Summary of Psychologists and Their Contributions

Psychologists and Their Contributions

Alfred Adler

  • A Neo-Freudian psychologist.
  • Focused on parenting styles.
  • Emphasized the concept of inferiority.
  • Proposed that individuals are born weak and strive to overcome deficiencies to become superior, driving human thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.
  • Introduced the idea of developing an inferiority complex.

Mary Ainsworth

  • Known for her work on early emotional attachment.
  • Developed "The Strange Situation" experiment to observe a child's reactions during brief separations from and reunions with their caregiver.
  • Observed the child's reactions while playing for 20 minutes as caregivers and strangers entered and exited the room.

Gordon Allport

  • Believed personality could be organized into three levels of traits:
    • Cardinal traits: Dominate and shape a person's behavior; rare.
    • Central traits: General characteristics found to some degree in every person (e.g., honesty).
    • Secondary traits: Characteristics seen only in certain circumstances (e.g., particular likes or dislikes).

Albert Bandura

  • Famous for the Bobo doll study.
  • Explained social learning theory: aggression is learned through observing and imitating others.
  • The experiment sparked studies on the effects of violent media on children.

Aaron Beck

  • The father of cognitive therapy, specializing in clinical depression.
  • Developed the cognitive triad of depression: negative thoughts about oneself, the future, and the world.

Alfred Binet

  • A French psychologist who created the first widely used intelligence test.
  • Hired by the French public school system to identify children needing special help.
  • First used the IQ formula: {\frac{MA}{CA} * 100 = IQ}
  • Influenced the Stanford-Binet test.

Paul Broca

  • Physician who reported that damage to Broca's area in the left frontal lobe results in difficulty forming words but does not affect the ability to sing familiar songs or comprehend speech.

Raymond Cattell

  • Best known for his discovery of 16 underlying personality traits.
  • Developed methods for measuring these traits, known as the 16 Personality Factor and the 16PF questionnaire.
  • Used factor analysis model.

Noam Chomsky

  • One of the fathers of modern linguistics.
  • His theory of generative grammar emphasizes universal grammar.
  • Differed from B.F. Skinner by suggesting certain linguistic knowledge is innate.

Hermann Ebbinghaus

  • Famous for creating the forgetting curve.
  • States that we forget the most information within the first 20 minutes, then an hour, then a day.
  • The forgetting curve is exponential, just like the learning curve.

Paul Ekman

  • Studied facial expressions and their reflection of emotions.
  • Believed there were six basic, universal emotions: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise.

Albert Ellis

  • Developed rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT).
  • REBT aims to help patients overcome irrational beliefs and unrealistic expectations and eliminate self-defeating thoughts while focusing on beneficial ones.

Erik Erikson

  • A neo-Freudian psychologist.
  • Famous for his stages of psychosocial development, based on Freud’s five stages.
  • Each of the eight stages includes a crisis that could go one of two ways (e.g., trust vs. mistrust, autonomy vs. shame and doubt, identity vs. role confusion).

Hans Eysenck

  • Stated that intelligence was largely inherited.
  • Summarized personality traits using two dimensions: extroversion (introversion) and emotional stability or neuroticism (instability).

Sigmund Freud

  • Often known as the father of modern psychology and psychoanalysis.
  • Believed that the unconscious determines everything we do.
  • Theories include psychosexual development stages (oral, anal, phallic, latent, genital) and the three parts of the mind—id, ego, and superego.
  • Believed that dreams, free association, and hypnosis could reveal the unconscious mind.

Phineas Gage

  • A railroad worker who survived a large iron rod going through his left frontal lobe.
  • Experienced a significant personality change, becoming very angry.
  • His case concluded that specific areas of the brain affect personality.

Howard Gardner

  • Created the theory of multiple intelligences, opposing Spearman’s idea of one general intelligence.
  • Believed there are eight ‘smarts’: language, logic, music, spatial, kinesthetic, intrapersonal, interpersonal, and nature smarts.

Carol Gilligan

  • Believed that Kohlberg’s theory of moral development was male-centered.
  • Argued that boys are more likely to apply moral rules to all contexts, while girls are more likely to consider relationships when making decisions.

Francis Galton

  • Developed the idea of “nature vs. nurture”.
  • Studied genetics and how they affected people’s individualism.
  • Nature refers to how a person acts because of their genetics, and nurture refers to how a person acts based on their environment. He believed nature is the most important in the debate.

Daniel Goleman

  • Most famous for his work with Emotional Intelligence.
  • Emotional intelligence involves handling feelings well and getting along with others.
  • Believed that EQ may be more indicative of a person’s success in life than academic IQ.

Harry Harlow

  • Raised monkeys with two artificial mothers: one for nourishment, the other for contact/comfort.
  • Discovered monkeys would feed from the harsh mom with food but quickly return to the soft cloth mom for a safe/secure base.
  • Illustrated the human need for social contact to thrive.

Ernest Hilgard

  • Known for his research on hypnosis.
  • Creator of the hypnosis theory of a “hidden observer,” where a person undergoing hypnosis can observe their pain without feeling actual suffering.

Karen Horney

  • Neo-Freudian, named parental indifference the true culprit behind neurosis.
  • Said the key to understanding this phenomenon is the child’s perception.
  • Children can overcome the Oedipus Complex if they have loving parents.

William James

  • Wrote the first influential textbook on psychology, called Principles of Psychology (1890).
  • A leading psychologist in the Functionalism movement, which emphasized the function (rather than the structure) of consciousness.

William James and Carl Lange

  • Came up with the James-Lange theory of emotion.
  • The theory proposes that emotions occur because of physiological reactions to events.
  • Based on how your body physically reacts to an event, your mind will decide the emotion you are feeling (e.g., smiling makes you feel happy).

Carl Jung

  • A Neo-Freudian, believed with Freud’s “personal unconscious”
  • Also thought humans have a collective unconscious — a shared, inherited reservoir of memory traces from our species’ history.
  • Also studied persona — different “masks” we wear in social situations.

Garcia and Koelling

  • Discovered taste aversion when looking at effects of radiation on rats.
  • Rats became nauseous from the radiation, and since the taste of water from a plastic bottle was accidentally paired with this radiation, the rats developed an aversion for this water.

Lawrence Kohlberg

  • Developed three stages of moral development:
    • Pre-conventional: Actions are based on whether they will gain rewards or punishment.
    • Conventional: Actions uphold social rules to be liked and gain approval.
    • Post-conventional: Actions are based on abstract reasoning.

Elizabeth Loftus

  • Known for her work in the study of false memory formation and the misinformation effect.
  • Famous for her car crash experiment, where participants who were asked about the crash using the word "smashed" were more likely to remember seeing broken glass (even though there was none) and recalled the car as driving much faster.

Konrad Lorenz

  • Rediscovered imprinting (phase-sensitive learning).
  • Famously acted as the mother-figure for Mallard Ducks.
  • Emphasized the presence of a critical period for attachment.

Abraham Maslow

  • Founded Humanistic Psychology, which focused on the individual and self-directed choices that influenced behavior (humans are basically good).
  • Developed a Hierarchy of Needs that addresses physiological needs, safety needs, love and belonging, esteem, and self-actualization.

Stanley Milgram

  • Most famous experiment involved an authority figure telling a teacher to test a learner with word pairs, and if the learner answered wrong, the teacher would have to punish the student by electric shocks.
  • Although no actual shocks were given, more than 60% of participants 'shocked' the learner up to full voltage.
  • Proved that people will do things mainly because an authority figure had prompted them to do so.

Ivan Pavlov

  • His experiments with dogs led him to discover classical conditioning.
  • Discovered that he could condition dogs to salivate at the sound of a tone when the tone was repeatedly presented with food.
  • Also discovered extinction (reaction would become extinct if the bell was sounded over and over) and spontaneous recovery (the reaction may reappear the next day when the bell is sounded).

Jean Piaget

  • Studied the cognitive development of children.
  • Defined four stages of cognitive development:
    • Sensorimotor: Babies develop object permanence and stranger anxiety.
    • Preoperational: Toddlers are egocentric.
    • Concrete operational: Children develop ideas such as conservation.
    • Formal operational: People ages 12+ begin to understand abstract concepts.

Carl Rogers

  • Humanistic psychologist who used the theory of self-concept.
  • Developed client-centered therapy, in which the therapist offers the client unconditional positive regard to help them get back on the road to self-actualization.

Hermann Rorschach

  • Most famous for his Rorschach inkblot test - designed to reflect unconscious parts of the personality that "project" onto the stimuli.
  • Individuals were shown 10 inkblots, one at a time, and asked to report what objects or figures they saw in each of them.

David Rosenhan

  • His experiment tested the validity of psychiatric diagnosis of insanity.
  • He sent fake patients who pretended to have disorders to mental hospitals, and they were still treated for months after reporting feeling fine.
  • Showed that doctors can’t distinguish between the sane and the insane in such environments.

Martin Seligman

  • Famous for theorizing about 'learned helplessness.
  • Argued that one will start to act helpless in a situation if they find that they can’t stop the harmful stimulus, even if they actually do have the power to stop it.
  • Found that dogs who had been shocked continuously would not escape even when given the ability to do so.

Hans Selye

  • Responsible for the idea of General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS).
    • The first stage is the “alarm reaction,” where we prepare for "fight or flight."
    • The second stage is resistance, where the resistance of stress is built.
    • After a long duration of stress, the body enters the third stage—exhaustion, which is most hazardous to health and has long-term effects.

Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer

  • Developed the two-factor theory of emotion, which states that emotions are comprised of physical arousal and a cognitive label.
  • Also said that emotional experience requires conscious interpretation of the arousal.
  • Experimented with college students by injecting them with epinephrine before placing them in a room with someone in either a euphoric or irritated state.

B.F. Skinner

  • Associated with operant conditioning and responsible for the Skinner Box or the operant conditioning chamber.
  • Sought to understand behavior as a function of environmental histories of reinforcing consequences (as all behaviorists do).

Charles Spearman

  • Believed that only one type of intelligence—g, or general intelligence—exists.
  • This is tested on a standard IQ test.

George Sperling

  • Studied iconic sensory memory.
  • Showed people a group of letters quickly, then asked them to repeat the letters immediately afterward.
  • Participants were generally able to recall 4–5 of the 9 letters, but could remember a whole row when prompted.
  • Sperling believed that all 9 letters were stored immediately (mini photographic memory), then were quickly forgotten.

Robert Sternberg

  • Distinguished among three aspects of intelligence: analytical intelligence, creative intelligence, and practical intelligence.
  • Contributed to the idea that there is more to creativity than that which intelligence tests reveal.

Lewis Terman

  • He revised Alfred Binet’s earlier tests and invented the Stanford-Binet IQ Tests.
  • Believed that children who scored high on his IQ tests were “gifted” and likely to become society’s leaders in adulthood.
  • Also, he felt that the test results proved that black men’s intelligence was inferior to the intelligence of white men.

Edward L. Thorndike

  • Widely known for the law of effect—the principle that rewarded behavior is likely to recur, and punished behavior is unlikely to recur.
  • This principle was the basis for B.F. Skinner’s behavioral technology.

Edward Tolman

  • Most famous for his studies on behavioral psychology, studied latent learning.
  • He is known for his study of learning with rats in mazes; rats who run the maze without a reward still learn how to complete the maze.

John Watson

  • Established the idea of behaviorism.
  • Recommended the study of behavior without reference to unobservable mental processes.
  • Also conducted the “Little Albert” experiment, where he proved classical conditioning by presenting a child with a white rat and a loud noise, causing the child to become afraid of the white rat.

Ernst Weber

  • Notable for his work in sensation and difference thresholds.
  • His principle that two stimuli, to perceive their difference, must be a constant proportion, not a constant amount, is known as Weber’s law.

Benjamin Whorf

  • Proposed that one’s language and grammar patterns shape one’s view of reality—linguistic relativity.
  • For example, English has many words that have to do with “time.” The Hopi, however, do not. As a result, time does not play an important role in Hopi society.

Wilhelm Wundt

  • Established the first psychology laboratory in Germany, where introspection was used.
  • He focused on inner sensations, images, and feelings, also known as structuralism.

Philip Zimbardo

  • His experiment assessed how role-playing affects attitudes.
  • Male volunteers were randomly assigned to either a “guard” role or “prisoner” role to be carried out in a mock prison.
  • The guards were told only to maintain order, but within two days, the guards began to act cruelly without reason, and prisoners began to show signs of extreme stress.
  • The experiment had to be cut short and there were no long-term effects, but the experiment changed ethical standards for experimentation.