Psyco

INTRODUCTION TO PSYCHOLOGY

CLASS #3

Dr. Charles-Etienne Benoit

The father of psychology

 As early as 1862, Wundt performed an experiment that led him to believe that a full-fledged discipline of experimental psychology was possible.

Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt 1832–1920

Baden, Germany

 Wundt concluded that one could either attend to the position of the pendulum or to the bell, but not both at the same time.

 He worked as an assistant to Hermann von Helmholtz.

Edward Bradford Titchener (1867 - 1927)

Sussex, England

 He then went to Oxford where he developed an interest in experimental and translated Wundt’s Principles of Physiological Psychology into English.

 Following his graduation, he went to Leipzig and studied for two years with Wundt.

 In 1892 he accepted the offer from Cornell University and soon developed the largest doctoral program in psychology in the United States.

The decline of structuralism

 Titchener’s brand of psychology, which he called structuralism, was essentially a psychology of pure consciousness with little concern for practical applications.

 It tried to analyze sensations, images and feelings into their most basic elements.

 By having a subjective study of the mind which is unreliable, it was meant to fail.

 The need of objective evaluations

Charles Darwin (1809 - 1882)

Shropshire, England

 Devised a theory of evolution that emphasized a struggle for survival that results in the natural selection of the most fit organisms.

 By showing the continuity between human and nonhuman animals, the importance of individual differences, and the importance of adaptive behavior, Darwin strongly influenced subsequent psychology.

 He signed on as an unpaid naturalist aboard the Beagle, which the British government was sending on a five-year scientific expedition (1831 - 1836).

Today’s Lecture

 USA early psychology

 Connectionism

 Russian objective psychology

 Behavioralism

 Gestalt psychology

 Psychoanalysis

Early USA psychology

 Titchener structuralist program at Cornell University (1892) competed with functionalism for several years.

 Functionalism: Under the influence of Darwin, the school of functionalism stressed the role of consciousness and behavior in adapting to the environment.

 For the structuralist, the assumptions concerning the mind were derived from British and French empiricism, the goal of psychology was to understand the structure of the mind, and the primary research tool was introspection.

 For the functionalist, the assumptions concerning the mind were derived from evolutionary theory, the goal was to understand how the mind and behavior work in aiding an organism’s adjustment to the environment, and research tools included anything that was informative, including the use of introspection, the study of animal behavior, and the study of the mentally ill.

William James (1842 - 1910)

 He helped incorporate evolutionary theory into psychology which represented a major departure from the pure psychology of both voluntarism and structuralism.

 According to pragmatism, which is the cornerstone of functionalism, any belief, thought, or behavior must be judged by its consequences. Any belief that helps create a more effective and satisfying life is worth holding, whether such a belief is scientific or religious.

 Believing in free will was emotionally satisfying to James, so he believed in it.

 For James, as well as for the functionalists who followed him, usefulness defined both truth and value.

New York, USA

Hugo Münsterberg (1863 - 1916)

 Münsterberg became Wundt’s research assistant and received his doctorate under Wundt’s supervision in 1885, at the age of 22.

 He met James in Paris at the first International Congress of Psychology in 1889.

 James needed someone to replace him as director of the Harvard Psychology Laboratory. In 1892 (the same year that Titchener arrived at Cornell), James offered Münsterberg the job despite the fact that Münsterberg could read but not speak English.

 Münsterberg accepted.

Danzig, Prussia

Today’s Gdanks

Münsterberg’s applied psychology

Clinical psychology:

 In an attempt to understand the causes of abnormal behavior, he saw many mentally ill people and never charged them a fee.

 He felt that psychosis was caused by deterioration of the nervous system and could not be treated.

 Münsterberg employed reciprocal antagonism, which involved strengthening the thoughts opposite to those causing problems.

Forensic psychology:

 He was the first to apply psychological principles to legal matters.

 Among other things, he pointed out that eyewitness testimony could be unreliable because sensory impressions could be illusory, suggestion and stress could affect perception, and memory is not always accurate.

Edward Thorndike (1874 – 1949)

 Thorndike went to Harvard, where he became good friends with William James.

 His doctoral dissertation “Animal Intelligence: An Experimental Study of the Associative Processes in Animals,” was the first in psychology using nonhumans as subjects.

 He did pioneer work not only in learning theory (for which he is most famous) but also in the areas of educational practices, verbal behavior, comparative psychology and intelligence testing.

 He had a significant influence on psychology, and it can be seen as representing the transition from the school of functionalism to the school of behaviorism.

Massachusetts, USA

Cat puzzle box

 To investigate systematically the trial-and-error

he used a puzzle box.

 If the cat performed a certain response, the door opened allowing him to escape.

 It also received a reward such as a piece of fish.

 He concluded:

 Learning is incremental. That is, it occurs a little bit at a time rather than all at once. With each successful escape, subsequent escapes were made more quickly.

 Learning occurs automatically. That is, it is not mediated by thinking.

 The same principles of learning apply to all mammals. That is, humans learn in the same manner as all other mammals.

Connectionism

 Thorndike’s concern was not with how ideas become associated but with how neural connections or bonds between sensory impressions and responses change their strength as a function of experience.

 Connectionism: The term often used to describe his theory of learning because of its concern with the neural bonds or connections that associate sense impressions and impulses to action.

Fate of functionalism

 It did not die as a school as structuralism had but was absorbed.

 As a systematic point of view, functionalism was an overwhelming success, but largely because of this success it is no longer a distinct school of psychology. It was absorbed into the mainstream psychology.

Russian objective psychology

 Sechenov sought to explain all psychic phenomena on the basis of associationism and materialism, thus showing the influence of the Berlin physiologists’ positivism.

 He strongly denied that thoughts cause behavior. Rather, he insisted that external stimulation causes all behavior.

 He did not deny consciousness or its importance, but he insisted that there was nothing mysterious about it and sought to explain it in terms of physiological processes triggered by external events.

Ivan Sechenov

1829 - 1905

Simbirsk, Russia

The importance of inhibition

 The most important concept that Sechenov introduced in Reflexes of the Brain (1863) was that of inhibition.

 Inhibition: The reduction or cessation of activity caused by stimulation, such as when extinction causes a conditioned stimulus to inhibit a conditioned response.

 It was this discovery that led him to believe that all human behavior could be explained in terms of brain physiology.

The experiment

 When middle regions of the frog brain and the medulla oblongata were stimulated chemically or electrically, inhibition of reflex activity usually occurred: i.e., it was more difficult to provoke defensive reflexes (bending of the leg).

 Inhibition was particularly intense with excitation of the thalamus and somewhat weaker when the medulla oblongata was excited directly.

 This experiment disproved the concept that the regulatory functions of the brain and spinal cord are ensured only by certain excitory processes.

Ivan Pavlov (1849 – 1936)

 Pavlov won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1904, becoming the first Russian Nobel laureate.

 His principles of classical conditioning have been found to operate across a variety of behavioral therapies and in experimental and clinical settings.

 During his first 10 years at St. Petersburg, Pavlov pursued his interests in the digestive system.

 Using the latest antiseptic surgical techniques he prepared a gastric fistula (channel) leading from a dog’s digestive organs to outside the dog’s body before its digestive processes were investigated.

Ryazan, Russia

Conditioned Reflex

 During his work on digestion, Pavlov discovered the conditioned reflex (or learned reflex).

 While studying the secretion of gastric juices in response to food (e.g., meat powder), he noticed that events associated also caused stomach secretions.

 For example, the mere sight of the experimenter or the sound of the footsteps.

Following the discovery

 Pavlov had a low opinion of psychology with its prevailing use of introspection.

 He resisted the study of conditioned reflexes for a long time because of their apparently subjective nature.

 After pondering Sechenov’s work, he concluded that conditioned reflexes, like natural reflexes, could be explained in terms of the neural circuitry and the physiology of the brain.

 At the age of 50, Pavlov began studying the conditioned reflex. His work would continue for 30 years.

Behaviorism

 Behaviorism: The school of psychology that insisted that behavior (psychology’s subject matter and goal) be prediction and control of behavior.

 What Watson and the Russian psychologists had in common was a complete rejection of introspection and of any explanation of behavior based on mentalism.

 Consciousness could not cause behavior. It was merely a phenomenon that accompanied certain physiological reactions caused by stimuli.

John Watson

1878 - 1958

South Carolina, USA

Watson’s influence

 Watson’s view of psychology had lasting effects.  First, he changed psychology’s major goal from the

description and explanation of states of consciousness to the prediction and control of behavior.

 Second, he made apparent behavior the almost-exclusive subject matter of psychology

 Through approach, Watson conducted research on animal behavior, child rearing, and advertising.

The little Albert experiment

 They showed Albert a white rat, and he expressed no fear of it. He reached out and tried to touch it.

 As Albert reached for the rat, a steel bar behind him was struck with a hammer. The loud, unexpected noise caused Albert to jump and fall forward.

 Again Albert was offered the rat, and just as he touched it, the steel bar behind him was again struck. Again Albert jumped, and this time he began to cry. So as not to disturb Albert too much, further testing was postponed for a week.

The little Albert experiment

 A week later, five more times. Albert, who had at first been attracted to the rat, was now frightened of it.

 Five days later, Albert’s fear of the rat was just as strong as it had been at the end of testing and that the fear had generalized to other furry objects such as a rabbit, a dog, a fur coat, and a Santa Claus mask.

Behvior therapy

Mary Cover Jones

1896 - 1987

 Instead, Watson and Jones aimed to find children who had already developed a fear and would try to eliminate it.

 The researchers found Peter, a three-year-old who was intensely frightened of rats, rabbits, fur coats, frogs, fish, and mechanical toys.

 Finally, Peter was able to eat with one hand and play with the rabbit with the other.

Another type of behaviorism

William McDougall

1871 – 1938

Lancashire, England

 He worked at University college of London, moved to Oxford until the war, then move to Harvard replacing Münsterberg as chair of the psychology department.

 He moved to Duke university in North Carolina in 1927 where he felt out of place since he tried to promote a psychology that emphasized instinct in the increasingly anti-instinct climate of U.S. psychology.

 Unlike Watson, he did not deny the importance of mental events. McDougall thought that one could study such events objectively by observing their influence on behavior.

The battle of behaviorism

 Two of the world’s most famous psychologists take opposite side.

 While they both agree psychology should be the science of behavior:  McDougall said that the instincts are the motivators of all

animal behavior, including that of humans.

 Watson said that instincts do not exist on the human level and that psychology should rid itself of the term instinct.

 On February 5, 1924, they confronted one another before the Psychological Club in Washington where more than 300 people attended. Proceedings publsihed in 1929

Neobehaviorism

 Neobehaviorism resulted when behaviorism was combined with logical positivism.

 Logical positivism: The philosophy of science according to which theoretical concepts are admissible if they are tied to the observable world through operational definitions.

 Although there were major differences among the neobehaviorists, they all tended to believe the following:

 Nonhuman animals should be used as research subjects:  Relevant variables are easier to control than they are for human

 Perceptual and learning processes occurring in nonhuman animals differ only in degree from those processes in humans

 The learning process is of prime importance because it is the primary mechanism by which organisms adjust to changing environments.

Edward Tolmann (1886 – 1959)

 In adapting the concepts of purpose and cognition, he helped shape the tradition of cognitive psychology during a time when it was nearly eclipsed by the ascendancy of classical behaviorism.

 He was able to do so by demonstrating that such concepts were compatible with a more sophisticated behaviorism.

 To avoid even the possibility of introspection in his research, he used only rats as his experimental subjects.

Massachussets, USA

Tolman’s maze

 The delayed reward took longer to reach the end of the maze because there was no motivation for them to perform.

Gestalt psychology

 When the behaviorists were rebelling against structuralism and functionalism in the United States, a group of young German psychologists was rebelling against Wundt’s experimental program that featured a search for the elements of consciousness.

 Gestalt psychology is an attempt to understand the laws behind the ability to acquire and maintain meaningful perceptions in an apparently chaotic world. The central principle of gestalt psychology is that the mind forms a global whole with self-organizing tendencies.

 German word for “configuration,” “form,” or “whole” is Gestalt.

Founding of the Gestalt psychology

 In 1910 he was on a train, on his way from Vienna when he had an idea that our perceptions are structured in ways that sensory stimulation is not. That our perceptions are different from the sensations that comprise them.

 In this sense, perception can shape vision and the other senses. He work on gestalt psychology with his colleagues.

Max Wertheimer

1880 – 1943

Prague, Czech Republic

Multistability

 Multistable perception is the tendency of ambiguous perceptual experiences to pop back and forth unstably between two or more alternative interpretations.

Reification

 The generative aspect by which the experienced percept contains more explicit spatial information than the sensory stimulus on which it is based.

 Reification can be explained by progress in the study of illusory contours, which are treated by the visual system as "real" contours.

It’s legacy

 Gestalt psychology played a major role in directing the attention of psychologists away from insignificant bits of behavior and consciousness and toward the holistic aspects of behavior and consciousness.

 As with functionalism, many of the basic features of Gestalt psychology have been assimilated into modern psychology, and therefore Gestalt psychology has lost its distinctiveness as a school.

You see an old or a young lady?

Mental illness

 Although the condition we now refer to as mental illness has existed from at least the beginning of recorded history, when the behavior and thought processes thought to characterize mental illness are examined, several recurring themes become evident.

 Harmful behavior

 Unrealistic thoughts and perception

 Inappropriate emotions

 Unpredictable behaviors

Early explanations

 The proposed explanations of mental illness that have been offered throughout history fall into three general categories:

 Biological

 Psychological

 Supernatural

 It was estimated that in Europe between 1450 and 1750 over 200,000 people were accused of witchcraft and 100,000 of them were executed. Of those executed, approximated 80% to 85% were women.

Improvement in treatment

 Pinel was upset by the greed and insensitivity of his fellow physicians that he moved to Paris, where he treated the poor people.

 He wrote influential articles in which he argued for the humane treatment of people with mental disturbances.

 In 1793 he was appointed director of the Bicêtre Asylum.

 He gradually removed more inmates from their constraints, improved rations, stopped bloodletting, and forbade all harsh treatment such as whirling an inmate in a chair.

Philippe Pinel

1745 – 1826

Tarn, France

Improvement in treatment

 Under his leadership, the number of inmate deaths decreased greatly, and the number of inmates cured and released also.

 His success at Bicêtre led to his 1795 appointment as director of La Salpêtrière, the largest asylum in Europe, housing 8,000 insane women. He had similar result.

Pinel releasing the insane from their chains

Impressive advances in neurology

 He became the director of La Salpêtrière in 1862, he immediately converted it into a research center.

 He carefully observed his patients’ symptoms, and upon their death he correlated those symptoms with specific abnormalities in the brain and spinal cord.

 He described a disease of the motor neurons still referred to as Charcot’s disease.

 He helped identify brain structures associated with a number of behavioral and physiological functions.

Jean-Martin Charcot

1825 – 1893

Paris, France

Hysteria and hypnosis

 Among those attending his lectures William James, and Sigmund Freud.

 His interests increasingly turned to hysteria, and because both hysteria and hypnosis produce the same symptoms (such as paralyses and anesthesia), he concluded that hypnotizability indicated the presence of hysteria.

 Toward the end of his life he admitted he was wrong.

Charcot demonstrating various hypnotic phenomena

Hysteria and hypnosis

 Charcot believed for many years that only individuals predisposed to hysteria could be hypnotized.

 His explanation of hysteria and hypnotic phenomena combined biology (the inherited potential for hysteria) and psychology (the pathogenic ideas caused by trauma or suggestion).

 By coincidence, Freud was studying with Charcot as he was formulating the theory. Freud accepted the theory uncritically and returned to Vienna believing that ideas could lodge in the unconscious portion of the mind where they could produce bodily symptoms.

Psychoanalysis

 He was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for treating psychopathology through dialogue between a patient and a psychoanalyst.

 He encouraged patients into Free association where the patient is asked to relax and say whatever comes to mind, no matter how embarrassing or trivial. A way to study the unconscious mind.

Sigmund Freud

1856 – 1939

Pribor, Czech Republic

Definition: psychoanalysis

 A therapeutic method originated by Freud for treating disorders of the personality or behaviour by bringing into a patient’s consciousness his unconscious conflicts and fantasies (which are attributed chiefly to the development of the sexual instinct) through the free association of ideas, analysis and interpretation of dreams and parapraxes, etc., and allowing him to relive them by transference.

 A theory of personality and psychical life derived from this, based on concepts of the ego, id, and super-ego, the conscious, pre-conscious, and unconscious levels of the mind, and the repression of the sexual instinct; more widely, a branch of psychology dealing with the unconscious.

Oxford English Dictionary

Psychoanalysis

Personality structure

ID is a reservoir of unconscious psychic energy constantly striving to satisfy basic drives to survive, reproduce, and aggress.

 The id operates on the pleasure principle: If not constrained bu reality, it seeks immediate gratification.

Ego is the largely conscious, “executive” part of personality that, according to Freud, mediates the demands of the id, superego, and reality.  The ego operates on the reality principle, satisfying the id’s desires in ways that will

realistically bring pleasure rather than pain.

Superego represents internalized ideals and provides standards for judgment (the conscious) and for future aspirations.

Psychosexual stages

Stage

Oral (0-18 months)

Anal (18-36 months)

Phallic (3-6 years)

Latency (6 to puberty)

Genital (puberty on)

Focus

Pleasure centers on the mouth-sucking, chewing, biting

Pleasure focuses on bowel and bladder elimination; coping with demands for control

Pleasure zone is the genitals; coping with incestuous sexual feelings

Dormant sexual feeling

Maturation of sexual interest

Nazi book burnings

Alternatives Psychoanalysis

 Jung worked as a research scientist at the famous Burghölzli hospital.

 During this time, he came to the attention of the Viennese founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud.

 The two men conducted a lengthy correspondence and collaborated, for a while, on a joint vision of human psychology.

Carl Jung

1875 – 1961

Kesswil, Switzerland

Jung separation from Freud

 Jung met Freud for the first time in Vienna in February 1907. They talked virtually non-stop for 13 hours and Jung vividly describes in Memories, Dreams, Reflections how the foundations were laid for their eventual separation.

 He subsequently proposes that sexuality is not the sole source of psychic energy, but that ‘libido’ is a general psychic energy which may flow in channels serving a range of instincts.

 For Jung the ego is the centre of consciousness and, as such, does not encompass or understand the whole person or self.

Collective unconscious

 From treating psychotic patients and wide reading Jung came to the conclusion that the unconscious material that emerged could not have come from the subject’s personal learning or experience. He postulated that it came from a collective unconscious derived through aeons of repetition of human experience.

 Jung wrote: ‘there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals.

The archetype

 Jung said that the collective unconscious also consists of pre-existent forms that Jung called archetypes.

 He first called them primordial images in that he considered them to be archaic or primordial types of universal images that date back to humankind’s remotest beginnings.

 Everyday realities like mother, father, husband and wife create the mightiest archetypes.

The shadow

 The inferior being in ourselves is what Jung calls the shadow. It consists of all that we are ashamed of and that we do not want to know about ourselves.

 It constitutes part of our personal unconscious, but we also have an archetypal shadow in the realm of our collective unconscious. It represents an encounter with evil and facing it can be a shattering experience.

 The shadow of every person has to be firmly grasped and acknowledged for a person to achieve a state of wholeness.

Next class

 Cognitive psychology

 Introduction to modern psychology experiments

That’s it for today!

What you see is not always what you get.