Transcript Lecture 11 - University of Toronto Scarborough

History of Psychology 2008
Lecture 11
Professor Cupchik
TA: Michelle Hilscher
Office: S634
Office: S142C
Email: [email protected]
Email: [email protected]
Office hours: Wed 1-2; Thurs 12-1
Office hours: Wed 12-2 pm
Course website:
Textbook:
www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~cupchik
Benjafield’s History of Psychology
Reminder about the Final Paper
1. 20 pages double-spaced including title page and references.
2. APA style + written in 3rd person.
3. Due on Monday December 1st by midnight. Please email a copy
to [email protected] AND [email protected]
4. I will send comments and your paper mark back by email.
5. For more information about the marking scheme, etc… check
the website (www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~cupchik)
Good luck!
Psychoanalysis
The stage was set by late 18th century reform of (dungeon-like)
madhouses and decent treatment of mentally ill people
simultaneously in England and France.
Pinel set the stage for this development in 1793 when he took
over an asylum in Paris and removed the chains of his patients.
He gave them freedom and good living conditions. An
improvement was found in the patients.
Pinel in 1793
Pinel related mental disorders to:
(1) environmental (i.e., upbringing) and
(2) physical (head injury) factors.
He examined disturbances of emotional reactions related to
extreme rage or fear and excessive grief or remorse.
Insanity was therefore related to medicine and not to prisons.
He assumed that patients were sick people. He studied them
regularly and methodically. These were the first case histories.
J. M. Charcot (1825-1895) was a neurologist who isolated
“hysteria” as a paralysis or convulsion not related to organic
disease.
Psychiatry expanded from the study of psychosis, insanity
requiring hospital care, to neurosis.
Pierre Janet (1859-1947) found that hypnosis helped patients
recall memories of repressed experiences. If the physician
suggested that recall would also occur in waking states, the
neurotic symptoms disappeared — catharsis.
* He therefore distinguished a neurotic mechanism whereby
memory of unpleasant consequences or events became
dissociated from normal consciousness.
* There were a variety of types of neurotic reactions – hysteria,
depression, compulsive reactions, obsession, phobias.
* But he regarded these as a product of a lack of energy, fatigue
or exhaustion. The degeneration of the total bodily system
explains why people could not carry out normal adaptive
behaviour.
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
He lived most of his life in Vienna
until driven out by the Nazis in
1938 and died of cancer in London
in 1939.
He was influenced by the ideas of
Brentano who taught the dynamic
Freud’s Couch
ideas of Leibniz and he was also
influenced by Goethe who sought a deep understanding of nature
through science.
He adopted a mechanistic view through the influence of
Helmholtz. He adopted an anti-vitalistic view based on the idea
that there were no forces in living bodies not found in non-living
bodies. There was no unique energy unaccounted for within the
organism (this refers to psychic energy).
Freud came to view dreams and
fantasies, wit and errors, as
determined (or overdetermined) and
not accidental. His notion of
determinism came from reading
Darwin.
So he was influenced by both the
Romantic & mechanistic traditions.
Freud studied the role of hypnotism for treating hysterics (with
Charcot in 1885). He modified the technique where hypnosis
could not be used and developed free association as a means to
finding the origins of symptoms. He came to stress the sexual
origins of symptoms but discovered that they were unreliable. He
also emphasized the importance of unconscious processes in the
etiology of neuroses since symptoms reflected unremembered
events.
This led to an account of the unconscious and repression as a
defence mechanism. Accordingly, undesirable impulses and
memories are pushed in the unconscious and are forgotten and
unavailable to the conscious mind. This material would have to
uncovered and resolved in order for a cure to take place.
In a quest for the origins of symptoms, he went further back into
childhood. He also developed the notion of transference whereby
the patient transfers to the therapist feelings originally attached
to other people, especially parents. Transference permits people to
express these feelings.
Cognitive Psychology
- Rooted in Gestalt psychology:
1. Wertheimer + productive thinking
2. Köhler + hungry, insightful chimps
- not just trial-and-error
- “aha moment” leads to willful action
- Piaget also a major influence due to his description of
children’s cognitive development.
- Early cognitive psychologists interested in studying internal
mental events – problem-solving, language, memory.
- Consciousness and will are emphasized.
Cognitive Psychology
- This “movement” in psychology was a product of a time when
psychology, anthropology and linguistics were redefining
themselves and computer science and neuroscience were
coming into existence as disciplines.
- Based on the human information-processing approach… the
idea that theories can be developed to describe how
information about overt stimuli and responses are represented
and processed by human and nonhumans.
- This description can be very basic – about neural events, or
about processing underlying high-level plans.
- Two independent “movements” – one involving attention and
short-term memory, the other to do with computational
models of thought.
The Computer Metaphor
- Mind = Computer
- Why this metaphor?
1. Lets psychology get tied in with language – Noam Chomsky’s
mathematical linguistics.
2. This metaphor favors an interdisciplinary approach.
3. Laboratory rat can be replaced by the human-computer system
as main source of data.
Alan M. Turing (1912-1954)
- Took off from Bertrand Russell and A.N. Whitehead’s (1913)
Principia Mathematica which argued that a system of
mathematics is reducible to Boolean (true-false) algebra.
- Introduced the idea of the Turing Machine in 1936 – it can
perform any operation or process that can be described
exhaustively and unambiguously.
- The Turing Machine is the “Holy Grail of artificial intelligence”.
“Analytical engine” 
- In his later life Turing was arrested and charged with
homosexuality.
Jerome S. Bruner
- Born in 1915 in New York, attended Duke University.
- During WWII, studied propaganda and popular attitudes.
- Served as the cofounder and director of the Centre for
Cognitive Studies at Harvard.
- How do “mental sets” affect perception?
- “New Look” approach – perception is self-sufficient and can be
considered apart from the world around it.
- Worked with children, showed that children would see toys as
bigger than blocks, even when both were the same height. Also
toys seemed to increased in size when they weren’t available to
the children.
- Early use of the tachistoscope to show familiar and novel
playing cards. People didn’t see the abnormal cards.
- Also well known for his work on the cognitive development of
children, and education… ‘so long as the proper teaching
method is applied, every child can study any topic at any age.’
George A. Miller (born 1920)
- Started out as a behaviorist.
- Early work for US military during WWII sought a mathematical
explanation for language and communication.
- Harvard had separate and warring psychology and “social
relations” departments… a fundamental problem for Miller
who felt that in studying language he was being kept apart
from his “natural allies”.
- Language and Communication (1951) – Covered: (a) physical
attributes of human communication system, (b) how sounds
are transmitted through air. Also described the probabilistic
nature of language – how using one word makes it more likely
that you will use some other word.
- Spoke of brain as a switchboard and nerves as transmitters
and receivers.
- Early work on memory – “immediate memory is like a purse
that can only hold seven coins, but that does not care whether
they are seven pennies or seven silver dollars”
Donald O. Hebb (1904-1985)
- Born in Nova Scotia, graduated from Dalhousie in 1925.
- Lashley’s graduate student, received his PhD in 1936.
- Early career spent studying intelligence and IQ tests. He noted
that environment is more important than usually assumed in
determining performance on IQ tests.
- Worked in Yerkes Lab of Primate Biology and published The
Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory in
1948.
- Basics of his theory: (a) Repeated neuron firing causes
metabolic changes in the synapse so it is more efficient in the
future (consolidation theory); (b) Hebb cell assembly interconnected groups of neurons which will continue to be
active for some period of time after the stimulus is gone; and c)
Phase sequence – thinking happens when many cell
assemblies are activated.
- This was Hebb’s version of connectionism.
Ulric Neisser
- Born in Germany, 1928.
- A physics major at Harvard before switching to psychology.
- Gave cognitive psychology its name in his book, Cognitive
Psychology in 1967
- Defined people as dynamic information-processing systems
whose mental activities might be considered
computationally.
- “Cognition refers to all processes by which the sensory
input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored,
recovered, and used. It is concerned with these processes
even when they operate in the absence of relevant
stimulation, as in images and hallucinations.”
- Published Cognition and Reality in 1976 in which he begins to
criticize cognitive psychology’s excessive reliance on laboratory
work as compared to real-life situations.