Please read chapter from one of the remaining chapters. After reading the chapter, please respond to the following questions:
What chapter did you choose? Why?
What were three (3) things from the chapter that you found interesting? Why were they interesting to you? What one (1) thing did you find the least interesting? Why?
What did you read in the chapter that you think will be most useful to in understanding the history of psychology?
How, in what ways, does this chapter relate (build on) to the previous chapters?
What topic would you like to learn more about? Why ?
What ideas did you have while reading the chapter?
Once you are done with your post make list of the terms and terminology you used in your post.
Chapter 15
The first thing I found interesting was reoccurrence of cognitive psychology after the World
War II. Psychologist became very involved with studying the mental processes. Now of coarse this was the most concerned topic for early psychologist as well. However, the cognitive psychology movement in America began during the 1950’s, 1960’s, and 1970’s. This is the period when behaviorism became less of a powerful topic. Outside of psychology, developments in computer science, information theory, and linguistic contributed to the evolution of cognitive psychology. Researchers began to create models of cognitive processes that used the computer program as a metaphor and emphasized concept of the individual as a processor rather than as a reporter to stimuli. Several researchers agreed that Skinnerian behaviorism was not relevant for the study the language development.
The second thing I found interesting was about the laboratory research of cognitive research. It appeared in 1967 with Neisser book. This book also helped produce a self-identification of the field as “cognitive psychology”. Decade later Niesser questioned the basis of cognitive psychology research in the laboratory. He called that there was an increase in cognitive processes research. Cognitive psychology has spread to other specialties within psychology. Cognitive science includes psychology, computer science, linguistics, anthropology, and epistemology. I thought it was very interesting to know that the artificial intelligence field included the study of computer stimulated programs of human cognitive processes and development. Through the developments in cognitive psychology advances were made in understanding the relationship between the brain and behavior, the effect of the social environment on individual behavior, the nature of human personality, and the process of human development.
The third thing that interested me was how this chapter included so many pioneers of psychology. Many of the names I have never been introduced to before, which helped me become more engaged with the material. This chapter discussed many of the disciplines of psychology and the contributors of that time. Floyd Allport and Kurt Lewin are important pioneers in social psychology, but Leon Festinger a student of Lewin developed the most important social psychological theory of the twentieth century, the theory of cognitive dissonance. In developmental psychology the most important figure of the twentieth century was a Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, understanding the growth and development of knowledge and stage theory of cognitive development eventually became influential in America. These are the individuals that got my attention. There were many others listed that helped the growth and development of psychology around the twentieth century.
I actually didn’t find anything that less interesting than one another. I really appreciated the author listing more contributors to certain disciplines of psychology. I liked hearing about all the individuals that helped contribute to psychology. I think that the information about the entire different psychologist will help me better understand the history of psychology through gaining knowledge of who the pioneers of psychology. I feel that this chapter relates to the last chapter through going into detail about cognitive psychology, along with extending the material on other pioneers of psychology throughout several disciplines of psychology. I think I would like to learn more about the processes of developing a cognitive model through computer science. I’ve never heard or seen such, so I would like to research more on that topic.
Terminology: cognitive model, disciplines of psychology, cognitive psychology, stage theory of cognitive development, Jean Piaget, developmental psychology, cognitive dissonance, Leon Festinger, Floyd Allport and Kurt Lewin, cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, computer science, linguistics, anthropology, and epistemology, Cognitive science, Niesser, behaviorism, Skinnerian behaviorism
I chose to do chapter 15 because I felt like it would be a good chapter to end on for this semester. It is called Linking Psychology’s Past and Present. I wanted to see how the author was going to link everything that we had learned so far together.
This chapter really works off every chapter leading up to it by combining some of the trends that have been seen throughout the years. It takes into account women, minorities, and other highlights of psychologies past. It takes some information from most of the chapters it seems and really brings it all together to end the textbook even though the author himself said that his textbook was incomplete because there is so much information out there in the history of psychology. It also takes the information from previous chapters and relates it to how psychology is today.
I am also a Criminology Major and reading about cases like Brown v. Board of Education and Plessy v. Ferguson interested me because I already knew some information about them and had learned about this time in criminology class. I thought that this was interesting because it was one of the biggest movements in the past bringing blacks and white together in a lot of public facilities. These movements led to blacks and other minorities to have equal rights in schooling and to allow them to have access to a higher education. It is interesting that Kenneth and Mamie Phipps Clark were able to get information on the self-esteem of black children and use it to help their cause.
The second thing that I thought was interesting was the part on whether or not psychology was a unified department. The author says that it is only unified in the sense of education and institutional aspects. I agree with him because there are just so many different branches of psychology that it is really all over the place and there is no way for it to all be unified. I like his analogy that it was like a zoo. Some of the different branches of psychology that he included were experimental, developmental, industrial, clinical, school, history of, and health psychology. I think that it is amazing that there are 56 divisions.
I also liked reading about his 5 contemporary trends. They were basically just a summed up history of psychology and where it has come today. The first trend he talked about was the accelerated study of the relationship between brain and behavior, which talked about how psychology is based on the study of the brain and without that it wouldn’t have gotten to where it is today. The second trend was the vigorous return of evolutionary thinking, which has to do with Darwin and other like him. The third trend was significant changes in research brought about by the capacities of modern computers, which was about ANOVA and other research designs created by technology. The fourth trend was the increased professionalization of psychological practitioners, which talked about how professional psychologists and academic psychologists have had an ongoing battle against each other. The fifth trend is the increased fragmentation of psychology.
The only reason I didn’t like reading about the women in Psychologies history is because it has been discussed a lot in this book, but even the author states that he has talked about it multiple times. I remembered what he had said about the women in the past so basically it was just summing up what I had read earlier in the chapter. Just because I didn’t find it interesting doesn’t mean that I don’t think it should have included. I think that it was useful in the last chapter of the textbook.
I think that it is important to take all of the information in this chapter in order to fully understand psychology. If I had to pick one thing for someone to read in order to better understand the history of psychology it would be the five contemporary trends because I feel as though they are a great short summary of the important things that have happened in psychology’s history.
It is hard to say if I had any ideas while reading this chapter because it is all stuff we have already thought about in this textbook. Really while reading this final chapter I was thinking about where psychology will go and which area of the zoo I would most like to help with after graduation. I think that reading this last chapter really had me thinking about me and where I want to go in life. After reading this chapter I would like to learn more about Kenneth and Mamie Phipps Clark because they were able to help minorities in getting equal rights and I am just interested in learning more about what they did and what kind of people they were.
Psychology, Kenneth, Mamie Phipps Clark, Brown v Board of Education, Plessy v. Ferguson, experimental, developmental, industrial, clinical, school, history of, health, contemporary trends, ANOVA, Darwin,
The first topic I found interesting in chapter 15 was Eleanor Gibson mainly because once again we are learning of an undermined women who climbed the ladder of success. Eleanor is most well known for her creation of the visual cliff and also for her study on depth perception in infants. She first started studying psychology at Smith College where she did rat mazes with Harvey Carr, and studied the psychologies history under Boring. Next she studied Gestalt psychology under Koffka but was highly unsatisfied with his teaching methods. Next she studied in a laboratory course under James Gibson who she later fell in love with. The two married and moved to Cornell, but she was unable to get a job through them because of antinepotism rules. Because these rules kept her from employment she labored as an unpaid research associate and won a series of research grants, this is how she was able to create the visual cliff/depth perception study. This research would also later be recognized by the president and she was awarded the highest honor a president can confer on a scientist. After the nepotism rules were dropped she became a full time professor and inspired many students. The statistics toward the end of this section about how today women outnumber psych undergrads 2:1 also blew my mind, but the stat that only 60% who get doctorates are women/most psych faculty are still men made me wonder if we are still facing discrimination?
I found the next section on Mamie and Kenneth fascinating, mainly because I have never heard of this study before but also because there results were inspiring. Mamie, an African American, grew up in a prominent home, her father a physician, in Hot Springs Arkansas. Originally Mamie planned to pursue an education in Math from Howard University but after she met her future husband, Kenneth, he convinced her to major in psychology and they went on to get their masters and doctorate degrees together. The pair is most known for their doll studies where they tested early school age black and white children from the North and South. They gave the children a black doll and a white doll and asked them various questions to determine their self-esteem/ see how they viewed the different races. They concluded that children tend to consider black dolls bad and had a preference for the white ones. Mamie and Kenneth used this information to help persuade the court that the separate but equal clause needed to be abolished because if childhood shapes adulthood, the low self-esteem in childhood could cause black children to suffer in their later years. Eventually the court ruling was overturned and this was a watershed moment for African Americans.
The last section in the chapter that I found interesting was the section about psychology or psychologies. I found this very interesting because I can definitely relate to the argument it possesses. Ever since the development of psychology there have been different specialization areas/divisions and it is even debatable as to whether or not even in the earliest history of psychology was it a unified discipline or were the main elements of its unity that it was different from physiology and philosophy? All though much of this section was already known the components made me think about the way they educate under grad psychology majors and it made me think of better ways of doing it. They should have individual majors for the different subtopics of psychology that way we can get a more in depth education in the area we want to go into and besides that subtopic our gen eds should require us to take several different electives in psychology. In a way our system is kind of set up like that but if we further cut out gen eds think of all the different psychology classes we could take and we could have more advanced/ more in depth specialized classes.
Because this chapter was so short it was hard to pick a specific topic that was uninteresting to me; the trends in contemporary psychology were interesting to read but all in all the structure of the section caused me to just skim through, but in a way I kind of liked this because I was able to see the main idea as quickly as possible.
This chapter really touched on many different things from previous chapters. Again we see the expansion of women into the field, and many of the prior universities/people we studied including: G. Stanley Hall, psychology after the world wars, Calkins, Washburn, Ladd-Franklin, Carr, Boring, Koffka, Gestlat, Kerkes, Hull, etc. I think all in all the most important aspect of the chapter in understanding the history of psychology would be the advances women have made as time has passed/ how it changed during and after the world wars, and the most important for the future: the contemporary trends and the importance of all the different subareas.
Terms: Eleanor Gibson, visual cliff, depth perception, Brown v. Board of Education, Plessy v. Ferguson, Kenneth/Mamie, doll studies, G. Stanley Hall, , Calkins, Washburn, Ladd-Franklin, Carr, Boring, Koffka, Gestlat, Kerkes, Hull.
Of the two chapters left I decided to read chapter fifteen. This chapter was about linking psychology's past and present. This was a fairly short chapter but I managed to find a few things that were interesting.
The first topic in this chapter that I found interesting was the big growth in the membership of the APA over the years. It had a steady expansion from when it began in 1892 to the mid 1920's. It went from 31 members to 125, and then 375 members after WW1. Now in the 21st century, the membership total is right around 100,000. It just amazes me that this association started with so few people and now is almost at 100,000. It goes to show how much psychology has expanded and been made popular over the years. The second thing that I found interesting in this chapter was the secion on minorities in psychology. Issues with minorities in psychology still happen today, not many minorities are recognized for their work. Psychology is still a predominantly a white area, of the minorities in psychology half are African-American, a quarter are Hispanic, and the remainder are Asian-American and Native American. The APA is still addressing this issue, and working to make it more equal. The third thing that I found interesting were the doll studies done by the Clark duo. I found this interesting because it showed that segregation does effect children, and it does effect how they will act as adults. It showed that their self-esteem suffered, and it would have lasting effects on them, well into adulthood. I remember learning about this study in a couple of my other psychology classes as well.
I didn't really find anything in this chapter that was least interesting, it was a shorter chapter. The topic in this chapter that most relates to previous chapters and this history of psychology is the doll studies and it proving the negative effects on self-esteem of children. I think this because it was a brilliant study and it showed that segregation wasn't all it was cracked up to be, and that it was essentially hurting the children in the long run.
Terms: Clark, Doll Studies, Psychology, APA, Minorities,
I thought chapter 15 would be the more interesting chapter out of the two that were left. After all it discusses how what we are learning, the history of psychology, can be connected to the present. I thought it would be beneficial to learn how the things we have talked about this semester can be linked to todays world.
The first subject this chapter talked about that I thought was intriguing was minorities in psychology's history. Women are discussed in almost every psychology course. We discuss their contributions, how hard they worked to get their work noticed by others, and all of the laws and complications they had to overcome. While this is important not only to psychology's history but to American history in general, I can't recall a course where we discussed contributions made by Hispanics, Native Americans, Asian-Americans or African-Americans for the same amount of time we talked about women's contributions. For instance I vaguely remember the doll studies performed by Kenneth and Mamie Phipps Clark. I only remember them a little bit because they are not shoved down our throats like Freud, Watson and Skinner. The doll studies, originally called "Racial identification and preference in Negro children," came from Mamie's Master's thesis. The Clarks would test young white and black children from the North and the South by showing them four dolls. There was a female and a male white doll, and a female and male black doll. They would then be asked questions like, "Show me the doll that you would like to play with," "Show me the doll that looks bad," and "Show me the doll that looks like you." They discovered that the white dolls were preferred by the black children and the black dolls were considered bad. Sometimes the kids even thought they looked like the white dolls. In a different for of the study they were asked to color in the dolls and almost always colored the skin slightly lighter than their own. The Clarks came to the conclusion that segregation lowered the children's self-esteem. They also believed that childhood shapes the adult they become so low self-esteem could cause problems in the future. I think this is interesting because from this study many things happened to broaden psychology, and also because similar studies have been done based off of the dolls study. Although minority group members are still not accurately represented in psychology the APA has done their best to include them in the organization. The APA Council passed a resolution that would allow their annual meeting to be held in states that performed non-discriminatory practices. The APA also created the Board of Social and Ethical Responsibility for Psychology and Board of Ethnic Minority Affairs. In 1974 the Minority Fellows Program started giving financial aid for graduate programs. The Society for the Psychological Study of Ethnic Minority Issues was also created. This shows that minorities are beginning to reach the same level as people such as Freud, Tichner, Darwin, and Rogers. They are also fighting struggles like women had to at one point. It just goes to show how much society and the world is changing.
Another part of this chapter I found interesting was the debate over whether or not psychology is unified or if it ever really has been. The twentieth century psychology is not a unified discipline and because there are debates over the fundamental issues, they are questioning if it had ever been one. What seems to be the main argument is that as psychology has grown so has the different specialties in psychology. The APA has come up with 56 divisions of specialties. A few of them are experimental psychology, psychopharmacology and substance abuse, and international psychology. Sigmund Koch suggested that instead of being a single discipline it is a collection of them. He argued that it should be termed psychological studies rather than psychology. I find this argument interesting because to me it seems that even though there are many different opinions on the fundamentals they are all agreeing that in one way or another the fundamentals are important. They are all studying how different parts of the body react to a certain stimulus. I also didn't know there were 56 divisions of psychology.
Another part of this chapter I liked was the opening paragraph. It discussed the growth of the APA from having only 31 members to reaching 125 to 375 by the time WW1 was over. However, after WW2 there were 5000 members and even that has increased to 70000, Psychology started out being a very limited, unrecognized science and has now become one of the big majors at universities. Grad applications out number the amount of spots they have open. That is what I find interesting. To have only a few disciplines to having 56 is another way to show that the field of psychology has improved. Minorities are now allowed in the field as well. Psychology is not only being expanded by the number of people that have entered the field but also by what these people are learning and discovering.
One part of this chapter I didn't care for when discussing minorities women held a big chunk in the chapter. It is important to know that women have struggled to hold their place in the psychological cannon but the book already had a whole chapter on them. I would have liked to learn more about the different minorities in this chapter. This chapter only discussed one other minority couple, The Clarks. Why not put a few other minorities in this chapter to show what they have over come in psychology?
Terms: APA, Stimulus, Psychological Studies, Psychology, Sigmund Koch, International Psychology, Psychopharmacology and Substance Abuse, Experimental Psychology, Freud, Tichner, Darwin, Rogers, The Society for the Psychological Study of Ethnic Minority Issues, Minority Fellows Program, Psychology Board of Ethnic Minority Affairs, Board of Social and Ethical Responsibility, Doll Studies, Kenneth Clark, Mamie Phipps Clark, Racial identification and preference in Negro children, history of psychology
I decided to read chapter 15 because it talks about women and other minorities, which I think is really interesting. As a whole, these groups have been left out of science and left out of history. I thought it would be interesting to see what contributions they actually made in psychology.
The first thing I found interesting was the section on women in psychology's history. In the 1920's universities had few female professors. Instead of trying to increase this number, they actually replaced most of their female professors with men in order to increase their university's prestige.
While Titchener allowed women to be in his psychology program at Cornell, he did not allow them to be part of his experimentalist club. When Titchener died, the club renamed itself the Society of Experimental Psychologists and allowed women to join. Margaret Washburn and June Downey were made members.
This section interested me because it showed just how much women were excluded from academia. It was thought that having men as professors was more prestigious than having women, so the women were fired. Now this would be considered discrimination and would be illegal, but during the first half of the 20th century this was simply the way things were. I also thought it was interesting that women were allowed to join the SEP. While this seemed promising, very few women were elected into the group. Since the group influenced universities hiring decisions, very few women were given jobs at universities at this time as well.
The second section I found interesting was on Kenneth Clark and Mamie Philips Clark. Kenneth and Mamie were two African American psychologists whose research influenced the decision in Brown V. Board of Education. They were able to show, using "doll studies" that African American children are negatively affected by segregation.
In the "doll studies" African American children were given two dolls. One was white and one was black. The children were then asked which doll they would rather play with, which doll was prettier, and which doll looked more like them. The children thought that the white doll was prettier and would rather play with the white doll. Some kids even claimed that they looked more like the black doll than the white doll. This showed that, because of segregation, African American children were left feeling inferior to white children.
I thought this was interesting because I had heard about this study in the past, but never knew about the people who came up with it, or what it was used for. I think that this was a really innovative way to show the damage caused by segregation, and I'm sure it really influenced the supreme court decision. I would be interesting in seeing what the results would be if this study were done today.
Another section I found interesting was the one that talked about the future of psychology. This section talks about whether psychology is one discipline or multiple disciplines, and whether it has always been this way. Since the beginning of psychology there have been opposing ideas. Psychologists in the 1900's were dissatisfied with the APA and reorganized it, only to have more conflicts develop. The APS was formed because of dissatisfaction with the APA.
Today, there are more than 50 separate divisions in the APA. Psychologists often belong to multiple divisions, but tend to focus in a specific area. Sigmund Koch argues that psychology is not one discipline, but a collection. He recommends that the term psychology be replaced with psychological studies to more accurately represent the collection of interests possessed by psychologists.
This section was interesting to me because I have noticed this division before. We have APA divisions because all psychologists are not interested in the same things. In order to get a masters or PhD in psychology you need to know which area you want to focus on. I have also noticed that different professors at UNI have different ideas and passions. I think it is important that, as psychologists, we are able to explore our own passions. This is what causes innovation. If we were all expected to love and understand biopsychology we would not be as successful as we are.
The section I found the least interesting was the one on the trends in contemporary psychology. The main trends today are the study of the brain and its effect on behavior, the increase in belief in evolutionary thinking, changes brought about by computers, psychological practitioners, and the division of psychology. Each of these sections are growing and becoming more popular.
I thought this section was interesting, but I wish they had gone into more depth about each topic. I wanted to know about the impact of modern technology, but instead I am left curious about it. The same thing happened with each point they had.
I think learning about the evolution of minorities in psychology will help us to understand why certain research has and has not been done. For most of psychology only white men have been studied, because that was all that was available in the universities. I think now we will start to see a shift to studying people of many different races, backgrounds, and genders.
This chapter built on the others in that before we were learning about the history of psychology, and now we are focusing more on the future and the present.
I would like to learn more about the doll studies, or the current trends in psychology. I think it would be interesting to see what studies are being done right now and what direction psychology is headed in.
While reading this chapter I thought a lot about minorities and how much of a struggle it has been to get them included. Women are still less likely to get a PhD and minorities are far less likely than white people to even go to college. Hopefully something can be done to change this, because I believe that white people aren't the only ones with good ideas. I think we could learn a lot from people from different backgrounds if we had the chance.
terms:
Titchener, Washburn, Downey, SEP, Kenneth Clark, Mamie Philips Clark, Doll Studies, Brown V Board of Education, APA, APS, Koch, psychological studies, contemporary psychology
I chose to read chapter 15 because I figured we have gone in order this far and I might as well keep it up for the remainder of the class. I found chapter 15 to be quite interesting. It discussed how the past and present psychology can be linked together. I think this is a good chapter to end the semester because it is a good way to link everything we have learned together and develop a pattern. I enjoyed reading this chapter because I was able to learn some new information that was not presented earlier in the book.
The first thing I found interesting in this chapter was about the trends in contemporary psychology. This section talked about 5 trends that the author of the book finds important and can only be understood with some knowledge in the history of psychology. The first of the trends is the accelerated study of the relationship between the brain and behavior. The author explains this as being rooted in the history of philosophy and physiology. The vigorous return of evolutionary thinking is the second trend. This trend connected the findings from Darwin and his research on evolution to the present of psychology. The third trend was about the changes in research that occurred due to technology. This was interesting because technology has played a huge part in the development of the field of psychology along with about every other scientific field. The 4th trend was the increase in the level of professionalism in psychological practitioners. This was important because it shows how over time practitioners became more like doctors to help the patients. This included better treatments. The 5th was the increased fragmentation in psychology. This was known as the chapter that ends the book and sums up what has been learned.
The next thing I found interesting was the future of psychology. This section talked about how much psychology has and is expanding. It explains how psychology was unified at one point in time but now has a number of different fields that all have separate characteristics. I thought it was interesting how George Miller explained the field of psychology as an intellectual zoo. There are 56 known divisions developed in the APA. A lot of psychologists belong to more than one division. This section was really interesting because it showed how the field of psychology is made up of a lot of different fields that all study different things that link between the brain and the behaviors we emit.
The last section I found interesting was the section about Eleanor Gibson. She is famous for her studies in depth perception in infants. The book talks about how her career in psychology was a case study in perseverance. This accurately sums up the information we learned about minorities in the field of psychology. Like most fields women and minorities were not given the same opportunities as white males. She had a very productive career in psychology and received the National Medal of Science to her in 1992. This was interesting because she is one of only 9 psychologists to ever receive this prestigious award.
All in all I really liked this chapter. It helped me to connect a lot of dots. It acted as a reinforcement to what we have already learned because it reviewed some key information we learned earlier and explained how it has played a role in the development of psychology over time. The history of psychology was not as boring as I had first expected when taking this class. I learned a lot of information in this class that I believe I will be able to use in other psychology classes.
I would like to learn more about Eleanor Gibson. This chapter explained her important research and how she won the award from the president but I would like to learn more about the research and how it was conducted.
Terms: trends, practitioners, Darwin, evolution, philosophy, physiology, George Miller, APA, Eleanor Gibson, and National Medal of Science.
I chose to read Chapter 14 for my final reading blog because chapter 15 seemed to focus primarily on people and dates, which is not my strong suit. Also, browsing through the two chapters, chapter 14 had a more widespread variety of topics, which I liked.
The first thing in Chapter 14 that I found to be interesting was Frederick Bartlett's work on memory. Although he is less known that Ebbinghaus, their work are of equal importance to the field. Bartlett published his studies in a paper titled Remembering, in the early 1900s. I liked reading about Bartlett's work because it added a different point of view compared to the work of Ebbinghaus, which surprisingly, I had not yet come across in all the psychology courses I have taken here at UNI. Perhaps the main difference in the two's work is that Bartlett believed "that research on memory should focus more on the attributes of the memorizer and less on the nature of the stimulus material." Instead of the memorizer passively accumulating memories through repeition, as Ebbinghaus proposed, Bartlett proposed that the memorizer actively organizes the material into meaningful wholes, or schemata. I do this while remembering list of numbers or phone numbers, instead of memorizing the last 4 digits, say 1648 as 1-6-4-8, i remember it at 16-48, which helps tremendously. In more abstract realms, Bartlett believed that we form umbrella schemas that we then then develop into more complex schemas as the number of experiences rises. Personally, I don't get why this was the first time I had read about Bartlett's work because I found it more tangent with my thoughts about memory than the work of Ebbinghaus.
The second thing that I found particularly interesting in Chapter 14 was the section about Social Psychology; social psychology is one of my favorite areas of study. Thanks to the work of Floyd Allport (1890-1978), Social Psychology began to develop as a sub discipline of psychology. It is weird for me to envision past psychology scholars, going about their studies without touching on social psychology-for it hadn't even existed! Allport deliberately worked hard to differentiate between behaviorism, sociology, and social psychology. I could see how, in those times, the three would be very hard to seperate, as they are so intertwined. Allport criticized the concept of "group fallacy" saying that the overall problems of the group did not depend on the group as a whole but rather on the individual persons making up the group. The book then went on to highlight the work of Leon Festinger (1919-1989). Fetinger offered a lot of input to the field of social psychology but his most prominent influence, and perhaps the most important theory to date, was that of cognitive dissonance. The theory of cognitive dissonance is very complex but the book gave a good summary of it. In latent terms, cognitive dissonance refers to one's motivation to be consistent in their thoughts, when there is an inconsistency, one experiences cognitive dissonance. At the dissonance phase, one's actions are motivated by the need to "return to a state of internal consistency.' Perhaps, this is so because of the outside pressure, especially in today's world, that we face that tells us to "be ourselves."
The last thing that I enjoyed reading about in Chapter 14 was Jean Piaget and his influence on Developmental Psychology. We have all most likely heard of Jean Piaget's stages of development but I had not heard of the therm genetic epistemology before, referring to the internal processes that undergo in an individual throughout their development but that are not heredity. This was trippy to read because I have always wondered how it could be that my mother and I are so much a like, yet so much different. Similar to Bartlett's work on memory, Piaget believed that children are "active formulators of their knowledge." Perhaps the experiences that I have had that my mother has not, along with the different time era that we grew up in has made us so different, yet our genetics keep us similar; too similar.
I didn't so much like the sectin about Artifical Intelligence that was included in this chapter because I just find that to be so far fetched and the jargin is very difficult for me to understand. However, I thought this chapter did a greta job of building off of previous chapters by clearly stating the start of certain subdisciplines and how this new work differed from the work of the past. An good example of this would be how the author highlighted Bartlett's work and made clear the differences in his work and the work of Ebbinghaus.
After reading this chapter, I would like to look up more current research studies that have been done, examining memory. Memory is something that really intrigues me, both the formation of memory and the various ways that people can obtian memory loss problems.
Terms used: Jean Piaget, genetic epistemology, artificial intelligence, Leon Festinger, congitive dissonance, social psychology, Frederick Bartlett, schemeta, Ebbinghaus.
I chose chapter 14 because I thought the title was interesting. With everything changing in our country, I think psychology also shifted it's focus a bit. Cognitive psychology had a spiking interest and became a growing field. I wanted to read about why this happened. What going on in our country at that post war time lead to this uprising? I really enjoy reading about Skinner so I wanted to see if this chapter talked about anything I may not know about his work.
I really enjoyed the section on Frederick Bartlett and constructing memory. I think it is very interesting that the book was, at first, ignored in the U.S. People who reviewed it said that it made no significant contribution to the area. I thought it was very interesting that now we look at it as one of his best contributions. It goes to show that you should not take something like that at face value. You should read it and honestly try to understand it.
I also thought that the section on artificial intelligence to be interesting. It tells you what sparked the interest in this field. One thing I was thinking about during this section is if we should continue in this field. We are improving our intelligence in AI more and more as time moves on. At some point I think they will reach their goal of mirroring human cognitive functions in robots. This is a fascinating thought, but one that sparks a lot of debate. Once we accomplish the goal, do we keep trying to make it better? What is the ultimate reason for their desired outcome? How will it better society?
The third section that peaked my interest was the one on social psychology. I think it is fascinating to see how people react in everyday social situations. Social psychology has a lot to do with antecedents and environment that, together, elicit a behavior. The work Festinger did on cognitive dissonance is very interesting. I think it is important because we have all had that feeling of anxiety when our thoughts do not match the majority. This theory explains why and how these feelings occur. Being aware of this can help us stand up for what we think is right, even if it does not go with the group. Chances are that you are not alone in those thoughts.
I found the section on evaluating cognitive psychology to be the least interesting. I think the author does a good job presenting a lot of information on the subject. I just cannot help but think that subconsciously he was writing the section to mirror his views and thoughts. This is not to say that they are not beneficial, it just makes me read with more skepticism.
I think this chapter did a good job explaining the changes in psychology after World War II. Cognitive psychology really got going. Studies in this area also lead to areas such as personality and social psychology. These fields give us a better understand on why people act and think the way they do. We can try to understand antecedents and what stimuli elicits what behaviors. They all can lead to a better society for all of us to live in.
This chapter builds on previous chapters because it moves us further along on the timeline. We can see the development of psychology as a whole. This chapter brings us almost all the way up to where we are today regarding different areas of study. I can definitely sense a more modern feel to this chapter because it is about schools of thought that are prominent today.
I would like to know more about personality and traits. I have yet to take a psychology course that had a lot to do with personality. I would like to learn more about personality and what we know about it to decide whether or not to take a course on it.
My main idea while reading this chapter is what is next for us. What event or events will occur that will shift the focus of psychology? What ways will we use new areas of psychology in the future to better our society? It is important to apply the new concepts we learn to the real world to better us all.
terms: social psychology, personality, elicit, cognitive psychology, Frederick Bartlett, constructing memory, artificial intelligence, cognitive dissonance, anxiety, human cognitive functions, Festinger, theory
After reading this chapter I found three things interesting. The first thing I found interesting was schemata. It is cool how our brains actively organize our information into little worlds. It helps our brains to figure out things. It also can cause us to be reluctant to change because the change may not fit into our schemata. The second thing that I found interesting was serial order problem. This chapter is talking a lot about how our brain organizes information. I find it very interesting because the brain is such a mysterious part of the body. The third thing I found interesting was selective filter. This is something that people with ADHD don’t have a very strong sense of. I also found it interesting because my family would always say my grandpa has selective hearing when really it’s just he selects where his attention goes to. In this chapter the thing that I found the least interesting was TOTE. It seems really confusing and I am not sure what it is about so it was hard and interesting to read.
In this chapter the most useful thing would be all the information on memory. Memory is a big part of psychology and having a good bases of memory is helpful when learning psychology. In previous chapter there was some talk about memory. I did some research on types of memory. This chapter talks about memory and how our brain organizes information. The last chapter talked about the mentally ill and how they processes information. I would like to learn more about the difference between the way normal people organize information and the way the mentally ill process information. It would be interesting to know what makes the mentally ill different than the normal. While reading this chapter I was thinking about how much memory a person has. I am only twenty and I remember so many things. When I was younger I always thought my memory would cap at some point.
Terms: ADHD, TOTE, schemata, serial order problem
My computer turned off when I was half way done writing my blog, so I am a little pissed of and lack motivation, but here we go.
Chapter 14 was an interesting one to read because of all the information that it covered throughout the chapter. One of the things that I liked from the chapter was the section on Bartlett and memory. As I am rewriting this blog I remember what I said the first time, but that is irrelevant. The second thing that I enjoyed reading about this chapter was the section on Magical numbers, selective filters, and TOTE units. The third thing that I enjoyed reading from this chapter was the section on artificial intelligence. One area of this chapter that I did not like the best was the section on personality psychology. I just that it was the least fun thing to read about, but would be interested to read more into the discipline. I will also talk about how this chapter relates to the last chapter, how this chapter helped me into my understanding of psychology, what I would like to learn more about, and then finally some ideas that I had while reading the chapter.
Like I said earlier, the first section that I like from the chapter was the section on Bartlett and memory. I liked this section because I got to learn about the history of the memory information that I learned in my introductory classes. The first definition that I came across was schema. This is basically active organization. The book gave a great example of this by talking about how other people might have different schema's based on ones experiences. The example was the one person might view death differently than another person based on their schema's. One cool experiment that I read about in this section was on the faces experiment that Bartlett conducted. He had participants look at five faces for an amount of time and then asked those participants to tell him the order, and the details of the faces that they had just observed. He found out that people were more likely to tell back the first and the last faces correctly. The middle faces were not as accurate. The second part of the experiment was for them to tell details about the faces that they had just observed. He found out that details were hard to recognize no matter the order, but more for the middle faces. Another experiment that Bartlett conducted that he was famous for was the native american study. He read them a 328 word story that had to go with some native american thing. He tracked down some of the participants later on in life and asked them to recall the story. What he found out is that the people would recall the information using constructs that they already had about the story (or what seemed right to put in a native american story). He also found out that the people were making up different endings of the story based on schema's that they had formed. These were both cool experiments that Bartlett conducted. I guess that I would be able to retell my blog back to you, but that is a totally different experiment.
The second thing that I found interesting in this chapter was the section on magical numbers, selective filters, and TOTE units. This was an interesting section because I got to read about the different ways that the human remembers information. One of the ways was chunking. This is the information that is held in the immediate memory. Recoding is the ability that humans have to fit more information into our chunking memory. dichotic listening was coined off the experiment that George Miller conducted were he had two headphones with completely different content going into each ear. He found out that humans use different channels to interpret information. Selective filter is the fact that humans use a filter when listening to two different sources of information. The filter works by selecting the important information from one source and another. Many people like to call this the cocktail party effect. Another thing that Miller discovered from this study was the fact that humans can only remember 7+-2. Which means that the working memory can only remember 9 to 5 things at a given moment. TOTE was confusing to read about, but the things that I got from it is that TOTE is a feedback system.
The third thing that I liked from the chapter was the section on Artificial Intelligence. This was interesting because I had never got to learn about this in any other class that I have a taken at UNI. Herbert Simon and Alan Newell were the main guys that were behind the start of AI. The definition of AI is that humans wanted to know if computers could act with some degree of intelligence. An algorithm is a set of rules guaranteed to produce a solution by working systematically through all possible steps. A heuristic is a more creative approach that is more efficient that an algorithm. Simon created a program that had installed a GPS. The first heuristic was the means ends analysis which was a feedback system. The main thing that I found interesting was the Turing Testing which was when they actually tested to see if the computer had the intelligence of a human. There were two sides of the argument and those were the Strong AI and the weak AI. Strong AI thought that through a systematic set of rules, a computer had the intelligence capacity of a human. The weak AI said that strong AI lacked creativity. A perfect example of this is done through the chinese room problem. If you were trapped in a room with a chinese person and had a set of rules on how to say chinese then you could escape the room or whatever. The thing is that you had no idea of how to speak chinese, but you had the rule book. If you believe in this experiment than you are said to have strong AI because you believe that intelligence is based on knowing/executing a set of rules. Thought that this was interesting because I thought that it was absurd that people think that computers are smarter than humans. They may be able to execute functions faster than a human, but what separates us from computers is our creative abilities.
The one thing that I did not like from the section was the part on personality psychology. The main things that I took away from this section was the nomothetic and idiographic. nomotheic is the approach to psychology that focuses on the individual. The actual discipline that studies this is called idiographic. The main man behind this field is Gordon Allport. I would not say that I did not like this section, but it was not my favorite. I know that UNI provides a course on this area, and maybe it is something that I would like to look into to see if I could gain another opinion on the topic.
This chapter relates to last chapter in the sense that the book is progressing faster as we go from chapter to chapter. I say this because by now psychology is becoming a popular field, and not looked down apon. As we go from chapter to chapter I am starting to see that we are given more information within the chapter. The people are becoming more relevant, and the topics more relevant to our times. I am soon beginning to realize that soon information will stop being so much history, but more present. Soon it will be information that is happening on the 2000's. Soon it might be someone from this class that is in the knew edition of this book. This may be something that should be in my thoughts section, but I feel that it is relevant now. The progression has to be moving forward to us now. I have been saying this whole time that psychologists are learning from the psychologists before them, and making the field and themselves better in the process. It is becoming more evident that it will soon be someone in my time period that makes the next discovery, and I bet you that it is something that they learned from a psychologist before them.
This chapter helps me in my understanding of psychology because I got to learn more about cognitive psychology. Without reading this chapter I would not be able to know the history behind the terms that I learned in my introductory courses that I have taken at UNI. I would not have realized the reach cognitive psychology has on the whole psychology field. I would not have know that famous psychologists that the chapter talked about. Bartlett was the person that I liked to read about the most in this chapter, and I did not know about him or who he was, but I did know what terms he coined.
I would like to learn more about Bartlett. He seemed like a very interesting person when i was reading about him during the chapter. It seems fitting that I would do my last topical blog article on him because I feel that it would be cool to learn more about who he was as a person. The book mentioned a few things about his personal life, but I know that there is a lot more that it left out that I could find. The thing that I would focus on in my blog is why memory. I like to know why the psychologist choose to research in their respective areas, and it usually comes down to a certain life event that influenced them in that certain direction.
My main thoughts that I had during this chapter I talked about already a little bit. I was just amazed on how the book is progressing, and how fast the information is becoming relevant to our time period. Psychology has not been around for the longest time, and it just makes me wonder whats next for the field. Will there be another Pavlov, Freud, Watson, etc that comes into the field and revolutionizes they way we think things. Or has psychology seen the best of its days, and know all we can do know is tweak the thoughts of the already great?
Terms: Bartlett, memory, schemata, facial memorization, George Miller, magical numbers, TOTE units, recoding, chunk, dichotic listening, selective filter, AI, algorithm, heuristic, means-ends analysis, GPS, LT, turing test, Strong AI, Weak AI, chinese room problem, personality psychology, nomothetic, idiographic, Gordon Allport
The chapter that I chose to read was chapter fourteen, psychological science in the post-war era. I choose this chapter because I felt the author made the chapters transition into each other in the past, and it would be build into the past chapter. I also wanted to learn more about the impact the war had on psychology as a whole, therefore I was interested! The three things that I found most interesting are memory tasks done by Bartlett, George Millers work on amount of memory, and artificial intelligence. I found the memory tasks to be very fascinating. The author went into great detail about the military man stimulus task, and it made me feel like I could relate to the actual study. Each post card resembled a man with small detailed features that varied in each photo. When the subjects were tested they found many mistakes. The subjects memory were subjective to their prior experience. He then moved on to a study where the retelling of a story was of interest. I really enjoyed that the author put the actual story in the text to make the reader totally understand. Memory is something that effects everyone, and I found it interesting to learn about the first person to perform studies on it. The second thing that was interesting was the section on magical numbers by George Miller. I have learned about this in small bits from past classes but never read about it in its’ entirety. This made me think about how many things are in numbers of 9 and words of 5. Things like phone numbers, zip codes, addresses, and so much more! I am more curious how they controlled for this study and what were the issues with it. Chunking is also something that I use in my own life that I enjoyed learning about. It made me think about where I learned how to do this, or was it a natural occurrence? The final thing about this chapter that was of interest to me was the artificial intelligence. Computer science made such a change in psychology that its hard to not mention it in this post. The artificial intelligence is that machines can act with intelligence, and looking in retrospect from todays modern psychology it obviously can. So many of our statistics and studies would not be available this early. I have always looked at psychology as something that needs to be done by a person, but after taking a course where we learned about he strong, mmpi, and other exams using computers, I realized what a large role they play. I am also getting introduced to statistics in my research methods course, and I am sure I will learn so much more about algorithms, heuristic, and means-end analysis. This section made me think about how many of my professors talk about when they were in college not even twenty years ago doing their work by hand. It makes me think about how much psychology still is evolving. I think understanding the aspect of technology in psychology is one of the most important thing to understand in psychology. It plays such a huge role in every aspect of our life, and psychology
Key Terms: George Miller, Chunking, Strong, MMPI, algorithms, heuristic, means-end analysis, Bartlett, Cognitive Memory,
I really enjoyed reading chapter fifteen about how psychology's past relates to its present. I thought this was a necessary chapter that helped piece everything we've learned throughout the course of this semester together. Going from one chapter to the next, the history of psychology seems to be quite "choppy" and it's true that the only thing truly uniting the field of psychology is its own history. With so many different subjects studied and so many different mentalities adopted by advocates of various schools of psychology, it's easy to get lost in each particular discipline and forget that they share a history. This chapter pieces together the different chapters of the book, putting each into perspective and helping the reader realize the importance of psychology's history.
Even though psychology is a very young science, it's amazing to see how much the field has changed over time. One of the most notable changes found in the chapter of this book is the recent increase in women and minorities in psychology. Though women as scientists were not taken seriously until recently, there were still a number of women (such as Mary Calking, Margaret Washburn, and Christine Ladd-Franklin) who made priceless contributions to the field and encouraged others to get involved. The same goes for minorities; the book says that in 1991, only 14 percent of bachelors, 11 percent of masters, and 9 percent of doctoral degrees were granted to minorities studying psychology. It's amazing to think that this was only 20 years ago. Reflecting on my own experiences as a psychology major, I see a drastic difference in the demographic already.
I really enjoyed reading about the trends in psychology as well. Although each school of thought in psychology has had its own important milestones, it's easy to get lost in them and forget about milestones of psychology at large. The book lists five main trends that can be seen throughout psychology's history, including: the accelerated study of the relationship between the brain and behavior, the return of evolutionary thinking, significant changes in research brought about by computers, increased professionalism of psychological practitioners, and the increased fragmentation of psychology. Each of these trends can be seen when we look at psychology's early history and see what it has evolved to today. These changes seem to be taking place at an exponential pace; as technology evolves and we learn more about the field of psychology, we find that it is a very exciting period of time to be studying psychology. No doubt will significant psychological findings take place during students' lifetimes.
I also found the last section of the book to be very interesting. This section draws upon the last of the trends mentioned-- the increased fragmentation of psychology. While we see that the field of psychology has certainly been unified when we look to its past, reflecting on what it is now, we see that there are significant changes from one school to the next. With such enormous growth and increased specialization, we find more differences than similarities between different schools. Consider the vast difference between Freudian psychodynamics and Maslow's Humanistic model. Humanistic psychology may have evolved as a response to the deficits seen in other psychological schools, but that's really all it has in common- a history. Koch argues that it may be best to start thinking of each school as an entirely different field, and as changes progress for each school of thought, the more apparent this realization will be for scholars.
There was honestly nothing in this chapter that was boring to me. It was easy to see the connections between my personal experiences as a psychology student and the previous readings with what this chapter had to say about the history, present, and future of psychology. It seemed to summarize the importance of studying the history, which helped put this entire course into perspective. Honestly, it may be my favorite chapter in the book. Reading this chapter was certainly helpful in that it elucidated the importance of studying the history of psychology.
I would be interested to see if there are any more trends that psychologists have noted over time. Perhaps there are follow ups about these trends that have been noted after this textbook was published, and maybe there are entirely new trends that have only recently been recognized. I would like to take a step back to look the field at large and see where it is going.
One thing that I wondered throughout the chapter was the importance of certain historical events and individuals in the history of psychology. Adopting a personalistic model of history means that this field would not be where it is without the advancements of specific individuals. However, it may just be that psychology would naturally evolve the way it did-- regardless of the individuals who happened to pioneer the different schools of psychology. After an entire course on the history of psychology, it's impossible to say whether the personalistic or naturalistic models have the real answer. I wonder if there will ever be a way to answer such broad questions.
Terms: Mary Calkins, Margaret Washburn, Christine Ladd-Franklin, APA, trends, evolutionary pscyhology, Freud, psychodynamics, Maslow, Humanism, humanistic pscyhology, Koch, individualistic model of history, naturalistic model of history
The chapter I choose to read and blog about this week was chapter 14. The reason for this is partly due to the fact that it was really only one of two chapter left in the book that we as a class have not covered. Another reason and one more suited to the answer your looking for is that I find events and findings related to wars enjoyable. No matter how many times you read about a war there is always something new to learn and in this case it’s in the field of psychology.
The first thing I found of interest was artificial intelligence (AI). A field in applied computer science that attempts to examine whether machines can act with some intelligence. The general topic that workers in this field focus on is trying to understand human intelligence by writing computer programs that can act out human cognitive processes. Two nonpsychologist pioneers by the names of Simon and Newell were two of the first to combined their knowledge of decision making and thinking and problem solving to come up with Logic Theorist (LT). A way to solve problems in a formal logic, just to be passed up with a more ambitious General Problem Solver (GPS) with a broader range of problem solving abilities later on. In order for LT and GPS to work there has to be some kind of programming and that programming comes in two forms; algorithms and heuristics. Algorithms are a set of rules that systematically work though all possible steps to produce a solution, where as a heuristic use’s a more creative strategy closely related to that of the humans “rule of thumb” that doesn’t always lead to a solution but is more efficient. To go even further into the aspect of heuristic, the basis in which GPS was built on, was called a means-ends analysis. Now, even after reading this section twice I’m still not sure how or what it is suppose to do, so I’m going to wing it and make it sound scientific. The means-end analysis is a way to get the computer end of AI to think out the process used in solving a problem, in that of how a human would.
With that all said and done, that was the older approach to AI. Since then AI has taken a different turn, one that involves merely performing a task in the most efficient way possible regardless of how a human would go about it. A way of dealing with a problem intelligently and with expert precision like that of a computerized chess program that can beat the world-class human player. It was this usage that brought about the question whether or not a computer could think. To test this question was Alan Turing, a brilliant mathematician who helped break the German code during WWII. His test was known as the Turing test and what it did was quite simple; he had a human and computer both come up with an answer to a situation and from these sets of answers had a questioner try to distinguish between the human and machine. If said questioner could not determine the difference between the two, then computers can think just like humans.
With the knowledge out there of computers thinking equally to humans critics arose from the shadows. Those that supported a strong AI (equivalent to human thinking) believed that human and computers both use the same rule-bound system of symbol manipulation. As for the weak AI John Searle had that covered. Arguing that strong AI’s were not justified and came up with the Chinese Room problem to illustrate his point.
I think the most useful thing I learned in reading this section is that a lot of thought is put into the programming of AI’s, along with incorporating the human aspect of thinking and problem solving. Some things that crossed my mind while I read were, in all these movies we watch; Ironman, Transformers, and Terminator we all think how cool it would be if that was real. In all reality some, if not all, of it is real, it’s just not public knowledge. The movies are a way of giving us hints of what is out there or is coming, we just have to pay attention.
Terms: AI, LT, GPS, algorithm, heuristic, means-end analysis, Simon, Newell, Turing, Turing test, string AI, weak AI, Chinese Room problem,
I decided to skip ahead to the last chapter of the book, chapter 15. I chose it because I like to see where the study is going, now that I know the gist of where it comes from. I see the last chapter of any textbook to be somewhat of a call to action, as though we now know the past so it is our duty to pick up where others left off.
One part that I wasn't very interested in was the large portion of this chapter that was focused on diversity. I understand that it is important for any field to be diverse, and I think that it was important to include this section in the book. However, I think it should have been a chapter on its own, so the last chapter could focus more on where the actual science is headed, as opposed to the social structure of the people studying it.
I was interested in the part that talked about studying the relationship between the brain and behavior, because I have noticed that the word "neuroscience" pops up quite frequently nowadays. However, one huge risk that comes up when studying brain scans, etc. is to read too much into the actual image, inferring that everything that lights up during a cognitive task must directly deal with that cognitive task.
I also like that psychology deals with evolution, because everything that we are -including how we think- derives from the differential net reproductive success of previous humans. There could have been people who thought in a completely different way, who just happened to reproduce a little bit less, and now they just do not exist. This concept plays a huge role in the area of social psychology.
I agree with the book that our study has been greatly affected by the capabilities of computers. Although it is still extremely confusing, statistical analysis is so much easier to do now that we have computers that do all of the calculations for us and generate easily readable graphs. We wouldn't have nearly as many studies, or nearly as large of studies, without the help of computers.
I also really liked the fact that this chapter implied that there really hasn't ever been one unified psychology, because different researchers got into the category of "psychology" by studying different things, and they all thought that their explanation was right. This can be seen all throughout the book; philosophers asked questions about why humans behave in a certain way, and then found a scientific way to study it. Physiologists got into psychology by studying much different things. Each group's work was compromised when they were grouped into the field of "psychology."
I believe that it is beneficial for the different areas of psychology to diverge into their own disciplines. To receive a well rounded education, a student must understand the basic concepts of all forms of psychology, but the divergence of the different fields will also be beneficial. First, it will allow the student to get deep within research of one area and find something that interests them. Second, there are so many theories in psychology that contradict one another; if they are from two different fields, it is easier for both concepts to be regarded as true. Third, the divergence of many different psychologies would help to grow the field altogether; there would be more job and research opportunities if people are focusing on many different things.
Terms:
Diversity, Science, Social Structure, Relationship, Brain, Behavior, Neuroscience, Cognitive, Evolution, Reproduce, Social, Psychology, Researchers, Theories, Contradict.
The first thing I found interesting in chapter 15 was the women in psychology's history section. This section discusses and recaps the struggles women went through during psychology's history. I found it interesting that women struggled so hard obtain the knowledge needed, yet some women still found a way. I also found it interesting that women experienced more of a struggle in the 1920 than they had previously. Prior to the 1920, women were still able to teach in schools, though not in graduate programs. However, in the 1920's these women were being replaced by men to enhance the schools' prestige. Another thing I found interesting was that although women began to become allowed to join psychology groups, it was very unknown, for women were left out of pictures, not voted into positions, nor rarely spoken of. It was like these groups were allowing women into the groups, yet completely ignoring them once allowed.
The second thing, or person, I found interesting was Eleanor Gibson, and her story of perseverance. I found Gibson's story interesting because of her dedication to her work, and to the completion of it. I was inspired by her perseverance to obtain a degree, even when Yerkes (who we had previously learned about) told her he does not have women work in his lab. I was also interested in learn of her work with the visual cliff in infants. I find this visual cliff theory interesting, so it was nice to finally understand the history of its creator. Eleanor is a great example of not only perseverance, but a great example of over coming barriers to achieve a goal.
The third thing I found interesting in this chapter how influential the Brown v. Board of Education case was, determining that the separate but equal did not apply to education. This decision paved the way for minorities and their advancements. Like women, minorities hardly made advancements in psychology prior to this chapter. I find it interesting that 'separate but equal' was found not to apply to education, but still able to be applied to other forms, such as public restrooms and restaurants. I had never thought of minorities as having problems prior to this chapter, mostly because I had just assumed men in this group was succeeding like white men. However, I was wrong so it was interesting to see their advancements, like the ones in self-esteem in black children.
There was not one thing I did not like about this chapter. The chapter was short, and did a great job wrapping up the book and the overall history of psychology.
This chapter is important to understanding the history of psychology because, to me, it shows that psychology is not done growing and evolving. That although this is the last chapter of the book, it is not the last chapter in the history of psychology.
In this chapter, it builds on things learned in previous chapters. When it discusses Eleanor Gibson's schooling, it takes about her doing studies with rats with a student of Harvey Carr, and studying psychology's history with a student of E.G Boring. If we had not read the previous chapters, we would not have understood who these people were, and what they had contributed to psychology.
I would like to learn more about Eleanor Gibson because her story is so inspirational. I would like to learn more about her struggles, especially her time with Yerkes.
While reading this chapter I realized that I have learned a lot about the history of psychology, more than I thought I would. While reading, I wondered what would come after this chapter, what new advances in the history of psychology could be added on the this book, adding chapters.
Terms Used: Eleanor Gibson, Yerkes, visual cliff, minorities, Brown v. Board of Education, Harvey Carr, E.G Boring
Chapter 15
One of the first things that caught my eye while reading this chapter was the section on Eleanor Gibson and the cute picture of her as an older woman shaking the hand of former President George W. Bush. Her story was very inspirational. Hearing about how badly she wanted to do research, something she really loved to do even after she was turned down and faced multiple hardships simply for being a woman. It's really teaches it's readers a lesson about endurance towards goals. Had she not persevered, she never would have achieved what she did or helped those school perform amazing research. It was also interesting to read what her former student wrote about her and how brilliant of a professor she was and how insightful her ideas were. However, it makes me very thankful that the Woman's Movement and the Civil Rights Act have already been put in motion. Although we live in a world run by patriarchs, it's people like Eleanor Gibson that are making the strides necessary to enforce equality.
Another thing that'd I liked in this chapter was the section about minorities in psychology's history. As a female preparing myself for the struggle to work up in a male dominated field, it was interesting and nearly devastating to read more about other minorities who have yet to have a significant representation in this field even after WWII. Women have been working their way up for quite awhile now and have made significant strides, however, we can't forget about the other minority groups that have yet to make those amazing strides. This paragraph was a fantastic reminder that we can't overlook progression created by people like Wertheimer or Lewin. It was also great to read that the APA is addressing these issues with a Commission on Ethnic Minority Recruitment.
A third thing that I liked from this chapter involved the case of Brown vs. Board of Education. This case is extremely popular in our history and I believe is important to understand. What I find the most interesting from this section, however, involves how this relates to psychology. It was unknown to me that this case relied heavily on the evidence that psychologist provided through extensive research involving segregation on young African Americans. I really found this interesting because I had no idea how psychology could have such an effect on the court system of that time with that case. It's very neat to learn that something so big in our history was determined by something that I am so familiar with, yet we never hear of those psychologists work on that case, which is really too bad. Another thing from this section that I found interesting was that the psychologists took this one step further and kept research on another huge move that made major advancements in American History, yet people still have no idea of psychology's major contribution. They kept studies on the self-esteem of African American children which is what made so many attributes to American History involving Civil Rights.
Something that I didn't like from this chapter was the section about the future of psychology or psychologies. I thought the section was rather dry and boring. Also I don't agree with what the section implies. I think that psychology as field needs to stay intact as one field. I understand that there are different approaches to this field, however, I think that those approaches need to continue in a forward motion together. Right now we need to focus on research in psychology. Not the division of 56 approaches. We would accomplish more as one field and one science, the separation is pointless and just leads to simple office work, not scientific advances.
I think that knowing about the strides that people have gone through to bring psychology to where it is now is something very important that will be of great value to understand, especially as a female. Its' stories like these that are something that I need to remember what the going gets tough in this field. Perseverance is something that needs to be more prevalently known. This is why I believe that the story of Eleanor Gibson is something that we all should know about.
I would like to learn more about how psychology has influenced court decisions throughout the years, with heavy regard to major historic cases such as Roe vs Wade. I would like to know about how psychology has encouraged the court to see their research findings as relevant and important in their major decision.
The big ideas that I had while reading this chapter revolved around how the psychologists presented their evidence in the court systems. I wonder if they were only able to present portions of their findings at a time due to some weir court rules that we hear of sometimes or if the court would find anything circumstantial or what sorts of things the psychologists had to deal with when presenting their evidence to the court.
Terms: Eleanor Gibson, Civil Rights, women's movement, Brown vs Board of Education, Wertheimer, Lewin.
I liked this chapter because it finally links Psychology’s past with its present. This chapter essentially sums up why we have to learn the history of psychology in the first place: to fully utilize the present. Psychology has grown and changed over the past one hundred years. Not only has the American Psychological Association grown from 31 members at its conception to over 100,000 members in the present, but the science has also become more diverse and psychologists have begun to specialize in certain areas. Professionals are no longer referred to simply as “psychologists.” There are now developmental psychologists, social psychologists, industrial-organization psychologists, etc. I think the thing that I will take away from this chapter is that every little thing in all of the previous chapters helped to define the many different subfields of psychology as we know it today.
The first thing that I found interesting was the section on Kenneth B. and Mamie Phipps Clark. I often wonder how groups of people who were segregated in certain fields were able to break those chains and thrive in society. The Clarks are the perfect example of this. They were researchers in a field dominated by white males and by research that suggested white supremacy (through biases). The fact that they were able to overcome that and have their research taken seriously is, in itself, very impressive.
I had learned about these doll studies before, and wondered the same things I think about right now. The doll studies pretty much show common sense: a group that is discriminated against will have low self-esteem. I still find the results somewhat strange. Young African American children actually preferred the light skinned dolls. One would think that if you were being suppressed by a group of people that you would dislike that group, but this shows that African Americans truly felt inferior to Caucasians.
The second thing I that I found interesting was the minorities in psychology’s history. I could not believe that Jewish Americans also faced struggles in finding jobs. The story about Robert Woodworth and his letters of recommendation shocked me. That he would consider it a praise to write that someone was not a “typical Jew,” and should thus actually be considered for the position was appalling. However, Jews were not thought to be mentally inferior and did not suffer the same scrutiny as African Americans did. Thankfully Brown vs. the Board of Education successfully ended separation of different ethnicities in public schools.
The third thing that I found interesting was the section called “The Future: Psychology or Psychologies?” I have alluded to this idea many times not only in this post but in previous posts as well. Psychology is now such a broad term and encompasses so much. One cannot be referred to simply as a psychologist anymore. If there continues to be much more division in the field, there may be a need to separate the studies completely into two different sciences. As Psychology grows and evolves, it may branch off into many different directions.
The thing that I did not find interesting was the section on Eleanor Gibson’s life. Giving her entire background was boring, long, and dull. I did not dislike the entire section however, as her accomplishments are worthy of recognition. The thing that I think will be the most useful to understanding the history of psychology. This chapter builds on all previous chapters because it brings everything full circle. Chapter 15 wraps up the book by bringing elements from all previous chapters together. I would like to learn more about the doll studies because something about them just tugs at my interest.
Terms: Kenneth and Mamie Clark, Eleanor Gibson, Brown vs. the Board of Education, Doll Studies
The chapter that I chose to reads was chapter 15. The reason I chose to read this chapter was because I would feel odd reading all the chapters of a book but the final one, it makes it seem like you’re missing the ending in a way.
The first thing that I found interesting about this chapter was reading about Eleanor Gibson overcoming barriers in life to become the first woman National Medal of Science winner for a lifetime of research on topics from depth perception to the process of reading. One interesting thing that I remember from what she did was the “visual cliff” that studied how depth perception had evolved in infants. The reason I found her story interesting was because she had to go through so much trouble to be who she is. An example in particular I am thinking of would be when she wanted to work for Yerkes and was dismissed because she was a woman and he wouldn’t allow women in his laboratory. Through all of this she kept on trying and eventually became a respected member of the psychological world. Eleanor Gibson’s story is very interesting and a true showing of perseverance.
The second thing I found interesting was also along the lines of perseverance and that was the story of minorities in the history of psychology. The interesting thing about this is how minorities overcome adversity even more than women. Unlike minorities, women started to get the respect they needed with the emergence of the women’s movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s but minorities were left behind. It was very trying especially for African Americans because of the stereotype on their intellectual levels. Eventually things started to change and people like Kenneth and Mamie Clark helped to create equality and end segregation in the school systems. I like this because when minorities overcame obstacles they changed the whole face of our country by doing so.
The final thing that I liked about this chapter was at the end when they started to talk about how there are so many different types of psychologies that it is only reasonable that the science will continue to expand and become more diverse and exciting with time. This was interesting because it is exciting to see what the future holds for psychological studies.
There is really nothing that I disliked about this chapter because it was short there wasn’t a lot that I had to choose to dislike; that and I found the last chapter all pretty interesting. This chapter builds on other chapters because it kind of shows where psychology has been and then shows where it could be going and just ties all the examples of the previous chapter into explaining these things. A topic that I would like to learn more about would be Eleanor Gibson. Her whole life just seems very interesting and I would like to learn more than the page-and-a-half that the book had to offer on her life. An idea that I had while reading this chapter was how in one part it talked about things with computers and how that brought about change in how we can measure correlation and relation and how computers make life so much easier. The reason I thought about this was because I am in a psychological stats class right now and it is amazing how fast computers can do ANOVA equations on research designs and how long it takes me to do them by hand. Every lab class I am thankful for that computer program.
Terms: Eleanor Gibson, National Medal of Science, depth perception, process of reading, “visual cliff”, Yerkes, women’s movement, Kenneth and Mamie Clark, psychology, psychological studies, ANOVA, research design, correlation, psychological stats, relation.
RB
For my final reading activity blog, I opted to read chapter 14 and write about it. It was a tough decision between chapters 14 and 15, especially since chapter 15 essentially sums up the entire book and class, but I selected 14 instead. I chose to do chapter 14 for two reasons. One, because the title of the chapter caught my eye and two, because the chapter center on the topic of cognitive psychology. As one who enjoys history though, it was more about the title that made me chose chapter 14.
In reading through the chapter, of all the topics presented in the material, the most interesting topic to me that pertained to cognitive psychology was that of the focus on artificial intelligence. Defined as the field that tries to examine if machines can act with some degree of intelligence. This field of psychology that tries to evaluate artificial intelligence can be divided into two separate categories. The first category pursues an understanding in human intelligence, by using computer programs to that stimulate human cognitive processing. Both Herbert Simon and Alan Newell were pioneers in this field. In collaborating their computer skills, they came up with two programs of problem solving. The first was Logic Theorist (LT) and the second was the General Problem Solver (GPS). The second category is to create computer programs that perform specific tasks in the most efficient ways possible. The second approach is the more modern one. The programs are meant to deal with problems intelligently.
Another topic that I found interesting in this chapter was that of Donald Hebb’s contributions to psychology. In looking at the brain and behavior, Hebb proposed that cortical organization occurs through the development of cell assembles and phase sequences. The cell assembly is the basic unit of neurons that associate with one another through repeated contact. Phase sequences are higher level organizations of cell assemblies. This came to be known as Hebb’s rule or Hebb synapses.
The final topic that I found to be interesting was that of Alan Turing’s contribution to psychology through artificial intelligence. In branching off of the second approach of artificial intelligence, Alan Turing came up with his own game that would test whether computers could actually think for themselves. This imitation game came to be known as the Turing test. A person in a separate room asks two questions to another person and a computer in a separate room. Based on the answers given by both subjects, the questioner had to determine which subject was the human and which one was the computer.
Of all the topics presented in in this chapter, I feel that the one that I least enjoyed was probably when I had to reread over the B.F. Skinner in the Evaluating Cognitive Psychology section. It just wasn’t very fun to read, as I have read about him again and again in these past chapters.
I think the one thing that will be most useful to me after reading this chapter, in terms of understanding psychology, would probably be the application of cognitive psychology to artificial intelligence. I just found that section of the chapter to be very educational and enlightening. In saying that, if there was one topic that I would like to learn more about would be that of the Turing test. I would very much like to learn more about the specifics of that contribution to psychology.
This chapter branches off of the previous chapters as it extends beyond the topics and units that we have covered before in this class. This chapter also leads into the next and final chapter, which sums up the book as a whole.
Terms: cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, Herbert Simon and Alan Newell, Logic Theorist, General Problem Solver, Donald Hebb, cell assemblies, phase sequences, Alan Turing, Turing Test,
I chose to skip to chapter 15 because the title itself sounded interesting. “Linking Psychology’s Past and Present.”
The first thing I found interesting in this chapter was the section devoted to Eleanor Gibson. Eleanor was awarded the highest on a president can give by President George Bush for he assortment and years of research. Eleanor researched topics ranging from the development of depth perception to the basic processes involved in reading. Prior to Eleanor winning this award, only nine other psychologists have received it. Gibson is most known as the creator of the visual cliff which was used to study the depth perception of infants. For most of her life, Gibson kept getting shot down at her attempts to do research in psychology because she was a woman. Yerkes showed her the door and said a woman could not work in his laboratory when she asked to help him with his research while at Yale. It took nearly 30 years for Gibson to be credited as a psychologist just because she was a woman and even then, she did not have it easy. I am interested in Eleanor Gibson because she is a strong woman to look up to. She persevered though the prejudices and is very well known today.
Another topic that peaked my interest was the doll studies. These studies were done by Kenneth and Mamie Phippes Clack. This study is properly called, “Racial identification and preference in Negro children” (Clark & Clark, 1947) In this study, children were presented with dolls; a female doll and a male doll with light colored skin and a female doll and a male doll with darker skin. The children were presented with questions concern9ing the doll such as: “Show me the doll that you would like to play with,” “Show me the doll that looks bad,” “Show me the doll that looks like you.” It was found that black children showed a preference for the light skinned dolls and considered the dark skinned dolls bad. There were even cases where the black children said they most resembled the light skinned dolls. It was concluded that segregation has a negative effect on black children’s self-esteem. I love this study. It really shows the effects and the stress that was and still is today put on black children. Children should never feel ashamed for how they were born and it is important to recognize what we are doing to our future.
One of the last things from this section that I will remember is how much psychology has and will continue to expand. It was really put into perspective for me when I read the growth of APA’s numbers. At first, APA only had about 30 member but later reached anywhere from 125 to 375 after WW1. By WW2, there 5000 members and increasing to 7000. It’s amazing to read and see how psychology wasn’t even considered as a science, just a branch off of other sciences like philosophy and physiology. Psychology has come very far over the years and it is still, very much so, a growing science.
I absolutely love this chapter and found it all extremely fascinating. This chapter sums up, and yet is a incomplete summary of what psychology is today. This chapter was a great ending to what we have discussed over the course of the semester. From this chapter, what will be most useful is the reminder of how far psychology had come and what we have to look forward to in the future. I would like to do more research on either Eleanor Gibson or the Clark studies.
TERMS: Eleanor Gibson, visual cliff, doll studies, Kenneth and Mamie Phippes Clack, APA.
I decided to read chapter 14 because I thought the title, psychological science in the post-war era sounded interesting. I have been wondering since the beginning of this course how the field of psychology was effected by World War II.
I found Fredrick C. Bartlett’s work on memory to be very interesting. In his experiments on facial recognition, Bartlett asked people to memorize the features of military men on cards. I thought it was very telling that the faces he used were of military men as opposed to any other set of people. It was surprising to me that people transposed features of one card to another, as well as imported features to the cards that were never on anything the subjects saw in the experiment. I was not surprised to learn that Bartlett’s subjects paid little attention to the way the men were facing, answering this question wrong more than half of the time. People focus on the things that are important. In recognizing a real human face, it never matters which way they are facing because the next time you see them, they may face a different direction. Bartlett also did a memory experiment using a native American tale. He told a story which was unfamiliar, nonsensical, and downright weird to European subjects. When asked to recall the story after a length of time, the subjects imposed their own cultural upbringing into the story. They told the story in a way that made sense to them. I think both of these are extremely important when taking eye witness accounts. It shows that people naturally recall things that makes sense to them. This goes right along with the way the brain fills in missing visual information. If you see a row of dashes, it looks like a dotted line, not a whole bunch of non-connected marks. In the same way, a human brain fills in missing information in a memory to the best of its ability in order to make the memory make sense. This is dangerous when thinking about eye witness accounts. A witness to a robbery may be more likely to say the man was Black, scruffy, scarred, or any other trait that he or she may attribute to an imagined robber. Even if the robber was quite different from this, a witness, in all the chaos, might often impose his or her culturally biased views on the information given to police.
I thought Bartlett was especially interesting because I had not heard or read about his work.
The section on artificial intelligence was interesting to me as well. The book made the distinction between algorithmic problem solving, working through all possible answers until finding a solution, and heuristic problem solving which is more creative and closer to the way people solve problems most of the time. It is hard for me to believe that a machine of any type could fully be capable of heuristic problem solving, but according to the book, Herbert Simon and Alan Newell created just such a machine. The machine was named the General Problem Solver, or GPS for short. The book described means-ends analysis which sounded surprisingly close to the thought process which Kim Maclin teaches in her course on Motivation and Emotion of feedback in goal striving. In both, the GPS or person assesses the current state, compares it with the goal state, identifies the difference between the two, begins a behavior/applies operator to reduce this difference, then begins the process over again. It is difficult for me to believe that a machine could ever do this in the same way a human does. It seems like the machines way would still be somewhat algorithmic, going through multiple possible solutions or operations until finding one that made the current situation closer to the ideal situation. A human on the other hand would be able to think logically and decide which behaviors would be more likely to work. Even if the artificial intelligence machine worked faster than a human, I believe this would be only because the system is fast, not because it is going through fewer or the same amount of steps.
The section describing Donald O. Hebb’s rise from a bad college student to a published psychologist was incredibly dry and boring to me, but I thought it was really cool the way the Hebb looked at the brain in accordance with psychology. Hebb was attempting to fully mesh the two subjects of psychology and physiology. I think this is a much more informative and better way to look at it. Many psychologists were trying to reduce all cognition, behavior, and motivation down to biological and physiological functions in order to understand the human condition. I believe this is too simplistic, as humans, while we are only a bunch of cells put together in just the right ways, are guided by emotions and perceived reasoning as well as physiological signals.
Terms: Fredrick Bartlett, memory, facial recognition, transpose, import, artificial intelligence, algorithmic problem solving, heuristic problem solving, Herbert Simon, Alan Newell, general problem solver, means-ends analysis, Donald Hebb, physiology, psychology, biology
Wow, it’s hard to believe that this will be one of my last blog posts. I can easily see how my comprehension of the material has grown in comparison to the beginning of the semester. It was just something that needed to be said but doesn’t relate to my current blog post.
The first thing that really caught my eye was the talk of the information theory and the concept of the bit. This idea was trying to relate the computer to the brain in the sense of circuits and the storing of data. This idea really gave us a way to somewhat quantify knowledge or at least a theoretical way to quantify knowledge in its simplest form. The book talks about being able to reduce true/false coin flips into “bits” of information. This gives us a way to quantify by deciding that two heads and a false are 3 different bits of information. However, this is a very simplified example and I don’t really see a way that this can be expanded to complicated situations such as decision making with multiple stimuli, though I’m sure it can be done. With all of that being said, one of the things I would be interested in looking into in the future would be what the future holds for our next thing to relate the brain to. The book talks about how historically we have used mechanical devices to attempt to describe the functions and actions of the brain. You have Descartes using the hydraulic garden to metaphorically describe the nervous system and more examples of different functions are out there. My question is what will be the next thing? Will be have something completely more advanced than a computer to functionally explain the processes of the brain? If we do find a different way of explaining the brain, what will happen to our previous theories and theories that made this assumption the basis of their reasoning? I guess these are questions we can only speculate about since we don’t have a definite answer.
One thing I didn’t agree with or am not interested in within the chapter is Chomsky’s explanation of grammar. He believed that there are linguistic universals that everyone follows and that the brain is structured to be able to understand. I see where he is coming from and the theory makes sense until you factor in linguistic disorders such as dyslexia. I guess I’m not the only one who thinks this way seeing how his ideas sort of paved the way of a revolution in psychology. Not that he was at the front of the revolution; rather his idea was one that was being revolted.
I think that right here is a good place in stating that I could have easily written a half page paper about each topic within this chapter. There is just too much information to be processed and argued within the span of one week. I hope to come back to this chapter and read it more carefully within the next week (if I have time) before the book must be returned.
Lastly I would like to discuss artificial intelligence because it is something that we are all aware of (or should be in this case). It is a possibility within the near future that we as humans will have the technology to create powerful artificial intelligences. Now I don’t want to sound like one of those crazy apocalyptic characters who want you to worry about how we are going to be overrun by robots, but I do think that we should be aware of the possible morals behind these advancements. On paper the study of artificial intelligence with intent of understanding the brain makes sense. It’s the idea that in order to understand something, we need to be able to reproduce it. Therefore we would have built it from the bottom up, understanding each individual small computation in order to define a bigger picture. This is all fine and dandy, but what are the findings used for? What practical implications do these theories have? I have a hard time seeing a practical application for this information and I would like to learn more about those practical implications.
Terms: information theory, bit, Descartes, Chomsky, grammar, dyslexia, revolution in psychology, artificial intelligence (AI)
I chose chapter to read chapter 15 because I wanted to read about more minority contributions to the field of psychology. I was disappointed in the small amount of information offered, although at the end of the chapter in Recommended Readings, the author directs me to a book by R.V. Guthrie titled Even the rat was white: A historical view of psychology published by Parker & Row in New York. Even so, I did read the chapter and wanted to comment on the contributions of Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Phipps Clark.
In other psychology classes I did read about the Clarks’ study on self-esteem which utilized different colored dolls and researchers asked African-American children their opinions about the different dolls. The children routinely chose the whiter dolls as the smartest and most beautiful, and the black dolls were viewed as inferior. I learned from this chapter that the study was used as part of the expert testimony against the concept of separate but equal in arguing the case of Brown v. Board of Education all the way up to the Supreme Court. Even the thought entire study was based on Dr. Mamie Phipps Clark’s master’s thesis at Howard University, her husband, Dr. Kenneth Clark, was the one who testified in courts and even brought the dolls in order to prove that that segregation was detrimental to the self-esteem of African-American children (she probably did not testify because women were not considered authorities or maybe even “smart enough” to testify in a credible manner). Dr. Kenneth Clark has been the only African-American president of the APA, he was elected in 1971.
Dr. Mamie Phipps Clark spent her years delivering counseling and support services to the people of Harlem. The text states that Dr. Clark set up an interdisciplinary approach to counseling in New York by involving counselors and educators in her program, and eventually Dr. Clark was involved in the implementation of the Head Start program nationwide. Dr. Clark had encountered many young black children in New York who had not been given adequate care by their parents and had been abandoned at a young age. She believed that the prevalence of inadequate care for black children was an effect of the racism and segregation experienced by the children’s parents, and Dr. Clark worked hard to provide counseling and support services to counteract those effects.
Minorities in psychology were experiencing the same barriers that women were experiencing, lack of educational opportunities, lack of job opportunities and a general lack of acceptance in the field of psychology. There was still an attitude that African-Americans were also intellectually inferior to whites, and many universities feared that their educational programs would be viewed as less credible if staffed with African-American professors, and would certainly not be attractive to most men if it were staffed by African-American women or women in general. With those attitudes prevalent in society and in universities, it is most remarkable that scholars like Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Phipps Clark were able to make such a positive impact on our society and for African-Americans, woman and all other minorities.
I was disappointed in this chapter because it jumped from a few pages on the achievements written about the Clarks and Dr. Eleanor Gibson to general trends and disciplines in psychology. I felt like the author was minimizing the struggles and achievements of minority groups (and women) by treating them as an afterthought. While the text does have a little information concerning some women throughout, I feel like more could have been written and at least one chapter could have been devoted to the contributions of minorities and one chapter for the contributions of women. Minority women like Dr. Mamie Phipps Clark are even more notable because, even though she claims to have had a relatively privileged childhood as the daughter of a physician, she still had major hurdles to jump to gain respect in her profession. Dr. Clark made a tremendously important impact with her work on self-esteem, as well as the social changes she helped to bring about in Harlem and with her work on Head Start.
This chapter read like a hurried wrap-up of the previous chapters. The book would not have been much different if this chapter had been left out, and the snippets about Gibson and the Clarks could have been integrated into one of the other chapters. I would like to learn more about the Clarks and I want to read Dr. Mamie Phipps Clark’s thesis paper about the self-esteem issues in African- American children.
Terminology:
Dr. Kenneth Clark, Dr. Mamie Phipps Clark, R. V. Guthrie, Brown v. Board of Education, Howard University, Dr. Eleanor Gibson, Harlem, Head Start
I decided to read chapter 15, when deciding between chapter 14 or 15 I opted for 15 because I felt like it was going to tie all of the chapters together along, filling in some questions or rough spots from previous readings and really set up that path to the understand of how psychology got to where it is today, but more importantly where it could possibly end up.
The first thing I enjoyed from the chapter was just realizing how many fields there currently are in psychology and how they will only continue to grow in the future. The book talked about how there aren’t just ‘psychologists’ anymore, but rather you have cognitive, behavioral, developmental, social, industrial, I could continue on but I won’t; and the fact within this groupings are many subgroupings and targeted areas of study. This is interesting to me because it really makes me excited to think about what’s to come, how many different areas psychology is going to explore and how many people it could potentially help.
The second thing I enjoyed reading was actually the section on woman in psychology, not necessarily because it was about the journey of the female population throughout psychologies history; we’ve pretty much covered that in every chapter, but really because it made me question certain things. One being that woman and minorities weren’t allowed to attend college and were thought to be useless in the field of psychology and many other fields, with that said, who is going to be the titled subject; “woman in psychology” in the future. What I mean by that is who is going to be the group that society basically shuns, but eventually accepts, whom end up contributing to the overall history. Could it be pouring education and money into third world countries, secluding ourselves here in the United States and focusing on the education here, sending our own students into more programs like study abroad, online education, requiring everyone goes to college, who knows what it could be. This section just made me think that regardless, there is going to be some type of group that is going to be overlooked, that will be recognized and then talked about like woman in psychology is talked about today.
The third thing I enjoyed reading was about Kenneth and Mamie Clark because I personally feel like their doll study was a huge moment for minorities, and the fact that it took African-Americans to realize that the separation in school did have an aversive effect on African-American children makes me wonder about issues today. Just the fact with gay marriage in our society right now, it’s obviously been a huge issue for generations and it just makes me think or wonder how it’s going to play out in the future. I’m not really going to elaborate much more on that, because it would take a while, but this section in the chapter just had me thinking about a lot of different issues.
Something I didn’t care for in this chapter was actually nothing, I wasn’t bored with the chapter, some of it was old information, but I just found new ideas evolving as I reread the information.
I think this chapter really doesn’t add more information, but it adds more thoughts, concerns, questions, and ideas about the field of psychology and where it is going to go from here. This chapter reminded me that psychology didn’t evolve over night, but it is growing at a rapid pace and when looking back on the history of psychology you need to do it with an open mind so you can best absorb or try and understand what was going on during that time. This also goes with the future of psychology, keep an open mind and really question everything; or at the least think outside of the box.
This chapter builds off of previous chapters in the fact that it’s not summing up all the previous chapters, but what it does is essentially it holds as the trunk of a tree and shows how psychology has grown and branched off in so many directions over the years, but yet emphasizes that to understand all these different ‘branches’ you must first start at the roots.
I found myself interested in the trends in psychology, and wondering what ‘trends’ are being written right now or are to come in the future. It’s interesting to think that major findings or topics of study can be evolving right now and we don’t even know it.
I think the main idea I had while reading this chapter were what is psychology going to consists of in 10, 20, 30+ years, looking at issues such as gender, cognitive psychology, behavioral psychology, etc. and how just these few areas have grown over the years, but even more along the lines of they were actually thought about long before they were ‘discovered’. Also with today’s technologies and advances who knows how psychology is going to change, in a 100 years I would love to be able to watch the students of that time learning about the findings that are going on now.
Terms: Behavioral psychology, cognitive psychology, Social psychology, industrial psychology, Kenneth and Mamie Clark, Eleanor Gibson,
BR
I chose to do this weeks blog over chapter 15. I wanted to do this chapter because I liked how it talked more about women’s and minorities influence in psychology, as well as their struggles to be able to work and be recognized in the field. It also talks about how psychology has grown and diversified, which is also interesting, because it ties up all the previous chapters and how it lead to present day psychology.
The first thing I found interesting was Eleanor Gibson’s story of struggle and success. She had endurance and never gave up, and that is one reason why I found this topic to be interesting. She received the National Medal of Science from the president, which was for her research she did with developmental psychology. I thought it was neat that Eleanor worked with some great psychologists and some of their students when devoting a lot of her time doing lab research. I found it interesting and inspiring how despite the rules for not being able to be a professor at the same college as her husband, not accepted by Yerkes because she was a woman, and the other hold backs in the field because of her gender; she still stuck with her research and ended up becoming very successful and having a great influence in developmental psychology. I enjoyed reading about how she was the creator of the visual cliff, which was for depth perception in babies; I liked this because I have learned and watched videos on this study in developmental psychology and it was nice to be able to apply what I learned in other classes to this chapter.
The second thing I found interesting in this chapter was the paragraphs about minorities. The studies done by Mamie Clark with African-American children in relation to how their self-esteem is affected due to racial discrimination. It was shocking and interesting to read that when they were given the chance to say which color of children is bad and which is good, and they chose the black doll to be bad. I also found it interesting that the black children when given the chance to color the doll that mostly represented them, they tried to color their doll to have lighter skin. This was sad to read, especially because it was in younger children. That time of your life you shouldn’t be worried about your appearance, you should be having fun and living life carefree. I also didn’t know that psychology had such an impact on the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling, because the studies and research were used as reference that had an influence on the overall decision. It was the studies showing that black children were suffering self-esteem issues due to discrimination in schools.
The third thing I found to be interesting in chapter fifteen was the section titled The Future: Psychology or Psychologies? This was interesting because it talks about how psychology is thought to be unified but in reality it’s characterized more by disunity than unity. A lot of psychologists don’t see it or recognize it as a unified field. I would agree with this aspect because psychology is everywhere and can be applied to about anything, which allows it to keep expanding and add more fields or departments to it as well. It would be hard for psychology to be strictly unified in my opinion due to it consistently changing as well as adding more departments to it.
One thing I found least interesting in this chapter would be the very beginning paragraph. It didn’t really keep my interest and I felt like it was review and was more about dates and statistics that I don’t really care about.
The section about the future of psychology and the impact it had on the Brown vs. Board of Education were the most useful in being helpful in understanding psychology’s history more. This is because I had never realized that the studies done about self-esteem were even being conducted nor did I know that psychology had an influence in the Civil Rights Era. I also didn’t know that there was a debate about if psychology was unified or not, and it makes sense now as to why most don’t see it as unified because of all the different fields and changes that occur.
This chapter builds off other chapters because it ties in how women and minorities made a difference in psychology and how they worked with and also rejected by some of the top psychologists named in earlier chapters, for instance: Yerkes, Titchener, Hull, E.G. Boring, etc.
I would like to learn more about Mamie’s research done on African-American children and their self-esteem. I think it would be interesting to read more about the procedures she did as well as the results, and the effect it had back in the day as well as today.
The idea that children still have self-esteem issues today as such a young age is what I kept thinking about while reading this chapter. It’s amazing how many young girls are into beauty pageants and think they need to change themselves to look better. I think the media is hard on children sometimes also, most dolls or barbies are still very thin and G.I. Joe’s are all masculine and buff. This type of stuff can send children the wrong message and make them not like who they are in return.
Terminology: Eleanor Gibson, visual cliff, depth perception, Robert Yerkes, Mamie Clark, self-esteem, Brown vs. Board of Education, Civil Rights Era, unified, Titchener, Hull, E.G. Boring
The first interesting topic from chapter 14 was Frederick C. Bartlett (1886-1969) and his work with constructing memory. Bartlett was head of the Psychology Laboratory in England’s Cambridge University. Bartlett researched such topics as fatigue and animal learning, however he would be most known for cognitive thinking and memory. When it came to memory, Bartlett “discarded the use of nonsense syllables” and instead wanted to focus on the person doing the memorizing, rather than the object being observed. Bartlett concentrated on how people are influenced by their own mental schemas and the way it affects their memory. He developed memory tasks to see what people recall after shortly reviewing five different cards with faces of military men, he then waited half an hour before having the participants explain the image of each card. Bartlett discovered the first card was the easiest to recall, overall first and last were easier to remember than the middle cards. Participants also had a difficult time trying to recall the direction each man was facing along with remembering other small details. Another technique Bartlett used was “the method if repeated reproduction” to study memory. He had his participants read a Native American folk tale called, “The War of the Ghosts,” fifteen minutes later; they would have to answer questions about the story. Bartlett found reproductions of the story were made, in other words people explained the folk tale in a manner that made since to them. It is interesting to understand how thoughts are constructed in the mind, and that every culture perceives thoughts differently from one another.
The second interesting topic was Ulric Neisser (1928) and the evolution of cognitive psychology. Neisser was interested in studying the cognitive process. He considered “sensation, perception, imagery, retention, recall, problem-solving, and thinking” to be a part of the cognitive process. Cognition would be instrumental in developmental, social, and abnormal psychology. It was interesting to learn that in the 1970’s, Neisser helped to change psychological research by focusing on ecological validity. This would allow researchers to study cognitive activities in a person’s natural habitat instead of the laboratory. Cognitive research continued to increase during the 1980’s and 90’s. It became important to understand how individuals adapt to their natural environment. For the last few decades cognitive science has had a huge impact in psychology.
The third interesting topic was social psychology. Floyd Allport (1890-1978) helped to form social psychology through his research on facilitation about the behavior of the individual and how they are influenced by the social environment. Also Leon Festinger (1919-1989), was influential in contributing to social psychology. He was Kurt Lewin’s most famous student, and attended graduate school at University of Iowa while studying with Lewin. Festinger was a member of the Research Center for Group Dynamics, and experimented on several social psychology topics. It was interesting to learn that Festinger came up with one of the most important theories in social psychology, the theory of cognitive dissonance. It basically explains how people like their thoughts to be consistent. When cognitive thoughts are inconsistent it causes discomfort. People will often revise their memories to match their thoughts to convince themselves that they feel better. Ultimately, social psychology helps us to cognitively understand how people are influenced by their environment.
This chapter relates to previous ones by showing how “cognitive revolution” has spread since WWII and become “a force in psychology.”
It would be interesting to learn more about the criticized Army research that studied the reaction of military soldiers under the influence of LSD.
Terms: Frederick C. Bartlett, schemas, Ulric Neisser, ecological validity, cognitive science, Floyd Allport, cognitive dissonance
1. I chose to read the last chapter on linking the past and present. I chose this because I saw it dealt with minorities and women, and thought it would be useful in the extra credit assignment that was given. I also felt since our final is over how history affects our today, I thought this chapter would be good to read to provide additional insight into the area.
2. 1. The 1954 supreme court ruling making education not part of the separate but equal decision. The law at that time said separate public facilities was okay, but this new ruling took education out of it after psychologists said it had a negative impact on black children. I thought this was pretty interesting because it seemed to me that nobody cared what kind of impact it had on people. Also that the court didn’t think it would have a negative impact in the first place, it’s crazy to me that this was some sort of revolution, like they had no idea it was negative to begin with.
2. Another interesting note was the discussion of how broad of a subject psychology is, and how it would be beneficial to consider the subject psychology, psychological studies. I felt this was interesting because it’s something I’ve thought of often. When people hear you’re in the psychology program they immediately think mental disorders, or think you’re training to be some mind reader or something. Stereotypical thoughts on what psychology is very much alive. Not until you start looking through your college classes do you realize there is so much variation in the field, and not until you begin your classes do you really realize what interest you and what does not. For example a few years back I would not see myself enjoying biology of psychology. I would have thought it would be far too hard and boring. Come to find out its one of my favorite classes yet, and it makes me want to learn more about the biological aspects.
3. I’m not sure if this last one is interesting, or just neat to me. In 1957 the APA moved its annual meeting from a city that wasn’t renting hotel rooms to black people, to one that would so everyone could join. That sounds like an obvious thing to do today, but this was back in 1957, just 3 years after schools were desegregated. I feel like that’s a big advancement in a small amount of time. That made me happy to know that the APA was so far ahead the rest of the country when it came to segregation. Here it is the very beginning of the civil rights movement and there is equality in one field. It just made me happy to see that, like I said, not sure if that’s interest of just find it very neat.
3. I think the most important area of this chapter would be the last segment that covers our more modern areas of interest and how they would not be understood if what came before wasn’t known. That while it would be nice to just jump forward and go with what we know now, the full understanding wouldn’t be there. Connections between popular topics or areas of interest today are made with past chapters, that helped me see things more clearly. Like how evolutionary psychology and the biological aspect along with the social aspect are important areas of study today, but they would not be understood without Darwin or the physiological studies that took place.
4. This chapter sums up a lot. It builds on almost every chapter because almost all of them are brought up. Besides discussing women and minorities roll in the field, it goes on to discuss the vast area of the subject. How there are so many different areas it almost seems too much to call it all psychology. How the main areas we cover today are only understandable if the history is known as well. Without understanding the history what we know about the present isn’t complete. This was the perfect chapter to show how what we’ve been reading about all semester plays a major role in topics we tend to cover today.
5. I think I’d like to learn more about Mamie Phipps doll study. I have never heard of this before, and until now realized I haven’t learned much about segregation and its effects in any other psychology class. I’m surprised it didn’t make its way into my social psychology class. I don’t feel this topic was too in depth in this chapter and I really would like to know more about it, even though I think it’s very sad. I’m surprised it hasn’t been discussed on the 1960’s shows as well, even though it wasn’t in the 60’s I feel it has a place since it was the beginning of the civil rights movements.
6. I thought about many things while reading this chapter. The civil rights movement, and the shows I’ve recently watched on TV about JFK. The documentary CNN (I think its CNN) called the 1960’s and 1970’s. I thought about the many psychology classes, and tried to see if there was an area I was more interesting in than others, realized social psychology was my least favorite area. I thought about past chapters I read in this book that I disliked, and tried to find something good in it. Like how I wouldn’t understand biology of psychology as much if I wasn’t forced into reading the awful chapter on the physiology.
7. APA, evolutionary psychology, psychology, psychological studies, biological psychology, Darwin, Maime Phipps, Social psychology,
1.I read chapter 15 that pertained to the researchers of psychology. I chose this chapter because, although we have learned a lot about different people like scientists and philosophers that have contributed to psychology, I wanted to learn more about what psychologists have done. I like learning about different sub-categories of psychology,which this chapter provided.
2.One of the first things that got my attention while reading chapter 14, was the evolution of cognitive psychology. I have also had in interest in this particular sub category of psychology and want to learn more about how we process our thoughts and use our language skills. With that being said, I also found interesting how Ulric Neisser came up with the name of cognitive psychology. They knew that people were studying thought processes, mental abilities, and use of language, and to come up with a name for it is very important since we study it and it is a very important sub category of psychology today.
While Neisser came up with the name of this type of psychology, he also had problems defining it and making the best it could be. He thought that the laboratory work that was being done was of no use towards research. This was interesting to me because although cognitive psychology means something to us today, and is very important, we didn’t know the struggle that these psychologists went through in order to make their ideas and research be the best they could be. We only get the end result, although there is always more research to be done in any kind of science.
The last component of this chapter that I found interesting was the fact that there a few criticisms of Neisser’s work. B.F. Skinner was one of the first ones to take a swing at Neisser. I understand that not all people will agree with each other, but it was interesting to me because Skinner seemed like he couldn’t wait to criticize Neisser because he thought his work made more sense. Another criticism of Neisser’s cognitive psychology was that it ignored some critical aspects human behavior such as motivation and emotion. I think he did the best he could, and we should be grateful for him, because who knows what cognitive psychology would be today without his work.
3. Although I think that all the work that these psychologists have done is important, I didn’t really find social psychology particularly interesting. I just don’t have a full understanding of it and I have taken a course in it in the past and couldn’t get interested in it. But, I do agree that some of the studies done such as Milgram’s obedience study was interesting to me. I like the studies, but that’s about all when it comes to social psychology.
4. This chapter discussed in great deal about many psychologists who did their work in different categories of psychology. Just by learning about their different work, and what each type of psychology entails will help me understand the history of psychology. To know where we are today, we need to know what has happened in the past dealing with psychology, and this text book has helped me quite well in understanding not only the history, but psychology in general.
5. Although this chapter focused mainly on psychologists and their work in the field along with research studies, by learning from other scientists and philosophers in previous chapters, I can get a better understanding of why and how they did what they did to help the field of psychology progress further.
6. I would really like to learn more about personality psychology. It would be interesting to learn about why people think and act differently than others. I also find it interesting that no one person is the same. Learning about what distinguishes us differently as humans seems like an interesting topic to me.
7. I was surprised to learn more about Milgram’s obedience study. It was nice to know a little more background information about him to get a better understanding of how and why he had the ideas he did. His obedience study is very famous, but I think it was somewhat unethical to shock people. With that being said, he got the results he wanted.
8. Ulric Neisser, Cognitive Psychology, B.F. Skinner, Stanley Milgram, Social Psychology