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Summary Lectures 3 & 4 theoretical psychology
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A summary of lectures 3 & 4 of theoretical psychology with important information from the slides.
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Lecture 3: the decline and returnof consciousness theory
Psychology in practice
Wilhelm and William: ‘psychology is the science of consciousness’ > criticized later on
Witmer: founder of clinical psychology
After: clinical psychology takes shape. Witmer used a team approach to clinical
psychology which included a psychologist, medical doctor and social worker. To
document the clinical cases, Witmer started the first journal in clinical psychology:
The Psychological Clinic
Psychology and the law: forensic psychology (Münsterberg)
Reliability of witnesses’ statements (memory consolidation)
Psychology in industry: personnel selection (‘assesment’) (Münsterberg)
Best prediction gives specific test (s) plus test for general intelligence (g)
Thorndike: applied psychology to school-related subjects, made a book: The Psychology of
Arithmetic > leading to educational psychology
Freudian practices (theoretical ideas of Freud)
Freud’s theory gains recognition with the rise of the unconscious.
Freud’s iceberg:
Ego (= reality principle) & superego
(= moral principle) (conscious) keep
unconscious desires in check. The id
(unconscious) is the pleasure-
principle. Mental disorders may arise
because of frustration of the id.
Criticism: theory can’t be disproved,
which violates a basic tenet of
science
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, Freud’s two main techniques to discover what frustrations are:
1) Free association
2) Dream analysis
Freud: ‘These techniques help to make repressed matters conscious’
The behaviorist ‘mind’
The behaviorists banished consciousness from their psychological theories altogether. They
redefined psychology as the science of behavior. Watson: psychology had failed as a
science, measurement was fine, but introspection was considered to be an unreliable method.
He thought psychology needed to restrict itself to objective methods.
Start of behaviorism: classical conditioning (Pavlov)
Law of effect
= the strengthening of successful responses and weaking of unsuccessful responses
Learning: operant conditioning. This is a form of procedural learning. E.g. operant
conditioning underlies addiction
The right path through reward and punishment: basal ganglia (procedural memory)
are the neural implementation of the law of effect. The neurotransmitter is dopamine,
which carries the teaching information for learning the appropriate response to a
stimulus.
Thorndike: “We learn by the gradual selection of the appropriate act or judgment, by
its association with the circumstances or situation requiring it, in just the way that the
animals do.”
Continuity hypothesis
= operant and classical conditioning are applicable to non-humans and humans
Watson: founder of behaviorism. He says: ‘introspection forms no essential part of its
methods, nor is the scientific value of its data dependent upon consciousness. The
behaviorist recognizes no dividing line between man and brute.
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