Key Psychologists and Historic FiguresHistory and Approaches- Charles Darwin

• Charles Darwin- British naturalist who came up with the groundbreaking theory of evolution. Darwin’s theory of natural selection continues to influence the modern evolutionary perspective.

William Wundt

• William Wundt- established first psychology research laboratory. Pioneered a research method called introspection in which subjects reported detailed descriptions of their own conscious mental experiences.

William James

• William James- Harvard professor who played a key role in establishing psychology in the US. He emphasized studying the purpose of behavior and mental experiences.

G. Stanley Hall

• G. Stanley Hall- studied adolescence and coined the phrase “storm and stress”

Mary Whiton Calkins

• Mary Whiton Calkins- female psychologist who was denied a Ph.D. at Harvard due to sexism and served as the first president of the American Psychological Association.

Margaret Floy Washburn

• Margaret Floy Washburn- holds the distinction of being the first woman to be awarded a Ph.D. in psychology.

Sigmund Freud

• Sigmund Freud- founded the psychoanalytic thought and developed a theory of personality that emphasized the role of unconscious conflicts. Also, believed that dreams provided a particularly important insight into unconscious motives.

John B. Watson

• John B. Watson- American psychologist who emphasized the study of observable behaviors rather than the study of subjective mental processes. Founder of behaviorism; known for 12 infant quote

Biological Bases of Behavior- Paul Broca

• Paul Broca- French physician who discovered that speech production center of the brain is located in an area of the lower left frontal lobe. He helped revolutionize the understanding of speech production

Carl Wernicke

• Carl Wernicke- German neurologist and psychiatrist who discovered that damage to area on the left temporal lobe caused deficits in language comprehension.

Roger Sperry

• Roger Sperry- best known for his pioneering research with split-brain patients and demonstrated that the brain’s right and left hemispheres have specialized functions.

Michael Gazzaniga

• Michael Gazzaniga- continued Sperry’s research by advancing understanding of how two cerebral hemispheres communicate with one another.

Sensation and Perception- Ernst Weber

• Ernst Weber- German physician who discovered the just noticeable difference (JND) and now what we call Weber’s law. This law states that for each sense, the size of the JND will vary depending on its relation to the strength of the original stimulus.

Gustav Fechner

• Gustav Fechner- German experimental psychologist who demonstrated that mental processes can be measured.

David Hubel

• David Hubel- research on feature detectors helped demonstrate the presence of specialized neurons in the occipital lobe’s visual cortex that have the ability to respond to specific features of an image.

Torsten Wiesel

• Torsten Wiesel- collaborated with David Hubel on feature detection and their joint work expanded the scientific knowledge of sensory processing and perception.

States of Consciousness- David Hilgard

• David Hilgard- renowned for research on hypnosis and pain control. Came up with the idea of dissociation during hypnosis that the person has a divided consciousness.

Learning- Ivan Pavlov

• Ivan Pavlov- originally studied digestion and devoted 3 decades of research on studying and formulating the principles of classical conditioning.

John Garcia

• John Garcia- pioneering researcher on taste aversion. His research supports evolutionary perspective that being biologically prepared to quickly associate nausea with food or drink is adaptive.

Robert Rescorla

• Robert Rescorla- refined Pavlov’s studies and indicated that the CS must be reliable signal that predicts the presentations of the UCS. His research demonstrated the complexity of classical conditioning.

Edward Thorndike

• Edward Thorndike- conducted first systematic investigation in animal behavior and coined the term “law of effect” which simply stated satisfying outcomes are more likely to be repeated, while unpleasant outcomes are less likely to be repeated.

B.F. Skinner

• B.F. Skinner- believed psychologists should only focus on observable behavior. Skinner formulated the principles of operant conditioning

Edward Tolman

• Edward Tolman- challenged Thorndike and Skinner by showing rats displayed a cognitive map or mental representation of a maze. He realized that latent or hidden learning does occur.

Wolfgang Kohler

• Wolfgang Kohler- believed that behaviorists had underestimated animals cognitive abilities and designed an experiment to see if chimps could obtain food outside of their cages. He coined the term insight to describe a sudden understanding of a problem

Albert Bandura

• Albert Bandura- best known for “Bobo doll” experiment that showed the role of modeling in human behavior. Believes observational learning is responsible for most human behavior.

Cognition- George Miller

• George Miller- best know for research on short term memory (7 plus or minus 2). He helped gain insight on chunking.

Herman Ebbinghaus-

• Herman Ebbinghaus- conducted research on forgetting. His famous forgetting curve shows a rapid loss of memories of relatively meaningless information, followed by a very gradual decline in the remaining information.

Elizabeth Loftus

• Elizabeth Loftus- Her research deals with the misinformation effect that demonstrates the weakness of eye witness testimony.

Noam Chomsky

• Noam Chomsky- renowned linguist who argued that children possess an innate capacity to learn and produce speech. His hypothesis states that human learn language because of innate speech enabling structures called the Language Acquisition Device.

Motivation and Emotion- Abraham Maslow

• Abraham Maslow- founder of the humanistic approach to psychology. He came up with the hierarchy of needs that stated that basic and physiological and safety needs and then ascends to belonging and self- esteem. Individuals reach self- actualization by realizing their full potential and achieving harmony and understanding

Stanley Schachter

• Stanley Schachter- best known for the two- factor theory of emotion. He believed our emotions depend on physical arousal and a cognitive label of that arousal.

Hans Selye

• Hans Selye- Best known for work on stress. He came up with the 3 stage General Adaption Syndrome that stresses Alarm, Reaction, and the Exhaustion.

Alfred Kinsey

• Alfred Kinsey- renowned for his pioneering controversial research on human sexuality.

Developmental Psychology- Mary Ainsworth

• Mary Ainsworth- came up with the idea of the “strange situation” to observe attachment differences in infants and their mothers were securely or insecurely attached.

Harry Harlow

• Harry Harlow- conducted a famous experiment on monkeys to see if they preferred their wire or cloth mother and research showed that the need for touch is essential in development.

Konrad Lorenz

• Konrad Lorenz- known as the founder of ethology- the comparative study of animals (including humans) and their natural surroundings and came up with the advances in imprinting and aggression.

Jean Piaget

• Jean Piaget- focused on the rational perceiving child who has the capacity to make sense of the world. He helped identify four distinct stages of cognitive development.

Lev Vygotsky

• Lev Vygotsky- believed that children learn their culture’s habits of mind through a process called internalization.

Diana Baumrind

• Diana Baumrind- best known for work on parenting styles. Came up with the idea of Permissive, Authoritative, and Authoritarian Parents.

Erik Erikson

• Erik Erikson- came up with the idea of social development that 8 stages from infancy to death. We will study this in detail in development.

Lawrence Kohlberg

• Lawrence Kohlberg- American psychologist who used hypothetical moral dilemmas to study moral reasoning. He believed we developed moral reasoning in 3 stages.

Carol Gilligan

• Carol Gilligan- best known for her critique against Kohlberg since all his subjects were male and argued that women focus more on caring on compassion.

Personality- Alfred Adler

• Alfred Adler- known as a neo- Freudian. Adler’s goal was to help his patients see the power of self determination and command the courage to alter their interpretation of events and life experience.

Carl Jung-

• Carl Jung- also known as Neo- Freudian who developed the concept of the collective unconscious. He believed the collective unconscious included shared human experiences and cultural archetypes. Influenced thinking on humans as symbol using beings.

Carl Rogers

• Carl Rogers- believed in optimistic view of human nature and a humanist who believed in client centered therapy where therapist is genuine, accepting, and empathetic.

Paul Costa and Robert Mccrae

• Paul Costa and Robert Mccrae- best known for the 5 factor model in personality which identifies conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, openness, and extroversion as the broad domains of personality.

Testing and Individual Differences- Francis Galton

• Francis Galton- interested in statistics and developed the statistical concept of correlation and was the first to demonstrate that the normal distribution could be applied to intelligence.

Charles Spearman

• Charles Spearman- He observed that an individuals intelligence scores on various tests of intellectual performance correlated with one another. Thus, he proposed that intelligence is a single, underlying factor, which he coined general intelligence.

Robert Sternberg

• Sternberg- Best known for his triarchic theory of intelligence which emphasized analytic, creative, and practical intelligences.

Howard Gardner

• Howard Gardner- known for his theory of multiple intelligences. Disputed Spearman due to different types of intelligences.

Alfred Binet

• Alfred Binet- invented first usable intelligence test. Made important distinctions between a child’s mental and chronological ages.

Lewis Terman

• Lewis Terman- best known as the inventor of the Stanford- Binet test. His simple equation took mental age/ chronological age * 100.

David Wechsler

• David Wechsler- Wechsler determined how far a person’s score deviates from a bell shaped normal distribution of scores.

Treatment of Abnormal Behavior- Dorothea Dix

• Dorothea Dix- American reformer who documented the deplorable conditions of how states cared for the mentally ill.

Albert Ellis

• Albert Ellis- renowned for developing the principles of rational- emotive therapy. Replaced irrational beliefs with more rational interpretations of events.

Aaron Beck

• Aaron Beck- widely regarded as the father of cognitive therapy and his theories are widely used to treat clinical depression.

Mary Cover Jones

• Mary Cover Jones- conducted the pioneering research in applying behavioral techniques to therapy.

Joseph Wolpe

• Joseph Wolpe- took Cover Jones research and furthered it with his technique called systematic desensitization that helped clients relax and work their way through anxiety producing situations.

Social Psychology- Leon Festinger

• Leon Festinger- came with the idea of cognitive dissonance- which states when are behaviors and attitudes are inconsistent we change them to reduce our inconsistent feelings.

Phillip Zimbardo

• Phillip Zimbardo- best known for Stanford Prison Study on role playing and deindividuation.

Soloman Asch

• Soloman Asch- study on conformity shows how individuals respond to the social pressures and expectations of others.

Stanley Milgram

• Stanley Milgram- shock study on obedience showed the power of informational social influence.