The History of Psychology: Practice Flashcards

Vocabulary-style flashcards covering the key people, movements, and laws from the history of psychology, based on the Lesson 1-6 lecture summaries.

Phrenology

A practice of examining the shape of a person's head to make pronouncements about their personality, abilities, and intelligence, aiming to provide a plan for success.

Franz Josef Gall

A figure who believed different parts of the brain were responsible for specific intellectual, emotional, and behavioral functions, which laid the foundation for phrenology.

Physiognomy

The evaluation of a person’s character and intellect based on facial features, often used to validate ethnic stereotypes.

Mesmerism

Identified as the first secular psychotherapy in America, it involved passing magnets over the body to relieve symptoms and relied on hypnotic suggestion.

Spiritualism

The belief in spirits and unseen energies, often involving a medium to facilitate contact with the dead.

Mental Healing

Also known as the ‘mind cure’ or ‘new thought’ movement, it emphasized how irrationality and negative thinking affected physical health.

British Empiricism

A philosophical movement, including figures like John Locke, which argued that all knowledge comes from sensation and reflection rather than innate ideas.

Tabula Rasa

The concept proposed by John Locke that the mind is a blank slate at birth, with all knowledge being derived from experience.

Scottish Realism

Known as ‘common sense philosophy,’ it argued that perception was innate and that the external world could be known directly through observation.

Thomas Upham

The author of the first American psychology textbook, who divided mental philosophy into three realms: intellect, sensibilities, and will.

Cortical localization

The theory investigated by researchers like Broca and Gall regarding whether specific areas of the brain correspond to specific functions.

Pierre Flourens

A researcher who used animal ablation to argue against phrenology, claiming that behavioral control was spread widely across the brain.

Paul Broca

Identified a specific area in the left frontal lobe responsible for speech production, providing key evidence for localization of function.

Bell-Magendie Law

The discovery that afferent information from senses is carried in the dorsal spinal cord, while efferent motor information is carried in the ventral part.

Law of Specific Nerve Energies

Proposed by Johannes M<cller, the belief that each sensory nerve carries only one kind of sensory information.

Hermann von Helmholtz

A researcher who measured nerve conductance speed at approximately $90\,ft/s$, proving that nerve impulses are not instantaneous.

Transduction

The process of changing environmental energy into the electrochemical energy used by neurons.

Trichromatic Theory

Also known as the Young-Helmholtz Theory, it suggests that color vision is based on red, green, and blue light receptors.

Opponent Process Theory

Hering’s theory that color perception depends on opposing receptors for blue-yellow, red-green, and black-white.

Weber’s Law

Expressed as $\Delta S/S = K$, it states the amount of change necessary for a subject to perceive a stimulus as different.

Fechner’s Law

Written as $S = K \log R$, this law describes the logarithmic relationship between physical stimulus intensity and perceived sensation.

Wissenschaft

A 19th-century German university philosophy emphasizing active epistemology and freedom of teaching and inquiry.

Voluntarism

The name given to Wilhelm Wundt’s specific system of experimental psychology.

V<clkerpsychologie

Wundt’s non-experimental branch of psychology focused on cultural and social psychology.

Apperception

The intentional process in Wundt’s psychology by which certain parts of consciousness are brought into focus and clarity.

Mediate vs. Immediate Experience

Mediate experience is independent of the observer (natural sciences), while immediate experience is the direct felt experience of the self (psychology).

Tridimensional Theory of Emotion

Wundt’s theory placing emotions on three continua: pleasant-unpleasant, tension-relaxation, and excitement-depression.

Nonsense Syllable

Created by Hermann Ebbinghaus to study memory without the interference of existing associations or meaning.

Act Psychology

Franz Brentano’s approach which focus on the act of seeing or experiencing rather than the elements within the experience.

Interference Theory

G. E. M<cller’s explanation for forgetting, involving proactive and retroactive inhibition.

Imageless Thought

Oswald K<clpe’s discovery that some mental processes occur without sensory images, contradicting Wundt’s views.

Stream of Consciousness

William James’s idea that consciousness flows like a stream and cannot be meaningfully broken into discrete units or elements.

James-Lange Theory

The theory that bodily changes result from the perception of a situation, and the recognition of these changes produces the subjective feeling of emotion.

Paired Associates Technique

A memory research method developed by Mary Whiton Calkins involving learning items in pairs to test recall using cues.

Self-psychology

The type of psychology advocated by Mary Whiton Calkins, which she described as a science of selves rather than consciousness or behavior.

Recapitulation Theory

G. Stanley Hall’s belief that individual development (ontogeny) repeats evolutionary developments in one’s animal ancestry (phylogeny).

Anthropometric Mental Testing

James McKeen Cattell’s method of measuring cognitive and motor abilities to identify student aptitude and progress.

Structuralism

Edward Titchener’s approach focused on discovering the structure of consciousness by identifying its basic elements.

Stimulus Error

A mistake in Titchener’s introspection where the observer confuses what is being observed with the actual physical stimulus label.

Dynamic Psychology

Robert S. Woodworth’s functionalist approach that emphasized internal motivations, drives, and organismic variables.

Lightner Witmer

The founder of the first psychological clinic and the field of clinical psychology, focusing on helping children with learning difficulties.