History of Psychology 2

Heuristics

Mental shortcuts that decrease the effort required to solve problems or make decisions

Confirmation bias

Looking for what you believe in and evidence for it, intuitively accepting info we already believe to be true

Belief perseverance

The tendency to stick with an initial belief even after receiving contradictory evidence

Placebo effect

Measurable, observable, or felt improvement in health not attributable to any real treatment

19th century context

Mass migration to cities, cheap labor, harsh working conditions

Institutionalization of Psychology

Universities started funding psychology as a discipline, labs moved from home to university, research journals became more specialized

New Woman Movement

Confronted patriarchal gender roles, rejecting inferiority, demanding rights

19th century women

Participation in post-secondary was very constrained, you had to choose between getting married or getting to work in a lab; APA was the first professional society open to women, but they had no position in leadership

Mary Calkins

Attempted to reconcile functionalism with structuralism by placing the conscious self at the center of psychology, and its relationship with the environment; the self cannot be reduced

Voluntarism

Wundt’s view of the mind being that the “will” is fundamental in organizing experiences; physical (immediate) and mental (mediate) processes are parallel

Apperception

Wundt’s concept describing using past experiences and knowledge to organize and make sense of new info

Reflexology

How the brain and body connect through the reflexes; stimulus → sensation → response

Hormic

All behavior is driven by innate goal-directed instincts, the mind and body work together with intention

Memory as an individual process (Ebbinghaus)

Memory happened inside one person’s mind dealing with objective facts, uninfluenced by external factors

Memory separate from perception (Ebbinghaus)

Perception comes first, before storing it into memory

Memory as copying and searching (Ebbinghaus)

Memory stores exact traces of what we experience, like photographic

Measuring memory by accuracy (Ebbinghaus)

Memory could be measured by how accurately people reproduced information; if you are able to perform better at a memory test than others

Lab experiments can reveal universal laws (Ebbinghaus)

What happens in the lab can reflect how memory works for everyone and everywhere

1920s context

Unemployment escalated, low wages, oppressive working conditions, psychology starts to play a role in marketing and propaganda

Gestalt Theory

How one part fits into the whole, and if one part changes — it impacts how the whole will look; the mind organizes elements into a meaningful form, like listening to a song in a different key

Praegnanz

All psychological experiences are “pregnant” with the potential to be organized, symmetrical, and meaningful, the brain looks for logic in the chaos

Gestalt Principles

Figure-ground relationship, closure, constancy, transposition, isomorphism

Figure-ground relationship

We focus on one element, and everything else fades into the background; e.g. focusing on one person’s voice at a loud party

Closure

Our minds “fill in the gaps” to perceive a whole; e.g. dotted outline is seen as a full circle, even when the lines are broken

Constancy

We perceive objects as stable/same, even when the stimuli slightly changes; e.g. a door still looks rectangular even when it’s open, half-open

Transposition

We recognize familiar patterns or relationships even when the elements have changed; e.g. caricatures exaggerating features

Isomorphism

The structure of a person’s subjective experience is similar to the structure of the underlying neural processes in the brain

Field Theory

Behavior is a function of “life space”, fields and forces in the environment push and pull a person’s behavior; getting either positive or negative reinforcement

Valences

In field theory, describes the positive or negative pulls that drive behavior; conflict can occur when choosing between goals that have the same/different valence

Approach-approach valence

Choosing between two positive goals

Approach-avoidance valence

Being drawn to and repelled by the same goal

Avoidance-avoidance valence

Choosing between two negative goals

Karl Lashley

Trained rats to perform specific tasks, lesioning parts of their brains to see what effects they had on learning and retention = the amount of cortex removed was critical to learning ability

Lashley’s 3 Principles

Mass action, equipotentiality, neural plasticity

Lashley’s mass action

The rate of learning depends on the mass of cortical tissue, so the greater the brain injury — the worse the brain performance

Lashley’s equipotentiality

No cortical area is more important to learning that any other area, as many parts of the brain work together

Lashley’s neural plasticity

If the brain is injured, nerves and neurons reorganize to restore basic behavior; they are inherently adaptive and malleable

Criticisms of Lashley

Adhered to the racist views of the time period and supported racialized studies of intelligence, believing that the number of connections and size of cerebral storage is genetically determined; contradictory to his own theory

Four orientations to developmental psychology

Romantic, environmentalist, psychodynamic, evolutionary

Romantic perspective of development

Educators should cultivate children’s natural potential, inspired by Rousseau and “blank slates”

Environmentalist perspective of development

Adults should apply principles of learning theory to their children, because children learn through their social relationships

Psychodynamic perspective of development

Freud’s unconscious biological drives of libido and aggression influence children to behave in the developmental stages, learning defense mechanisms and inner conflict

Evolutionary perspective of development

Children’s relations with their mothers have a survival value, inspired by Darwin

Piaget

Believed that there are universal stages of development, and that development occurs before learning

Piaget’s constructivism

Children actively build their understanding of the world through interaction and experience, making meaning from these experiences

Piaget’s structuralism

Children’s knowledge is built from experience into “schemas”, which grow more complex as they age

Vygotsky

The developing self is a result of social, cultural interactions, and language shapes the development of higher mental processes

Vygotsky developmental principles

Biological development is intertwined with social context, development proceeds continuously, and teaching children at their potential can enable them to actualize it or exceed it

Vygotsky’s scaffolding

A more knowledgeable adult (like a teacher) can assist a child with a task they can’t do on their own, gradually removed as the child becomes more proficient

Personality psychology context

Became institutionally recognized when psychologists became more interested in practical problems, self-help emerging from the US’s ideal personality of someone assertive, extraverted, sociable, and adaptable

Nomothetic approach 

Generalizing a group of people… “norm”

Idiographic approach

Focusing on the uniqueness/nuance of a label… “individual”

Social Psychology

Became experimental and focused on the individual, developing scales to measure attitudes (similar to IQ test); attitude assessment was popular for self-help and politics

Small groups: sociology vs psychology

Psychology insisted that groups cannot have their own identity, and that the study of the group should be reserved for sociologists

Lewin Social Psychology

Studied patterns of group interactions in complex social situations, if one’s membership in the group changes — the entire group dynamic changes