1. Welcome to AP Psychology!! Ms. Juretic

2. 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.

3. 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!!

4. 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!

5. 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.

6. 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

7. 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?

8. 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!!

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

10. 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

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

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

13. 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!

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

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

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

17. Agree or Disagree? 1. People are born smart – the types of schools they attend and parents they have don’t really matter. 2. People are born with their personalities intact. You will have the same personality at 40 that you had at 5. 3. It’s perfectly fine to use animals in psychological research. 4. Homosexuality is biologically determined. 5. Media violence causes children to behave violently. 6. All humans are capable of extreme violence (such as in Rwanda and Nazi Germany) if they are placed in the “right” situations.

18. 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