Welcome to AP Psychology!! Ms. Juretic

History of Psychology “Psychology has a long past, but only a short history.”  Hermann Ebbinghaus (1902?) Psychology (Ψ)  The scientific study of the behavior and mental processes of humans and other animals.

Rene Descartes (1596 – 1650) Dualism: mind and body are separate Conarium = the pineal gland? voluntary & involuntary behavior  Reflexes (no more pigs on trial!) Nativism  We know certain stuff at birth thought sensory and motor nerves the same  He was wrong!! Oui! Oui! I am a French philosopher!!

John Locke (1632 – 1704) Tabula rasa  Latin for “blank slate” Empiricism  Knowledge comes from sensory experiences  Science should rely on observation and experimentation British Empiricists  Locke’s little club Empiricism is one of your vocab terms for this unit!

Thomas Hobbes (1588 – 1679) Mind can produce voluntary behavior but can work like reflexes  How is this different from Descartes? You can override your reflexes. Hedonism = the pleasure principle  If something feels good, you do it again.

Psychology’s Big Three to Remember!  Wilhelm Wundt – Father of Ψ  First psych lab in Leipzig, Germany in 1879  E.B. Titchener – Brought Ψ to the U.S.  Was Wundt’s star student (and an American!)  Introduced structuralism: used introspection to discover the way the way the mind works  Can you see any problems here?  William James – Father of American Ψ  Functionalism: study how mental and behavioral processes function and enable the organism to adapt and survive

Pierre Flourens (1794 – 1867) Lesion method (ablation)  Lesion = a destructive change in body tissue, such as a wound.  This method is still a powerful way to learn about the brain. Ethical problems today? Hmm. I wonder what would happen if I damaged a puppy’s brain?

Paul Broca (1824 – 1880) Broca’s area  Controls speech  Located in left hemisphere of frontal lobe Clinical method  Learning about the brain through case studies of patients with brain damage You will learn more about me in our unit on neuroscience!!

Ebbinghaus (1850 – 1909) Studied memory and the “forgetting curve” using nonsense syllables: CAZ, KIB, BLE

E. L. Thorndike (1874 – 1949) An early American learning researcher Cats in puzzle boxes and maze-running chicks Law of Effect  Basically a restatement of the pleasure principle

Ivan Pavlov (1849 – 1936) Studied his drooling dogs You can create new reflexes! Classical Conditioning

John B. Watson (1878 – 1958)  Behaviorism  Studies observable behavior  Does “Little Albert” study with Rosalie Reynolds and gets fired from Johns Hopkins University.  Why?

B. F. Skinner (1904 – 1990) You will learn more about me and my studies of rats in our unit on learning. BTW, I am also a behaviorist!

Margaret Washburn PhD 1894  First woman to get PhD in psychology from Cornell  Was a student of Titchener

Francis C. Sumner PhD 1920 Clark University Inez Beverly Prosser PhD 1933 Cincinnati University

Kenneth Clark PhD 1940 Mamie Clark PhD 1944  Their “doll studies” influenced the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954.

Issues in Contemporary Psychology  Stability versus change  Do our traits persist over time or do we become different people as we age?  Rationality versus irrationality  In some ways, we can outsmart computers; at others, we are prone to error and bias.  Nature versus nurture  Are we born the way we are or are we products of our environments?  Darwin’s natural selection: the idea that genotypes in a population that are best adapted to the environment increase in frequency over a number of generations