Hist & Systems Exam 3

Mental Age

A measurement of a person's intellectual performance compared to the average performance of children at a particular age.

• the age at which children of average ability can perform certain tasks

• Ex: A 7-year-old who performs like the average 9-year-old has a mental age of 9.

Coca-Cola was taken to court because the government argued that the caffeine in the drink was harmful. Psychologist Harry Hollingworth conducted research to investigate the effects of caffeine on human performance. No negative effects were found.

• Showed that companies could fund research without influencing the results.

• Proved psychologists could work in applied psychology while maintaining their professional integrity.

• Demonstrated how experimental psychology could be used in real-world settings, not just universities.

What was the significance for psychology of the Coca-Cola trial and Harry Hollingworth’s research?

• Not enough job opportunities in academia

• psychologists had to enter other industries to escape poverty

• applied psychology had mass appeal

• public school enrollments were increasing dramatically

  • Psych was able to apply methods to education

What persuaded psychologists to apply their expertise to problems in education?

Interested in psychology as a result of his own experiments with drugs

What provoked James McKeen Cattell's interest in psychology?

interested in Galton’s work in eugenics

• Argued for the sterilization of delinquents and “defective persons”

• Argued for offering incentives to healthy, intelligent people so they would intermarry

What were Cattell’s opinions of eugenics? Who did he believe should be sterilized?

Mental tests measured basic motor skills and senses rather than intelligence

• dealt primarily with elementary sensorimotor measurements

What did Cattel’s mental tests primarily deal with?

• used more complex measures than Cattell

• believed that assessing cognitive functions would provide a more appropriate measure of intelligence

• measured three cognitive functions: judgment, comprehension and

  reasoning

How did the Alfred Binet tests differ from previous mental tests? What did they each focus on?

a number representing a person’s intelligence

• formula: mental age divided by chronological age, multiplied by 100

What is intelligence quotient (IQ)? And what is the formula?

Henry Goddard

• Translated test from French

Who translated and introduced the Binet intelligence test to American psychologists?

to persuade people that psychology was just as legitimate, scientific, and essential as the more established sciences

What was the purpose of adopting metaphors from medical and engineering terminology?

He was a vocal critic of IQ tests and results because they indicated that blacks and immigrants had less intelligence than whites.

• demonstrated the importance of environmental factors, including educational opportunities and social conditions, in explaining differences in test performance.

Who is Horace Mann Bond? Why is he so important? What did he do?

• Florence L. Goodenough : Developed the Draw-a-Man Test, which attempted to measure children's intellectual development by having them draw a human figure.

• Psyche Cattell : Developed the Cattell Infant Intelligence Scale.

What contributions did Florence L. Goodenough and Psyche Cattell make to the testing movement?

He treated learning and behavioral problems in school children

• now called school/educational psychology

What is Lightner Witmer's "clinical psychology" known as today?

physical problems, genetics, and environmental factors

What did Witmer attribute behavioral and cognitive disorders to?

World War II created a large need for psychologists to help soldiers and veterans experiencing psychological problem

• The Army created training programs to prepare hundreds of clinical psychologists to treat military personnel.

• The VA funded graduate programs and paid tuition for those willing to work for the VA

New type of patient: adult w/ emotional problems

How did WWII and the VA changed clinical psychology?

• applied psychology to advertising, business, and employee selection.

• He studied how psychological principles could make advertising more effective and help businesses select workers.

How did Walter Dill Scott contribute to the field of IO psychology?

they often do not act rationally, they can be easily influenced

What did Walter Dill Scott argue in terms of consumers?

World War I

• IO psych grew in popularity and importance.

• Scott evaluated the job qualifications of 3 million soldiers.

• This showed the military how useful psychology could be.

World War II

• Psychologists helped test, screen, and classify military recruits.

• Psychologists improved how soldiers were selected and trained.

• Engineering psychology grew as a result.

• Engineering psychologists worked with weapons designers to make sure equipment matched human abilities and limitations.

How did the World Wars impact IO psychology?

Researchers discovered that productivity was influenced by social relationships, attention, group dynamics, and workers' attitudes, not just physical working conditions.

• encouraged the human relations movement in industrial psychology.

How was industrial-organizational psychology affected by the Hawthorne studies?

• Promoted studying the time and movements involved in tasks to make work more efficient.

• Was one of the first to use videos to study how people moved while working.

• Faced discrimination because she was a woman

• Applied her ideas to both workplaces and everyday home life.

  • Ex: Refrigerator door shelves to help organize items more efficiently.

What contributions did Lillian Moller Gilbreth made to IO psychology?

applied areas such as clinical, industrial, and forensic psychology

What areas of psychology did Hugo Munsterberg did research in?

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, psychology faced criticism:

• People believed psychologists were failing to solve problems.

• Industrial psychologists were blamed for problems in businesses.

• Public interest in psychology decreased.

How did economic forces influence the development of applied psychology?

Tropism

Loeb’s theory of animal behavior based on an involuntary forced movement

• An animal’s reaction to a stimulus is direct and automatic (consciousness is not necessary)

• An automatic movement or response of an organism toward or away from a stimulus.

Connectionism

Thorndike's theory that learning happens by forming connections between stimuli and responses.

Trial and error learning

Learning by trying different behaviors until one works.

Law of effect

Behaviors followed by satisfying results are more likely to happen again, while behaviors followed by unpleasant results become less likely.

Law of exercise

Connections between stimuli and responses become stronger through practice and repetition.

Conditioned reflexes

Learned automatic responses that occur when a previously neutral stimulus becomes associated with another stimulus.

ex: pavlov dog salivating

Associated reflexes

learned reflexes created by associating one stimulus with another, often studied through observable movements.

• ex: a buzzer sounded at the time of the shock soon brought about by itself the withdrawal of

  the finger.

He rejected them

What were John Watson’s views on mentalistic concepts and the concept of consciousness?

animal psychology

What was the most important antecedent of Watson’s behaviorism?

Margaret Floy Washburn: wrote “The Animal Mind”

Who wrote the first comprehensive overview of animal psychology? What was the title of the textbook?

State legislators and university administration did not consider the field to have any practical value or future for that psychology

Why was Animal Psychology a difficult profession?

Hans answered correctly when the questioner knew the answer/ was visible.

And poorly when the questioner did not know the answer/not visible

• Conclusion: Hans was not solving math problems; He was conditioned to respond to small, unconscious body movements and facial cues from people.

What happened in Oskar Pfungst’s experiment with Clever Hans?

Thorndike placed a food-deprived cat in a box to test how long it would take for the cat to activate the lever to be fed.

• responses were random at first, but eventually less when they learned and escaped faster.

What happened in Edward Thorndike’s puzzle box experiment?

• was on subjective ideas;

• switched to objective and quantifiable physiological events

  • Example of topic: glandular secretions and muscular movement

What did Ivan Pavlov’s work help shift psychology’s emphasis to?

Designed a three story research building w/ extra thick windows, and double steel airtight doors

• The floors of the building were supported by steel girders set in sand

• The building was surrounded by a straw-filled moat

• The building also eliminated temperature changes, odors, vibrations, and extraneous noises

Did this to eliminate outside influences affecting his results

Describe Pavlov’s “Tower of Silence” and how it helped keep his research objective

unconditioned stimulus: something that naturally causes a reaction.

• ex: Food

US

Unconditioned response: The natural reaction to the stimulus

• ex: Dog salivates when seeing food.

UR

conditioned stimulus: Something that becomes associated with the natural stimulus through learning

• ex: bell

CS

conditioned response: The learned reaction to the conditioned stimulus

ex: Dog salivates when hearing the bell

CR

Conditioned stimulus (bell) is paired with the unconditioned stimulus (food)

• After many pairings, the dog learns to associate the bell with food.

• Eventually, the dog salivates just from hearing the bell, even without food.

What are the main steps in a typical Classical conditioning experiment

reinforcement

something that increases the likelihood of a response

• necessary for learning to take place

• simultaneous discovery with Pavlov

• discovered knee jerk response

• no one seemed interested and his research findings were eventually ignored

E. B. Twitmyer

found that reflexes could be triggered by the original stimulus or by something associated with it through learning

What did Vladimir Bekhterev’s research regarding Associated reflexes show?

Functionalism was more objective than previous schools

• Applied psychology had little use for consciousness and introspection

What was the influence of functionalism on behaviorism?

Behaviorism

Watson’s science of behavior:

• dealt solely with observable behavioral acts and objective terms.

Conditioned reflex method

Studying learning by observing how a neutral stimulus becomes capable of producing a learned response.

Verbal report

Using what a person says as objectively observable verbal behavior

• (used instead of introspection)

Law of mass action

The more brain (cortical) tissue a person has, the better or more efficiently they can learn.

Principle of equipotentiality

the idea that one part of the cerebral cortex is equal to another in it’s contribution to learning.

The little albert experiment

• Albert was shown a white rat.

• A loud, frightening noise was made when the rat appeared.

• The rat and noise were paired repeatedly.

• Eventually, Albert became afraid of the rat even without the noise.

Albert developed a conditioned fear response.

adult fears, anxieties, and phobias are conditioned emotional responses that were established in infancy and childhood and stay with us throughout our lives

What conclusions can be made from the Little Albert experiment?

• Psychic or mental concepts have no value for a science of psychology

• Argued for the acceptance of animal psychology

• Wanted behaviorism to be of practical value; applied to the real world as well

What were some of John Watson’s ideas about the development of Behaviorism?

Watson’s program was not embraced immediately or universally

what were the reactions to Watson’s program?

• Observation with and without the use of instruments - Watching and recording behavior.

• Testing methods - Measuring responses under controlled conditions.

• The verbal report method - treating people's spoken responses as observable behavior rather than introspection.

• The conditioned reflex method - Studying learned responses through conditioning.

What were Watson’s methods of Behaviorism?

it is stimulus substitution

How did Watson describe conditioning (in terms of the Conditioned reflex method)?

now focus on objective methods along with the elimination of introspection.

subjects became less important

• They no longer observed, instead they were observed by the experimenters

• The experimenters were the observers who established the experimental conditions and recorded the subject’s responses

What were some changes in the nature and role of the subject in behaviorism (in terms of psychological labs)

objective, complex responses like writing, dancing or building a house

• involves an organism moving around/taking action to achieve a goal and change its surroundings.

what are Acts? (know the definition and what they involve)

Implicit responses

happen inside organism

ex: Visceral movements, glandular secretions, and nerve impulses

explicit responses

overt and directly observable responses

• ex: jerking away from heat, blinking from a puff of air, saying “ouch”

accepted them initially but later rejected them

• believed that behaviors that seemed instinctive were really socially conditioned responses

How does Watson explain instincts?

believed that emotions were nothing more than physiological responses to specific stimuli

How does Watson explain emotions?

• Fear - produced by loud noises or sudden loss of support

• Rage - produced by restriction of body movements

• Love - caused by caressing the skin or by rocking and patting

All other emotional responses are compounded from these basic emotions through the conditioning process

What three fundamental unlearned emotional states did Watson suggest infants show?

demonstrated Watson’s theory of conditioned emotional responses.

• Watson concluded that all adult fears, aversions, and anxieties likewise are conditioned in early childhood.

How the studies of Albert and Peter support Watson’s ideas on the role of learning in emotion

Mary Cover Jones:

• study with three-year-old Peter, who already

  showed a fear of rabbits

Who was the first person to successfully eliminate the fear response through conditioning?

Believed thinking was a form of implicit motor behavior

• particularly involving subtle or internal speech-related movements.

He argued that thought could be understood through bodily responses rather than through an independent, unobservable mind.

Watson’s view on Thought Processes were:

• Believed behavior could be controlled and changed rather than being determined by myths or traditions.

• Offered people a new way of understanding behavior instead of relying on old beliefs.

• Believed childhood experiences and environment strongly shape behavior.

• Thought inherited traits (genetics) played a smaller role than the environment.

why was Behaviorism popular ?

• Proposes sweeping revision

• Blatantly attacks the existing order

• Suggests that the earlier version of the truth be discarded

• Is said to have omitted important components

What were some criticisms of Watson’s Behaviorism?

• believed that you needed introspection and consciousness to determine the meaning of a subject’s response or the accuracy of speech behavior

• questioned Watson’s tenet that human behavior is fully predetermined

what were some of William Mcdougall’s arguments/beliefs in his debate with Watson?

• Made psychology more scientific and objective.

• Replaced older ideas about studying the mind.

• Watson is recognized as the founder of behaviorism.

• Other psychologists built on his ideas.

• His work helped shape modern psychology.

What were the contributions of Watson’s behaviorism?

Operationism

The idea that scientific concepts should be defined by the specific procedures used to measure or observe them.

Purposive behaviorism

Edward Tolman's approach that behavior is goal-directed and purposeful, even though it can be studied objectively.

Intervening variables

Internal factors that help explain the relationship between a stimulus and a response.

• Examples: Hunger, expectations, motivation.

Sign gestalts

Tolman's term for learned expectations about the relationship between environmental cues and outcomes.

• Example: A rat learns that a particular path leads to food.

Cognitive maps

a pattern of sign gestalts (Mental representations of an environment that help an organism navigate)

• This pattern is what the animal learns, it learns a map of the maze not just a set of motor habits

Hypothetico-deductive method

Creating a theory, developing predictions from it, and testing those predictions through experiments.

Law of primary reinforcement

idea that learning is strengthened when a response is followed by reduction of a biological drive, such as hunger or thirst.

Habit strength

The strength of a learned connection between a stimulus and a response.

Operant Conditioning

Learning in which behavior is influenced by its consequences, such as reinforcement or punishment.

• the behavior of the rat in the skinner box is instrumental in securing the

  stimulus or food

an attraction featuring trained animals performing unusual behaviors.

• established by Keller and Marian Breland

what was the IQ Zoo and who established it?

• Watson's Behaviorism (John B. Watson) - Observable stimulus-response behavior

• Neobehaviorism (Edward Tolman, Clark Hull, B. F. Skinner) - More systematic learning theories, experiments, and explanations of behavior

• Sociobehaviorism (Albert Bandura, Julian Rotter) - Social learning, expectations, and cognitive influences on behavior

What are the three stages of behaviorism, the major psychologists involved in each, and the major ways each differed from the others?

1. environmental stimuli

2. physiological drives

3. heredity

4. previous training

5. age

what were the 5 independent variables that Edward Tolman believed caused behavior?

• Simple observation

• systematic controlled observation

• experimental testing of hypotheses

• Hypothetico-deductive method

what methods did Clark Hull consider useful?

primary drives

associated with innate biological need states and are vital to the organism’s

survival

• ex: Hunger, Thirst, Temperature regulation, Fatigue/sleepiness, sexual reproduction and pain-relief

environmental stimuli associated with the reduction of primary drives and so may become drives themselves.

secondary drives

Learned motivations that develop through experience.

• avoiding food that makes you sick

primary reinforcements

Things that naturally satisfy biological needs.

• the reduction of a primary drive

• ex: Food, Water, sleep, sex

secondary reinforcements

“Conditioned reinforcers” - Things that become reinforcing through learning and association with other rewards.

• ex: money, grades, tokens

his system of psychology reflected his own early life experiences

• According to his view: life is a product of past reinforcement

what was B.F. Skinner’s life a product of?