Pysch Lecture 2

Course Logistics & Assessment Rules

• Quiz Grading Structure:

  • Only the top $3$ quiz grades are calculated into the final course grade.

  • Every quiz includes $1$ extra credit point.

  • Score Calculation Scenarios:

    • If a student earns a score of $3$ out of $5$ on a quiz, and subsequently earns a $6$ out of $5$ on Monday, their recorded grades adjust to $4$ out of $5$ and $5$ out of $5$.

    • If a student earns a $6$ out of $5$ on the subsequent quiz, their grade shifts to a perfect $100\%$ average across all $3$ quizzes.

  • Primary Requirements for Success: Attendance in class on time and completion of assigned readings.

• Course Material Access:

  • All lecture slides and related materials are uploaded to Canvas prior to class.

  • Location: Canvas site $\rightarrow$ Files tab $\rightarrow$ Lectures folder.

• Introductory Quiz Review:

  • Question: What were the first two primary schools of psychology?

  • Answer: Structuralism and Functionalism.

Philosophical and Theological Origins of Psychology

• Developmental Psychology Perspective:

  • Developmentalists (child psychologists) examine an individual's historical context to explain current behavioral and psychological phenomena when immediate environmental context is insufficient.

• Historical Roots:

  • Psychology originated in ancient Greek philosophy before evolving into an empirical science.

• Definition and Attributes of Consciousness:

  • Consciousness is defined as a unique awareness of oneself, one's environment, decisions, and others.

  • It provides a distinct sense of self and shapes individual identity and human essence.

• Theological Rationale:

  • Early inquiry into consciousness resided in theology.

  • It was accepted that humans uniquely possess self-awareness and world-awareness.

  • Historically, scholars did not investigate the underlying mechanisms of consciousness because human uniqueness was attributed directly to divine creation (i.e., "that is how God made us").

Early Structural and Functional Schools of Thought

• Structuralism:

  • Core Focus: How consciousness works ($\text{the "how"}$).

  • Premise: Humans are the only entities possessing consciousness; therefore, humans must use consciousness to examine itself inward.

  • Methodology: Introspection — a structured, systematic, and careful observation of one's own conscious experiences, breaking down thought processes into fundamental structural components.

• Functionalism:

  • Core Focus: The purpose and utility of consciousness ($\text{the "why"}$).

  • Premise: Knowing how thought processes occur is secondary to understanding why humans evolved or possessed this capability.

  • Methodology: Investigating the practical function and adaptive value of unique human self-awareness.

Foundation of Scientific Psychology: Wilhelm Wundt

• Wilhelm Wundt (Founder of Psychology):

  • A German scholar widely recognized as the father/founder of psychology.

  • Distinguished psychology from adjacent philosophical fields by implementing rigorous, empirical scientific methodology.

  • Utilized peer review, controlled methodology, and the scientific method to minimize bias and confounding variables, producing valid and replicable research.

• First Psychology Laboratory:

  • Established at the University of Leicester / Leipzig in Germany in the year $1879$ ($150$ years ago).

  • Highlights the relative youth of psychology compared to established fields such as geology (thousands of years old), philosophy, mathematics, or evolutionary biology (Charles Darwin published fundamental texts in the late $1700\text{s}$ and early $1800\text{s}$).

• Academic Discipline and Dissemination:

  • Psychology is currently the largest undergraduate major and one of the fastest-growing global academic fields.

  • Wundt established the first dedicated psychological research journal.

  • Prior to this journal, medical and psychological research was scattered across localized, foreign-language publications (e.g., French medical journals), requiring physical cross-border transport.

  • Wundt's journal centralized research submissions, curated peer-reviewed studies, and regularly distributed empirical findings internationally.

Psychoanalytic Theory and the Unconscious Mind

• Sigmund Freud:

  • Read Wundt's empirical journals and became the first figure to apply research principles to clinical practice.

  • Widely regarded as a foundational historical figure in psychology, though evaluated critically as a clinical practitioner by contemporary standards.

• Freud’s Topographical Model of Mind:

  • Conscious: Thoughts, feelings, and environmental awareness active at the immediate moment.

  • Subconscious: Mental contents hovering just beneath active conscious awareness.

  • Unconscious: A reservoir of innate drives, learned experiences, repressed memories, thoughts, and desires that exist entirely below conscious awareness yet exert massive influence on decisions, behaviors, personality, motivation, and mental health challenges.

• Psychoanalytic Practice (First Wave Psychology):

  • Objective: Access the client's unconscious, dredge up repressed material, analyze its meaning, and translate that knowledge into behavioral/psychological change.

  • Intensity & Resources: Standard psychoanalysis required clients to meet with an analyst for up to $3$ hours per day, $5$ days per week.

  • Stigma & Historical Context:

    • Mental health disorders (e.g., depression, anxiety, OCD, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia) were historically attributed to biological defects or supernatural causes (e.g., demonic possession treated via exorcism).

    • Psychoanalysis gained widespread popularity despite its resource demands because it was the first system to validate mental illness as a treatable psychological condition.

• Current Status & Governance:

  • Pure psychoanalysis is not evidence-based.

  • The American Psychological Association (APA) does not allocate research funding or institutional resources to pure psychoanalytic graduate training programs.

Evolution of Clinical Psychology Waves and Contemporary Methods

• Three Waves of Clinical Psychotherapy:

  • First Wave: Psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud, early $1900\text{s}$).

  • Second Wave: Psychodynamic Theory (1950s).

    • Founded by Anna Freud (Sigmund Freud's daughter) alongside contemporary researchers.

    • Expanded and revised classical psychoanalysis into a modern theoretical framework.

    • Currently practiced selectively (e.g., concentrated in Manhattan, supported by the Anna Freud Foundation; offered in select Master's programs).

  • Third Wave: Contemporary evidence-based therapies.

    • Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT).

    • Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT).

    • Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCT / PCIT).

    • Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT).

• Evaluation of Non-Evidence-Based Practices:

  • Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR):

    • Involves wearing a specialized visor/glasses that project light/lasers into the eyes, triggering rapid lateral eye movements intended to activate neural pathways.

    • Lacks empirical consistency across EEG or MRI brain scans to validate its theoretical neural mechanism.

    • Exhibits a $20\%$ clinical success rate for smoking cessation among young adolescent populations.

  • Placebo Effect & Therapeutic Alliance:

    • Non-evidence-based interventions can elicit positive outcomes due to cognitive expectancies, self-fulfilling prophecies, and the strength of the clinician-client relationship.

    • Double-Blind Experiments: Demonstrates that placebo effects (e.g., sugar pills vs. active pharmaceuticals) occur statistically even when control parameters prevent patients and administrators from knowing the active treatment status.

Hypnosis, Somatic Regulation, and Psychoanalytic Techniques

• Franz Mesmer and Mesmerism:

  • French psychologist operating historically between Wundt and Freud.

  • Developed hypnotherapy (mesmerism), directly inspiring Freud’s psychoanalytic methodology.

  • Posited that inducing a sleep-like or dream-like trance state disrupts environmental conscious awareness, permitting direct access to subconscious and unconscious states.

• Clinical Spatial Environment and Somatic Imagery:

  • Traditional Psychoanalytic Couch Setup: Analyst sits out of direct line-of-sight behind a reclining patient (historically smoking a pipe) to sever the patient's visual connection to the immediate environment.

  • Topographical Body Metaphor:

    • Neck and above: Conscious mind.

    • Throat / Neck level: Subconscious.

    • Torso / Deep well: Unconscious drives and feelings.

  • Analogies Used in Psychoanalysis:

    • River Bed: Reaching into the deep floor of the river to pull unconscious thoughts up into the flowing surface of consciousness.

    • Mind as a Bubble: Visualizing internal mental fog clearing through rhythmic physical self-regulation.

• Physiology of Deep Breathing & Self-Regulation:

  • Inhalation through the nose and prolonged exhalation through the mouth acts as a somatic self-regulation technique.

  • Anxiety triggers sympathetic nervous system arousal (fight-or-flight response), resulting in rapid heart rate and accelerated blood flow.

  • Rhythmic deep breathing stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system, slowing heart rate and blood circulation to induce physical calm.

  • Repetition leads to habituation, shifting deliberate conscious focus on breathing into an automatic subconscious state.

Historical Case Study: Ernst Lanzer ("Rat Man")

• Posthumous Freud Archives:

  • Anna Freud donated Sigmund Freud's private session notebooks to a museum.

  • Comparative analysis between Freud's private session notes and published case presentations revealed that Freud significantly exaggerated clinical outcomes.

• Case Details of Ernst Lanzer:

  • One of the earliest detailed documentations of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD).

  • Lanzer's family waived anonymity rights posthumously to ensure his suffering contributed to clinical history.

  • Precipitating Incident: Lanzer read a text detailing medieval torture involving a rat enclosed in a cage secured to a victim's chest.

  • Psychopathology:

    • Obsession: Lanzer developed intrusive, uncontrollable, distressed thoughts that his family and close friends would be subjected to this rat torture.

    • Compulsion: Driven by intense internal distress, Lanzer felt forced to perform daily ritualistic behaviors to ward off the imagined harm.

• Formal Clinical Definitions of OCD:

  • Obsessions: Persistent, intrusive, unwanted thoughts that create intense internal distress.

  • Compulsions: Repetitive, compelled behaviors performed specifically to alleviate the internal anxiety generated by obsessions.

Behaviorism and Experimental Psychology

• John B. Watson:

  • Rejected Freud's unconscious mind as unscientific, unobservable, and unmeasurable.

  • Founded Behaviorism: The school of psychology asserting that psychology must be strictly empirical, focusing exclusively on overt, observable, and measurable behaviors.

• Ivan Pavlov (Classical Conditioning):

  • Demonstrated that organisms can be conditioned via biological associations.

  • Pairing a neutral stimulus (ringing bell) with an unconditioned biological stimulus (food) causes the neutral stimulus alone to elicit the conditioned physiological response (salivation in dogs).

  • Real-world Application: High school dismissal bells conditioning students to automatically close laptops and stand up.

• B. F. Skinner (Operant Conditioning & Behavioral Purity):

  • Asserted that internal mental states (thoughts, emotions, desires) cannot be measured scientifically and are unnecessary for explaining behavior.

  • Declared free will to be an illusion, maintaining that all human actions are fully determined by environmental conditioning.

  • The Little Albert Experiment (Watson & Rayner / Skinner Context):

    • Demonstrated conditioned fear in an infant (Little Albert).

    • Presented a neutral stimulus (white rat) alongside an aversive unconditioned stimulus (banging iron pots/bars behind the infant's head).

    • After repeated pairings, Albert displayed severe fear (crying) when presented with the white rat alone.

    • Stimulus Generalization: Albert's conditioned fear response automatically generalized to similar stimuli (e.g., white rabbits, white dogs, rabbit masks, Santa masks).

• Clinical Relevance of Behaviorism:

  • Indispensable when treating acutely dysregulated, hostile, or psychotic patients (e.g., a child actively destroying an office searching for scissors to assault a therapist).

  • When high-level emotional distress disables cognitive processing, talk therapy fails; foundational behavioral techniques must be used first to establish physiological and environmental stability.

Operant Conditioning Matrix: Reinforcement and Punishment

• Core Concepts:

  • Reinforcement: Any stimulus modification that increases the probability of a target behavior recurring.

  • Punishment: Any stimulus modification that decreases the probability of a target behavior recurring.

  • Positive ($+\text{stimulus}$): Adding or presenting an external stimulus.

  • Negative ($-\text{stimulus}$): Removing or subtracting an external stimulus.

• Four Quadrants of Operant Conditioning:

  1. Positive Reinforcement:

     • Definition: Adding a pleasurable stimulus to increase a target behavior.

     • Classroom Example: Presenting verbal praise/compliments every time a student raises their hand, increasing the likelihood of hand-raising participation.

  2. Negative Reinforcement:

     • Definition: Removing an unpleasant/aversive stimulus to increase a target behavior.

     • Academic/Home Examples:

       • Dropping a student's lowest exam grade if they perform well on preliminary tests.

       • Excusing a student from daily household chores after achieving high scores on a spelling test.

       • Removing a screen-time limit when a child earns good marks.

  3. Positive Punishment:

     • Definition: Adding an aversive stimulus to decrease a target behavior.

     • Example: Applying physical spanking or delivering verbal reprimands following a child's backtalk to reduce future backtalk.

  4. Negative Punishment:

     • Definition: Removing a desirable/pleasant stimulus to decrease a target behavior.

     • Examples:

       • Confiscating a child's toys or grounding them (removing freedom) following misbehavior.

       • Ignoring an individual to decrease unwanted conversational attempts.