PSYC 305 - Chapter 7 (Functionalism)

What did Wilhelm Wundt suggest about consciousness?

Consciousness was a product of the activity of the mind.

Who was the founder of Structuralism?

Edward Titchener (Wundt’s student).

He suggested that you cannot understand the function of something, until you know its structure.

What did Titchener believe about Structuralism and Consciousness?

He believed that Structuralism was the truest way of understanding the mind.

He also believed that consciousness and exploring the function was futile or at the very least misguide.

Why did other researchers disagree with Wundt and Titchener?

Other psychologists were no longer concerned with the structure of consciousness but rather preferred to understand its function.

What is Functionalism?

Functionalism is concerned with how the mind functions and how it is used by organisms to adapt to the environment.

The focus was on practical, real-world consequences that seemed to be more useful than what Titchener was suggesting.

What kind of questions were Functionalists asking and what was their focus?

• What does the mind do?

• How does it do it?

There was a focus on the description and measurement of individual differences.

What did the Functionalists allow that the Structuralists didn’t?

The inclusion of animal psychology, given that Darwin had suggested that the difference between humans and animals was one of degree rather than difference of kind.

How did Functionalism begin?

It was not started intentionally. It began as a protest against the restrictions and limitations of Wundt’s version of psychology and of Titcherner’s structuralism: specifically, they opposed the elementism of structuralism.

How was Functionalism organized/structured?

There was no single form of functionalism, and it was never a well-defined school. It did not have one recognised leader or an agreed-on methodology, but they shared common themes that ran through the work of those calling themselves Functionalists.

What were the shared common themes amongst Functionalists?

The emphasis was on mental functions, real-world problems, and how people function in, and adapt to, different environments.

How did Functionalism shape psychology?

What began as a protest against the restrictions and limitations of structuralism, would soon evolve into the broad reaching psychology we know today. Because there was no single form to functionalism and because the goal was to find the adaptive value of consciousness, information had to come from various perspectives.

What was the goal of Functionalism?

Functionalism was meant to be a practical science and the goal was to be able to apply findings to the improvement of the human condition. This involved research on many participants and these participants included animals, children, and non-typical humans. Functionalists researched the “why” of mental processes. This would open the doors to an interest in motivation, which would give insight in why we think and behave the way we do. They accepted both mental processes and behaviour.

Who is William James?

James is known as the American precursor to functional psychology. Although he was not the founder of functional psychology, he brought forth new ideas to American Psychology.

His family moved to Europe when he was a teenager, and he became very interested in art as well as science. He moved back and forth between the US and Europe. In Rhode Island, he studied painting with William Hunt, and then in Geneva, he studied science, and then he went back to Newport to study painting. Finally, he went to Harvard to get his medical degree, but by 1866, in medical school, he began to suffer eye strain, back problems, and suicidal depression. He finally received an M.D. degree but never practiced. He travelled again to Europe and met with Ewald Hering, Carl Stumpf, Ernst Mach, Wilhelm Wundt, Jean Charcot, and others. He was attracted to the new psychology from Germany but not the Americanised version.

What was James diagnosed with?

Neurasthenia.

Neurasthenia was, at the time, an epidemic that swept through the American upper class.

It was a nervous condition which resulted in insomnia, hypochondria, headache, skin rash, nervous exhaustion, and “brain collapse.”

Today we would consider it chronic fatigue syndrome.

It occurred most frequently in intellectuals, possibly due to overwork and burnout. It was suggested that female sufferers (feminists and intellectuals) should spend six weeks in bed, without any work, reading, or social life, and gain large amounts of weight by eating a high-fat diet. (Keep in mind, this was a time when intellectualism in women was perceived as going against the norms of nature).

Males should go out west and test their willpower to reinforce masculinity, which had been weakened by the feminizing effects of the nervous illness. In males, this illness seemed to be an attack on their masculinity.

Why did James become depressed?

He became depressed because the new field of psychology, at least in America, seemed to deny freedom. Part of what upset him so much about the materialist perspective and lack of free will was that he felt it implied he was powerless against his depression.

Upon reading an essay on free will by Charles Bernard Renouvier, James noted that he was experiencing a “crisis of meaning.”

Instead of succumbing to this loss of hope in the field, he decided to take an idea from the essay, one that suggests that opting to choose one particular thought over another when presented with many thoughts can signify free will.

What was James’ first act of free will?

He decided that his first act of free will would be to believe in free will. This actually motivated him to keep hope in psychology and work on his depression.

What did James highlight, and what philosophy did it reflect?

James highlighted the value of ideas and theories based on their usefulness (a philosophy of pragmatism).

What is Pragmatism?

Pragmatism is the stance that the truth of an idea should be judged according to its practical consequences.

If it is useful and it works, then it is valid.

What did Pragmatism open the doors for?

Several factors.

Specifically, for James, the purpose and practicality of psychology as a scientific field should include uncovering the functions of the mind rather than its contents or structure. This implied movement away from structuralism and towards functionalism.

Darwinian evolution and studying adaptive traits held practical value; as such, studying consciousness as an adaptation was required. Furthermore, psychology would pull together various domains in order to fully understand the functions of the mind.

Why did James seek alternative methods to study aspects of thought and behavior that do not lend themselves to lab testing?

Although James agreed with the determinist perspective on studying human behavior, he acknowledged that this perspective was limited and left room for the metaphysical, hence searching for alternative methods to study those aspects of thought and behavior that do not lend themselves to laboratory testing.

This required not just scientific experimentation, but also introspection and comparison. Introspection must be a basic method, and the results could be verified by appropriate checks and by comparing findings obtained from several observers.

James acknowledged the importance of the experimental method, though he did not use it himself.

What did James write in his highly successful book “The Principles of Psychology”?

Among the content, he challenged British Empiricists and their reductionistic ways of examining experience, instead proposing Radical Empiricism.

What is Radical Empiricism?

Radical empiricism is a pragmatic philosophical stance that suggests that we don’t just perceive sensations but rather objects in relation to other objects, and all of this experience is important.

How did James see psychology?

To him, psychology is the science of mental life.

This needs to include both phenomena, or the immediate experience, as well as the conditions which brought about this experience, including the importance of the body and brain in mental life.

The conditions are important because, according to James, no experience can ever be replicated exactly. The stimulus may be the same, but the conditions may be different and will give a different experiment.

He gave the example of smelling a particular perfume, “do we not get the same olfactory sensation no matter how many times we put our nose to the same flask of cologne?” Objectively, it should be the same, but subjectively it is not, especially if the wearer of that perfume is a past lover you are no longer thrilled by. But all this makes up the conscious experience and how we adapt to our surroundings.

What led James to target Wundtian experimentation and psychology?

The phenomena and conditions.

(Keep in mind, his disdain for Wundt was as an experimenter, and likely he would not have taken issue with Völkerpsychologie).

James accused Wundt and others of committing what he called the psychologist’s fallacy, or reading into an experience whatever their systematic position tells them should be there.

He believed that Wundt’s suggestion of how the mind worked, based on participants’ experience, was artificial and self-serving.

He also disagreed with Wundt’s reductionist approach of having participants introspect during their phenomenal experience because consciousness is like a stream or a continually flowing process, and any attempt to reduce it to elements will distort it.

What is the Stream of Consciousness?

• The stream of consciousness is personal to the individual.

• It is continuous and cannot be divided up for analysis, and it is always changing.

• For James, selective attention is an important aspect of consciousness. Our mind focuses on what it deems important and disregards the rest.

• Finally, and most crucially, consciousness is functional. It is adaptive, and its purpose is to aid the individual in adapting to the environment to ensure survival.

Consciousness must have some sort of adaptive value because it has persisted in our species. It enables us to adapt to our environment and allows us to selectively attend to things and make choices.

What did James believe about instincts and habit?

James differentiated between conscious choice and instincts and habit.

He argued that instincts are the primary source of habit in wild animals, and acts of reason are the primary source of habit in domesticated animals and man.

How does James define instincts?

Instinct is a complex behavioural response to a specific stimulus or situation that doesn’t require learning. We are evolutionarily primed to be afraid of things that can kill us, which is why the fear of spiders and snakes is common, even though most of us have never interacted with the venomous version of either animal.

How does James define habits?

James believed habits were involuntary and nonconscious, whereas when we encounter a novel problem, consciousness engages to find a solution.

Habits are repetitive actions that involve the nervous system and serve to increase the plasticity of neural matter. We know that doing something over and over again strengthens the connection at the neural level, which is why they seem to be our default system.

What did James believe about habits (and kids in particular)?

James quotes, “Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct in the plastic state.” He seems to caution young people against falling prey to their habits, but he did not entirely see habits as a life sentence. You can decide to form a new, healthier habit.

Describe James’ outline on how to best create new, healthier habits and take advantage of the plasticity of the nervous system.

Example: you want to stop bingeing Netflix and want to start working out.

James suggest: launch ourselves with as strong and decided initiative as possible in the acquisition of a new habit or the leaving off of an old one.

Basically:

• Decide that you want this and get excited about this new habit.

• Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life.

• Keep working out without fail until the habit is set.

• Do not miss more than one day of engaging with the new habit.

• Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain.

• Prioritize the new habit, make time for it, engage in it whenever you have an opportunity. These all deal with the idea that habits are reinforced in the brain by their continued execution, and if you start to skip days, then that strength is diminished.

• Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day.

• Do things daily which you find uncomfortable or undesirable so that when the time comes that such action is necessary, you will do it out of habit rather than hesitate

James was one of the first psychologists to study what?

Self-Esteem.

According to James, under what circumstances or conditions do we feel better about ourselves?

For James, self-esteem was a ratio of success over pretensions, or a ratio of things attempted to things succeeded.

If these were equal, we performed as well as we hoped, or we succeeded at all the things we attempted, then the ratio equals 1.

If we performed less well than we hoped or failed at a few things we attempted, the ratio would be below 1 and your self-esteem would decrease.

If we performed better than we hoped or succeeded greater than expected at the things we attempted, the ratio would be above 1, and your self-esteem increases.

Give a practical example of the self-esteem ratio.

Let’s say you had a very high R score coming out of CEGEP and were a straight-A student.

When you started university, maybe you had the same expectation. You saw yourself as an A student and expected to have straight A’s (a GPA of 4.0 or above), which would be the denominator or make up the pretensions.

If in your first semester of University, you were like most students and found that your GPA was somewhere in the 3.5 range (which is the numerator or success), your self-esteem ratio would be below 1 (3.5/4.0), and your self-esteem would decrease to 0.88.

If, instead, you came in with a healthy level of expectation and would be satisfied with a 3.0, then the 3.5 you were successful in accomplishing would increase your self-esteem, (3.5/3.0) to 1.17, exceeding your expectations.

How does James believe you can increase your self-esteem?

You can attempt less or succeed more, or at least have your expectation be one that is achievable.

What is the James-Lange Theory of Emotion?

The James-Lange theory of emotion states that emotion is equivalent to the range of physiological arousal caused by external events.

Both William James and Carl Lange came up with the theory independently around the same time, so both get credit.

The two scientists suggested that for someone to feel emotion, they must first experience a physiological response such as increased heart rate and breathing. The physiological response is recognised, and then the person can say that they feel the emotion.

Eg. you encounter a bear in the woods, your heart will begin racing, and then you will fear fear.

The idea is that emotional experience is an interpretation of bodily arousal within a given situation that suggests an adaptive response that allows you to get away from the bear rather than being overcome by fear and mauled by the bear.

For james, how could the self be differentiated?

The self could be differentiated as a knower and the self as known; that is, the awareness of one’s empirical self as both the object and the subject (me versus mine).

James therefore suggested a three-part self.

What is the Three-Part Self as suggested by James?

The three-part self included the material self (which includes everything uniquely our own: our bodies, our clothes), the social self (the recognition we get from others), and the spiritual self (which is our inner and subjective being).

Who was Hugo Münsterberg?

Münsterberg was an early German-American psychologist who was a pioneer in applied branches of psychology. He completed his PhD with Wilhelm Wundt and also earned an M.D.

William James offered him a position at Harvard, where he nurtured Mary Calkins and Robert Yerkes, among others.

By 1900, Münsterberg began to focus on applied psychology, which is a field that uses psychological research to solve practical problems in daily life.

He made important early contributions in several applied fields.

What were two of the applied fields Münsterberg made contributions to?

1. Forensic Psychology

2. Industrial and Organizational Psychology

What is Forensic Psychology?

The application of psychological principles to the legal system.

How did Münsterberg contribute to forensic psychology?

In his book “On the Witness Stand” of 1908, he laid out many of the issues that are still important in the field, such as:

• the fallibility of memory

• the reliability of eyewitness testimony

• principles of lie detection

• methods of jury persuasion.

He also invented an early polygraph device, which he called the “truth-compelling machine.”

What is Industrial and Organizational Psychology?

The application of psychological principles to business, manufacturing, and other large-group settings.

It garnered much support from the government, and hence funding agencies.

How did Münsterberg contribute to industrial and organizational psychology?

Münsterberg published numerous books and articles on:

• advertising

• personnel selection

• vocational guidance

• management techniques

Who was Mary Whiton Calkins?

A student of Münsterberg’s.

The feminist researcher that challenged Joseph Jastrow’s research on the variability hypothesis with the Wellesley study.

The first female president of the APA.

What test did Calkins devise?

Calkins devised paired association tasks.

This was a test of learning in which the participant memorized pairs of unrelated words.

For example, you might be asked to remember associations such as shoe-calendar and cloud-pen. Later, when prompted with shoe, you should respond with calendar.

She also paired colours and numbers, then tested recollections of which number had been paired with which colour.

Titchener would eventually make use of these tasks and, unfortunately, take credit for them.

What else did Calkin analyse (though not in a clinical setting)?

Calkin also performed analysis of dreams.

She and Dr. Edmund Sanford would wake themselves up during the night, at random intervals, and record their dreams.

In his work “The Interpretation of Dreams,” Sigmund Freud cites this research as evidence supporting his theory of dreams.

Interestingly, however, Calkins disagreed with Freud that dreams were symbolic of any type of wish fulfilment.

Calkins recorded over 205 dreams, and she concluded that dreams were correlated with waking life. Generally the people, places, and events we perceived during the day were often manifested in dreams.

What type of psychology was Calkins instrumental in creating?

Self-Psychology.

What is Self-Psychology?

The position that the proper subject of psychology is the study of conscious selves as they interact with their social and physical environments.

Similar to her mentor, James, Calkins was becoming disillusioned with psychology’s direction, specifically the behaviorist perspective of ignoring consciousness.

Self-psychology is personalistic and introspective. Calkins describes the fundamental ideology of self-psychology as one that understands the self as “the person or organism which is conscious, which experiences, which functions, which drives or is driven.”

Within this framework, similar to James’ three-part self and radical empiricism, the self, objects external to the self, and the self’s relation to the objects are all of value.

Who was Robert Yerkes?

Yerkes was the early American psychologist who was a pioneer in the fields of comparative psychology and intelligence testing.

What is the Yerkes-Dodson Law?

In keeping with the functionalist perspective of all things pragmatic, useful, and adaptive, in 1908, Yerkes, along with his graduate student John Dodson, studied discrimination learning in mice with the threat of electrical shock.

What they found was that there is an optimal level of arousal, neither too high nor too low, for best performance on a complex task. On screen, there is an optimality curve with arousal plotted against performance.

If arousal is too low, then performance is low too. The organism becomes bored, sleepy, and fatigued from under stimulation.

If the arousal level is too high, the performance is also low because there is too much stress and anxiety to perform well.

But at the optimal level of arousal, performance will also be optimal.

If you drink coffee or tea, or any other stimulant, you likely know exactly how many cups of coffee you must have in order to be productive. For some, it is two cups in the morning. If they have one, then they are groggy and drag through the morning. If they have more than two, they may feel like a hummingbird and nothing really gets done, at least not coherently.

What was the focus in psychology at Clark University?

Development.

Who was Granville Stanley Hall?

Hall was instrumental in establishing Psychology as a boundary field.

In 1878, he was awarded the first American PhD in psychology while studying under William James at Harvard. He then completed his post-doctorate with Wilhelm Wundt.

In 1884, Hall became a professor of philosophy at John Hopkins, and then in 1887, was given a substantial amount of money by Jonas Gilman Clark to start Clark University.

He is credited with being the founder of the American Journal of Psychology in 1887 and also founding the American Psychological Association (APA) in 1892.

What was Hall’s focus at Clark University?

Research in child development and some race relations.

What was the Child Study Movement?

The child study movement was the most popular educational movement of the 1890s. This was a campaign to reform educational practices in child education, based on the scientific study of child development.

Hall would become integral in this areas of research.

This domain formed a bond between psychologists and teachers.

What was Hall’s singular theme?

Evolutionary theory.

He believed that the normal growth of the body and mind involved a series of evolutionary stages.

Children, in their development, repeat the life history of the human race, evolving from infancy to childhood to rational human beings.

What theory did Hall use regarding children’s evolutionary development?

The Recapitulation Theory: “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.”

It was coined by Ernst Haeckel, a 19th-century German biologist and philosopher, who suggests that the development (ontogeny) of an organism expresses the evolution (phylogeny) of the species.

Humans evolved from primordial fish and other earlier vertebrates, and we can track this evolution in utero as human embryos first develop gill slits and a tail, which disappear before birth.

For Hall, this may also be paralleled after birth in terms of lifespan development. Each person goes through changes in both the psychological and physiological aspects, which start out as more basic and evolve to be more complex.

What research did Hall publish in his book “The Contents of Children’s Minds”?

Hall gathered data on childhood activities through use of the questionnaires completed by teachers and principals. He was able to collect data on 100,000 students.

An important note about his data collection is that he used “theory-free” data collection. These were not hypothesis-driven and were criticised by other psychologists as unscientific and having no clear way to interpret the results.

This would be the beginning of the normative period of childhood development.

What is the Normative Period of Child Development?

The normative period of child development involves collecting large data samples of individuals in order to determine what is typical at this age.

By understanding the process of normative development, doctors and educators are better able to spot potential problems and provide early interventions that can result in better outcomes.

What does the Normative Period of Child Development data suggest?

The data, along with Hall’s version of recapitulation theory, suggest that children develop best when they are not forced to follow constraints, but rather to go through the stages of evolution freely.

Basically, before age six, the child should be allowed to act like a primate: running, jumping, climbing.This is a time for high physical activity but not a time for reasoning, religion, or social skills. By age eight, the child should be in stage two, where formal learning should begin.

What might Hall best be known for?

For adding adolescence to the stages of lifespan development.

Given the changes in social structure that came about when children were required to go to school, teens were no longer getting married or spending their days working but rather, they were in school and interacting with their peers.

What is a part of the adolescence stage?

This new stage marked a period of transformation and what Hall referred to as “storm and stress.”

It was a transitory stage between the fun and active childhood and a more civilized adulthood.

This stage was marked by conflict with parents and authority figures, mood disruptions, and risky behavior.

Today we consider adolescence to be more than a transitory stage; it is a stage of neural development with increased sense of identity and we know that not all adolescents go through "storm and stress,” but this was back in 1904.

What did Hall’s book include regarding the adolescent stage?

It included topics such as growth, language, hygiene, crime, friendship, etc.

The controversial part of this book was that it put a great deal of focus on sex. He discussed masturbation in considerable detail. Although he did not agree with the popular belief that masturbation caused psychosis, he did believe it contributed to neurasthenia, vision disturbance, and skin issues.

How did Hall found the American Psychological Association?

In July 1892, Hall and a small group of men organized a meeting to discuss creating a psychological association. There were several reasons as to why this was somewhat of a pressing matter:

• First, it would help give some validation to psychology because only those individuals that had been properly trained could call themselves psychologists.

• Second, there would be extensive training and degrees set up for members and would help create a demand for trained professions.

The APA had 31 members in 1892, 125 members in 1899, and 308 members in 1916 and today there are over 118,000 members.

Who was Yujiro Motora?

Motora worked with Hall at John Hopkins University and also focused on child development.

Motora was the first Japanese psychologist to earn his PhD at an American university. He established Japan’s first psychology lab, where he studied the process of attention in children.

What type of clinic did Motora open?

He opened a clinic in Tokyo for underachieving children and believed that the reason these children were struggling was because they had difficulty inhibiting distractions.

He found ways to help children cope with what we would now call attention deficit disorder (ADD) by developing tasks to teach them how to focus their attention.

After treatment in his clinic, many of these children showed improved performance in school.

Who was Arnold Gesell?

Gesell was an early American psychologist and pediatrician who studied under Hall and who went on to Yale in 1911 to measure developmental norms in infants and young children.

He conducted behavioral interviews to provide a detailed description of the developmental process.

What did Gesell revolutionize?

He revolutionized the interview process by using a video camera and a one-way vision screen set up in the lab, so that students could watch him conducting behavioral interviews and he would have an extensve amount of recorded data.

What theory did Gesell create?

The maturational-developmental theory.

With the data he collected, Gesell established a set of developmental norms that are still in use today.

Most researchers would agree that this theory was fundamental to all other developmental theories that would follow, specifically those that agree that there’s a typical timeline for the onset of behaviours.

What is the Theory of Maturationism?

Maturationism is the belief that development unfolds according to a set schedule of milestones which, he maintained, were dependent on the development of the nervous system.

If a child did not reach a specific developmental milestone, it is because their nervous system was not yet ready.

Variances in this ‘readiness’ include internal factors such as genetics, temperament, personality, learning styles, physical and mental growth, as well as external factors such as environment, family background, parenting styles, cultural influences, health conditions, and early experiences with peers and adults.

Gesell’s research established normative trends for four areas of growth and development, namely:

1. motor

2. adaptive (cognitive)

3. language

4. personal-social behaviour.

Who was Francis Cecil Sumner?

Sumner was another one of Hall’s graduate students and the first African American to receive a PhD in psychology.

Sumner graduated from Lincoln University at 19 as the class valedictorian. He remained at Lincoln for his Master’s degree but would not be accepted to any doctorate program because of his race.

He wrote directly to Hall and informed him of his intent to study race psychology, and Hall agreed to take him on.

After graduation, Sumner was brought to Howard University, a university for African Americans, to begin a psychology department.

Sumner argued for segregated higher education; however, evidence indicates that his public statements might have been a pragmatic way to obtain funding for African American higher education.

Other than William James, who else contributed to the founding of functionalism?

John Dewey & James Rowland Angell would highlight the perspective that consciousness has adaptive value.

Harvey A. Carr extended functionalism to learning, specifically how organisms use motivations and perception of the situation to learn how to maneuver their environment to ensure survival.

Who was John Dewey?

Dewey worked under Hall and along with James.

He is recognized as one of the founders of the philosophical school of pragmatism. He is also one of the founders of functional psychology.

He was a leading representative of the progressive movement in US schooling during the first half of the 20th century.

What marked the official beginning of the school of functionalism?

Dewey’s article, “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology.”

He discussed behavior in terms of reflexes. You can witness James’ influence when Dewey suggests that reducing the behavioral experience into basic elements of stimulus and response is as artificial as trying to reduce consciousness to its elements.

For Dewey, behavior was a stream, much like James’ consciousness.

How did Dewey develop the theory of the Reflex Arc?

Dewey suggested that there was more to the basic, linear stimulus-response theory.

He used the example of our response to a flame, where the basic, linear stimulus-response suggests that we observe a flame (stimulus), we touch it (response), we feel pain from the burn (stimulus), and we withdraw our hand (response).

But this does not encompass the learning experience that we have when we get burnt by the flame. In order for there to be an association, or in order to learn that touching a flame is not a good idea, there has to be a mental process that changes the way we perceive the flame.

It is more adaptive that this scenario leads to us evaluating the flame as dangerous the next time we encounter it and adjusting our behaviour around it.

At one time, the flame was enticing but after the response, it would be aversive.

How does the Reflex Arc view stimulus-response as a non-linear system?

Rather than a linear system, it becomes more circular with the interconnection of the stimulus and response; therefore, we observe a flame (stimulus), we touch it (response), we feel pain from the burn (stimulus), we withdraw our hand (response), we observe a flame and now know that it will hurt us, so we pull away without touching it.

Reflex forms a circle because the perception changes, thus serving a different function.

What are the 3 elements of the circular reflex model?

The circular model implies three elements of the reflex that must be considered a coordinated system directed toward a goal, usually related to the survival of the organism. These are:

• the sensory processes (in this case, observing the flame)

• brain processes (this is enticing but will hurt me)

• the motor response (pulling hand away or avoiding it)

Dewey’s reflex arc concept in psychology begins functionalism, with the suggestion that neither behaviour nor conscious experience could be reduced to elements.

Why did Dewey creae the experiential learning model?

Dewey embraced pragmatism in all domains and created the progressive style of education in America, in which the student is encouraged to learn by experience rather than rote memorizing facts.

For Dewey, education was not just a way to gain knowledge but rather it provides important information about moral decision-making and life skills.

In Dewey’s experiential learning model, the teacher should serve as a guide to obtaining knowledge and act as an eager partner with the student. The teacher acts more as a facilitator, prompting students to discover their own understanding of the topic at hand.

This type of education was considered more liberal, and was quite reformative to the existing education system.

Experiential learning has adaptive value given that it is more generalizable and of better use in real-world scenarios, and when students are able to relate to the information through experiences of their own, they can absorb and retain the information in a more personal and permanent manner.

He also suggested that this type of learning could be beneficial in helping students realize their ultimate potential and use their knowledge to impact society in a positive way.

Who is James Rowland Angell?

Angell defined functionalism as a somewhat clearer school and turned the psychology department at the University of Chicago into the major training centre for functional psychology.

Angell had worked with James at Harvard and had continued his studies in Europe, being influenced by Hermann von Helmholtz and Hermann Ebbinghaus.

Although he did not complete his PhD, he was the chairperson of the psychology department at the University of Chicago for 25 years.

What did Angell suggest in his well-received textbook “Psychology: An Introductory Study of the Structure and Functions of Human Consciousness”?

Similarly to James, Angell suggested the function of consciousness is to improve the organism’s chance of survival. It had evolved and been sustained in the species given its adaptive value.

In 1906, while serving as the president of the APA, Angell gave a speech in which he targeted structuralism and laid out how functionalism was a better-suited perspective. What main themes did he discuss in his speech?

1. Functionalism focused on mental operations as opposed to structuralism, which focused on mental elements.

2. Consciousness was considered utilitarian, and its purpose was mediating the needs of the individual with the demands of the environment.

3. Functionalism focused on the mind-body issue in its totality. There was no distinction between mind and body. Both belonged to the same organism and acted as a unit for the organism’s survival.

Who was Harvey A. Carr?

One of Angell’s students, who would also serve as president of the APA, and began an experimental psychology lab at the Unviersity of Chicago.

He elaborated Angell’s theoretical position and extended it to learning. Because learning is a major tool used in adjusting to the environment, it was a major concern of functionalism.

How did Carr extend Angell’s theoretical position to learning?

In Carr’s words, mental activities were “concerned with the acquisition, fixation, retention, organization, and evaluation of experiences, and their subsequent utilization in the guidance of conduct.”

Basically, these mental acts would be involved in the learning process and were adaptive in navigating the environment and surviving.

Here, we are introduced to learning based on motivation, need satisfaction, and any other type of evaluation of our experience in our surroundings.

What are Adaptive Acts?

Carr discussed adaptive acts which were made up of the interrelation of a motive that acts as a stimulus, an environmental setting or the situation the organism is in, and a response that satisfies the motive.

How can hunger be used to demonstrate adaptive acts?

Hunger can work as a stimulus to motivate you to seek out food, and eating will satisfy the need.

Whatever behavior you engaged in to have this need satisfied will result in you learning to behave that way again the next time the need arises.

If you’re at home and you feel hungry, you might be motivated to go to your fridge and get a snack. You likely learnt this behavior early on and repeat it whenever you’re home, but what happens when you are not at home? What if you are at someone else’s house or out in nature and don’t have access to a fridge?

Different environments mean different behaviors.

What example did Carr use to explain adaptive acts with wild animals?

Carr also used the example of encountering a wild animal in nature versus at the zoo.

Encountering a bear in the wild will elicit a different behavioral response than encountering one that is in an enclosure (provided you are not in the enclosure with it).

For Carr, the response is contingent on the perception of the environment. Although Carr was in direct opposition to the structuralists, there were some similarities to behaviorism. However, the perspective of mental acts and perception being part of learning would go against strict behaviorism.

Who were two Chicago alumni who contributed to the field of psychology (still within the functionalist perspective)?

Helen Bradford Thompson Woolley challenged Joseph Jastrow in his research on gender differences and also contributed to revising child labour laws.

Louis Leon Thurstone gave a new perspective on factors of intelligence.

Who was Helen Bradford Thompson Woolley?

Thompson made contributions to the psychology of women and child development.

In her study, the first systematic study of gender differences, she used Galtonian-type testing of sensory, motor, and cognitive tasks in order to dispute the variability hypothesis.

The differences she found were small, and there was more within-subject variability than between genders. In fact, she argued that environmental factors such as training or social expectations were at the root of any differences between genders.

What was Thompson fundamental for?

For the crusade for ethical treatment of children by conducting a large study of the city of Cincinnati’s school district to investigate the effects of child labour on later development.

In 1911, Thompson became the director of the Bureau for the Investigation of Working Children. Under her direction, the bureau conducted a five-year study, investigating the mental and physical differences between 750 children in school and 750 children who had left school to go to work at age 14.

Her findings suggest that education can increase children’s IQ, and that children benefit from being in school. She appealed to congress to pass revised compulsory school attendance and child labour laws for Ohio.

Who was Louis Leon Thurstone?

Thurstone was another Chicago alumnus.

He started his career by studying engineering, then later earned his PhD with Angell.

What were Thurstone’s main contributions?

• He became a pioneer in psychometrics (the practice of constructing tests to measure psychological attributes)

• He proposed that intelligence could be broken down into seven primary mental abilities.

What statistical technique did Thurstone use to break down intelligence into 7 primary mental abilities?

Thurstone used Charles Spearman’s factor analysis which is a statistical technique for reducing a large number of observed variables to a small number of underlying variables.

If you recall from the IQ testing component, Spearman postulated that a general factor, g, or general intelligence, worked through specific intelligences to produce abilities on specific tasks. But unlike Spearman, Thurstone suggested seven primary mental abilities.

What are the 7 Primary Mental Abilities Thurstone suggested?

1. Space Ability (the ability to perceive complex spatial relations)

2. Perceptual Speed (the ability to detect visual details quickly)

3. Numerical Ability (the ability to make mental and other numerical computations)

4. Verbal Comprehension (the ability to understand the meaning of spoken and written language)

5. Word Fluency (the ability to retrieve and use vocabulary rapidly)

6. Memory (the ability to retrieve information efficiently)

7. Reasoning (the ability to induce a general rule from a few instances)

The idea of multiple intelligences is one that has still not been resolved. Although Thurstone did give remarkable data suggesting that the g-factor may be incomplete, there is no consensus of just how many factors there may be.

What did functionalism centre around at Columbia University?

Learning.

Which psychologist spearheaded functionalism at Columbia University?

James McKeen Cattell.

What did Cattell do?

He brought Galtonian-type testing to Columbia Uni.

Through his many editorships and ownerships of journals (incl. Psychological Review), Cattell advanced the discipline of psychology and particularly functional psychology.

Who were two important mentees of Cattell’s and what did they do to help further Functionalism?

Edward Lee Thorndike & Robert Sessions Woodworth.

They would further the functionalist movement by applying the principles to two crucial domains: education & industry.

Who was Robert Sessions Woodworth?

Although Robert Sessions Woodworth disliked the constraints imposed by membership in any school of thought and did not technically call himself a functionalist, many of his ideas fit very well in this school.

He was interested in individual differences and in 1917 would devise a questionnaire to assess emotional stability.

Who were some individuals that these emotional stability assessments were utilized on?

In 1917, many men were returning from the war with what was referred to as shell shock. The symptoms of shell shock included heart palpitations, insomnia, and uncontrollable weeping, which rendered the sufferers incapable of performing their military duties. This would later be known as post-traumatic stress disorder, but at the time, it was believed that the men afflicted by this condition were weak or malingering and were often imprisoned as deserters or were subject to horrible physical and psychological treatment.

What committee was Woodworth a part of?

Woodworth was placed in charge of the Committee on Emotional Fitness and developed a written form of the questions routinely used by psychiatrists to assess emotional stability.

How did Woodworth generate his test items?

He generated his test items by surveying hundreds of case reports of diagnosed men to have an idea of emotional and personality characteristics they displayed.

From these data, he composed hundreds of questions and administered them to a group of non-neurotic subjects.

The result was the Woodworth Personal Data Sheet.