Psychology and United States Essay

Submitted By potatococks123
Words: 4573
Pages: 19

Scott Liu, Dennis Park, Daniel Suh, and Kevin Wan
Period 3

Historical Outline
Structuralists
Plato
Born May 21, 428 BC; Died January 14, 348 BC
Greek
Explained relationship between abstract ideas and their physical representations
Philosopher that said that the whole of science can be deduced from a few truths
Structuralism

Functionalists
William James
Born: January 11, 1842 in New York, New York, United States
Died: August 26, 1910 in Chocorua, New Hampshire, United States
Pragmatism
James wrote considerably on the concept of pragmatism. According to pragmatism, the truth of an idea can never be proven. James proposed we instead focus on what he called the "cash value," or usefulness, of an idea.
James opposed the structuralism focus on introspection and breaking down mental events to the smallest elements. Instead, James focused on the wholeness of an event, taking into the impact of the environment on behavior.
The James-Lange theory of emotion proposes that an event triggers a physiological reaction, which we then interpret. According to this theory, emotions are caused by our interpretations of these physiological reactions. Both James and the Danish physiologist Carl Lange independently proposed the theory.

Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850-1909)
German
His famous works are the Forgetting Curve and the Spacing Effect.
He showed how memory can be influenced by time, effort, and the methods used.
Functionalism
Mary Whiton Calkins (1852-1930)
American
Her famous works include self psychology, and the Paired Association Technique.
It helped show that there are methods to help with memorization.
Functionalist
Paul Costa (1942-…)
American
His greatest works are his Revised NEO Personality Inventory, and his association with the Five Factor Model.
He shows that personality affects the behavior of people.
Functionalism
Psychoanalytic/ psychodynamic
Gustav Fechner
Born: April 19,1801
Died November 18, 1887
Freud admired Fechner as the pioneer of psychophysics and a founder of scientific and experimental psychology
He set out the foundations of psychophysics, such as the Fechner-Weber law, by which he is remembered as a founder of experimental psychology.
In this latter work Fechner offers the "principle of constancy" to explain how a progressively ordered and structured system can evolve from a disorganized state, a notion that suggests Freud's famous formula.
Fechner was a role model for Freud, thus he was a member of the psychoanalytic branch.

G. Stanley Hall
Born: February 01, 1844 in Ashfield, Massachusetts, United States
Died: April 24, 1924 in Worcester, Massachusetts, United States In 1884 Hall set up an experimental psychology laboratory (the first in the United States) at Johns Hopkins University, affiliated with the biology department
There he investigated motor sensations of the skin, the perception of rhythm, and other aspects of physiological psychology. But he also developed an interest in the unconscious mind, specifically hypnosis, and as a result grew increasingly disenchanted with this completely somatic approach to psychology, the processes of which now seemed to him to require more complex explanations than those offered by physiology. Hall's new interests were parallel to those of Sigmund Freud, the Austrian psychiatrist whose papers on hysteria Hall had read in the 1890s.
He would either be a member of the biological branch or the psychoanalytical branch.

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov
Born September 26, 1849; Died February 27, 1936
Russian
Pavlov’s Dog—conditioned a dog to salivate upon hearing a bell ring
Showed behavioral development is dependent on conditioned responses to life events and the unconscious thoughts of an individual control behavior
Psychoanalytic

Sigmund Freud
Born: May 06, 1856 in Freiberg, Germany
Died: September 23, 1939 in London, England
Austrian founder of psychoanalysis, marked the beginning of a modern, dynamic