Psychology and behavorial sciences - Theme
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The early Greeks invented philosophy and first theorized in fields as physics (Thales), mathematics (Pythagoras), and medicine ( Hippocrates), among others.
They held that every living organism possesses a psyche, a general life-principle with various functions. Our word psychology derives from this Greek root.
Socrates believed the most important sources of wisdom resided inside the psyches of his pupils, and that his task was to draw knowledge out of them in conversational question-and-answer dialogues, rather than to impose it through lectures promoting his own ideas.
Socrates was the first great proponent of nativism as a philosophy of the mind.
His pupil Plato differentiated between transient appearances (everyday sensations and conscious experiences we have of the external world), and the eternal and abstract ideal forms that lie behind appearances.
Plato thought the human psyche has three components governing the appetites, courage and reason, which occur in unequal proportions within different individuals.
Plato's student Aristoteles placed greater emphasis on empiricism, the observation and classification of those sensory experiences Plato had dismissed as mere appearances.
Aristoteles observed countless animals and plants and organized them into a hierachy of groups and subgroups. In his work Peri Psyche, he attributed just the elementary functions of nutrition and reproduction to the psyches of plants, and further higher abilities to sense, to move themselves and sometimes to remember and imagine experiences to animals.
Rational souls, with the ability to think logically and to organize experience in terms of innate abstract categories, were, according to Aristoteles, unique to human beings.
Aristoteles was the leader of a school called the Lyceum, and became the greatest intellectual authority of his age because he recorded virtually all available knowledge.
Democritus proposed a radical atomic theory of the physical universe, holding that everything was composed of tiny, invisible atoms moving randomly in otherwise empty space, and interacting with one another to create material bodies.
Later adopted by Epicurus, atomism remained a distinctly minority view and was condemned as atheistic because of its mechanistic emphasis on random causation.
After the fall of Rome and the rise of Christianity in Europe, Greek philosophy was regared as blasphemy and would have been lost if it had not been preserved by Islamitic Scholars.
Al-Kindi promoted Aristotelian philosophy and introduced the system of Indo-Arabic numerals, which revolutionized computational mathematics and made possible modern science.
Alhazen refined classical theories about light and the optical properties of the eye, laying important foundations for modern visual science.
Avicenna codified medical knowledge and amplified Aristotle's conceptions of the soul.
Descartes's comprehensive system of mental philosophy originated after he developed a method of doubting everything, in his quest to discover what was ultimately certain and true.
The one thing he could not doubt was the reality of his own act of doubting, and therefore the existence of his own thinking mind, or soul, was unquestionably real.
He held that the most simple natures constituting the physical world are extended material particles in motion and interaction, and hypothesized a universe in which the smallest fire particles concentrate in the center to form the sun, the largest earth particles form the material bodies, and transparent air particles fill all the spaces in between.
He concluded that all animal bodies could be explained as physical mechanisms, similar but more complicated than the mechanical statues he had observed as a young man.
He provided mechanistic explanations for all the functions of the Aristotelian vegetative and sensitive psyches, laying the foundation for modern neurophysiology, including the concept of the reflex.
He saw the mind and body as separate but interacting entities, a position known as interactive dualism.
Locke agreed with Descartes that the ultimate units or primary qualities of the physical universe are extended particles in motion and interaction, and proposed that their impact on sensory organs leads to secondary qualities, such as sights, sounds, smells, and other conscious sensations that are sometimes deceptive or illusory.
He rejected Descartes's innate ideas, concluding that everything we know arises from experience. For Locke, the mind at birth is a tabula rasa, or blank slate.
Because everyone's experiences are unique and limited, their knowledge bases differ and often contradict one another.
Locke advocated the systematic observations and experiments of scientists as the way to gain knowledge, and the sharing of experiences in groups to compensate for the limitations of single person's experiences.
Leibniz likened the mind at birth not to a blank slate but rather a veined block of marble predisposed to respons to a sculptor's chiseling by breaking along certain inherent fault lines.
He believed the mind has an innate capacity for apperception, going beyond simple perception by enabling both self-awareness and the ability to organize and interpret experiences in terms of certain necessary truths, such as the laws of logic and mathematics.
Leibniz conceptualized the universe as composed of monads-infinitesimal, energy-laden, purposeful entitities with some capacity for awareness.
The empiricist, Lockean tradition has been particularly influential in the development of psychology in English-speaking countries.
The Leibnizean tradition has been stronger in continental Europe, placing relatively greater emphasis on understanding the innate controlling and organizing functions of an active mind.
In the early 1800s, Gall proposed that the brain is composed of many organs, each associated with a psychological 'faculty', whose strength could be assessed by measuring the overlying bumps and indentations of the skull.
Gall's theory of phrenology was challenged by Flourens: from surgical ablations of parts of the brain, he came to believe that seperate functions were evenly distributed within each organ.
Localization theory was revived with the discovery of specific language areas by Broca and Wernicke, using brain autopsies from patients with unusual expressive and receptive language impairments.
More evidence for localization of a different kind came from Fritsch and Hitzig: using electrical probes to stimulate exposed areas of the brain's cortex, they identified motor and sensory strips associated with specific movements or bodily sensations.
In the early 20th century, attention shifted to the subject of learning and memory, and researchers wondered whether specific memories might be 'stored' in specific regions of the brain.
Franz doubted this idea after observing the apparent plasticity of the brain of many patients recovering from major injuries or ablations. When one area was damaged its function appeared, at least sometimes, to be compensated for by another.
Franz collaborated with Lashley on studies of the impact of brain ablation on previously acquired maze learning in rats. The amount of learning loss turned out not to depend on the location of the ablations, but on the total amount of tissue removed. This demonstrated the 'law of mass action'.
The next approach to studying brain function was research on the direct electrical stimulation of the conscious human brain, especially by Penfield in his work with epileptic patients in the 1930s.
Depending on the area stimulated, Penfield found he could artificially produce a great variety of sensory, experiential and interpretive impressions in the patient, some of which seemed like hallucinatory reliving of past memories.
Milner advanced Penfield's views with the intensive study of H.M., an epileptic patient whose hippocampus had been ablated to provide relief from intractable seizures.
H.M. showed a distinctive pattern of strengths and weaknesses that led Milner to postulate the existence of seperate systems for declarative and procedural memory, as well as separate storage areas for working memory and long-term memory.
By the 1970s, technological advances in brain imaging combined with a resurgence of interest in cognitive processes. The two came together in the interdisciplinary field of cognitive neuroscience.
In the late 1700s Kant, after being stimulated by Hume's skeptical analysis of the concept of causality, distinguished between the noumenal world, consisting of 'things-in-themselves' that exist indepently of direct experience or consciousness, and the phenomenal world as subjectively experienced, after being processed and transformed by the senses and the mind's intuitions and categories.
Kant did not believe they could be quantified or studies scientifically, but Helmholtz took up this challenge. He helped establish the case for physiological mechanism as opposed to vitalism, and then showed that the speed of the nerve signal, previously thought to be infinite, was measurably finite. This led to the discovery that reaction times are variable and can be studies scientifically.
In many studies of sensation and perception, Helmholtz showed how the energies from the physical world, when conceived in their most elemental senses such as the frequencies and wavelenghts of light and sound, are analogous to Kant's noumenal world.
These energies are processed by first physical, then physiological and finally psychological systems to produce conscious sensations and perceptions that correspond to Kant's phenomenal world.
Helmholtz proposed a trichromatic theory of color vision that is considered largely accurate to this day. He also demonstrated the importance of experience, learning, and what he called unconscious inference in the conversion of raw sensations into meaningful perceptions.
Fechner studies the relationship between the intensities of physical stimuli as measured objectively and the way they are experienced subjectively.
Using the jnd (just noticeable difference) to represent subjectively experienced intensity, he showed that these related to objectively measured intensities in a general logarithmic function that became known as Fechner's law.
The Gestalt psychologists Wertheimer, Koffka and Köhler demonstrated further ways in which the mind actively organizes its perceptions of the world.
The phi-phemenon, figure-ground reversals, and the innate tendency to organize complex aggregates of stimuli into clusters or groups were all examples of this transformative and creative function of the mind.
The Gestaltists emphasized the importance of wholes as being more than the sums of their parts, and of fields analogous to the physicists' force fields as the organizing environments for psychological events.
Wundt developed an approach to studying basic mental processes that built on the German tradition of Fechner's psychophysics and Helmholtz's studies of sensation and perception.
His program of mental chronometry examined the time it took to perform basic attentional tasks. He established the first large-scale laboratory for experimental psychology, and founded the first journal focusing on experimental psychology research.
He argued that higher mental processes as well as the products of culture could not be studies experimentally. For these, he proposed a nonexperimental, voluntaristic approach he called Völkerpsychologie, using comparative, qualitative and historical methods instead.
Cattell, a student of Wundt, worked extensively on reaction-time studies, devising instruments to measure different response times under highly varying conditions.
Titchener, another of Wundt's students, brought structuralism, a somewhat idiosyncratic brand of Wundtian psychology, to the US.
Titchener's primary goal was determining the basic elements of consciousness-sensations and feelings- through the rigidly defined introspective method.
Titchener's structuralism ignored many important aspects of Wundt's voluntaristic psychology, including apperception, creative synthesis, and psychic causality.
Külpe, another Wundt student, challenged his teacher's assumption by applying experimental introspective methods to certain higher mental processes, such as imageless thought and directed association, at his laboratory.
Ebbinghaus further challenged Wundt by conducting an experimental analysis of the higher process of memory using his technique of nonsense syllables.
Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection has had a very broad impact in scientific disciplines, the way we think about ourselves as human beings, our relationships with each other, and our society.
Darwin's systematic observations of features of the natural world during his voyage on the Beagle, combined with previous exposure to his grandfather's theories and the work of Lamarck, Lyell and Malthus, led to his proposal of a mechanism by which evolution could occur: natural selection.
He suggested that local conditions constantly select the individuals best suited to that specific environment to survive and reproduce.
Changes in the natural environment over successive generations have produced countless variations in selection presures, leading to the gradual evolution of thousands of species.
Darwin also proposed that humans are descended from animal ancestors, and that certain human emotions betray our evolutionary animal past.
His observations of his son's early developmental milestones suggested support for the position that individual development proceeds through the same stages as that of the species, and constituted one of the earliest baby biographies, the basis of a research method used later in developmental psychology.
Several aspects of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection influenced the form and content of scientific psychology. The theory's general emphasis on adaptation and function especially appealed to early psychologists in the US.
The importance of variation as the raw material for evolution provided the foundation for the psychological study of individual differences, and Darwin's contention that animals and humans are related on an evolutionary continuum provided a rationale for comparative psychology.
Galton introduced several important concepts about the nature and measurement of intellectual ability that became the focus of later research and applications in psychology.
He theorized that such ability must be related to the strength, efficiency, and size of the brain and nervous system.
His anthropometric tests measured head size, reaction time, and several kinds of sensory discrimination, which he felt would reflect individual variations in intellectual ability. These measures were the first serious attempt to develop intelligence tests.
After reading Darwin's The Origin of Species, Galton concluded humans must be constantly evolving like other species, and that the human variations most likely to influence future evolution and development were intellectual and psychological.
To support his believe in the innate nature of these qualities, he cited the normal distribution of intellectual attributes in the population, the tendency for intellectual superiority to run in families, and the greater similarities between biological than adoptive relatives.
He pioneered the twin study method and other techniques to assess the relative impact of genetics and environmental factors that in more refined forms became foundations for the field of behavior genetics.
Although Galton recognized the existence of environmental factors and popularized the phrase 'nature and nurture' to denote interactions of heredity and environment, he disregarded the importance of nonhereditary influences.
Convinced of the importance of heredity, he envisaged a program of eugenics in which the most gifted young people would be identified by intelligence and encouraged to intermarry and have many children.
Galton also made notable contributions to statistical analysis, including the notions of scatter plots, regression toward the mean, regression lines, and coefficients of correlation to visually and mathematically convey the strength of association between variables.
These innovations enabled Pearson to develop a formula for computing correlation coefficients that extended their range to cover negative relationships. Known as Pearson's r, it has become one of the most widely used of all statistical tools in research.
Following Galton's work, later researchers studies the similarities and differences between pairs of separated identical twins, to determine the heritability of intelligence and other psychological characteristics.
Heritability is a statistical measure of genetically determined variability of a characteristic within a population, and except for a single study ultimately dismissed as fatally flawed, all the reputable investigations were restricted to twins raised in middle-class environments. Those studies yiielded heritability estimates for intelligence of about 70%.
The most important founder of academic experimental psychology in America, James, established a laboratory at Harvard in 1875.
He published his successful textbook, The principles of Psychology in 1890.
In this book, he included chapters on a diverse array of topics. He proposed the notion of the stream of consciousness - the idea that thought has a fluid, dynamic, continuous quality that cannot be studies by breaking it down into its separate elements.
He presented the James-Lange theory of emotion, which states that emotions are the consequence, not the cause, of physiological responses.
He also wrote about free will, asserting that a true science of psychology had to be predicated on complete determinism, although outside science a belief in free will was completely adaptive.
He also noted that a science of psychology would itself have certain limits.
He had a longstanding interest in psychical research, elaborated a philosophy known as pragmatism, and published a widely read set of lectures on religious experiences.
Hall, the first person in the US to earn a PhD, with a dissertation in experimental psychology, made important contributions in the areas of pedagogy, child study and development, and evolutionary theory, while also becoming a leading institution builder. He was the founder of the American Psychological Association and the editor of the American Journal of Psychology.
As a woman in the early 1900s, Calkins had to overcome many obstacles before studying under James at Harvard but quickly became a prize student. She developed an influential self-psychology and pioneered the paired-associates technique to study learning and memory. She set up the experimental psychology laboratory at Wellesley College.
The year after her death, Heidbreder arrived at Wellesley having just published her highly acclaimed work Seven Psychologies.
Thorndike began his graduate work with James at Harvard and set up a small laboratory to study learning in chickens in James's basement.
He constructed his famous puzzle boxes, demonstrating that trial-and-error behavior led to learning that could be explained by the law of effect.
Most of Thorndike's research had an applied, functional cast that was becoming characteristic of a distinctly American approach to psychology known as functionalism.
In the early 20th century several important figures changed their definition of psychology from the study of the conscious mind to the study of observable behavior.
Pavlov helped initiate this transition with his conviction that explanations of reflexive behavior must be expressed in terms of objective physiological and behavioral indicators.
Building on his earlier work on the physiology of digestion and the reflexive responses of salivation in dogs, Pavlov conducted meticulous studies of conditioned reflexes, using the procedures of classical conditioning.
Among the many phenomena his lab investigated were discrimination, generalization, and the production of experimental neuroses in animals confronted with too difficult discrimination tasks.
Watson extended Pavlov's ideas to human psychology. Although he had pursued a neurologically based theory to account for his findings, Watson emphasized the environmental factors that lead to the acquisition of behavior.
He insisted that if psychology were to be a true science, it should abandon the introspective method, study only observable behavior, and adopt the goals of prediction and control.
Watson demonstrated that with a few basic exceptions, such as fear in response to a loud, unexpected noise, all emotions are built up through conditioning.
In his famous Little Albert study, he repeatedly paired a loud noise with stimuli to which Little Albert had previously shown no fear, such as a white rat. Soon the presentation of the rat alone elicited a fear response in the young subject.
In his later career Watson left academia but applied his behavioral principles in the advertising world. He also wrote popular articles and an influential book on childrearing based on his behavioristic outlook.
Skinner developed the theory of operant conditioning, which places less emphasis on reflexive behaviors and more on those that are emitted by an organism.
Skinner believed that behavior can be increased or decreased in frequency by manipulating its contingencies. When the consequences following a response increase the probability that that response will occur again, it is said to have been reinforced. He applied this idea to a range of human concerns, such as how to help students learn more efficiently and how to develop better social systems.
In Walden Two, Skinner described a utopian society based on his favored behavioristic principles.
From the 18th century exploits of Mesmer, who promoted a theory of animal magnetism, through his student Puysegur's work on artificial somnambulism, to Faria's concept of hypnotic susceptibility, the notion that people respond to social influence of various kinds has been exploited for a number of positive and negative purposes.
Among the most useful was inducing hypnotic trance as a form of anesthesia during surgical procedures, pioneered in India by Esdaile in the mid-ninetheenth century.
The Scottish physician Braid lent the subject of hypnotism some scientific respectability by confirming its effects and publishing them in recognized periodicals.
Hypnotism in the medical context was explored by Charcot in his studies of hysteria patients at the Salpêtriere Hospital in Paris, where he attributed hypnotic susceptibility to the presence of the same neuropathological condition that presumably underlay hysteria.
Charcot's prestige was essential in bringing the important subjects of hysteria and hypnosis out of scientific obscurity. The more general subjects of suggestibility and crowd behavior received wide publicity by the flamboyant theorist Le Bon.
Binet studied suggestibility experimentally in the laboratory, and Triplett did the same with social facilitation in the early 1900s. Both of these pioneers are considered anticipators of the field of experimental social psychology.
In 1924, Allport's textbook, Social Psychology, called for a social psychology focussed on objectively observable responses made by individual subjects in objectively specifiable social situations.
The more important lines of research that evolved as this approach took hold included Asch's conformity studies, Festinger's research on cognitive dissonance, Milgram's obedience studies, and Zimbardo's prison experiment.
The Milgram and Zimbardo experiments raised questions about the ethics of using deception in psychology investigations, and the importance of informed consent.
More recent research by Loftus and others has confirmed the profound influence that suggestibility can have on memory, including memory for traumatic events.
Freud developed the technique of free association, which encouraged patients simply to let their thoughts run free, as a nonhypnotic method of revealing the pathogenic ideas of hysteria patients.
This led him to appreciate the importance of intrapsychic conflict, repression, overdetermination, and unconscious sexual ideas.
Following a self-analysis of his own dreams, he concluded that both dreams and hysteria result from a similar primary process, in which unconscious whishes of an anxiety-arousing and often sexual nature are transformed into the consciously experienced manifest content of the dream, or the physical conversion symptoms of hysteria.
Following his self-analysis, Freud postulated the Oedipus complex as a nearly universal consequence of childhood development and proposed a theory of childhood sexuality in which a child first experienced an undifferentiated state of polymorphous perversity and then passes through oral, anal, and genital stages before arriving at adult heterosexuality. Fixations during any of these stages can result in character traits in the adult personality.
From the case of Dora, Freud learned that patients often unconsciously transfer feelings about important figures in their past lives onto the analyst.
Metapsychology was Freud's term for his broad theoretical models of the mind, the most famous of which divided the psyche into the id, ego and superego. The ego attempts to find compromises in response to conflicting instinctual demands from the id, moral demands from the superego and reality demands from the external world.
After 1905, psychoanalysis became a movement that attracted both supporters and influential dissidents. Among the latter, Adler developed individual psychology, which featured the inferiority complex, guiding fictions, and social interest.
Jung established analytic psychology, featuring a collective unconscious, the concept of extroversion-introversion, and the importance of balance in a theory of psychological types.
As psychoanalysis became increasingly well known and popular, academic psychologists, after initially treating it with contempt, gradually began to test some of its concepts in laboratory situations. This helped lay the groundwork for a new subdiscipline of personality psychology.
Allport's PhD dissertation on the emerging concept of personality proposed that the trait was the most important unit. Allport taught the first American university courses on personality psychology.
In 1937 he published the first textbook in the field, which emphasized the limitations of psychoanalytic theory for understanding the normal personality, and argued that sometimes motives originally developed in childhood may become rewarding, or functionally autonomous, in later life. He distinguished between nomothetic and idiographic research methods.
The nomothetic approach to studying traits was subsequently developed, using factor analysis, by Cattell, Eysenck, and more recent promotors of the Big Five model, all proposing that the large number of individual trait terms can be reduced into a small number of closely intercorrelated cluster.
Idiographic research entailing in-depth case studies and going by the name personology was conducted by Murray and his colleagues at the Harvard Psychological Clinic. That tradition is represented today by psychologists who conduct in-depth studies and psychobiographies of individual lives.
Maslow, after studying sexual and dominance-related motives in monkeys, he was strongly influenced by a series of New York mentors, including the anthropologist Benedict; the neo-Freudians Adler, Horney and Goldstein.
Becoming interested in not just normality but also the conditions leading to superior psychological functioning, Maslow hypothesized a state of self-actualization as the epitome of psychological health.
He also proposed a five-level hierarchy of needs (physiological, safety, belonging and love, esteem and self-actualization), in which each level becomes dominant only when all the needs below have been satisfied.
Maslow explored the qualities inherent in a self-actualized personality. He studied the lives of people who seemingly achieved self-actualization, and proposed an approach to psychology that would focus on the growth-enhancing, positive aspects of human motivation, as opposed to the more pessimistic and deterministic views of behaviorism and psychoanalysis.
This approach became known as the third force or humanistic psychology. Maslow was joined by Rogers, May and Allport in establishing humanistic psychology as a new area.
Binet and Piaget were both concerned with how the intellectual capacities of the mind develop in children. Binet's observations of his daughters, and in-depth case studies of unusually talented people, convinced him that intelligence manifests itself in many different ways.
His attempts to establish individual psychology, a program of short tests that would reveal individual qualities with the same richness as individual detailed case studies, proved disappointing but his experience with many different procedures led to his most famous achievement: the Binet-Simon intelligence test.
Intended as a means of diagnosing subnormal young children who were incapable of learning from a standard elementary school curriculum, this test was based on the discovery that although subnormal children can pass many of the same subtests as normal ones, they learn to do so at an older age.
Binet's tests revealed an intellectual level or mental age for each subject, which could be compared with the actual or chronological age. Binet's mental orthopedics program produced limited but real improvements in subnormal children's intelligence scores.
Stern defined the ratio of mental age to chronological age as the intelligence quotient, which Spearman interpreted as a rough measure of general intelligence (g), a factor he likened to a person's general mental horsepower.
Goddard translated Binet's tests into English and promoted them as a way of diagnosing feeblemindedness, which he believed to be a hereditary trait.
Terman multiplied Stern's intelligence quotient by 100 to yield the IQ, and emphasized unusually high IQs as indicators of giftedness.
In the 1930s Wechsler developed deviation IQ tests as most appropriate for adults, where someone at the exact everage for his or her age was assigned a score of 100; besides providing an overall full-scale IQ, his WAIS tests gave separate results for verbal and performal items.
Flynn showed in the 1980s that as tests were revised periodically, the standards for deviation IQs became increasingly difficult, suggesting that in some sense the population is getting smarter.
Piaget observed that older children do not just think faster or more than younger children, they also think in different ways. His system of genetic epistemology, developed in collaboration with Inhelder, subvided a child's intellectual development into four stages: sensory-motor, preoperational, concrete operations, and formal operations. Each stage was increasingly powerful and abstract in terms of solving problems.
Vygotsky emphasized the social nature of a child's intelligence and argued that any assessment of it must include a zone of proximal development, or potential for immediate improvement with appropriate guidance from a teacher.
Bruner combined Piaget's and Vygotsky's ideas in developing a theory of instruction based on three modes of representation: enactive, iconic and symbolic.
Pascal's Pascaline was considered by many as a thinking machine because it could add and subtract.
Leibniz invented a machine that could also multiply and divide.
Babbage designed a difference engine that could calculate complex equations, and an analytical engine, a universal machine whose components became the prototypes for those of a modern programmable computer: input system, mil, control, memory store, and output device.
Lovelace anticipated the usefulness of such a machine in many different fields, while objecting that it could never be genuinely creative.
Boole's invention of Boolean algebra and symbolic logic expanded the range of mathematics, enabling the calculation of solutions to traditional problems in logic.
Turing designed a universal machine that potentially could function like Babbage's analytical engine but with a simpler structure.
Shannon demonstrated that notations in binary code could represent problems in Boolean algebra and symbolic logic, and that binary codes could be represented mechanically by sequences of open and closed electrical switches.
Shannon also defined the amount of information conveyed by a single on or off binary switch as a bit, which became the fundamental unit of analysis in the new field of information theory.
The Turing test defined artificial intelligence as a computer's ability to perform some complex task requiring intelligent behavior with results that matched those of a human.
Newell and Simon's Logic Theorist was an early AI program that could generate mathematical theorems but was limited to problems requiring relatively limited search space.
Their later General Problem Solver improved on this by incorporating means-end analysis as a more flexible heuristic. Inspired by this concept, Miller, Galanter and Pribram proposed the TOTE unit as a basic concept in their analysis of human problem solving.
Increasingly succesful AI programs in the decades since GPS have passed the Turing test in many different ways, and have defeated human champions in chess and other challenging tasks.
These achievements followed the adoption of connectionist programming strategies, carried out by machines with greater computing speed and power.
In the context of the Lovelace objection, Boden concluded that they hvae demonstrated improbabilist but not impossibilist creativity.
Citing his Chinese room thought experiment, Searle further argued that a computer program can never replicate the qualities of intentionality and consciousness that accompany human intelligence and reasoning.
Miller adopted Chomsky's theory of an innate grammatical sense and rejected the behaviorist theory of language acquisition. After studying aspects of human information processing, he estimated that the typical storage capacity of the mind was limited to seven units at one time.
Miller established the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies.
The new interest in unobservable inner states was sometimes referred to as the cognitive revolution.
As cognitive research grew, Miller's student Neisser summarized and consolidated it in his textbook Cognitive Psychology, defining a new and separate academic subdiscipline focusing on the mental information processing that occurs between a stimulus and an individual's response to it.
Münsterberg became one of the first prominent advocates of applying psychology to business and industry; this was referred to as psychotechnics.
He published popular books on the use of psychology in the courtroom, the psychology of education, and business psychology.
He also devised tests of vocational skills to help companies select workers for various jobs, an area that became known as personnel selection.
Scott conducted a large-scale personnel selection exercise with army recruits during World War I, and also applied psychological principles to advertising.
Marston, one of Münsterberg's students, became a prominent popularizer of applied psychology between the wars, promoting his own version of the lie detector and creating the comic book superheroine Wonder Woman.
Lillian Gilbreth began her career collaborating with her husband Frank, a self-trained engineer. Initially influenced by the principles of scientific management devised and promoted by Taylor, the Gilbreths soon developed their own approach to efficiency in the workplace.
They conducted elaborate motion studies of individual tasks to determine the one best way to do a job efficiently and easily for the worker.
After her husband's death, Gilbreth expanded her expertise to designing appliances and kitchens that would minimize strain on the homemaker, and she made recommendations to employers to help them create more enjoyable and productive workplaces for their employees.
Both Münsterberg and Gilbreth were early pioneers of industrial/organizational psychology.
Mayo and his work on the controversial Hawthorne studies in the late 1920s and early 1930s expanded the focus of I/O psychology to aspects of the social and interpersonal environment that would affect worker satisfaction and productivity.
Findings from these studies generated a phenomenon known as the Hawthorne effect, a change in partcipants' performance from knowing they are part of a study.
Mayo and his colleagues argued that the special treatment their experimental group received may have been responsible for their increased productivity aside from economic and physical factors, such as wage incentives and rest periods.
One of the primary roles of early applied psychologists was to administer psychological tests in a variety of settings, including hospitals and clinics.
Hollingworth began her career doing this work, but eventually held an academic position that allowed her to do research as well. She conducted pioneering research on exceptional children at both ends of the ability spectrum and became well known for her studies of gifted children.
Hollingworth was also an early professional credentialing of clinical psychologists. Her recommendations foreshadowed many of the issues concerning the professionalization of clinical psychology that would resurface after World War II.
The professionalization of clinical psychology accelerated after World War II because of a number of factors, including the need for more trained mental health practitioners to treat the war's psychiatric casualities.
In the US, one response to this need was federal funding to help establish training programs for this new profession.
Central to discussions about the appropriate training model for clinical psychology was the role scientific research would play.
Harrower was a clinician who initially trained as an experimentalist and continued to conduct research while seeing patients for both diagnostic evaluations and psychotherapy.
She developed the group Rorschach projective technique and contributed to national forums about the professional roles of the clinical psychologist, especially in relation to psychiatry.
Shakow was also trained as a researcher but worked in a hospital setting early in his career. There, his outlook on clinical psychology training was shaped by his interactions with medical personnel.
He suggested three roles for clinical psychologists: diagnosis, research and therapy. This became the official training model for clinical psychologists in de US.
One of the first psychologists to conduct psychotherapy research was Rogers. He developed client-centered therapy based on his careful study of the therapeutic factors that seemed to produce succesful outcomes.
Beck, the originator of cognitive therapy, also based his theory and therapy on research he conducted with depressed patients. Beck moved away from psychoanalysis when his research suggested that depression was caused by distorted thinking rather than anger-turned-inward, as psychoanalytic theory proposed.
His emphasis on cognition was shared by Ellis, who developed a related approach, rational emotive therapy.
The desire to understand which forms of psychotherapy were most effective led to a number of large-scale research studies, one of the most important of which was the Treatment of Depression Collaborative Research Program coordinated through the National Institute of Mental Health in the US.
Useful and valid assessment tools were also being created. The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) was originated by Hathaway and later developed further by his student Meehl.
The MMPI seemed to offer an objective approach that relied purely on statistical data and not on clinical judgement, in contrast to projective measures, such as the Rorschach.
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