History of Psychology

Beginning of modern psychology field.

Establishment of Wundt's research lab at Uni of Leipzig, Germany, 1879

First psychology lab in North America.

John Hopkins Uni, 1883

Early psychology practice that measured shapes of the skull of clients, looking for bumps/indentations that signified talents or deficiencies.

Phrenology

Early psychology practice that studied contours/features of clients' faces to determine personality traits/abilities.

Physiognomy

Early psychology practice who predicted the future and advised clients about current or future actions.

Clairvoyance

Early psychology practice that made psychological assessments based on the client's handwriting.

Graphology

Aims of early psychology practitioners.

Cure depression/anxiety, improve marital relations, teach parenting skills, increase job satisfaction, assist in vocational choices

19th-century staple in student education that focused on sensation/perception, attention, learning, memory, thinking, emotions/sensibilities, and will.

Mental philosophy

Founder of phrenology.

Franz Josef Gall

North Americans who spread phrenology and established phrenological clinics in cities.

Johann Spurzheim, George Combe

Aim of phrenologists in clinical practice.

Provide plans of action designed to strengthen weaker mental faculties

In phrenology, bumps in the skull indicated ____.

Overdeveloped brain parts, stronger mental faculties

In phrenology, indentations in the skull indicated ____.

Underdeveloped brain parts, deficiencies

Founder of physiognomy.

Johann Lavater

Major drawback of physiognomy.

Used to justify racial/ethnic stereotypes

Early psychology practice that relieved medical/psychological symptoms in patients by passing magnets over their bodies to move bodily fluids called humors.

Mesmerism

Founder of mesmerism.

Franz Anton Mesmer

Result of King Louis XVI's investigation in the validity of mesmerism.

Negative findings, but mesmerists continued practice

Time periods in which spiritualism gained popularity.

US Civil War, influenza epidemic, WWI

Psychological services provided by spiritualists

Depression/anxiety treatment, advice about workplace/marital/child rearing problems

Early psychology practice that involved communicating with spirits of the dead via seance to provide clients with psychological relief.

Spiritualism

Early psychology practice that helped clients reach spiritual healing by helping them see how irrationality/negative thinking affected their heath. Cures resided in mental powers of individuals, not medicine.

Mental healing, mind cure movement, new thought movement

Founder of the mental healing/mind cure movement.

Phineas Quimby

Time in which the mind cure movement played a role in the development of psychotherapy in the 20th century.

Emmanuel movement

Scientific psychology conflicted with ____ and _____ when it arrived in North America. Opposed them strongly as the sole authoritative voice on psychology.

Public psychology, Mental philosophy

Founder of mental philosophy in 17th century England. Published a book in 1690 that conceived the mind as a tabula rasa- blank slate. All knowledge came from sensation and reflection.

John Locke

Strengthened the assertion that the mind was assumed to not know the external world directly, but only indirectly through processes of reflection.

George Berkeley

Published a book in 1843 that called for an empirical science of psychology.

J.S. Mill

Founder of Scottish realism, a common sense philosophy. Disagreed with the denial of the reality of direct knowledge of objects and events in the world.

Thomas Reid

Early psychology practice that described the mind in terms of its separate faculties. Provided support for the legitimacy of phrenology. Dominated North American college classrooms by 1820s.

Scottish realism

Professor of mental/moral philosophy. Considered the author of the first textbook in American psychology.

Thomas Upham

The first textbook in American psychology, published 1827. Used widely for 50+ years.

Elements of Intellectual Psychology

Practice of boring/chiseling holes into the skull of living individuals to release trapped spirits and cure physiological/psychological issues.

Trephining

Credited with recognition that the brain is the organ of intelligence.

Hippocrates

Dissected more than 300 cadavers and made 1500+ detailed drawings of the brain.

Leonardo da Vinci

Made significant advances in neuroanatomy. Described the human brain more realistically than ever before in words with pictures.

Andreas Vesaius

Milestones of neuroanatomy during the Renaissance.

Discovery of cerebrospinal fluid, differentiation of white vs gray matter, naming of brain areas, discovery that image on retina is inverted

Critical 17th century invention that allowed for sufficient magnification to see neurons for the first time.

Microscope

Sought to measure the relationships between events in the physical world and psychological perception of those events.

Psychophysics

Device that provides images of blood flow or other metabolic changes in an intact, functioning brain of a conscious human subject. Compares brain activity with ongoing mental activity. Adds to understanding of brain function.

fMRI

Most vocal proponent of the theory of cortical localization in the 19th century.

Franz Josef Gall

Tested claims of phrenologists through surgical investigations and concluded erroneously that different behaviors were spread widely across the brain, not localized.

Pierre Flourens

Made a case for functional locations in the brain in 1825, emphasized the anterior portion of the cortex as responsible for speech.

Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud

Ardent supporter of cortical localization in the mid 1800s. Believed that the speech center for the brain was in an anterior location.

Simon Ernest Aubertin

Discovered that the left frontal lobe was important for language via patient autopsies. Discovered the area of the brain associated with the production (but not understanding) of speech.

Paul Broca

Used electrical stimulation to study nerves in 1870. Stimulated various points on the cortical surface and found a number of different voluntary movements that occurred due to stimulation. Findings supported voluntary motor specificity in the cortex.

Edward Hitzig, Eduard Fritsch

Applied electrical current to a patient's brain in 1874, reported movement in her arms and legs that was contralateral to stimulation in the brain.

Roberts Bartholow

Published the book The Functions of the Brain based on several years of intensive studies on several animal species. Produced detail in mapping the sensory and motor functions of the brain.

David Ferrier

Scottish anatomist who privately published a booklet in 1811 in which he stated the spinal cord was made up of two kinds of nerves- sensory nerves in the dorsal position and motor nerves in the ventral position of the cord.

Charles Bell

French physiologist who published a similar discovery to Bell's in a French scientific journal in 1822, claiming original discovery. This angered Bell.

Francois Magendie

German physiologist known for discovery of the law of specific nerve energies, published in 1826. Stated each sensory nerve carries only one kind of sensory information, regardless of how the nerve is stimulated. Argued the speed of nerve transmission was instantaneous.

Johannes Muller

Created the ophthalmoscope to observe the retina, measured the curvature of the eye, contributed to the development of the theory of color vision, theory of pitch perception, law of conservation of energy, and speech synthesis. Measured the speed of nerve conductance using a severed frog leg in 1849.

Hermann von Helmholtz

Theory in 1852 that proposed 3 kinds of fibers in the retina were differentially sensitive to red/green/blue light. Any spectral hue could be reproduced by some combination of those 3 colors.

Trichromatic theory of color

Trichromatic theory of color was originated by _____ and revived by _____.

Thomas Young, Hermann von Helmholtz

Proposed an opponent process theory of color vision in 1874, which proposed the existence of 3 color receptors that can either be built up or broken down. One receptor was responsible for blue-yellow perception, another for red-green, and the third for black-white. Accounted for the way color information is processed in the lateral geniculate body of the thalamus.

Ewald Hering

Proposed by Helmholtz in 1863 that different frequencies of sound would have their greatest impact at different places on the basilar membrane in the cochlea. Different transverse fibers were tuned to separate frequencies. The brain could discern low or high frequency of sound based on info carried from different regions of the membrane.

Resonance theory, place theory

Argued for frequency theory in 1886: the firing o impulses from the basilar membrane would match the frequency of incoming sound.

Ernest Rutherford

German philosopher/physicist who realized in 1850 that it was possible to measure with great precision the relationship between the physical and psychological worlds. Founded psychophysics field.

Gustav Fechner

Physiology professor at Uni of Leipzig whose principal area of research was somatosensory perception. Most important contributions were the two-point threshold and Weber's law.

Ernest Weber

The distance required between two compass points for a subject to reliably discriminate between one and two points of touch. Distance is lesser in skin areas where nerve endings are denser and sensitivity is greater.

Two-point threshold

Point at which a subject can reliably discriminate between 2 stimuli. Varies in terms of absolute magnitude of the stimulus.

Difference threshold, just noticeable difference

Formula that expresses the amount of change necessary for a subject to perceive a stimulus as different.

Weber's Law

The perceived difference between two stimuli are identical for the subject, psychologically.

Fechner's Law

Established the first laboratory at Uni of Leipzig for experimental psychology. Trained many of the first generation of psychologists in his lab. Recognized as the founder of the science of psychology.

Wilhelm Wundt

Philosophy that changed university education in Germany. Curriculum promoted active epistemology particularly in science. Professors and students were given a great deal of freedom to choose research questions and what to teach/learn.

Wissenschaft

Most important book on psychology published by Wundt in 1874.

Principles of Physiological Psychology

One of Wundt's two psychologies that involved experimental psychology that guided lab work.

Physiologische psychologie

One of Wundt's two psychologies that was nonexperimental, cultural psychology. Could not be understood through laboratory means. Studied relationships among religion, art, language, customs, morality, myths, and culture.

Volkerpsychologie

Wundt's goal of psychology.

Discover the facts of consciousness, to discover the laws which governs it, identify basic elements of conscious experience to understand how those elements organize into psychical components/aggregates

The two factors of conscious experience.

Content of experience, what the observer makes of that content (apprehension)

Psychological system that indicated the voluntary/willful nature of the mind.

Voluntary psychology/voluntarism

Active intentional process in which parts of consciousness have a greater focus/clarity. Principle process by which psychical elements/compounds were synthesized into new conscious experience, process called creative synthesis.

Apperception

Goal of psychological experiments.

Provide causal explanations of mental processes in psychological terms.

Wundt's method of research on consciousness.

Introspection, experimental self-observation

Used by Helmholtz to measure the speed of nerve conduction. Tests subjects using simple reaction time tasks.

Reaction time method

Focuses of Wundt's lab.

Sensation, perception, emotions

Theory that placed all emotions on 3 separate continua: pleasant-unpleasant, tension-relaxation, excitement-depression.

Tridimensional theory of feeling

Fields of which volkerpsychologie was a precursor.

Linguistics, cultural psychology, social/personality psychology

Began research program on human memory. Worked alone, used self as test subject.

Hermann Ebbinghaus

Discoveries of Ebbinghaus's research.

Forgetting curve, nonlinear relationship between length of series and number of trials needed for learning, how retention affects learning

Founder of act psychology: moral psychology that called for a larger unit of analysis in looking at consciousness. Argued it was important to study the act of seeing itself, rather than focusing on what was seen.

Franz Brentano

Postulated intentionality of conscious acts. There was a purpose to consciousness. Psychology should not study the contents of consciousness but the actions of it.

Act psychology

Argued science was best served by a few grand experiments that tested big questions, with a few smaller studies to round out the edges. Opposed introspection as a research method. Advocated for by Brentano.

Experimentum crucis

Did important work on depth perception. Emphasized the study of sensation and perception. Performed classic experiments on audition, especially pitch perception. Greatest contributions to psychology of music.

Carl Stumpf

Spent most of his career working on memory. Contributed to topics of sensation, color vision, learning, attention, and psychophysics. Learned that people assign meaning to stimuli that were meant to be meaningless, chunk syllables into units to give them meaning. Invented the memory drum.

George Elias Muller

Investigated higher mental processes like thinking. Used introspection for research. Discovered imageless thought and mental set.

Oswald Kulpe

Organized the Psychology Laboratory exhibit at the Chicago World Fair in 1893. Showed off scientific apparatus used in psychological experiments and an interactive testing exhibit.

Joseph Jastrow

Signed by Henry Holt to produce a volume on psychological science for the American Science book series in 1878. Book had great importance in history of American psychology.

William James

Key concepts of James' volume on psychological science in the American Science Series.

Stream of consciousness, linkage to selective attention

Goals of James' research.

Role/adaptive value of consciousness in human survival, role of habits in maintaining social order

Argued that bodily changes result from perception of a situation, and that recognition subsequently produces the subjective feeling we label emotion.

James-Lange theory of emotion

First woman elected president of APA in 1905. Studied under James at Harvard. Completed doctoral research and passed oral doctoral exams but was not granted a PhD due to being female. Advocated for self psychology.

Mary Whiton Calkins

Founded first psychology journal in America, first psychology laboratory in America at John Hopkins Uni in 1883, first professional organization for psychologists in 1982 (APA), began Child Study Movement.

G Stanley Hall

Movement in which broad goal was to discover all that could be known about the child. Triggered by exploding school enrollments in 19th century, calls for school reforms, renewed concerns about raising children of good moral character. Headed by Hall. Involved public school teachers, college educators, and parents. Collapsed in 1910.

Child Study Movement

Two-volume book by Hall published in 1904 credited for establishing adolescence as a distinctive stage of human development. Discussed adolescent sexuality, controversially. Argued for sex education classes in schools.

Adolescence: Its Psychology and its Relations to Physiology, Sociology, Crime and Religion

Coined the term "mental test." Purpose of tests was to give useful indication of the progress/condition/aptitudes of a pupil. Claimed could identify gifted students. Became main owner/editor of journal Science for 50 years after original owners abandoned it.

James McKeen Cattell

Chief product of psychologist involvement in WWI.

Army Alpha/Army Beta intelligence tests

Methods by which psychologists got their message to the public reg. their new science.

Wrote articles for popular press, public addresses before civic groups/organizations, Chicago World Fair

Scientific theory with the greatest impact on the broad community of sciences, regarded practically as fact.

Darwin's theory of natural/sexual selection

One of the earliest American converts to Darwin's theory. Had great influence on William James who influenced many other American psychologists.

Chauncey Wright