General Psychology: A Historical Timeline
-​ The study of thoughts, feelings and behaviors.
-​ Attempts to understand the mind and predict behavior.
-​ Behavior: totality of observable human action
Came out of the fields of philosophy and physiology
-​ How are bodily sensations turned into mental awareness?
-​ Are people's perceptions of the world accurate reflections of reality?
-​ How do the mind and body interact? sensation to me knowing it's truly happening.
Physiologist Wilhelm Wundt campaigned to make psych an independent discipline. He
succeeded in 1879 in a research lab in Germany.
-​ Pushed to be a scientific field, modeled after physics and chemistry.
-​ Must use the scientific method. Reaction time experiments.
Psychology’s Focus
-​ Wundt pushed for the primary focus is consciousness: the awareness of the immediate
experience. This focus kept a psychological orientation toward the mind and mental
process and demanded empirical research.
-​ G. Stanley Hall, contributed to America’s embrace of psychology. The field became tense
ASAP.
Established America’s first research lab at John Hopkins, and became first president of
the APA.
Competing schools of thoughts
-​ Structuralism: based on the notion that the task of psychology is to analyze consciousness
into its basic elements and investigate how these elements are related. (Edward Titchner)
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Sensations
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Feelings
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Images
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Lab experiments: Introspection (Careful systemic self observation of one's own
emotions and consciousness) To increase objectivity and awareness
-​ Functionalism: Based on the belief that psych should investigate the function or purpose
of consciousness, rather than the structure. (William James)
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James moved from the study of separate parts of the mind and focused instead on
how all the parts operate to produce action.
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Natural Selection is an evolutionary theory that postulates that those who inherit
characteristics that help them adapt to their environment have a selective
advantage over those who do not.
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He fought to concentrate on the function rather than structure.
Focus shifted from elements of consciousness to the FLOW itself, referred to by
James as a “Stream of Consciousness.”
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Structuralist gravitated to the laboratory while Functionalist were more interest in
how people adapt their behavior to the demands of the real world.
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THis new way led pioneers to begin investigating mental testing, childhood
development patterns, and the effectiveness of educational practices.
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While both camps faded, functionalism fostered the development of important
ideas: Behaviorism and Applied Psychology.
Sigmond Freud (1856-1939)
-​ Austrian Physician who grew the field in efforts to treat mental disorders.
-​ Known for the invention of psychoanalysis with a strong focus on the unconscious and
emphasis on sexuality.
-​ Freud approached irrational fears, obsessions, and anxieties, in what is termed
psychoanalysis.
-​ Work led to to propose the idea of unconscious:
The unconscious contains thoughts, memories, and desires that are well below the surface
of the conscious awareness but have a great influence on behavior. (looking at what we
are unaware of)
The psychoanalytic theory: attempts to explain personality, motivation, and mental disorders
by focusing on unconscious determinants of behavior.
-​ Most viewed theory as a fad that would fade, but its popularity forced the field to take in
and apply their scientific method to the topics Freud studied.
Personality/Personality Traits (the unique consistent way you act on a day to day basis)
Too much gratification and frustration would lead to specific urges. It would leave a person
stuck. TRAITS PG 31!!!! He believed those traits would become fixed.
Over gratification would lead to oral fixations. Also chewing, binge eating.
Frustration would lead to be anal retentiveness. Control issues.
Motivation
Abnormal Behavior: Fixations (oral fixations, control issues)
He believed in psychosexual traits. He doesn't believe we change after age 5!
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Psychoanalytic theory:
-​ Adults personally tied to early often unconscious experiences, emphasized the sexual
nature of a child, unconscious forces influence every aspect of life.
-​ Thoughts and feelings are rooted in inner drives, motives, and unmet/unconscious needs
of childhood.
-​ Keeps coming up with him saying “urges and tendencies”
Structural model of the psyche. Psychic energy is what motivates you for good or dysfunction.
ID: present from birth, highly primitive, driven by the pleasure principle. Unconscious,
biological urges, impulse = survival.
EGO: manages the tension between the Id and the real world. (Is it acceptable? Can I delay
gratification?) Can I manage the anxieties, finding socially acceptable behaviors.
Super EGO: Our moral compass and guilt center. Over-developed people can live in guilt and
shame all the time, trying to be perfect 24/7, obsessive compulsive disorder. Acts as
consciousness. Can induce pride and guilt.
John B. Watson: Behaviorism
-​ Proposed that psychologists abandon the study of consciousness altogether and focus
exclusively on behaviors that could be observed directly. Watson believed that the
scientific method rested on the idea of verifiability.
-​ Watson took extreme position:
the field should be focused on the observable only.
Rejected introspection and mentalism (doesn't care what you think/what you're worried
about)
I want to know inputs and outputs. People are products of their environment, stoking
Nature vs Nurture debate.
Believed association is the path of learning, spending a great deal of time on parenting
practices.
Little Albert: Wanted to prove that all fears are learned, however the only two fearful
things we are born with are loud noises and falling.
-​ Conditioning by showing a stimuli, which conditioned Little Albert to be afraid of the rat.
Believed that humans are conditioned to act as they do not in stages, but through learning and
this can happen at any point in the life span. Reactions can be learned as well as unlearned
through stimulus response (response tendencies) which came to also be called classical
conditioning.
-​ Raised his own children under strict behaviorist principles. Both tried to commit suicide,
one succeed.
B.F Skinner “Father of Behavorism”
-​ Behaviorism: a theoretical orientation based on the premise that scientific psychology
should study only observable behavior.
●​ Behavior refers to any overt (observable) response or activity by an organism.
-​ B.F. Skinner further popularized the theory by studying stimulus-response in animals.
-​ Classical conditioning: stimulus-response.
-​ Operant conditioning: the consequences control responses.
●​ postive/negative reinforcement.
●​ positive/negative punishment.
-​ Opposed movement toward the consideration of internal states despite the field
embracing the study of the conscious and unconscious.
-​ Asserted that free will is an illusion and "external stimuli fully govern all behavior.”
-​ The field shifted to study from mind to responses by laboratory animals.
Humanism!
-​ “We are not the expert, the client is the expert.” The client knows more about them than I
do. They already have the capacity, helping them set it up so they can grow.
-​ Carl Rogers: person- centered therapy, self actualization/self concept. Open ended
questions, reflective listening, empathy.
●​ If the environment is right people will naturally improve self growth.
-​ Abraham Maslow: Hierarchy of needs: humans are motivated to satisfy needs in order to
grow and actualize.
●​ He believes that we all are working towards self actualization. We have to have
certain things met so that we are able to grow. This idea is becoming more used in
idealized situations (elementary school, kids need to have their first needs met to
be able to learn.)
Cognition: A return to consciousness
-​ The 1960s showed renewed interest in understanding the mental process. Concerned
with memory
-​ Cognivists believe that human behavior cannot be fully understood without examining
how people acquire, store and process information.
-​ Cognition: refers to the mental processes involved in acquiring knowledge.
●​ Jean Piaget (How children acquire knowledge at each age)
●​ Noam Chomsky (how do we acquire language, we were born with a language
device)
●​ Bandura: Social cognition (self efficacy, internal and external locus of control)
-​ Humans seek cognitive equilibrium through assimilation and accommodation. We always
just want to have balance, we don't want to be uncomfortable.
-​ How do we learn and hold on to it?
-​ Cognitive perspective: Proponents say that we must study internal mental events to fully
understand behavior.
Biology
-​ Biological perspective maintains that much of human and animal behavior can be
explained in terms of the bodily structures and biochemic processes that allow organisms
to behave.
-​ Trait theory: traits are mostly inborn or genetics or early childhood sets them in place for
life.
●​ James Olds: electrical stimulation evokes emotional response
●​ Roger Sperry: showed that the right and left halves of the brain are specialized
(lateralizaiton)
●​ Hubel and Wiesel: visual signals are processed in the brain (Critical periods)
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