation, decided there was an evolutionary element to taste aversion

Howard Gardner

-Theorized that there are actually eight different kinds of intelligence
-Language, logic and math, visual and spatial thinking, music, bodily-kinesthetic skills, intrapersonal skills, interpersonal skills, naturalist skills

Carol Gilligan

-Created a theory of moral development in women because male psychologists were overly focused on defining moral maturity in terms of justice and autonomy
-She pointed out that there is also an ethic of caring about others that is a major element of moral development

G. Stanley Hall

-Founded the American Journal of Psychology

Harry Harlow

-Separated baby rhesus monkeys from their mothers at birth, placed with surrogate mothers either made of wire/metal or cloth, studied mother-infant relationships and discovered Contract Comfort

Hilgard

-Researched hypnosis and its effectiveness as an analgesic "hidden-observer" effect

Karen Horney

-Neo-Freudian
-Among the first to challenge the obvious male bias in Freud's theories, also disagreed with his cause of anxiety-believed that people feel anxious because they feel isolated and helpless in a hostile world, believed causes are rooted in childhood

William James

-Wrote Principles of Psychology and helped establish psychology as a serious discipline, regarded consciousness as a stream or flow of images and sensations

Carl Jung

-People are either introverts or extroverts
-Collective unconscious - mental storehouse for unconscious ideas and images shared by all humans, such universals create archetypes
-Anima (female principle) & Animus (male principle) exist in everyone

Alfred Kinsey

-Studied human sexuality

Wolfgang Kohler

-Co-founder of Gestalt psychology
-Studied insight learning in chimpanzees

Lawrence Kohlberg

-Studied moral development
-Preconventional-Conventional -Postconventional

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

-Reactions to impending death - denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance

Elizabeth Loftus

-Along with John Palmer showed people a filmed automobile accident, asked how fast cars were going when they smashed or bumped or contacted, asked if they had seen broken glass in the film (there was none) to study the tendency of people to construct memories based on how they are questioned

Konrad Lorenz

-Discovered the principle of imprinting
-Studied instinctive behavior in animals

Abraham Maslow

-Humanist
-Self-Actualization was important
-Hierarchy of human needs - physiological needs, safety and security, love and belonging, esteem and self-esteem, self-actualization

William Masters & Virginia Johnson

-Directly studied sexual intercourse and masturbation in nearly 700 males and females
-Sexual response can be divided into four phases: excitement, plateau, orgasm, and resolution

Franz Mesmer

-Austrian physician who believed he could cure disease with magnets
-His treatments were based on the power of suggestion, not really magnetism and he was later rejected as a fraud
-The term "mesmerize" comes from his name, his treatments sparked interest in hypnosis

Stanley Milgram

-Studied obedience
-Two subjects ("teacher" and "learner") but the "learner" was actually an actor: the teacher was told to shock the learner every time they answered a question incorrectly to see how far they were willing to go

Ivan Pavlov

-Studied classical conditioning
-Paired a bell with food to make dogs salivate

Jean Piaget

-Child development occurs in stages
-Sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, formal operations

Carl Rogers

-Humanist
-Emphasized the human capacity for inner peace and happiness
-People need ample amounts of love and acceptance from others

Hermann Rorschach

-Created the Rorschach inkblot test, a projective test of personality

Stanley Schachter

-Emotion occurs when we apply a particular label to general physical arousal - we have to interpret our feelings

Martin Seligman

-Prepared fear theory - we are prepared by evolution to readily develop fears to certain biologically relevant stimuli, such as snakes and spiders

Hans Selye

-Studied stress - the body responds in the same way to any stress (infection, failure, embarrassment, a new job, trouble at school, etc.)
-General Adaptation Syndrome - a series of bodily reactions to prolonged stress (alarm, resistance, exhaustion)

B.F. Skinner

-Studied operant conditioning with rats and pigeons
-Created a Skinner Box

Charles Spearman

-intelligence
-"g" factor

Robert Sternberg

-Triangular theory of love - love is made up of intimacy, passion and commitment which can combine to produce seven types of love (romantic, liking, fatuous, infatuation, companionate, empty, consummate)
-Believed insight involved selective incoding, selective combination, and selective comparison

Lewis Terman

-Revised Binet's intelligence test to help create the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales for use in North America, appropriate for people ages 2-90

Edward L. Thorndike

-Learning theorist
-Law of Effect - the probability of a response is altered by the effect it has, acts that are reinforced tend to be repeated

Edward Titchener

-Carried Wundt's ideas into the United States and called them structuralism

Lev Vygotsky

-Sociocultural theory
-Children's thinking develops through dialogues with more capable persons, children actively seek to discover new principles
-Zone of proximal development - range of tasks a child cannot yet master alone but that she or he can accomplish with the guidance of a more capable partner

John B. Watson

-Behaviorist
-Objected to the study of the mind or conscious experience, thought introspection was unscientific
-Observed stimuli and response, adopted Pavlov's concept of conditioning

David Wechsler

-Intelligence testing

Benjamin Lee Whorf

-Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis

Wilhelm Wundt

-Father of psychology - set up the first psychological laboratory to study conscious experience
-Introspection

Yerkes & Dodson

-Yerkes Dodson law - the ideal level of arousal depends on the complexity of a task: If the task is more complex your performance will be better at lower levels of arousal
-If the task is simple it is best for arousal level to be high

Philip Zimbardo

-Stanford prison experiment.
-Students volunteered to play the roles of prisoners and guards, experiment had to be called off after 6 days, rather than the planned 2 weeks because the guards had become so sadistic that four of the ten prisoners suffered severe emotional issues.