A History of Modern Psychology
C.J. Goodwin. 1999. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Chapter 1, pgs. 21-22
Psychology and Its History
Recently, psychologists have celebrated several centennials,
including the anniversary of the founding of Wilhelm Wundt's laboratory
at Leipzig, Germany, in 1879, and the creation of the American
Psychological Association in 1892.
Interest in the history of psychology has grown steadily since
the mid-1960s, primarily through
the initiatives of Robert Watson. He helped establish professional
organizations for historians of psychology (Division 26 of the
APA, Cheiron), a journal (Journal of the History of the Behavioral
Sciences), an archives at the University of Akron (Archives of
the History of American Psychology), and a graduate program in
the history of psychology at the University of New Hampshire.
Why Study History?
Knowing history helps us to avoid mistakes of the past and to
predict the future, but its more important value is that it helps
us understand the present day. Knowing history puts current events
into a better perspective.
Knowing history can immunize us against the belief that our current
time has insurmountable problems, compared to the "good old
days." Every age has its own set of problems. Knowing history
also reduces the tendency to think that modernday accomplishments
represent a culmination of the "progress" we have made
from the inferior accomplishments of the past.
Why Study Psychology's History?
Because psychology is a relatively young science, much of its
history is recent and of relevance for understanding psychological
concepts and theories. Also, many of the issues of concern to
psychologists 100 years ago (e.g., nature-nurture) are still important.
The history of psychology course provides a synthesizing experience
tying together the loose threads that comprise the modern diversity
of psychology.
Knowing of historical examples of (a) supposed breakthroughs
in psychological research or practice, or (b) new theories that
were shown to be pseudoscientific, the student of history is better
able to critically evaluate modern claims.
Because the history of psychology course informs the student
about historically important people behaving within their historical
context, the course provides a further understanding of human
behavior.
The presentist evaluates the past in terms of present values,
studying the past for the sake of the present. The historicist
tries to avoid imposing modern values on the past, studying the
past for the sake of the past.
An internal history of psychology is a history of the ideas,
research, and theories that have existed within the discipline
of psychology. An external history emphasizes the historical context-institutional,
economic, social, political-and how it influenced the history
of psychology.
A personalistic approach to history glorifies the major historical
figures and argues that history moves through the action of heroic
individuals. A naturalistic approach emphasizes the zeitgeist,
the mood or spirit of the times, as the prime moving force in
history. The existence of multiples is consistent with a naturalistic
view.
Historiography: Doing History
Historiography refers to the process of doing research in history
and writing historical narratives.
Historical research often takes place in archives, which hold
unpublished information such as diaries, notes, original manuscripts,
and correspondence. The major archives for historians is the Archives
of the History of American Psychology, located at the University
of Akron.
Archival collections can be extensive, but they can also be incomplete,
with important information missing for various reasons. The information
that is available is subject to numerous sources of error (e.g.,
the biases of the diary writer).
Historians are faced with two major problems: the selection of
information for their historical narratives and interpretation
of the information at hand. These decisions can reflect bias on
the part of the historian, and they can reflect the historical
context within which the historian is writing. Nonetheless, most
historians believe that some degree of truth can be reached through
the open exchange of information and by examining historical events
through a variety of perspectives.
Key Issues in History
The traditional approach to the history of psychology has been
presentist, internal, and personalistic. Recently, historians
have tended to be more historicist, external,
Chapter 2, pgs. 24-54
A Long Past
• The Ebbinghaus statement that psychology has a long past
but a short history is a reminder that the issues of concern to
psychologists have been addressed by serious thinkers for thousands
of years, even though psychology as a self-defined discipline
is just over 100 years old. The "new psychology" that
emerged in the late nineteenth century differed from philosophy
in that the questions about human behavior and mental life were
taken into the laboratory for the first time.
Descartes and the Beginnings of Modern Philosophy and Science
• Descartes lived during the end of the Renaissance and
during years of great advances in science and technology. It was
a time when the authority of the Church and of Aristotle came
to be questioned, by Galileo's replacement of a geocentric model
of the universe with a heliocentric model, for example. Descartes'
life also overlapped that of Sir Francis Bacon, who argued for
an inductive approach to science.
• Descartes was a rationalist, believing that the way
to true knowledge was through the systematic use
them as gradually approaching but not quite reaching the "holy
grail" of scientific psychology. It is a serious mistake,
however, to think of these individuals as somehow falling short.
In fact, they were clearly the best and the brightest of their
day, going far beyond their peers in the brilliance of their insights.
The proper way to view the philosophers in this chapter is to
think of them as people living in the context of their times and
grappling as best they could with the issues of their day. That
these philosophers wrestled with the same questions that exist
today is not an indication of steady progress upward from then
to now, but of the universality of the issues. It is futile to
criticize them for not seeing what others saw later on-after all,
to borrow from Isaac Newton's famous quote, the others were standing
on their shoulders.
of his reasoning abilities. Because he believed that some truths
were universal and could be arrived at through reason and without
the necessity of sensory experience, he was also a nativist. In
addition, he was a dualist and an interactionist, believing that
mind and body were distinct essences, but that they had direct
influence on each other.
• To explain mind-body interactionism, Descartes developed
a model of nervous system activity and was the first person to
describe reflex action. His model of bodily action was a mechanistic
one the body was like a machine. According to the Cartesian dichotomy,
animals are pure machines, but humans have a rational mind (soul)
to complement their machinelike bodies.
The British Empiricist Argument and the Associationists
• The founder of British empiricism was John Locke, who
rejected the nativist belief in innate ideas and argued that the
mind was like a blank piece of paper, to be written on by our
experiences. Ideas that result from our experiences have two sources:
sensation and reflection. Locke used an atomistic model, assuming
that complex ideas were built from the basic elements of simple
ideas. Primary qualities (e.g., extension) exist independently
of the perceiver, but secondary qualities (e.g., the perception
of color) depend on perception. Locke's beliefs led him to recommend
that parents take an active role in educating their children.
• George Berkeley wrote a detailed analysis of visual perception
based on empiricist arguments, in the process describing visual
phenomena such as convergence, accommodation, and the effects
of the inverted retinal image. He rejected Locke's primary/secondary
qualities distinction, and to counter materialism, he proposed
(subjective idealism) that we cannot be sure of the reality of
objects except through our belief in God, the Permanent Perceiver.
• David Hume was an empiricist/associationist known for
his distinction between impressions, which result from sensation,
and ideas, which he said were faint copies of impressions. He
also identified the rules of association as resemblance, contiguity,
and cause/effect. He believed that we cannot know true causality,
only that certain events occur together regularly.
• David Hartley is considered the founder of associationism
because of his systematic attempt to summarize all that was known
about it and his argument that the essence of association was
contiguity (both spatial and temporal) and repetition. He developed
a model of nervous system action based on the Newtonian concept
of vibrations, and his position on the mind-body issue was that
of parallelism.
John Stuart Mill, a child prodigy, was the leading British philosopher
of the nineteenth century Compared with others (including his
father, th empiricist philosopher James Mill) who describe the
mind in mechanical, building-block terms,
S. Mill used a more holistic chemical metaphor complex ideas
are greater than the sum of simple ideas. Mill analyzed the logic
of science, an described three methods for trying to arrive at
scientific truth: the method of agreement, the method of difference,
which underlie today experimental method, and the method of comitant
variation, similar to the modern correlational method.
Rationalist Responses to Empiricism
Gottfried Leibnitz challenged Locke's white papa analogy and
said the mind was more like veined marble, with the veins being
analogous to the innate ideas and abilities that shape our experiences.
He also challenged Descartes' interactionism arguing for a parallelism
and using the metaphor, two synchronous clocks to make his point.
His monadology provided a basis for the concepts the unconscious
and sensory thresholds.
Immanuel Kant recognized the importance of oi experiences for
developing our understanding
the world, but argued that experience itself w. not possible
without a basis in some a prior knowledge to provide the framework
for oi experiences. Kant believed that psychology can not achieve
the status of a science.
Chapter 3, pgs. 55-83
SUMMARY
Heroic Science in the Age of Enlightenment
• The Enlightenment was a period during the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries when great faith existed in the ability of
science and human reason to produce true knowledge about the world.
Scientists were heroes, considered to be objective and value free,
with Newton being the prime exemplar. Science was thought to lead
inevitably to progress through technological innovation. In this
context, the belief that psychology could become scientific began
to take hold.
Sensory Physiology
• From the time of Descartes, scientists have been interested
in the nature of the simple reflex. In the eighteenth century,
Whytt completed the first systematic studies, showing conclusively
that the spinal cord was necessary in order for reflexes to occur.
Anticipating the concept of conditioning, Whytt also pointed out
that the stimulus-response connections could develop through habit
When Magendie severed the posterior root of a dog's spinal cord,
the affected area could move but was insensitive to stimulation.
When the anterior root was severed, no movement occurred. Magendie
concluded that the posterior root controlled sensation, while
the anterior root controlled motor movements. Bell made similar
observations, and the distinction is now known as the Bell-Magendie
Law.
According to Muller's doctrine of the specific energies of nerves,
(a) we are directly aware of our nervous systems, not the world,
and (b) each of the five basic sensory systems has nerve fibers
designed for that specific sense.
Helmholtz was opposed to vitalism and fought it through his doctrine
of conservation of energy and by measuring the finite speed of
the neural impulse. He was without peer as an expert on visual
and auditory perception, known for the trichromatic theory of
color vision, the resonance theory of audition, and his empiricist
approach to perception, which emphasized unconscious interference.
Localization of Brain Function
• Phrenology, developed by Gall and promoted by Spurzheim,
was the first serious theory of localization of brain function.
Phrenologists believed that different parts of the brain served
different faculties, that the portion of brain allocated to a
faculty was proportional to the strength of the faculty, and that
faculties and their strengths could be determined by measuring
the skull.
• Because it relied too heavily on anecdotal evidence and
faulty logic, phrenology lost scientific credibility quickly.
It remained popular with the general public, however, being consistent
with the American ideals of individuality and self-improvement.
• By developing the method of ablation, Flourens was able
to falsify phrenological doctrine, while at the same time showing
that the cortex operates as an integrated system.
• Evidence for localization came from clinical studies,
in which those suffering from various forms of brain disease or
damage were studied. The case of Phineas Gage illustrated the
effects of severe frontal lobe damage on judgment and personality.
Broca's study of "Tan," who suffered from motor aphasia,
showed that the ability to produce articulate speech depended
on a fairly circumscribe area of the left cortex.
• By developing the procedure of electrically stimulating
the surface of the cortex, Fritsch and Hitzi; in Germany and Ferrier
in Great Britain began to map the functions of the surface of
the brain with a "scientific phrenology."
Early Twentieth-Century Studies of the Nervous System and Behavior
• The identification of neurons as the basic units o the
nervous system was made by Golgi, why thought they were physically
connected to each other, and Ramon y Cajal, who thought they were
physically separate from each other.
• Ramon y Cajal's theory was verified by Sherrington, who
is credited with discovering the synapse and demonstrating its
existence in hi research on reflexes and through the phenomena
of temporal and spatial summation.
• Lashley's research on the brain and learning showed that
maze learning was not localized in any particular area of the
cortex. Rather, the cortex operated as a system and was characterized
by equipotentiality and mass action.
Chapter 4, pgs. 85-116
An Education in Germany
In the nineteenth century a large number of American students
studied the sciences in Europe, especially in Germany. In the
latter half of the century, many students went to Germany, in
particular to Leipzig, to study a new approach to psychology that
was developing there.
The German educational system promoted a philosophy of Wissenschaft,
which emphasized academic freedom and research. This created an
environment conducive to new ideas, including the idea of a new
psychology.
On the Threshold of Experimental
Psychology: Psychophysics
Psychophysics is the study of the relationship between physical
stimuli and the psychological reaction to them. The first research
in this tradition was completed by Ernst Weber, who investigated
the relative sensitivity of various areas on the surface of the
body using the two-point threshold. In experiments in which observers
made comparisons between two weights, Weber discovered that the
ability to distinguish between them depended on the relative rather
than the absolute differences in their weights (Weber's Law).
Gustav Fechner elaborated Weber's research and his Elements of
Psychophysics is considered experimental psychology's first text.
Although more interested in using his research to defeat materialism,
Fechner is known for developing several important psychophysics
methods in use today (limits, constant stimuli, adjustment) and
for the precision of his work in measuring absolute and difference
thresholds.
Wundt Establishes a New Psychology at Leipzig
• Wundt is generally known as the founder of experimental
psychology. He explicitly set out to create a new psychology that
emphasized the experimental methods borrowed from physiology,
and he created the first laboratory of experimental psychology
and the first journal devoted to describing the results of psychological
research.
• Wundt's new science involved studying immediate conscious
experience under controlled laboratory conditions. Because they
could not be subjected to experimental control and replication,
higher mental processes (e.g., language) had to be studied through
nonlaboratory methods (e.g., observation).
• In Wundt's laboratory, most of the research concerned
basic sensory and perceptual processes. The lab also produced
a large number of "mental chronometry" studies, which
attempted to measure the amount of time taken for various mental
activities. James McKeen Cattell, an American student, and Wundt's
first official lab assistant, completed a number of these studies,
which utilized a subtraction procedure developed by F. C. Donders.
• Recent historical scholarship has uncovered serious distortions
in the traditional accounts of Wundt's theories. Rather than being
a structuralist, seeking to reduce consciousness to its basic
elements, Wundt was more interested in the mind's ability to actively
organize information. One of his main interests was the process
of apperception, an active, meaningful, and attentive perception
of some event. He called his system voluntarism to reflect the
active nature of mental processing.
The New Psychology Spreads
• One of the most important programs of research carried
out in psychology's history involved the study of memory by Hermann
Ebbinghaus. To investigate the development of new associations
between unassociated stimuli, he invented nonsense syllables.
Ebbinghaus measured retention in terms of the amount of effort
"saved" in relearning. His famous forgetting curve showed
that for getting occurs at a very rapid rate shortly after initial
learning, then tapers off. He also documented the benefits of
distributed practice and the effects of remote associations.
G. E. Muller and his students significantly extended contemporary
research on color vision, the psychophysics research of Fechner,
and the memory research of Ebbinghaus. By adding introspection
to the nonsense syllable experiments, he argued that memory was
an active process, not the passive buildup of associative strength.
He was the first to identify retroactive inhibition (i.e., forgetting
results from interference from events occurring between initial
learning and recall), and he invented the memory drum.
Oswald Kulpe and his students created the Wurzburg school of
psychology, which defied Wundt by studying thinking under laboratory
conditions and liberalizing the method of introspection. In their
research they found evidence for mental sets, imageless thought,
and conscious attitudes.
Chapter 5, pgs. 118-146
Summary 147
SUMMARY
The Species Problem
• During the Enlightenment, some scientists began questioning
the biblical account of how species were created. The species
problem concerned the question of how species originated, why
there were so many, and how extinction could be explained. The
argument from design enabled scientists to continue to examine
nature scientifically while maintaining religious beliefs.
• An early theory of evolution that omitted reference to
the deity was proposed by Charles Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus.
A more important theory was proposed by the French naturalist,
Lamarck. His theory included the concept of the inheritance of
acquired characteristics.
Charles Darwin (1809-1882) and the Theory of Evolution
• After several false starts, Charles Darwin found a vocation
in science while a student at Cambridge. He initially thought
of himself as a geologist, but he was also greatly interested
in zoology. Two important mentors were the botanist John Henslow
and the geologist Adam Sedgwick.
• During a five-year voyage aboard the Beagle, Darwin collected
evidence that led to important contributions to both geology and
zoology. He made discoveries that supported Charles Lyell's uniformitarian
model of geological change (the earth changes gradually according
to known principles, rather than as a result of periodic geological
catastrophes) and he collected data that would eventually provide
evidence for his theory of evolution. Evidence from the Galapagos
islands (e.g., finches) was especially important.
• In developing his theory. Darwin was influenced by the
views of Thomas Malthus, who pointed out that because populations
tend to grow faster than food supplies, a struggle for existence
occurs among members of those populations. He also observed that
hobbyists and farmers were able to bring about dramatic changes
in species by careful breeding.
Darwin created the essence of his theory in the late 1830s, but
did not publish for 20 years. He
was slowed by ill health, a concern over how his theory would
be received by the scientific community, and a scientific cautiousness
that led him to accumulate as much evidence as possible to support
his theory. He was motivated to publish in 1859 by the appearance
of a similar theory by Alfred Russel Wallace.
Darwin's theory proposes that individual members of every species
vary from each other, that some variations are more favorable
in the struggle for existence than others, enabling the organism
to adapt to the environment, and that nature "selects"
(natural selection) those with the most favorable variations for
survival.
The Origins of Comparative Psychology
An implication of Darwin's theory was that there existed a continuity
between species. This led to the development of comparative psychology,
the study of differences between and similarities among species
on various traits (e.g., intelligence). Darwin was an early pioneer,
who examined the evolutionary history of emotional expressions
and demonstrated that human expressions had evolutionary roots.
George Romanes is considered the founder of comparative psychology
and he provided extensive descriptions of the behavior of many
species. He relied on anecdotal observations and was too anthropomorphic
in his interpretations of the behaviors he described. A more experimental
approach was taken by Douglas Spalding, who demonstrated that
certain behaviors were the result of instinct, not experience.
C. Lloyd Morgan took issue with the excessive anthropomorphism
shown by other comparative psychologists and argued for more parsimonious
explanations. For example, some behaviors were more parsimoniously
explained as being examples of trial-anderror learning than rational
thought.
Studying Individual Differences
Individual variation is a cornerstone of evolutionary theory,
and Francis Galton was the first to carefully examine these individual
differences in humans. He studied individual differences in visual
imagery, studying it through the first systematic use of the survey
method (questionnaire). He also invented the word association
method to study the nature of associations.
Galton believed that intelligence was an inherited ability; nurture
played no significant role. As evidence, he pointed to the fact
that certain abilities tended to run in families. He argued for
a eugenics-based society-only those who are fit should be encouraged
to reproduce. To identify those who were most fit, he set out
to measure individual differences in ability. This resulted in
the first widespread attempt to measure and classify human abilities.
His measures relied heavily on basic sensory/motor processes and
did not prove very useful.
Darwin's Century in Perspective
• One modern indication of the power of Darwinian thinking
is the development of evolutionary psychology, which aims to explain
many social behaviors in evolutionary terms.
Chapter 6 pgs. 179-181
Psychology in Nineteenth-Century America
Prior to the Civil War, psychology in America was taught as mental
or moral philosophy. It was taught following the precepts of faculty
psychology, which was based on Scottish Realistic philosophy.
Faculties were separate subcategories of the mind, normally falling
into three categories: cognitive, affective, and behavioral.
Thomas Upham's Elements of Intellectual (Mental) Philosophy (1827)
is considered to be the first textbook of psychology, and it was
organized around the concepts of faculty psychology.
The post-Civil War period was one of great expansion in higher
education. The modern university (e.g., Johns Hopkins), based
on the German model which emphasized graduate education and independent
research, began during this time.
William James (1842-1910): America's First Psychologist
• Although he was trained in medicine and ultimately thought
of himself as a philosopher, William James is considered America's
first modern psychologist. He brought the new psychology to Harvard,
and he wrote what is arguably the most important book in all of
psychology's history, the Principles of Psychology (1890).
• Disturbed by nineteenth-century materialism and determinism,
James decided to believe in free will because it was a useful
belief for him to hold. Out of this emerged his general approach
to philosophy, called pragmatism.
• In the Principles, James took issue with those who would
analyze consciousness into its elements. Instead, he argued that
it was more appropriately conceived of as analogous to a stream.
Consciousness was personal, constantly changing, continuous, selective,
and active, and it served individuals by enabling them to adapt
quickly to new environments. Habit also had survival value, allowing
individuals to avoid having to think about some activities so
they could save their consciousness for more difficult and novel
problems.
• According to the James-Lange theory of emotions, emotional
responses were identified with the bodily reactions that accompanied
the perception of some event. When trying to conceive of emotions
without the physiological arousal, James argued, nothing remains.
A problem with the theory is that it requires that a recognizably
different pattern of arousal be associated with each different
emotion.
• In his later years, James became interested in the possibility
that there could be some validity to spiritualism. Despite criticism
that he was harming the fragile scientific status of the new psychology,
he believed that spiritualists and mediums should be investigated
with an open mind.
G. Stanley Hall (1844-1924): Professionalizing Psychology
• Hall is best known for his efforts in professionalizing
psychology. He founded the first psychology lab in America (at
Johns Hopkins), America's first academic journal (the American
Journal of Psychology), and the American Psychology Association.
As the first president of Clark University, copied the German
ideal of graduate education that he first encountered at Johns
Hopkins. F several years, Clark was a leader in graduate ed canon
in several scientific fields. After 1892, however, only psychology
remained as a prominent field of study at Clark.
Hall was interested in a wide range of topics, b they generally
fall under the heading of gene psychology, the study of the origins
and development of consciousness and behavior. The importance
of evolution was a consistent theme in Ha work. At Clark, Hall
encouraged research
developmental, abnormal, and comparative psychology. Under the
direction of Edmund Sanford Clark's laboratory produced important
research throughout the 1890s, including the first stud of rats
learning mazes.
As a developmental psychologist, Hall pioneer the child study
movement and is responsible
identifying adolescence as a distinct stage of development. He
characterized adolescence as a time "storm and stress."
Later in life he wrote about t developmental changes associated
with adulthood and aging. He believed in a theory of recapitulation-the
development of the individual organism is a mirror of the evolution
of the species.
Hall's interests in development, sexuality, a abnormality led
him to invite Freud to Amer for Clark's twentieth anniversary
in 1909. It v Freud's only trip to America, and he believed that
the invitation was the first sign that his ideas m developing
an international reputation.
Mary Whiton Catkins (1863-1930): Challenging the Male Monopoly
Mary Catkins was barred from being an official student at Harvard,
but nonetheless completed important experimental dissertation
on association, during which she invented a memory procedure still
in use, paired associate learning. In her thesis, Catkins investigated
frequency, recent vividness, and primacy as conditions that coy
strengthen associations, and found that frequency was the most
important.
In 1905, Calkins became the first woman elected president of
the American Psychological Association; as her interests shifted
to philosophy, she became (in 1918) the first woman elected president
of the other APA, the American Philosophical Association.
Calkins's major theoretical contribution was her self psychology,
which was centered on the idea that all consciousness is personal.
She used it as a way to reconcile competing theoretical schools
of thought (e.g., structuralism and functionalism).
Two other important women psychologists during this era were
Christine Ladd-Franklin and Margaret Washburn. Both faced the
exclusionary practices that made it difficult for women to
become professional psychologists. Ladd-Franklin was a skilled
mathematician and developed an evolutionary theory of color vision.
Washburn was best known for her work in comparative psychology.
The New Psychology at the Millennium
• By the turn of the century, psychology in America had
grown considerably and had shifted from faculty psychology to
the new laboratory-based experimental psychology. Students also
had numerous options for graduate study in America by 1900, and
the number of students going to Germany quickly declined.
Chapter 7 pgs. 214-215
E. B. Titchener earned a Ph.D. with Wundt at Leipzig, then came
to Cornell University, where he established an approach to psychology
called structuralism. Its main goals were to analyze human conscious
experience into its elemental units, then show how these units
could be synthesized into mental processes.
Titchener promoted an experimental/laboratory approach to psychology
by writing a series of highly detailed training manuals that introduced
students and instructors to the particulars of precise laboratory
work and by forming a close group of fellow male researchers called
Experimentalists, who met annually to share details of their ongoing
research.
Titchener's Text-Book of Psychology (1909) pro the best overall
summary of his system. In defines psychology's subject matter
as experience that is dependent on the experiencing person proposed
a parallelist solution to the mind-body question. He also identified
introspection as
psychology's primary method and defined experiments as observations
that could be repeated, isolated, and varied. He believed that
introspections could yield valid data only if introspectors were
highly trained and capable of the introspective bit. Training
was also needed to avoid the stimulus error, a tendency to describe
a meaningful stimulus instead of the direct conscious experience
of the stimulus.
Tichener identified the main elements of conscious experience
as sensations, images, and affects. Sensations and images have
the attributes quality, intensity, duration, and clearness, but
ages aren't as clear as sensations. Affects have two qualities-pleasantness
and unpleasantness-and they lack clarity.
Tichener's primary contribution was to promote laboratory psychology,
but his system omitted major topics of interest to most American
psychologists, and his method of introspection was own to be fundamentally
flawed because of its lack of objectivity.
America's Psychology: Functionalism
Most American psychologists, influenced by evolutionary theory
and a generally pragmatic attitude, were interested more in the
functions of consciousness than in its structure. Functionalism
was widespread, but mainly associated with the University of Chicago
and Columbia University.
The origins of functionalism are often traced to a paper on the
reflex arc by John Dewey of Chicago. Dewey argued against the
analytic strategy of reducing the reflex to its elements and argued
instead that the reflex needed to be seen in its broader context
as a coordinated system that served to adapt the organism to its
environment. Dewey was known primarily for his progressive views
on education, believing that students should be active learners,
and for his philosophical writings on democracy.
The earliest clear statement of the functionalist philosophy
came from the 1906 APA presidential address of James Angell, who
succeeded Dewey at Chicago. Angell explicitly compared structuralism
and functionalism, pointing out that structuralists were more
likely to ask the question "What is consciousness?"
whereas functionalists were more concerned with the question "What
is consciousness for?" This led them to study topics ranging
from developmental to abnormal psychology and led them to be interested
in individual differences and how psychology could be used to
solve everyday problems.
Harvey Carr was Angell's successor at Chicago, bringing functionalism
to its maturity there. He was known for his maze learning research
and for developing Chicago into one of the country's best graduate
programs.
Functionalism at Columbia was led by James McKeen Cattell and
associated with two of his students, Edward Thorndike and Robert
Woodworth. Thorndike became a leading educational psychologist,
but in his early years he was known for his studies of cats in
puzzle boxes. He proposed that learning occurred through the creation
of connections between situations and responses that were successful
in those situations (Law of Effect). His debate with Mills reflected
a fundamental disagreement between those advocating laboratory
methods and those who preferred to study animals in their daily
environments.
Woodworth is remembered for his research with Thorndike on transfer,
which called traditional educational practices into question,
his dynamic psychology, which replaced an S-R model with an S-O-R
framework and emphasized motivational influences on behavior,
and his textbook writing, especially on methodology. His "Columbia
Bible" institutionalized the distinctions between experimental
and correlational research and between independent and dependent
variables in experimental research.
Chapter 8 252-254
Pressures Toward Application
• From the time when the new psychology first appeared in
America, in the late nineteenth century, psychologists have been
concerned with how psychological knowledge could be put to
good use. The concern over application was partly a natural consequence
of traditional American pragmatism, and the belief that scientific
progress should result in beneficial technology.
• Psychologists also experienced institutional pressures
to justify their existence within departments of philosophy and
their needs for fully-equipped laboratories.
The Mental Testing Movement
Galton's approach to mental testing, which emphasized physical
and basic sensory measures, was imported to America by James MCKeen
Cattell, who created the term "mental test" and developed
an elaborate testing program at Columbia. The program failed when
the measurements could not be correlated with academic performance,
however. Cattell played an important role in the prof essionalization
of psychology in America, primarily through his editorial work.
Modern intelligence testing, with its emphasis on measuring cognitive
rather than sensory processes, originated with the Ebbinghaus
completion tests and the creation of the Binet-Simon test. Binet's
goal was to identify students who were academically weak (debiles),
so that special programs could be developed for them. The test
was scored in terms of mental level (later called mental age)
and children in need were considered to be those scoring two mental
levels below their actual age. Binet's approach to psychology,
which he called individual psychology, was to emphasize the study
of individual differences rather than the search for general laws.
The Binet tests came to America when they were translated by
Henry Goddard of Vineland Training School. Goddard used the tests
to classify degrees of feeblemindedness in terms of mental age
and created the term "moron" to identify those with
mental ages between 8 and 12. He believed that mental deficiency
was inherited, and supported his case with the methodologically
flawed Kallikak study, which traced the lineage of one of the
Vineland children. Goddard also used the tests to help officials
at the Ellis Island immigration center try to identify those who
were mentally unfit. His results added to the perception that
immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were mentally inferior
to those from northern and western Europe.
Lewis Terman institutionalized intelligence testing by revising
and standardizing the Binet tests, thereby creating the Stanford-Binet,
one of the
best-known tests of intelligence. The test was scored in terms
of William Stern's concept of IQ, a ratio of mental age to chronological
age. To support his belief in a meritocracy Terman conducted an
extended study of gifted children, finding that they broke the
stereotype that such children are intellectually superior but
socially and physically inferior.
Robert Yerkes, a comparative psychologist at heart, became involved
in mental testing in World War I by organizing the Army testing
program. He and his team developed two group intelligence tests,
one for literate soldiers (Army Alpha) and one for illiterates
(Army Beta). The program was minimally useful to the Army, but
launched intelligence testing as big business and made testing
a popular enterprise in the 1920s. After the war, Yerkes's report
on the program, which suggested that the typical American soldier
was scored barely higher than moron level, generated much controversy
over mental testing, IQ, and the question of how much intelligence
resulted from nature and nurture.
Applying Psychology to Business
The first psychologists to apply psychological principles to
business were Walter Dill Scott, who wrote books on advertising
and how to improve business practices, and Hugo Munsterberg, who
came from Germany to run the laboratory at Harvard, but soon developed
interests in several applied areas, including forensic psychology,
educational psychology, psychotherapy, and industrial ("economic")
psychology.
Miinsterberg's Psychology and Industrial Efficiency included
several examples of how psychological principles could be used
to select employees. He recommended two approaches to measurement:
simulations of critical features of the worker's task, as in driving
an electric railcar, and analysis into component skills, as in
being a telephone operator. The book also included research-based
advice on improving the workplace and on how to market products.
Other pioneering industrial psychologists include Walter Van
Dyke Bingham, whose Division of Applied Psychology at the Carnegie
Institute developed programs for training people in sales
and retailing, Lillian Moller Gilbreth, an efficiency expert and
one of the first to study ergonomics, and Harry Hollingworth,
a reluctant applied psychologist, but an effective one who applied
sophisticated experimental design to applied problems such as
the effects of caffeine on performance.
Chapter 9 286-287
The Origins and Development
Gestalt Psychology
The gestalt movement had it roots in the philosophical traditions
of Kant and Husserl and in nineteenth-century developments in
physics, in particular the work of Max Planck, a pioneer of field
physics. Force fields can only be understood in terms of the overall
patterns of relationships among objects in the field.
The physicist Ernst Mach argued that some of our sensory experiences
are of forms (e.g., squareness) that cannot be further reduced.
Similarly, Christian von Ehrenfels used the example of a melody
that changes key to illustrate the concept of form-qualities.
A melody played in a new key retains its form-quality even though
all the individual elements are different. The prominent philosopher
/psychologist Carl Stumpf directed the dissertations of three
of the four men featured in the chapter, and briefly taught the
fourth.
Gestalt psychology was founded in 1910 to 1912 when Max Wertheimer,
with the help of Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Kohler, completed research
on apparent motion, which Wertheimer called the phi phenomenon.
By flashing separated lights at certain intervals, the observer
perceives one light in motion, and the whole experience cannot
be analyzed into its component parts. Wertheimer concluded that
the whole is different from and determines the nature of its parts.
When the Nazi party came to power in the early 1930s, posing
a direct threat to Jewish scientists, Wertheimer emigrated to
America and spent his remaining years at the New School for Social
Research in New York.
Kurt Koffka, one of Wertheimer's observers in the apparent motion
study, earned his doctorate under Stumpf. He is known for introducing
the gestalt movement to America, both through his
publications and visits. He was the first gestaltist to move
to the United States permanently, accepting a position at Smith
College in 1927. He was gestalt's major theorist, and he extended
gestalt ideas into the area of developmental psychology.
• Wolfgang Kohler also earned a doctorate with Stumpf, and
he also aided Wertheimer in the apparent motion study. From 1913
to 1920 he studied primate behavior at a German research station
in the Canary islands, where he completed research on insightful
problem solving. He moved to the United States permanently in
1935, where he became gestalt's most influential spokesperson.
Gestalt Psychology and Perception
• Wertheimer described a number of basic principles that
determine how our perceptions are organized. These gestalt organizing
principles included figure-ground, grouping by proximity and similarity,
and good continuation. Our perceptions are governed by pragnanz,
a tendency to organize perceptions into the simplest meaningful
whole. We often construct such good figures by filling in gaps,
a phenomenon called closure.
• Koffka made an important distinction between the world
as it exists in reality, the geographical environment, and the
world as perceived by the individual, the behavioral environment.
Our behavior is most clearly influenced by the latter.
• Kohler's principle of isomorphism stated that phenomenal
reality and the underlying physical reality of the nervous system
were functionally equivalent to each other.
The Gestalt Approach to
Cognition and Learning
• Kohler's Mentality of Apes summarized his research on
problem solving in animals. He criticized Thorndike's mechanical
trial-and-error explanation of animal learning and argued instead
that animals could show insight and solve problems quickly if
they were able to perceive all elements of the problem situation.
Kohler's apes were able to solve problems by stacking boxes to
retrieve fruit suspended from a ceiling and by building crude
instruments to retrieve other fruit. Sultan, for example, joined
two sticks to reach beyond his cage for fruit.
Wertheimer's Productive Thinking described how thinking could
be inhibited by an educational system that relied on rote learning
and rule memorization. Alternatively, the productive thinker had
a true understanding of relationships and could solve novel problems.
He used the example of figuring the area of a parallelogram as
one illustration of the weakness of rule memorization and the
advantage of his more insightful productive thinking approach.
Other gestaltists who worked on cognition included Hedwig Von
Restorff, who showed that memory would be improved for information
that stood out from the background (Von Restorff effect), George
Katona, who studied the effects of organization on memory, and
Karl Duncker, who investigated factors that inhibit insightful
problem solving, such as functional fixedness, a tendency to think
only of the normal uses for objects.
Kurt Lewin (1890-1947):
Expanding the Gestalt Vision
Like Koffka and Kohler, Lewin earned a doctorate in Stumpf's
laboratory, then joined Kohler and Wertheimer at Berlin during
the 1920s. He emigrated from Nazi Germany in 1933, and spent his
remaining years at Cornell, the Child Welfare Research Station
at Iowa, and the Research Center for Group Dynamics at MIT, which
he founded shortly before his death.
Lewin's field theory is centered on the concept of the life space,
which includes all of the factors influencing a person's actions
in a given moment. These factors include those within the person
(P) and those in the environment (E). Thus, B = f (P,E). Lewin
borrowed from topology to represent various life spaces symbolically.
He emphasized the importance of motivation and the goal-directedness
of behavior.
Lewin used his system to describe various conflict systems (e.g.,
approach-avoidance). One of his students, Bluma Zeigarnik, showed
that unresolved tension in the system could have behavioral consequences.
The Zeigarnik effect states that memory will be greater for uncompleted
than completed tasks.
As a developmental psychologist, Lewin argued for the study of
individual cases over the "average child," and he considered
development to be a process of increased differentiation. He studied
the effects of frustration by giving children the opportunity
to play with attractive toys, then removing the toys. The frustration
resulted in the deterioration (regression) of their behavior.
Lewin is often considered a founder of modern social psychology.
His most famous work in this area involved studying the consequences
of different types of leadership styles. Adolescent boys were
more effective when led by a democratic leader, than by either
an autocratic or a laissezfaire leader.
Much of Lewin's research has been called "action research"
because of its social relevance. A committed activist, Lewin always
believed that his research should contribute to the improvement
of society. Examples of his action research include studies of
prejudice and its reduction, in-group loyalty, and the effectiveness
of group processes. Interest in the dynamics of group action led
to the development of Training-groups (T-Groups), designed to
improve in-group communication and leadership skills.
In Perspective:
Gestalt Psychology in America
Gestalt psychology was a vigorous movement that continually criticized
psychologies that were based on the idea of understanding behavior
and mental processes through analysis into constituent parts.
In America, they were regular critics of behaviorism.
American psychologists tended to be more eclectic than the gestaltists
liked, willing to learn from gestalt principles but not willing
to commit themselves entirely to gestalt psychology. Americans
were also critical of the gestaltists' tendency to rely more on
theory than research and application.
Chapter 10 318-319
Moving Toward Greater Objectivity
Prior to Watson, many psychologists were becoming concerned about
the objectivity of their measures. One influence was evolutionary
theory, which led to the study of animal behavior. Studying animals
meant developing behavioral measures, and American psychologists
did just that (e.g., Thorndike's puzzle box studies).
The philosophies of empiricism and association
ism, which both emphasize the importance of experience, provided
a foundation for behavioral thinking. Positivism, which argued
that the only valid knowledge is obtained through inductive, systematic
observations, also contributed.
Many psychologists became interested in more objective measures
of psychological phenomena because they were becoming increasingly
critical of introspection.
Pavlov's Life and Work
• Pavlov thought of himself more as a physiologist than
psychologist, and his 1904 Nobel prize was for research on the
physiology of digestion. He was especially known for developing
surgical procedures (e.g., the Pavlov pouch) that allowed the
digestive processes of live, intact animals to be studied.
• Pavlov's work on conditioning developed out of the digestion
research, when he decided to investigate why his dogs would often
salivate before food reached their mouths. He systematically examined
a large number of conditioning phenomena, including acquisition,
extinction, generalization, differentiation, and experimental
neurosis (a breakdown in the ability to differentiate stimuli).
He interpreted these phenomena in terms of the reciprocal brain
processes of excitation and inhibition.
• Although initially hostile to the Soviet government, Pavlov
eventually accommodated when the threat from Nazi Germany developed.
The Soviets saw Pavlovian conditioning as a foundation for shaping
the modern communist citizen; consequently, Pavlov's research
was heavily subsidized by the government.
• Pavlov's work was generally known to American psychologists
from the early years of the twentieth century, but not widely
known and appreciated until his research was translated into English
in the 1920s.
John B. Watson and
the Founding of Behaviorism
• Watson was trained at the functionalist University
of Chicago, where he developed a distaste for
introspection and a love of animal research. His dissertation
on the relationship between cortical development and the learning
abilities of rats was followed by several important studies on
how rats learned mazes by relying on their kinesthetic sense.
After teaching at Chicago for several years following his doctorate,
Watson moved to Johns Hopkins in 1908, where he stayed until 1920.
In his behaviorist manifesto (1913), he proclaimed that introspective
psychology should be replaced by a psychology that specified the
relationships between stimuli and responses. In his APA presidential
address (1915), he showed how behaviors could be conditioned using
procedures similar to Pavlov's.
In his final years at Johns Hopkins, Watson studied newborns
and young children, especially their emotional development. He
argued that fear, rage, and love were the three fundamental emotions,
each resulting from specific stimuli. More elaborate emotional
responses resulted from conditioning.
Watson attempted to demonstrate the conditioning of emotional
responses in the famous Little Albert experiment. By pairing a
loud noise with a white rat, Watson and Rayner created a fear
of the latter. The fear generalized to similar stimuli (e.g.,
rabbits) and lasted at least a month. Later, Mary Cover Jones
demonstrated that fears could be unlearned.
Watson spent his final professional years as an advertising executive,
applying behavioral principles to marketing. During this time,
he also became a popularizer of behaviorist philosophy, especially
in the area of child rearing.
Chapter 11 355-356
Post-Watsonian Behaviorism
Contrary to traditional historical accounts, American psychology
did not become predominantly behaviorist as the immediate result
of Watson's program. Behaviorism did begin to take hold in the
1930s, however, partly because of Watson's continued propagandizing
but also because full translations of Pavlov's research became
available for the first time.
Logical positivism, which allowed for theories to include abstract
concepts but insisted that these concepts be tied to observable
events, created a fertile climate for the evolution of behaviorism.
Operationism, originating in physics in the late 1920s, also helped
to create an environment con
ducive to objective, behaviorist thinking. Operational definitions
define concepts in terms of a set of operations, under the control
of the researcher, that are assumed to bring about the term in
question (e.g., 24 hours without food brings on hunger). Confidence
in the generality of some research outcome increases when various
studies, each using a slightly different operational definition,
nonetheless converge on the same outcome.
Neobehaviorists disagreed on a number of issues, but agreed that
(a) continuity between species allowed for general rules of behavior
to be derived from nonhuman species, (b) understanding behavior
required a thorough knowledge of how the organism learns, and
(c) research results should have practical applications.
Edward C. Tolman (1886-1959): A Purposive Behaviorism
• Much of Tolman's research used maze learning, and he investigated
both the general reliability of the maze as an apparatus and the
manner in which rats learn mazes. According to Tolman, rats in
a maze do not learn a series of S-R connections; rather, they
learn an overall cognitive map of the maze. This spatial ability
can be shown in latent learning studies, in which animals can
be shown to be learning a maze even though the learning is not
reflected in their performance until reinforcement is made available,
and in place learning, in which animals learn to go to a location
more quickly than they learn to make a specific response.
• Tolman believed that all important behavior was goal-directed
or purposive and that molar rather than molecular behavior should
be the unit of study. He did not think that reinforcement was
necessary for learning to occur. He developed the concept of the
intervening variable, a hypothetical factor internal to the organism
that intervenes between stimulus and response and is defined operationally.
Many of the intervening variables in Tolman's system (e.g., expectancy)
were cognitive.
Clark Hull (1884-1952): A Hypothetico-Deductive Behaviorism
• Although he is known primarily for his theory of learning
based on animal studies, Hull also studied the development of
concept learning in humans, aptitude testing, and experimental
hypnosis, producing a doctoral dissertation on the first and books
on the latter two topics.
• Modeled on Newtonian physics and consistent with the dictates
of logical positivism, Hull's hypothetico-deductive system of
behavior involved the development of a theory in which specific
experiments were created to test hypotheses that were derived
from highly formalized postulates. Research outcomes would then
strengthen faith in the postulates or bring about their revision.
Hull's learning theory is a drive-reduction theory. Postulate
4 proposes that learning (i.e., an increase in habit strength)
involves stimulusresponse contiguity accompanied by reinforcement.
Reinforcers are stimuli that reduce drives. They can be primary
or biologically based (e.g., food), or secondary (i.e., learned
through association with primary reinforcers).
Hull used a large number of intervening variables. The most important
one was reaction potential, SE R, the probability that a response
will occur at a given time. It was said to be influenced by a
number of factors, including drive (D) and habit strength (sHR),
both of which Hull believed were necessary for behavior to occur.
F. Skinner (1904-1990): Radical Behaviorism
Skinner rejected the more formal theories of both Tolman and
Hull and argued for a more inductive, descriptive behaviorism
that simply looked for evidence of behavior that could be predicted
and controlled. He is best known for developing the distinction
between classical (Type S) and operant (Type R) conditioning and
for investigating the latter. To do so, he created the Skinner
box, an experimental chamber in which the rate of some response
(e.g., bar pressing) is recorded continuously by a cumulative
recorder. Operant conditioning occurs when behavior is shaped
by its immediate consequences. If the consequences are positive,
the behavior occurring in a specific environment is more likely
to occur in that environment in the future; if they are negative,
the behavior becomes less likely to occur.
He rejected the use of what he called explanatory fictions, hypothetical
factors that appear to explain a phenomenon but actually do nothing
more than relabel it. Hence, he was critical of nervous system
explanations of behavior, and he never accepted the idea that
explanations for behavior would be found by cognitive psychologists.
Skinner called for a technology of behavior to improve child
rearing, education, and society as a whole through the use of
behavioral techniques. In Walden 71.vo, he outlined how an entire
community could function according to operant principles.
Chapter 12 394-396
Early Treatment of the Mentally Ill
• Near the end of the eighteenth century, Enlightenment
thinkers pressed for reform in the ways of treating the mentally
ill. In France, Phillipe Pinel introduced the concept of "moral
treatment," in which institutional living conditions were
improved, the tendency to rely exclusively on physical restraint
of patients was reduced, and direct efforts were made to improve
the behavior of patients. Similar reforms were undertaken at the
York Retreat in England by William 'Iuke. His model was copied
extensively in the United States in the nineteenth century. Benjamin
Rush, considered to be the founder of modern psychiatry, introduced
a medical model as a way of explaining mental illness and developed
an approach to treatment that emphasized "improving"
the condition of patients' blood and circulatory systems.
• In the middle of the nineteenth century, Dorothea Dix
successfully urged the reform of large public asylums and better
treatment for the mentally ill poor. At the turn of the twentieth
century, Clifford Beers, a former mental patient, agitated for
similar reforms; he was also a pioneer in the Mental Hygiene movement,
which emphasized prevention.
Mesmerism and Hypnosis
• In the mid-1700s, Franz Anton Mesmer developed a procedure
for treating hysteria (apparent nervous system disorders with
no true organic damage), based on his belief that the disorder
was
the result of disturbed magnetic forces within the body. Believing
that he had magnetic powers, he treated patients and effected
some cures by "mesmerizing" them. Although he didn't
know it, his successes were the result of the power of suggestion,
and Mesmer had discovered a procedure that would eventually be
known as hypnotism.
• Before the discovery of such drugs as ether in the nineteenth
century, mesmerism was championed by the British doctor John Elliotson
as an anesthetic for surgery and used extensively in India by
another British doctor, James Esdaile. It gained further scientific
credibility in the hands of James Braid, who renamed the procedure
"neurypnology," which soon came to be called hypnology
or hypnotism.
• In France in the mid-nineteenth century, two schools of
thought developed about the nature of hypnotism. According to
Liebeault and Bernheim of the "Nancy" school, hypnotism
was a normal phenomenon that had its effects through the power
of suggestion; people differed in their levels of suggestibility.
According to Charcot in Paris, however, hypnotic effects mirrored
the symptoms of hypnosis and suggestibility was a sign of hysterical
neurosis.
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939): Founding Psychoanalysis
• Freud is one of psychology's best-known figures. Over
the years, a Freudian myth has developed, a false belief that
Freud was the solitary hero fighting for his ideas against overwhelming
opposition, and that his ideas were original to him, without important
antecedent. Recent scholarship has questioned both aspects of
the myth.
Freud was trained in neurology and influenced, through his contact
with Ernst Brucke, by the prevailing materialism of nineteenth-century
physiology. Financial problems led him to the private practice
of neurology, where he became interested in the treatment of hysteria.
In the 1880s, he studied with two of the leading experts of the
problem, Meynert and Charcot. He was also greatly influenced by
Darwin's work.
Through his association with Joseph Breuer, Freud learned of
the Anna O. case, in which hysteric symptoms were shown to be
related to repressed memories and successful treatment occurred
(apparently) if the patient would retrieve memories of the events
surrounding the first appearance of a symptom. The recall produced
an emotional release or catharsis. With Breuer, Freud published
Studies on Hysteria in 1895, normally considered the founding
event for psychoanalysis.
Freud believed that hysteria resulted from the repression of
trauma, real or imagined, into the unconscious, and the purpose
of psychoanalysis was to bring repressed memories back to the
surface so that insight into the causes of the patient's problem
could be gained. To explore the unconscious, Freud developed the
procedures of free association, in which a person said whatever
came to mind, and dream analysis, in which the surface or "manifest"
content of a dream was examined to discover the underlying or
"latent" content of the dream. All dreams reflected
some disguised wish fulfillment, Freud argued. He also believed
that all events have causes; even accidents or slips of the tongue
(Freudian slips) can be traced to unconscious purposes.
Freud believed that sexual problems were a critical determinant
of hysteria. He initially believed that hysteria resulted from
the effects of childhood sexual abuse, but he later abandoned
this "seduction" hypothesis, arguing that the memories
of abuse were actually the results of imagined sexual feelings
originating in childhood. This led to his theory of infantile
sexuality and the Oedipal complex.
International recognition for psychoanalysis came when Freud
was invited to deliver a series of five lectures at Clark University
in 1909. His lectures included descriptions of Anna O., his dream
theory, Freudian slips, and infantile sexuality.
Freud cultivated an inner circle of followers loyal to psychoanalysis.
Two early converts, Alfred Adler and Carl Jung, both broke with
Freud over the issue of sex and established their own schools
of thought, individual psychology (Adler) and analytical psychology
(Jung). One of Freud's most loyal followers was his daughter Anna,
known for extending psychoanalysis to the treatment of children.
After World War 1, Freud's theory evolved to include the proposals
(a) that both life (sex) and death (aggression) instincts are
a part of human nature; (b) that personality structure centers
on the ego, which mediates between the instinctive demands of
the id, the moral restrictions of the superego, and the constraints
placed on behavior by reality; and (c) that each of the three
sources of pressure on the ego can create anxiety, and the ego
reacts through defense mechanisms such as repression, projection,
and reaction formation.
Freud's ideas were treated with some skepticism by academic psychologists,
and were more influential, at first, in the medical community
and in the general public. His contributions include the concepts
of the unconscious and repression, his emphasis on the importance
of early childhood, and his insistence on the psychological nature
of mental disorders. Critics have cited his overemphasis on sex,
problems with the scientific status of psychoanalysis, and his
description of female psychology.
Clinical Psychology in America
Lightner Witmer is usually credited with establishing, in 1896,
the first clinic for the treatment of psychological disorders
in the United States. His clinic focused on "psycho-educational"
problems similar to those encountered by modern school psychologists-physiological,
cognitive, and behavioral problems related to school performance.
He called his treatment program orthogenics.
Prior to World War II, clinical psychologists for the most part
provided mental testing services and did not have high status,
either in clinical settings, which were dominated by psychiatrists,
or in the APA, which was controlled by academics. The American
Association for Applied Psychology was formed in 1937 as a way
of prof essionalizing the practice of psychology.
Alternatives to psychoanalysis proliferated in the postwar years,
with behavior therapy and clientcentered therapy being the prime
examples. Behavior therapy derived from learning theory, and assumed
that positive change resulted from relearning rather than insight
into the unconscious. The best-known behavior therapy technique
is Joseph Wolpe's systematic desensitization, which is similar
to a procedure used by Mary
Cover Jones in the 1920s. Desensitization has been shown to be
useful in the treatment of anxiety disorders; clients are trained
to replace anxiety responses with relaxation responses.
Client-centered therapy is the creation of Carl Rogers, and is
based on the idea that positive psychological change results from
a therapeutic atmosphere in which the therapist shows unconditional
positive regard for the client, empathy, and congruence. Rogers's
approach to therapy assigns responsibility for change to the client
rather than to the therapist, and his faith in the individual's
ability to take control of his or her life made him a leader (along
with Abraham Maslow) in the humanistic psychology movement.
Chapter 13 422-423
Cognitive Psychology Arrives (Again)
• After World War 11, psychologists became increasingly
involved in studying mental processes, a topic that had been a
central interest for psychology's earliest pioneers. This cognitive
psychology movement in America developed gradually dur
ing the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, while behaviorism became a less
powerful force. The change was more evolutionary than revolutionary.
During the period when behaviorism dominated American psychology
(1930s and 1940s), some American researchers (e.g., Stroop) still
investigated cognitive topics and European psychologists, who
never became as enamored of behaviorism as the Americans did,
made important contributions to the understanding of mental processes.
The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, whose genetic epistemology
and stage theory of cognitive development eventually became influential
in America, is a prime example. Another is England's Frederick
Bartlett, who was critical of the laboratory, nonsense-syllable
type of memory research being done, and proposed instead that
research on memory should emphasize real-life situations. He believed
that memory was constructive and was influenced by schemas, that
is, one's basic concepts about the phenomenal world. His "war
of the ghosts" research showed that memory is affected by
schemas unique to one's culture.
Within psychology, the cognitive movement gained momentum from
problems that developed within the behaviorist/ associationist
tradition. At the Hixon Symposium in 1948, Lashley showed that
associationist principles could not explain the problem of serial
order, and behaviorism seemed incapable of explaining language
behavior.
Outside of psychology, developments in computer science, information
theory, and linguistics contributed to the evolution of cognitive
psychology. Researchers began to create models of cognitive processes
that used the computer program as a metaphor and emphasized the
concept of the individual as an information processor rather than
as a responder to stimuli. Chomsky argued that Skinnerian behaviorism
was not relevant for the study of language and proposed a nativist
account of language development.
During the decade of the 1950s, several landmark papers and books
appeared. These included Miller's paper on the limited capacity
of information processing in immediate memory (7±2), Broadbent's
research on selective attention, Bruner, Goodnow, and Austin's
book on strategies in concept identification, and the book by
Miller, Galanter, and Pribram on "plans," which featured
the idea of information feedback in the form of TOTE units as
a replacement for the reflex arc concept.
The first major summary of laboratory research in cognitive psychology
appeared in 1967 with Neisser's book; the book also produced a
self-identification of the field as "cognitive psychology."
About a decade later, Neisser questioned cognitive psychology's
emphasis on basic laboratory research and in the spirit of Bartlett,
called for an increase in research on cognitive processes as they
operate in the everyday world to help individuals adapt to their
environments (i.e., research having ecological validity).
Cognitive psychology has spread to other specialty areas within
psychology, including developmental, social, personality, and
abnormal psychology. In addition, the interdisciplinary field
of cognitive science evolved in parallel with cognitive psychology.
Cognitive science includes psychology, computer science (e.g.,
artificial intelligence), linguistics, anthropology, and epistemology.
The field of artificial intelligence includes the study of computer
simulations of human cognitive processes and the development of
expert systems in which the computer acts intelligently. Researchers
disagree on the extent to which machine thinking resembles human
thinking.
Chapter 14 440
The Growth and Diversity of Psychology
Psychology has shown vigorous growth during its 100-plus years
of existence as an independent discipline, and as it has grown,
the interests of psychologists have become more specialized. Throughout
most of its history, leading psychologists were white and male,
a situation that is now changing, especially as more women enter
the field. Although women were excluded from psychology's inner
circles throughout most of the twentieth century, some made important
contributions. Eleanor Gibson is a prime postwar example. She
overcame negative stereotypes of "woman-asscientist"
and became a leading developmental psychologist, known for her
research on depth perception (visual cliff research) and reading.
Minority groups, including Jews and AfricanAmericans, have also
faced discrimination throughout psychology's history. Blacks in
particular had to confront the prejudices deriving from the early
twentieth-century belief in the inherited racial superiority of
white males and the social policy of separate but (not really)
equal schools. Black scholars found it virtually impossible to
find adequate graduate training and if they did manage to complete
a doctorate in psychology, their employment opportunities tended
to be limited to teaching in black colleges.
Francis Sumner was the first African-American to earn a doctorate
in psychology; he studied with G. Stanley Hall at Clark University.
As head of the psychology department at Howard, he helped turn
the university into one of the country's most prominent institutions.
Trends in Contemporary Psychology
During the second half of the twentieth century, there has been
an acceleration of interest in studying the brain-behavior relationship.
Interest was sparked by technological breakthroughs (e.g., EEG),
but especially by the research and theoriz
ing of Donald Hebb. Hebb's model of the brain centered on the
cell assembly, an interrelated combination of associated neurons,
and the phase sequence, an organization of cell assemblies and
the neurological equivalent of thinking. Hebb synapses are synapses
that have undergone structural change as a result of some learning
process.
A second trend has been an increase in the use of evolutionary
thinking. This began as sociobiology, Edmund Wilson's theory about
the evolutionary and biological basis for social behavior. Evolutionary
psychology begins with the assumption that human behaviors reflect
the outcome of natural selection processes; these behaviors can
be studied by examining how they help the individual adapt to
the environment.
Third, the professional practice of psychology has grown considerably
since the end of World War II. Clinical psychologists are trained
primarily by the Boulder, or scientist-practitioner model, which
emphasizes an integration of diagnostic, therapeutic, and research
skills, and leads to a Ph.D. More recently, a Vail model has emerged,
which emphasizes professional practice over research and leads
to a Psy.D. degree. Practitioners and academician/ scientists
have often been at odds in psychology's institutional history,
the most recent outcome being the creation of the American Psychological
Society (APS) by the latter group.
Psychology or Psychologies?
Psychology in the late twentieth century is not a unified discipline,
and with its recurring debates over fundamental issues, it may
never have been one. Modern psychology is marked by increased
specialization, and it might be more appropriate to replace the
idea of a single field of psychology with Koch's concept of there
being a set of psychological studies. One unifying force in psychology
lies in the discipline's history, however.
