Historical and conceptual issues in psychology, by Brysbaert, M and Rastle, K (second edition) - a summary
- 4433 keer gelezen
Foundations of psychology
Chapter 6
The input from brain research
Beliefs of the ancient Egyptians
The Edwin Smith papyrus
In 1862 an American collector, Edwin Smith, bought a papyrus scroll in the Egyptian city of Luxor.
In the text, written around 1700 BCE, but probably a copy of an older papyrus from 3000 BCE, a series of 48 cases were described dealing with the consequences of head and neck injuries.
Each case included a title, details of the examination, a diagnosis and an indication of the treatment.
The diagnosis consisted of one of three conclusions
The Edwin Smith papyrus: papyrus from Ancient Egypt that contains short descriptions of the symptoms and treatment of different forms of brain injury; named after the person who bought the papyrus in Egypt and had it analysed.
They illustrate how physicians treating wounded soldiers quite early became convinced of the importance of the head (brain) in controlling behaviour.
Beliefs in the wider society
The existence of the Edwin Smith papyrus did not imply that the knowledge contained in it was widespread.
In Ancient Egypt most scholars were convinced that the heart was the seat of the soul.
The roles of the heart and brain in Ancient Greece
The discussion over whether the soul was in the heart or in the brain continued in Ancient Greece.
Plato
Plato and Hippocrates placed the soul in the brain.
Plat also saw a function for the heart.
According to Plato, the soul was divided into three parts
Aristotle
Aristotle was convinced that the heart was the seat of the soul.
The function of the brain was to counterbalance the heat of the heart.
The heart and the brain formed a functional unit in which the brain, which was cold, tempered the heat and seething the heart.
Galen
Galen (c. 130-c.200 CE)
Started to experiment on animals.
Demonstrated that the voice came from the brain not from the heart.
He did not think the brain was important for reason or emotion but for the soul residing inside the brain.
The soul lived in the solid parts and produced and stored animal spirits in the apertures in the ventricles.
Animal spirits: spirits that were thought by Galen to travel over the nerves between the ventricles in the brain and body.
Ventricles: apertures in the middle of the brain, which for a long time were thought to contain perceptions, memories and thoughts; seat of the animal spirits.
Galen mostly focused on the ventricles.
Interim summary
Research about the brain came to a complete standstill in the Middle ages and only really too off again in the nineteenth century.
Developments in the Renaissance
The continuing primacy of the ventricles
Galen’s views remained the norm until well into the eighteenth century.
Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564) resumed dissections and extended them to humans.
Differentiation between the ventricles
Vesalius established for certain that there were three ventricles.
Gradually, the function of the three ventricles became differentiated.
Speech problems can be caused by brain injury
With the rediscovery of Galen’s texts, researchers also regained interest in the relationship between brain injuries and behaviour.
On the basis of his studies, Johann Schenk von Grafenberg concluded, among other things, that after brain damage patients could no longer speak and even though their tongue was not paralysed.
What seemed to happen was that the memory of words had disappeared or at least no longer be accessed.
Developments in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
The brain instead of the ventricles
Gradually the investigators turned their focus to the sold parts of the brain rather than the ventricles.
In the seventeenth century they started to pay attention to the difference between the outer layer of the cerebral hemispheres, which looked greyish, and the layer underneath, which had a white appearance.
An increasing number of scholars started to doubt the existence of spirits in the nerves.
Instead, they hypothesised that fluids flowed in them.
Increased interest in reflexes
A topic that started to gain momentum in the seventeenth-eighteenth centuries was the insight that some behaviours were elicited automatically, without voluntary intervention.
A proposed treatment for brain injury
The greater insights into the workings of the nervous system for a long time did not lead to improvements in the treatment of brain injuries.
Interim summary
Advances in the understanding of the brain in the Renaissance and the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries:
A series of five breakthroughs in the nineteenth century irrevocably altered the model of brain functioning and made modern neurophysiology possible
Their timelines largely overlap and the discoveries occurred shortly before psychology was founded as an independent discipline.
The discovery of the cerebrospinal axis
The body remains functioning when the cerebral hemispheres are disconnected
The discovery of the role of the cerebrospinal axis in the regulation of physical functions.
This spinal cord was seen as a transmission channel of the spirits or – later – brain fluid.
This view started to be questioned when researchers began to realise that a body remained functioning in a vegetative state when the cerebral hemispheres were taken away or disconnected from the structures at the top end of the spinal cord.
So there were many bodily functions that did not seem to require the cerebral hemispheres.
The new view of the precedence of the spinal cord and the subcortical structures in the control of physical functions agreed with the finding that some animal species had a spinal cord but no brain, whereas the reverse was never observed.
Growing focus on reflexes
The reflex arc
Researchers started to pay more attention to the nature and function of reflexes in brain functioning.
Reflex arc: notion introduced in the nineteenth century to describe the process underlying a reflex; a signal is picked up by sensory receptors, transmitted to the spinal cord through an afferent nerve, transferred to interneurons, which activate motor neurons that send a motor command over an efferent nerve to initiate the withdrawal movement.
The reflex arc as the basis of mental functioning
Some time later, researchers extended Hall’s reflex arc from the spinal cord to the complete brain.
For them, the reflex was no longer mode of action in the nervous system among others, but the basal unit from which the remaining nervous functions evolved.
Localisation of brain functions
The brain equipotentiality theory
A major discussion taking place in the nineteenth century was whether different psychological functions were localised in different parts of the brain or whether the whole brain was involved in all of them.
Language production is controlled by the front parts of the brain
In 1825 Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud presented evidence which according to him proved that speech was controlled by the front parts of the brain, the parts of the left and right half touching the forehead.
Language production is controlled by the left frontal lobe
In 1861 Paul Broca repeated and extend Bouillaud’s work and presented evidence that speech production was controlled by the frontal lobes.
He claimed that only a region of the frontal lobe of the left hemisphere was involved.
This region has since been called Broca’s area.
Language understanding and the posterior part of the brain
Karl Wernicke in 1874 presented evidence that language problems could also occur after damage to the rear part of the left hemisphere.
These problems had to do with the understanding of language.
The discovery of the nerve cell
The finding that the grey matter of the cerebral hemispheres consisted of billions of cells and the white matter and the nerves were the ‘tails’ (axons) of these cells.
The availability of better microscopes
First, microscopes of sufficient quality had to be built and used correctly.
These only become available in the nineteenth century.
Before, magnification was not strong enough and there were major distortions in the images obtained.
New techniques to stain the brain tissue
A way to colour the brain cells with their fine details.
There was little to be noticed about the organisation of brain tissue as long as the researchers had to look at the raw material.
Disentangling communication in the nervous system
Individual neurons instead of a continuous network
The big question among brain physiologists was whether the network was a continuous structure or whether it consisted of individual cells.
It would take nearly half a century before it became generally accepted that the network was composed of individual cells.
Neuron: brain cell; basic unit of the nervous system; contains a cell body, dendrites and an axon.
Once it was accepted that the nervous system consisted of billions of independent neurons, the next challenge was to explain how they stored and exchanged information.
Electricity within neurons
A new idea emerging at the end of the eighteenth century was that communication in the nervous system might resemble the transmission of electric signals.
Physiologists were struck by the similarities between electrical signals and what happened in the nerves.
The first to find clear evidence for the involvement of electricity in the nervous system was Luigi Galvani.
Although in hindsight he misinterpreted quite a lot of findings, it was undeniable that body movement could be generated by an electric current applied to a nerve.
Communication between neurons: the synapse
In the twentieth century the communication between neurons also became understood.
Although a small part of this communication is electrical, the bulk is achieved chemically, by means of neurotransmitters.
Neurotransmitters: chemical substance used to communicate between neurons; is released from the synapse when a signal arrives through the axon; can be affected by drugs.
Interim summary
Five big breakthroughs in the nineteenth century
Localisation studies in the World Wars
The World Wars resulted in new insights.
Vision problems after gun-shot wounds at the back of the head
Gordon Holmes (1876-1965) examined the consequences of small-scale wounds at the back of the head in World War I.
World War II and prosopagnosia
Joachim Bodamer described soldiers who lost their ability to recognise faces as a consequence of an injury to the rear of the brain. This is prosopagnosia.
The start of neuropsychology
The mission of neuropsychology
Increasingly, in the second half of the twentieth century psychologists rather than physicians became involved in studying the behavioural consequences of brain injury.
Neuropsychologists: branch of psychological research and practice that looks at the relationship between brain and behaviour; research traditionally focused on understanding the consequences of brain damage and localising the affected tissue; practice aimed at assessing the behavioural and mental consequences of the injury and administering the rehabilitation programme.
Neuropsychology was presented as a new link between psychologists and the medical world.
A change of focus: cognitive neuropsychology
Dissent among neuropsychologists
In the 1970 and 1980s, a number of neuropsychologist became dissatisfied with the way in which the subject matter was investigated.
They had two grievances
What neuropsychology had to do, the dissenters argued, was to use observations from patients with brain damage to test and amend the information-processing models proposed by the cognitive psychologists.
A new name
To emphasise the difference between the new type of research and the traditional neuropsychological approach, a new name was coined. Cognitive neuropsychology.
Cognitive neuropsychology: part of neuropsychology aimed at understanding and treating the behavioural consequences of brain damage within the information processing models proposed by cognitive psychologists.
By relating the consequences of brain damage to the theories of normal functioning, the cognitive neuropsychologists explicitly aimed to increase the impact of their research within the departments of psychology.
Deep dyslexia
A landmark publication in the history of cognitive neuropsychology was a book on deep dyslexia.
Deep dyslexia: a condition of strongly impaired reading after brain injury with a very particular symptom; sometimes, when patients try to identify a word, they do not read the word itself but a semantically related word.
By integrating neuropsychological research in the mainstream of cognitive research, the cognitive neuropsychologists not only advanced the cognitive information processing models, but also ensured that the findings from the clinic became central to psychological thinking and teaching.
Interim summary
Neuropsychology
For a long time the evidence about the neurophysiology of the brain and the localisation of functions was based on post-mortem analysis.
In the twentieth century, scientists increasingly managed to extract information from a working brain.
Non-invasive techniques: methods in neuroscience that allow the study of the workings of the brain without surgery or the use of irreversible interventions.
Measuring electrical signals from groups of cells
EEG recording
Hans Berger
Reasoned that if brain activity was electrical activity, he might be able to pick up some signals if he puts electrodes on the human scalp.
EEG: electroencephalogram; outcome of measurement of electrical brain activity by means of sensors placed on the scalp; routinely used in hospitals for the detection of epilepsy.
Event related potentials and magnetoencephalography
As the accuracy of the EEG recordings grew, two further applications became available.
Magnetoencephalography (MEG): measurement of the electrical brain activity by means of measurement of the magnetic field around the head; is one of the most promising brain imaging techniques, because it has the potential of both a high temporal and spatial resolution.
Measuring blood flow in the brain
By looking at the blood flow it is possible to know which brain regions are particularly active during a task
PET and fMRI
There are several ways to determine the blood flow, depending on precise the measurement has to be.
Measuring effects of ‘virtual lesions’
TMS
Because brain activity is electrical electricity, it is possible to interfere with it by introducing a weak electric current in the neurons.
Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS): stimulation of a brain region by means of a coil placed on the head; allows temporary interference with the processing of a small part of the brain.
The birth of cognitive neuroscience
Cognitive neuroscience: testing the cognitive information-processing models with brain imaging techniques
The availability of techniques to measure human brain activity while participants are performing mental operations opened a completely new field of research for psychologists.
Psychologists increasingly relied on brain imaging data to test their theories.
Cognitive neuroscience: the scientific study of the biological mechanisms underlying cognition; largely based on brain imaging techniques, TMS and the measurement of electrical activity.
Is cognitive neuroscience more than high-tech localisation?
According to some authors, the findings of fMRI are more comparable to the localisation efforts of traditional neuropsychology than to the testing of cognitive models done in cognitive neuropsychology.
In defence of cognitive neuroscience
Arguments against the claim that cognitive neuroscientific studies are unable to provide anything more than information about the localisation of brain activity
Interim summary
Cognitive neuropsychiatry as a new research area
Cognitive neuropsychiatry: subfield that tries to understand consequences of mental disorders in terms of breakdowns in the cognitive models of normal psychological functioning.
Interim summary
Foundation of Psychology
Chapter 1
The wider picture, where did it all start?
Introduction
This book describes the growth of psychology as an independent branch of learning and tries to comprehend the essence of the discipline.
The introduction of written records represents one of the most important moments in the development of science.
The preliterate culture
Preliterate civilisation: civilisation before writing was invented.
Though these civilisations have not left us with written testimonies, it is possible to discern several important features of them by studying existing cultures that do not use writing.
This research revealed three important characteristics of knowledge in these kinds of cultures:
The first writing systems
Written language appeard separately in at least four cultures:
These four written languages were preceded by protowriting, the use of symbols to represent entities without linguistic information lining to them.
Characteristics of writing systems
From an early stage, writing systems were a combination of pictograms and phonograms.
Pictogram: an information-conveying sign that consists of a picture resembling the person, animal or object it represents.
Phonogram: a sign that represents a sound or a syllable of spoken language.
Phonograms were gradually replaced by simpler signs symbolizing meaningful sounds in language, (phonemes or syllables).
The use of phonograms to represent phonemes led to the alphabetic writing systems.
Logograph: a sign representing a spoken word, which no longer has a physical resemblance to the word’s meaning.
Written documents form an external
.....read moreFoundation of Psychology
Chapter 2
The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century and its aftermath
Introduction
The word psychology did not appear in literature before 1500.
Scientific revolution: name given to a series of discoveries in the seventeenth century, involving Galilei, Descartes and Newton, that enhanced the status of science in society.
The geocentric model of the universe in the sixteenth century
The earth as the centre of the universe
The model that of the universe used in the sixteenth century was the model described by Aristotle who built on others) and elaborated by Ptolemy.
Aristotle’s universe was a limited universe with the Earth in the middle
Geocentric model: model of the universe in which the Earth is at the centre; was dominant until the seventeenth century.
The addition of epicycles
A key problem within the Aristotelian universe was the movements of some of the wandering stars.
To explain strange movements, Ptolemy used the notion of ‘epicycles’.
Epicycles: small cycles made by the wandering stars in addition to their main orbit around the earth.
Copernicus’s alternative heliocentric model
The sun at the centre of the universe
Aristotle’s model was not the only one that had been proposed in ancient cultures.
Heliocentric model: model of the universe in which the sun is at the centre.
Copernicus saw the heliocentric model as a valid alternative for the geocentric model.
Why Copernicus waited to publish his model
Only shortly before his death, Copernicus was persuaded to get his book printed.
Possible reasons
Galilei uses a telescope
Because of the many problems with Copernicus’s model, it failed to have much impact.
Galilei’s observations
Galilei built a telescope and found out that:
Foundation of Psychology
Chapter 3
Eighteenth- and nineteenth- century precursors to a scientific psychology
A characteristic of current Western society is that people derive their self-image and self-esteem from their own qualities and accomplishments rather than from the position of their family in society.
Individualisation: trend in a society towards looser social relations and a greater focus by individuals on themselves than on the groups they belong to.
Historians believe that this process of individualisation started sometime around the end of the Middle Ages and is still growing.
Following factors are contributions:
Interim summary
Since the end of the middle ages there has been increasing individualisation in society. Factors hypothesised to play a role include:
Descartes was the first Western philosopher after the Ancient Greeks to value new and independent thinking.
Epistemology: branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of knowledge.
Empiricism instead of rationalism
The traditional rationalist view
The traditional view of understanding in philosophy was based on
.....read moreFoundation of psychology
Chapter 4
Establishing psychology as an independent academic discipline
By 1850 there was a thriving literature of psychological subjects in Germany.
The universities reform in Germany
Universities in the German states for a long time were dominated by the humanities and religion.
This was a feature proponents of the Enlightenment fought against.
The Enlightenment ideas mainly came from a group of academics who had been expelled from the University of Leipzig, because of their critical attitude and modern ways of thinking.
A reform took place after the defeat of the Holy Roman Empire in 1805-1806.
The defeat by the French particularly upset the Prussians, who decided it was high time to modernise their country.
The school system was reorganised and a new university model was installed.
The emphasis on scientific research and the freedom given to the professors made the German universities dynamic and open to new areas for scientific investigation.
Wundt and the first laboratory of experimental psychology
Wundt’s career
After this Phd in medicine, he obtained an assistantship with Hermann von Helmholtz where Wundt began to identify himself as a scientific psychologist.
In 1862 he gave his first course in ‘Psychology as a natural science’ and in 1874 he published a book on physiological psychology.
In the book, psychology was defined as the study of the way in which persons look upon themselves, on the basis of internal physiological changes that inform them about the phenomena perceived by the external senses.
Wundt called his psychology physiological because:
In 1875 Wundt was appointed Professor in Leubzig were
.....read moreFoundations of psychology
Chapter 5
Strengthening the scientific standing of psychology
The USA began to rule psychology in the twentieth century.
The expansion of psychology around the start of the twentieth century
As well as laboratories, in 1892 the American Psychological Association (APA) was founded, giving psychology researchers a forum to meet and discuss their findings.
Two journals were established that would dominate the field and that still exists today.
The first American psychology: functionalism
As psychology in the USA expanded, it got moulded by the expectations and preoccupations of American society.
There was a mistrust of intellectualism, knowledge for the sake of knowledge.
America was a nation of common-sense businessmen, not interested in abstract science, but in practical accomplishments that at the same time made money, revealed God’s glory, and advanced the American dream.
If psychology were to prosper, it had to subscribe to American values, which it readily did.
Part of the attraction to the functionalist approach to the Americans was that Wundt’s experimental research programme ran into problems in 1880s.
Psychology and its position within universities
Most psychology laboratories were set up within philosophical and theological institutes.
Staff members were not always happy with this.
On other occasions experimental psychologists were told not to stay too far from good old psychology as developed in philosophical writings.
Trying to win over the public
Phrenology
Phrenology: view that mental functions are localised in the brain and that the capacity of a function corresponds to the
.....read moreFoundations of psychology
Chapter 6
The input from brain research
Beliefs of the ancient Egyptians
The Edwin Smith papyrus
In 1862 an American collector, Edwin Smith, bought a papyrus scroll in the Egyptian city of Luxor.
In the text, written around 1700 BCE, but probably a copy of an older papyrus from 3000 BCE, a series of 48 cases were described dealing with the consequences of head and neck injuries.
Each case included a title, details of the examination, a diagnosis and an indication of the treatment.
The diagnosis consisted of one of three conclusions
The Edwin Smith papyrus: papyrus from Ancient Egypt that contains short descriptions of the symptoms and treatment of different forms of brain injury; named after the person who bought the papyrus in Egypt and had it analysed.
They illustrate how physicians treating wounded soldiers quite early became convinced of the importance of the head (brain) in controlling behaviour.
Beliefs in the wider society
The existence of the Edwin Smith papyrus did not imply that the knowledge contained in it was widespread.
In Ancient Egypt most scholars were convinced that the heart was the seat of the soul.
The roles of the heart and brain in Ancient Greece
The discussion over whether the soul was in the heart or in the brain continued in Ancient Greece.
Plato
Plato and Hippocrates placed the soul in the brain.
Plat also saw a function for the heart.
According to Plato, the soul was divided into three parts
Aristotle
Aristotle was convinced that the heart was the seat of the soul.
The function of the brain was to counterbalance the heat of the heart.
The heart and the brain formed
Foundations of psychology
Chapter 7
The mind-brain problem, free will and consciousness
Throughout history, humans have been impressed by their ability to reflect about themselves and the world around them.
Self: the feeling of being an individual with private experiences, feelings and beliefs, who interacts in a coherent and purposeful way with the environment.
Mind-brain problem: issue of how the mind is related to the brain.
Three main views
Mind: aggregate of faculties humans (and animals) have to perceive, feel, think, remember and want.
Dualism: view of the mind-body relation according to which the mind is immaterial and completely independent of the body; central within religions and also in Descartes’ philosophy.
Dualism in religion and traditional philosophy
Religion
Dualism is central to religions.
They are grounded in the belief that people possess a divine soul created by God, which temporarily lives in the body, and which leaves the corpse upon its death.
The soul is what gives people their purpose and values in life.
It usually aims for the good, but can be tempted and seduced by evil forces.
This gave rise to the demonologist view of psychopathology.
Demonologists view: the conviction that mental disorders are due to possession by bad spirits.
Plato and Descartes
Dualism was central in the philosophies of Plato and Descartes.
Cartesian dualism: theories in which the mind is seen as radically different from the body and as independent of the biological processes in the
.....read moreFoundation of psychology
Chapter 8
How did psychology affect everyday life?
Introduction
Over the course of the twentieth century, the discipline of psychology grew from a marginal academic field to a discipline that has done more than any other to transform the routines and experiences of everyday life.
Applied psychology: the application of psychological knowledge and research methods to solve practical problems.
Evolutions before World War II
Mental health problems must be treated by partitioners with a medical degree
Psychologists were not allowed to provide unsupervised therapies in official settings and their private practices were not covered by health insurance.
The first clinical psychology centres
Treatment centres run by psychologists started in the USA and were university-related.
Lightner Witmer
Opened the faculty that was the first psychology health centre in 1896.
Aimed at helping behavioural and learning problems in school children.
The founding of clinical psychology centres was impeded by the lack of support from academic psychologists.
In the meantime mental health problems and psychoanalysis became popular courses in psychology.
Clinical psychology: branch of psychology applying psychological knowledge to the assessment and treatment of mental disorders.
The first clinical psychology centre in the UK was set up in 1920 in a private house in London.
The impact of World War II
An urgent need for psychological advice and treatment
Shell-shock: anxiety response of battlefield that prevents soldiers from functioning properly; was one of the first topics addressed by applied psychology.
The finding of shell-shock in World War I gave rise tow two developments
When the USA decided to join World War II they also decided to properly staff the military psychiatric service.
A crash course in the treatment of mental disorders was offered to all medical officers, and clinical psychologists were taken on broad, both for testing and treatment.
The beginning of client-centred therapy
The rising demand for psychological help provided a rich environment for new developments in therapy.
Psychoanalysis required a long series of treatment sessions and was not
Foundation of psychology
Chapter 9
What is science?
Science’s claim of superiority was based on four principles
Thoughts before the scientific revolution
Plato, Aristotle and the sceptics
Plato
A strong rationalist view of knowledge acquisition.
Human perception was fallible and the observable world was only a shadow of the Real world.
The human soul had innate knowledge of the universe, which could be harnessed
Aristotle
More scope for observation and made a distinction between deductive reasoning and inductive reasoning.
True, theoretical knowledge started from axioms, form which new knowledge was deduced via so-called demonstrations.
Perception was the source of information but not knowledge itself.
Correspondence theory of truth: a statement is true when it corresponds with reality. Assumes that there is a physical reality which has priority and which the human mind tries to understand it. First formulated by Aristotle.
Pyrrho of Ellis
Scepticism: philosophical view that does not deny the existence of a physical reality, but denies that humans can have reliable knowledge of it; first formulated by Pyrrho of Ellis.
Humans must suspend judgment on all matters of reality.
Augustine
Augustine (354-430CE)
True knowledge was knowledge based on God’s revelations.
This view became dominant until well into the seventeenth century.
Interaction between theory and experiment: the scientific revolution
Galilei’s thought experiments
Galilei is usually credited as the person who convinced the world of the importance of observation and experimentation for the acquisition of knowledge.
But Galilei might in reality be a transition figure steeped in the Aristotelian tradition.
Foundation of psychology
Chapter 10
Is psychology a science?
The foundation of psychology as an academic discipline was legitimised on two pillars
Psychology has a long, respectful past and uses the scientific method
Steven Ward
Makes the case that a new branch of knowledge can establish itself and survive only if it succeeds in convincing the ruling powers of the need for such knowledge as well as reassuring them that it is no threat to their prosperity.
The founders of psychology promoted it as a new academic discipline by stressing two messages
Consequences for the psychology curriculum
Because psychology was promoted on the basis of its long past and its sound method, both ‘history of psychology’ and ‘research methods’ were major components of the curriculum.
These books on history were self-legitimisation as much as essential stepping stones for a good psychology education.
Science is defined by its method rather than by its subject matter
Every topic studied within the scientific method is a science
To be accepted as a science, psychologists had to make the case that what differentiated sciences from non-sciences was the way in which problems were investigated, and not the type of problems addressed.
Although few people spontaneously associated the study of mental life with scientific research, the first academic psychologists maintained that there was nothing inherent in the subject matter that prevented it from being studied using the scientific method.
Methodolatry
Because of its emphasis on method in the definition of science, academic psychology invested heavily in developing appropriate research designs and analysis techniques.
It has been argued that psychology throughout its existence has overplayed the role of research methods at the expense of theory building.
Methodolarty or methodologism: tendency to see methodological rigour as the only requirement for scientific research, at the expense of theory formation.
The shadow of positivism
One reason why psychologists tended to stress valid testing rather than theory formation was that they tried too hard to be good scientists.
Foundation of psychology
Chapter 11
The contribution of quantitative and qualitative research methods
Quantitative research methods: research methods based on quantifiable data; are associated with the natural-science approach based on the hypothetico-deductive method.
Assumptions underlying quantitative research methods
There is an outside reality that can be discovered
Quantitative psychologists start from the assumption that phenomena in the world have an existence outside people’s minds.
They defend the idea that humans can discover reality by using the scientific method.
They are well aware of the fact that science is not a linear accumulation of facts but proceeds through trial and error. But are convinced that in the long term the scientific method based on the hypothetico-deductive model leads to an understanding of reality → scientific knowledge is cumulative
The main aim of scientific research is to find universal causal relationships
Researchers are primarily interested in discovering relationships between causes and effects.
How general are principles? And how do humans function?
Ideally they hope the mechanisms they discover will apply to all humans.
Trying to avoid confounds and sources of noise
Users of quantitative research methods are extremely vigilant about the possible intrusion of undesired factors into their designs.
They try to maximally control the circumstances under which they run their studies
They also try to eliminate the impact of random variables called noise.
Suspicion about the researcher’s input
A source of confounding and noise that is of particular interest to quantitative psychology researchers is the researcher him- or herself.
To protect themselves against biases and noise, quantitative researchers make use of standardised measurements and instruments.
Progress through falsification
Researchers constantly try to prove each other wrong.
Research methods are divided into three broad orientations
Descriptive research
Observation of numerical data
Detailed observation is the start of scientific research.
Typical for quantitative research is that the data are gathered in a numerical form, either by collecting measurements or by counting frequencies of occurrence.
Before researchers collect data, they have a good idea of how they will analyse them; what types of measurements they will obtain and what types of statistics they can apply to summarise and evaluate the data.
Large samples and a few data points per participant
The vast majority of descriptive quantitative studies involve the collection of a limited amount of data from a reasonably large group of participants.
Two main reasons to include
Foundation of psychology
Chapter 13
Psychology and society
Science overtakes religion in Western society
Initial strong links between psychological thinking and religion
Psychology as a separate branch of knowledge grew out of the rising role of scientific thinking in Western society.
Education for a long time was controlled by the churches, which did not look favourably upon those who tried to examine the soul.
Many early psychologists had strong connections with religion.
Alliance formation with the expanding sciences
Rapidly, the experimental psychologists distanced themselves from religion, because it jeopardies their scientific credentials.
They sought to align themselves with the rapidly growing natural sciences, by denouncing weaker fields that might contaminate them, such as religion, philosophy, and sociology.
Psychologists replace pastors
Fewer people felt comfortable discussing their mental health problems with religious authorities.
Whereas for a long time churches were the first port to call for mental health problems, growing secularisation increased the need for non-religious counselling.
At the same time, a growing number of clergy started to study psychology to improve the help they were able to provide.
Changes in society impinge on psychological practice
Impact on psychological research
The massive changes in the organisation of Western society in the nineteenth and twentieth century generated ideas and research opportunities for psychologists.
Six historical developments that affected psychological research
Societal influences were not limited to the science-oriented track of psychology, but also shaped thought in the hermeneutic part.
Impact on clinical practice
Changes in society influenced clinical practice.
Mental disorders show cultural variation.
This is not only true between cultures, but also across time within a culture.
Each culture has a symptom pool, a collective memory of how to behave when ill.
At each time period patients with psychological problems gravitate towards the symptoms that at the time are thought to be legitimate indications of disease, as no patients wants to select illegitimate symptoms.
Society as a metaphor provider
Metaphors: in science, stands for an analogy from another area that helps to map a new, complex problem by making reference to a better
.....read moreThis is my personal collection of content about the history of psychology
The invention of writing
The discovery of numbers
The Fertile Crescent
Civilisations in the Fertile crescent:
The Greeks
Developments from the Roman Empire to the end of the Middle Ages
Ancient Romans:
Byzantine empire
Arab empire:
Western Roman empire:
Introduction
Mind-brain problem: issue of how the mind is related to the brain.
Three main views
Dualism
Materialism
Functionalism
In this magazine, you can find the summaries you need to finish the course foundations of psychology in the second year of the study psychology at the uva.
JoHo can really use your help! Check out the various student jobs here that match your studies, improve your competencies, strengthen your CV and contribute to a more tolerant world
JoHo kan jouw hulp goed gebruiken! Check hier de diverse studentenbanen die aansluiten bij je studie, je competenties verbeteren, je cv versterken en een bijdrage leveren aan een tolerantere wereld
There are several ways to navigate the large amount of summaries, study notes en practice exams on JoHo WorldSupporter.
Do you want to share your summaries with JoHo WorldSupporter and its visitors?
Field of study
Add new contribution