AP Psychology People and Theories

Dorothea Dix

Advocated for the mentally ill

Charles Darwin

Wrote On the Origin of Species, made compelling arguments for evolution

Wilhelm Wundt

Credited for establishing psych as an experimental science

William James

Established functionalism; Developed James-Lange theory

G. Stanley Hall

Founded APA, elected first president

Ivan Pavlov

Believed that behaviors were learned (beginning of behaviorism); Developed classical conditioning

Sigmund Freud

Established psychoanalysis; Developed the psychoanalytic perspective of personality

Mary Whiton Calkins

Earned her psych Ph.D. (first woman), but refused by Harvard; Became first woman elected president of APA

Edward Titchner

Established structuralism, first major school of thought

Margaret Floy Washburn

Became first woman to earn official psych Ph.D.; Became second woman elected president of APA

John Watson

Established behaviorism as a new school of thought (built upon Pavlov), Conducted the Little Albert experiment with Rosalie Rayner

Max Wertheimer

Founded Gestalt psych; Studied stroboscopic motion; Flashing lights look like they’re moving

Jean Piaget

Believed that children actively try to learn rather than passively absorbing information, proposed that children go through distinct stages of cognitive development

Carl Rogers

Founded humanistic psych; Studied actualizing tendency, self-concept, conditional vs. unconditional positive regard; The inborn drive to maintain and enhance the organism (actualizing tendency); People are motivated to maintain a consistent self-concept; Conditional positive regard by parents leads to incongruence so that self-concept conflicts with experience; Unconditional positive regard by parents lead to congruence

B.F. Skinner

Shaped behaviorism with experiments on rats and pigeons; Studied operant conditioning; Invented the operant chamber (Skinner box)

Abraham Maslow

Developed a theory of motivation that emphasized psychological growth; Hierarchy of needs, self-actualization

Kenneth Bancroft Clark

Researched negative effects of discrimination; Became first African American president of the APA; Was Sumner’s student

Francis C. Sumner

Became first African American to earn a Ph.D. in psychology; Studied under Hall

Mary D. Salter Ainsworth

Devised the Strange Situation to measure attachment

Sandra Bem

Developed the gender schema theory

Renee Baillargeon

Used visual tasks to study object permanence

Lev Vygotsky

Stressed the importance of social and cultural influences in cognitive development

Erik Erikson

Proposed that each of 8 stages of life is associated with a particular psychosocial conflict that can be resolved in either a positive or negative direction

Lawrence Kohlberg

Developed levels and stages of moral development

Carl Jung

Emphasized psychological growth and proposed the existence of the collective unconscious and archetypes

Karen Horney

Emphasized role of social relationships in protecting against anxiety; Basic anxiety, womb envy

Alfred Adler

Believed the most fundamental human motive was to strive for superiority; Inferiority vs. superiority complex

Albert Bandura

Developed the social cognitive perspective; Studied observational learning; Conducted the Bobo doll experiment

Raymond Cattell

Identified 16 personality factors; Developed a test to measure the 16 factors

Hans Eysenck

Proposed three basic personality dimensions: introversion-extraversion, neuroticism-emotional stability, psychoticism

Robert McCrae and Paul Costa Jr.

Studied the Big 5 personality traits

Solomon Asch

Led the Asch Conformity Test (1950s)

John M. Darley, Bibb Latane

Wrote The Unresponsive Bystander: Why Doesn’t He Help? (1970)

Stanley Milgram

Led the Milgram Experiment on obedience (1961); Studied obedience and social norms

Muzafer Sherif

Led the Robbers Cave Experiment (1954)

Philip G. Zimbardo

Led the Stanford Prison Experiment; Studied cognitive dissonance, attitudes, shyness, prison, psychology of evil; Was familiar with the power of situational influences and stereotypes/prejudices due to his childhood experiences

Pierre Paul Broca

Discovered Broca’s area; Crucial role in speech production

Karl Wernicke

Discovered Wernicke’s area; Crucial in language comprehension

Roger Sperry

Performed split brain test; Left hemisphere can verbally identify objects from right side; Right hemisphere cannot verbally identify objects from left side, but can non verbally identify

J. Alan Hobson, Robert W. McCarley

Developed the activation-synthesis model of dreaming

Ernest R. Hilgard

Developed the neodissociation theory of hypnosis; Believed that the hypnotized person experienced dissociation

Ernst Weber

German physiologist; Weber’s law; A principle of sensation that holds that the size of the difference threshold will vary depending on its relation to the strength of the original stimulus

Karl Duncker

Gestalt psychologist; Studied induced motion; The thing we expect to move is the thing we perceive as moving

John Garcia

Studied taste aversion with rats; Studied biological preparedness

Robert A. Rescoria

Concluded that classical conditioning involves learning the relationships between events; Experimented on rats

Edward Lee Thorndike

Studied how voluntary behaviors are obtained; Studied cats in puzzle boxes; Developed law of effect

Edward C. Tolman

Studied the cognitive map and latent learning; Believed that cognitive processes played a role in learning complex behaviors

Martin E.P. Seligman

Studied learned helplessness with dogs; Launched positive psych; Developed idea of positive and negative explanatory style

George Sperling

Studied iconic memory (visual sensory memory); Had subjects briefly stare at rows of letters and recite as many as they could remember

Hermann Ebbinghaus

Studied forgetting; Ebbinghaus forgetting curve

Elizabeth Loftus

Studied misinformation; Car crash experiment with different phrasing of the question (“contacted,” “smashed,” etc.)

Karl Lashley

Studied memory trace/engram; Removed parts of a rat’s brain to see the effect on its ability to run a maze

Richard Thompson

Studied memory trace/engram; Found that the engram of a classically conditioned eye blink was formed and stored in a region of the cerebellum

Eric Kandel

Studied long-term potentiation; Neuron changes in classically conditioned sea snails

Suzanne Corkin, Brenda Milner

Studied anterograde amnesia; H.M., a man who underwent a brain surgery that caused anterograde amnesia

Alfred Binet

Developed idea of mental age; Not measuring innate ability; The score could vary; Intelligence was more than just a number

Lewis Terman

Developed the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale and IQ

David Wechsler

Developed Wechsler Adult intelligence Scale; Verbal and performance score; Intelligence involved a variety of mental abilities; Scores could be influenced by personality, motivation, culture

Charles Spearman

Developed idea of g factor

Louis Thurstone

Developed idea of 7 different primary mental abilities

Howard Gardner

Developed idea of multiple intelligences

Robert Sternberg

Developed triarchic theory of intelligence

Willaim Masters, Virginia Johnson

Studied 4 stages of human sexual response

Edward L. Deci, Richard M. Ryan

Developed self-determination theory (autonomy, competence, relatedness)

Paul Ekman

Studied facial expressions of emotions

Walter Cannon

Challenged the James-Lange theory; Body reactions are similar for many emotions; Emotional reaction is often faster than physiological reaction; Artificial physiological changes does not necessarily produce an emotional response; Identified the fight-or-flight response

Richard Lazarus

Developed cognitive appraisal model

Han Selye

Researched impact of prolonged stress; General adaptation syndrome

Mary Cover Jones

Studied counterconditioning; Eliminated fear of furry objects in a 3-year-old, Peter

Albert Ellis

Developed REBT

Aaron T. Beck

Developed cognitive therapy

Social learning theory of gender-role development

Theory that gender roles are acquired through the basic processes of learning, including reinforcement, punishment, and modeling

Gender schema theory

Theory that gender-role development is influenced by the formation of schemas, or mental representations, of masculinity and femininity

Activity theory of aging

Psychosocial theory that life satisfaction in late adulthood is highest when people maintain the level of activity they displayed earlier in life

Information-processing model of cognitive development-Model that views cognitive development as a process that is continuous; studies the development of basic mental processes (attention, memory, problem solving)

Personality theory

A theory that attempts to describe and explain and similarities and differences in people’s patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving

Reciprocal determinism

A model that explains human functioning and personality as caused by the interaction of behavioral, cognitive, and environmental factors

Five-factor model of personality

A trait theory of personality that identifies extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to experience as the fundamental building blocks of personality

Implicit personality theory

A network of assumptions or beliefs about the relationships among various types of people, traits, and behaviors

Activation-synthesis model of dreaming

The theory that brain activity during sleep produces dream images (activation), which are combined by the brain into a dream story (synthesis)

Neurocognitive model of dreaming

Model of dreaming that emphasizes the continuity of waking and dreaming cognition, and states that dreaming is like thinking under conditions of reduce sensory input and the absence of voluntary control

Neodissociation theory of hypnosis

Hypnotic effects are due to the splitting of consciousness into two simultaneous streams of mental activity, only one of which the hypnotic participant is consciously aware during hypnosis (Ernest Hilgard)

Signal detection theory

A means to measure the ability to differentiate between information-bearing patterns and random patterns that distract from the information

Trichromatic theory of color vision

The theory that the sensation of color results because cones in the retina are especially sensitive to red light, green light, or blue light

Opponent-process theory of color vision

The theory that color vision is the product of opposing pairs of color receptors, red-green, blue-yellow, and black-white; when one member of a color pair is stimulated, the other member is inhibited

Frequency theory

The view that the basilar membrane vibrates at the same frequency as the sound wave

Place theory

The view tha different frequencies cause larger vibrations at different locations along the basilar membrane

Gate-control theory of pain

The theory that pain is a product of both physiological and psychological factors that cause spinal gates to open and relay patterns of intense stimulation to the brain, which perceives that as pain

Stage model of memory

A model describing memory consisting of 3 distinct states: sensory, short-term, long-term

Semantic network model

A model that describes units of information in long-term memory as being organized in a complex network of associations

Decay theory

The view that forgetting is due to normal metabolic processes that occur in the brain over time

Interference theory

The theory that forgetting is caused by one memory competing with or replacing another

Baddeley’s model of working memory

A model with 3 main components: phonological loop, visuospatial sketchpad, central executive (Alan Baddeley)

Linguistic relativity hypothesis

The hypothesis that differences among languages cause differences in the thoughts of their speakers

Triarchic theory of intelligence

Theory that there are 3 distinct forms of intelligence: analytic, creative, practical (Robert Sternberg)

Instinct theories

Certain human behavior are innate and due to evolutionary programming

Drive theories

Behavior is motivated by the desire to reduce internal tension caused by unmet biological needs

Incentive theories

Behavior is motivated by the pull of external goals, such as rewards

Arousal theory

People are motivated to maintain a level of arousal that is optimal

Humanistic theories

Emphasizes the importance of psychological and cognitive factors in motivation, especially the notion that people are motivated to realize their personal potential