What we would like you to do is to find a topic from what we have covered in this week's readings that you are interested in and search the internet for material on that topic. You might, for example, find people who are doing research on the topic, you might find web pages that discuss the topic, you might find youtube clips that demonstrates something related to the topic, etc. What you find and use is pretty much up to you at this point. But use at least 3 sources (only one video please and make sure it adds to the topic).
1) Once you have completed your search and explorations, I would like you to say what your topic is, how exactly it fits into the chapter we have covered this week, and why you are interested in it.
2) What are three aspects of the topic you want to talk about for this assignment?
3) Next, I would like you to take the information you found from the various sources and integrate/synthesize them into the three aspects of the topic, and then write about the topic.
4) Finally, at the end of your post, please include working URLs for the three websites. For each URL you have listed indicate why you chose the site and the extent to which it contributed to your post.
Next make list of the terms and terminology you used in your post.
Let us know if you have any questions.
--Dr. M
Topical Blog: Eugenics
For my topical blog post I decided to do some research on eugenics. First of what is eugenics? Eugenics is the science of improving a human population by controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics. In the United States of America, the eugenics movement began after the civil war. The economy was becoming more uncertain and the social inequalities were becoming more visible. This is also when the idea of Social Darwinism became popular, or the concept of natural selection, the survival of the fittest. Social Darwinism is the belief that individuals with certain physical and mental traits will succeed in a competitive environment. For example some researchers thought wealthy are more likely to survive and produce children compared to those families that were poor. This was untrue seeing as how the birthrate of those in poverty was increasing while “the elite” or the wealthy birthrate was declining.
The eugenics movement became very popular. It was popularized at some state fairs as the “Fitter Families Contest.” Schools embraced eugenics and it was presented as a science fact by the majority of biology texts at this time. There were sterilization laws. Mothers were sterilized if the child they had, had been born out of wedlock. The child would then also be sterilized. The Supreme Court made a law allowing the involuntary sterilization of criminals because they were seen as unfit. In 1914, eugenicist Harry Laughlin published a Model Eugenical Sterilization Law that proposed to authorize sterilization of the “socially inadequate” people “maintained wholly or in part by public expense.” This law included sterilization of the “feebleminded, insane, criminalistic, epileptic, inebriate, diseased, blind, deaf, deformed, and dependent” It also included, orphans, prostitutes, those who were homeless, and those who were poor. Laughlin’s publication was the basis for Virginia’s Eugenical Sterilization Act, passed in 1924, which was first tested in the well-known Buck v. Bell case.
This is also what Hitler believed. I remember when I first researched eugenics last year how shocked I was to learn that we were no better than Hitler, in fact, he got his idea for gas chambers from a book released in California. California was considered an epicenter of the American eugenics movement. Before World War II, nearly half of coercive sterilizations were done in California, and even after the war, the state accounted for a third of all such surgeries. The Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune were all in league with some of America’s most respected scientists that studied and practiced eugenics during this time. The Rockefeller Foundation helped found the German eugenics program and even funded the program that Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschwitz.
I could not believe all that I have read, but I have researched this before, and I never can truly grasp this. I know that not all eugenics are bad, but it is more interesting to see what and how eugenics were wrongfully used. That is probably what drew me to it in the first place, was the fact that it was weird and wrong and I knew it was something that I would not forget.
http://blogs.dnalc.org/2012/01/18/sterilization-laws/
I used this link because it talked about eugenics and the Sterilization Act. I found it interesting, and horrifying all at the same time, but I was truly fascinated by what I read.
http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/eugenics/
I used this webpage because it gave a lot of good information and background to the eugenics movement and provided me with new insight.
http://hnn.us/article/1796
Lastly, I used this article because it helped show that Hitler was not the only bad guy in this world, and even though I could not believe some of the things I read, I could not help but read on.
1a) State what your topic is. 1b) Discuss how the topic relates to the chapter. 1c) Discuss why you are interested in it.
The topic that I will be discussing is Henry Goddard and his involvement with Intelligence Testing. This topic relates to Chapter 8 because the whole chapter pretty much revolves around intelligence texting and all the people who had contributions to the idea of that time. Goddard and his intelligence testing relates to this chapter also because it is discussed the different ways intelligence tests were used and implemented. As well as, Goddard made some interesting contributions to the how intelligence tests were implemented. I am interested in Henry Goddard and his methods of intelligence testing because I enjoyed reading about his implementations of IQ testing on Ellis Island. I liked reading about Goddard’s involvement with Ellis Island because it’s bizarre the methods he used to test immigrants IQ levels and how he went about doing so.
2) Next, we would like you to take the information you read or viewed related to your topic, integrate/synthesize it, and then write about the topic in a knowledgeable manner. By integrating/synthesizing we mean taking what your read/experienced from the internet search organize the information into the main themes, issues, info, examples, etc. about your topic and then write about the topic in your own words using the information you have about the topic.
Henry Goddard made several great contributions to the idea of mental intelligence in his lifetime. Oddly enough he didn’t start out studying mental deficiencies in humans, but was a teacher and football coach. As he continued his education he developed a love for research for feeble-minded people. Goddard was influenced greatly by Galton and his ideas regarding heredity and intelligence. Like Galton, Goddard believed that intelligence is mainly heredity and that other factors barely effect mental ability.
Goddard was the first American to translate the Binet intelligence test into English and distributed them throughout the United States. As well as, Goddard was invited to Ellis Island to perform the Binet Intelligence test on immigrants being emitted into the country. As I read about this in the text I noticed that that Goddard would only perform the intelligence test on immigrants who looked as thought they were mentally unstable. Goddard also believed that people with mental abilities less then a certain number shouldn’t have children. In fact, they should be sterilized in order to not reproduce. He felt as though reproducing among the mentally disabled was only going to produce mentally deficient people. Although Goddard’s methods were questionable he was well like and supported for his methods and work.
About this time while he was doing work at Ellis Island he was also working on making a laboratory for people with mental disabilities as well as putting into place and helping implement a special education program in America. Goddard made several contributions to the field, although maybe not accepted today, without his translation of the Binet scale America might not have been up to date on intelligence testing.
3) At the end of your post, please include working URLs for the three websites. For each URL you have listed indicate why you chose the site and the extent to which it contributed to your post.
http://www.apa.org/monitor/2009/01/assessment.aspx
This site gave some great information regarding Goddard and his contributions. It was longer then the other sites I chose and gave me a great deal of interesting information.
http://www.intelltheory.com/goddard.shtml
This site was the most useful. It gave me a great layout of information. It was easy to compare and contrast the information given in this site in respects to the textbook.
http://newlearningonline.com/new-learning/chapter-6-the-nature-of-learning/henry-goddard-on-iq/
I liked this site because it gave me a good idea of what Goddard’s tests were like. I chose it because it was similar to the first site I found and the information was compatible with the other two sites I chose.
What we would like you to do is to find a topic from this week's chapter that you were interested in and search the internet for material on that topic.
Please be sure to use at least 3 quality resources. If you use videos, please limit it to one video.
Once you have completed your search and explorations we would like you to:
1a) State what your topic is. Leta Hollingworth
1b) Discuss how the topic relates to the chapter. She was a psychologist that contributed to the “gifted education” and made may contributions to the psychology field.
1c) Discuss why you are interested in it.
2) Next, we would like you to take the information you read or viewed related to your topic, integrate/synthesize it, and then write about the topic in a knowledgeable manner. By integrating/synthesizing we mean taking what your read/experienced from the internet search organize the information into the main themes, issues, info, examples, etc. about your topic and then write about the topic in your own words using the information you have about the topic.
Leta Setter Wollingworth was born in 1886 in Nebraska. She had a very hard home life in her early life, as her mother died when she was very young and her father deserted the family. Her and her siblings then went to live with her mother’s parents, until her father reentered her life and forced her and her siblings to move in with him and his wife. There, times were very hard. Not only was she ripped away from her grandparents, but her new home was plagued with mental and physical abuse, as well as alcoholism in the household. The one light in her life was school, in which she excelled. At the age of 16 she started college at the University of Nebraska, where she got her Bachelor of Arts degree and a teacher’s certificate. While at college she met her soon-to-be husband, Harry Hollingworth. Harry moved out to New York, and after he finished his doctorate degree he sent for Leta to move and then they were married. Leta wanted to teach in New York, but found out that in New York there was a law that didn’t allow married women to teach. Since she couldn’t teach, she decided she wanted to continue studying. She ended up getting her Masters in Education at Columbia. Her first job she had once she was done with her masters was administering Binet intelligence tests. In order to administer the test, she herself had to take it, and she scored very well. She ended up being the first psychologists under the Civil Service in New York. This was how she began with her psychology career. She was then offered a teaching position at Columbia Teacher’s College. Hollingworth died prematurely at the age of 53 from abdominal cancer.
Hollingworth contributed to the field of psychology in a variety of ways. She contributed to the areas of the psychology of women, psychology of education, specifically to the gifted, and also to clinical psychology. In her work with gifted children, she spent much of her work on finding strategies for helping the development of gifted children. Unlike Terman who believed that intelligence was only inheritable, Hollingworth believed that it was not only inheritable, but also that the environment and education could have an effect on their intelligence. She worried that current education was not doing enough to help aid the gifted children, they believed that these children should be able to take care of themselves more or less. Hollingworth did not believe this, and this is why she worked so hard to try and help in the development of intelligence. She discovered that it was important to do a few things with gifted children to help them develop. She stressed the importance of maintaining contact with them every day, they should be identified as gifted early in life, and they should not be isolated from other children. One of the most important things she noted about gifted children is that they needed to be challenged in order to flourish.
3) At the end of your post, please include working URLs for the three websites.For each URL you have listed indicate why you chose the site and the extent to which it contributed to your post.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leta_Stetter_Hollingworth - This was a good place to start research, and I used it for her background information. I also used this to find out more about her psychology career.
http://www2.webster.edu/~woolflm/letahollingsworth.html This article was very detailed, and gave a lot of information about her personal life.
http://www.feministvoices.com/leta-hollingworth/ - This website was useful because it was more concise and to the point about Hollingworth, and helped narrow down what was most important.
1a) State what your topic is.
1b) Discuss how the topic relates to the chapter.
1c) Discuss why you are interested in it.
I chose to do my topical blog over Hugo Munterberg. Although he had a small part in the section about how psychology is applied to business, I still found him interesting because he was also discussed in another one of my classes.
2)Hugo Munsterberg was from Germany and is considered to be the founding father of forensic psychology. He was involved in one field of psychology, applied psychology. He was not only interested in psychology, but he enjoyed art, music, reading and much more. After listening to Wilhelm Wundt speak, it sparked his interest in psychology.
He was a very intelligent man, and went on to become Wundt's assistant. Later, he went on to get him PhD and used his degree to persue a career in medicine. To further his career, he began a professorship at Harvard. While at Harvard, he learned how to speak English and met William James. Many students were intrigued by Munsterberg and began taking his classes.
Wundt's book, "On The Witness Stand," was a book that discussed the different ways a trial's outcome can be determined psychologically. He was known as being the first to do jury research and studies.He claimed that lawyers, judges and jurymen are confident in their skills that by experimental psychology he can show the flaws of their thinking. He even went on to explain how eye witness testimonies are unreliable. He mentioned how their perceptions were merely illusions influenced by the situation that causes them to think in a certian way.He believed that memory can be affected by suggestions, judgements etc.
Not only was he interested in forensic psychology, but he also made a contribution to industrial psychology. He posted an article that suggested how industrial psychology can benefit certain areas of business. Some of those areas were management, advertising and employee motivation. In my opinion, this is one of the best and interesting contributions because still do this day, we are trying to improve the business world. I feel that psychology plays a huge role in business and is something that should still be applied to certain business roles.
Munsterberg made many influential contributions to psychology. His studies and research will continue to pave the way for future studies in psychology and business. He passed away in December of 1916.
3)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_M%c3%bcnsterberg
I chose this site because it discussed his contributions in industrial psychology.
http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesal/p/hugo-munsterberg.htm
I chose this site because it talked about his early life and more of his contributions.
http://www.all-about-forensic-psychology.com/hugo-munsterberg.html
This site gave information pertained to his book called "On The Witness Stand"
J.P.
1a) Henry Goddard and the Kallikak family
1b) Henry Goddard and the Kallikak family have their own sections but I plan on blending the two a bit as well as bring up information the book left out.
1c) Honestly, I joined a fantasy football league where each of our team names had to be a leading eugenic scientist to see who is the most fit of all of them. My team is of course Henry Goodard. The league leaders are Charles B. Davenport, Henry Garrett, and yours truly. Francis Galton must have inferior fantasy genetics because he is in last.
If there were one person Americans can blame for putting the academic youth through countless and arguably effective intelligence tests it would be Henry Goddard. He discovered this weapon of mass deportation whilst traveling Europe surveying residential “feebleminded” child facilities. His weapon of choice for it was the only choice was the Binet-Simon Intelligence Scale. Goddard was enthusiastic about translating and using this test to screen children to determine mental placements. He wanted to decide if they were fit for regular school or facilities like his first post-doctoral position at Vineland. Prior to Goddard’s doctorate and Vineland days, he was a teacher at the University of Southern California where he holds a prestigious record in an unexpected field. That field happens to be the good, old American gridiron; Goddard led USC Trojans to its only undefeated season in the schools history at an impressive 2-0. The observation of athletes and students may have influenced him slightly to notice individual physical and mental abilities.
The DSM-5 came out recently and one change from the previous DSM-4 is the change of mental retardation to intellectual deficient because the former is considered derogatory and hurtful. However, mental retardation was implemented to replace Goddard’s terminology for the same reasons. I wonder how long or if at all intellectual deficient will become degrading and we have to come up with an even more cleverly neutral title. Goddard was the American pioneer of the word moron. Idiots were unable to care for themselves and imbeciles could care for themselves to an extent but were not entirely independent. Then there was this unnamed third group that Goddard was finding a way to define them. Once he found the Binet-Simon scale he could use it to weed out this third group or the moron. He defined a moron as having a mental age between 8 and 12, and a corresponding score on the test determined mental age. Goddard already had a major pool test subjects when he returned from Europe at Vineland, and he quickly applied it. He eventually got bored and decided to apply this test to immigrants, or the more likely reason being that is was that immigration was a major social issue. Goddard did do more that just run around handing our intelligence tests. He also led one of the most famous case studies.
The Kallikak family case study is one of the most famous genetic tracings of early psychology for being influentially good as it was, later deemed, bad. The first Kallikak member was a patient at Vineland named Deborah. Of course these names were false to protect confidentiality. During the course of tracing her family line, Goddard stumbled on a strange branch. Deborah’s great-great-great grandfather Martin Kallikak was an American Revolutionary War soldier who was married to a Quaker woman, and was a respectful, smart, and prosperous man. But war makes any person man question his morality. Deborah’s late descendant partook in sexual relations with a feebleminded barmaid during one of his weary war travels. This woman gave birth to a male that went on to spread the feebleminded family that Deborah descended from. But Martin went on with his wife to sire smart, wealthy, and prosperous generations, whereas his bastard child went on to quite the opposite. This is how Goddard “proved” that intelligence was hereditary and supported his push to socially comb out the feebleminded, morons, and the like thus making him a leading figure in eugenics. Of course there were many problems with this case study that even Goddard later admits to. He leaves out that the weaker side of the family started out in poverty. Even though poverty and intelligence kind of have a chicken and the egg argument, we cannot leave intelligence out as a purely hereditary factor. Also, they had a major alcohol problem as a family, who would have thought a family starting with a barmaid would have drinking problems? This of course left a lot of children to have fetal alcohol syndrome and other substance related ailments. Lastly, as Goddard came out with new editions of this study they altered pictures to make them to look more sinister, puzzled, or other negative facial expressions. Since photography was a new technology many did not question pictures or have the keen eye required to pick out tampered images.
http://www.apa.org/monitor/2009/01/assessment.aspx
This has a nice biography of Henry Goddard along with many not-so-relevant fun facts. This is where I found out about his football coaching career. It is always nice to get multiple perspectives when research a person to get different perspectives.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_H._Goddard
This source was also quite biographical as are most Wikipedia pages. This also had a lot about Goddard’s exposure to the Binet-Simon Intellgice Test and his stay at Vineland. It had good stuff about his work with immigration too but I did not care so much about that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kallikak_Family
I used this source for nearly all of my Kallikak family information. It was only marginally more informative than the book with the actual family. However it had a lot to say about the impact the Kallikak research had on society as well as the interesting early photoshopping.
1a) State what your topic is.
My topic is Harry Hollingworth and his caffeine study.
1b) Discuss how the topic relates to the chapter.
Harry Hollingworth was mentioned in chapter 8 but only briefly and the only interesting part I found in that part of the reading was the part on his caffeine study.
1c) Discuss why you are interested in it.
I am interested to know more about how he went about the study. I want to know more about it because I think it’s interesting how now days caffeine is drank by millions of people every day. I wonder what people back then would have thought about coffee.
Harry Hollingworth was born in 1880 in DeWitt Nebraska. He graduated from DeWitt High School in 1896, he graduated from the University of Nebraska in 1906 with his Bachelors of Arts degree in 1906 and graduated from Columbia in 1909 with his doctorate. Hollingworth spent his entire career at Barnard University. He published over 100 articles and 25 books mainly in the area of applied Psychology. He was elected president of the American Psychological Association in 1927. Hollingworth died in 1956 at the age of 76.
Harry Hollingworth was a professor at Barnard when he did research on caffeine for the Coca-Cola Company in 1911. He did this research because the company was being sued by the government for adding a dangerous ingredient to a food (the lawsuit was called the “United States vs. Forty Barrels and Twenty Kegs of Coca-Cola”). For his experiment he used 10 men and 6 women ranging from 19 to 39 years old. They were expected to not drink caffeine or alcohol and keep record of their level of alertness, sleep habits and general health and a physician would keep measurements. There were three separate studies performed, the longest running for 4 weeks.
These tests involved cognition, perception, attention, judgment and discrimination. In these studies, three groups received different doses of caffeine and one group received a placebo. This experiment was a double blind study, meaning the experimenters and the subjects were unaware of who had which treatment. Hollingworth concluded that there was no evidence of caffeine producing any negative effects on cognitive or motor performance.
When Hollingworth presented his evidence at the Coca-Cola trial, he was successful. His study was and still is cited by many to show that caffeine does not have any severely negative effects. With Coca-Cola getting a victory, they made them popular again. With this study being the first comprehensive behavioral study of its time, it remains a classic. As of now, Coca-Cola remains one of the world’s largest soft drink companies. Harry Hollingworth does not seem to get the credit he deserves for the role he played in keeping Coca-Cola a big name brand like it is today.
3 sources:
http://nutritionhistory.org/harry-hollingworth
This website was helpful because it gave me the name of the Coca-Cola trial. I also liked this source because it mentioned that Hollingworth insisted on having the study be a double blind one, which I think was for the best.
http://nebraskahistory.org/lib-arch/research/manuscripts/family/harry-hollingworth.htm
This website was useful because it gave me the information about Hollingworth’s background, such as his date of birth, date of death, what he published, and where he went to school.
http://drvitelli.typepad.com/providentia/food_and_drink/
This website was the best website that I found. I like this one because it broke down the caffeine study and told how Hollingworth went about doing it.
1a) State what your topic is: My topic is Henry H. Goddard, morons, the Kallikaks, and immigration.
1b) Discuss how the topic relates to the chapter:
Henry Goddard is prominent in this chapter due to his work with intelligence testing, mental age, the Kallikaks saga, and deciding which immigrants could enter America or which would be sent home.
1c) Discuss why you are interested in it:
I’m interested in Henry H. Goddard because I would like to find out if he ever did anything good for society; and if yes, what was it?
2) How would you feel if your claim to fame was coining the word “moron” for all the American masses to use on an everyday basis? That belongs to Henry H. Goddard. I doubt that he could have envisioned the word moron being used thousands of times in every American school every day but that is what has happened. The work he conducted in the field of intelligence testing is extremely flawed at best. He stated that his assistant could pick out a feebleminded immigrant with 90% accuracy. Does anybody else see a problem with that? That’s before they even gave the test.
His most famous work, The Kallikaks, was flawed from the very start. He claimed the woman who was responsible for starting the “bad” side of the Kallikaks family was feebleminded and bad because she was in a tavern. He never researched this to find out if it was actually true. He made assumptions about many members of the “bad” side of the Kallikaks family. He himself called this work obsolete after it was under fire from his peers. The Nazis liked his book about the Kallikaks. I don’t believe it was his intention for his work to be used in such a way but there is no escaping that it was. An interesting side note is that NBC made a sitcom in 1977 called “The Kallikaks” which was about an Appalachian family. It lasted five episodes.
Goddard eventually reversed many of his beliefs. He came to find out that a feebleminded person with a mental age of 12 could function in society and did not need to be institutionalized. He also had the revelation that he overstated the dangers of the feebleminded reproducing. I bet there were more than a few people who wished he would have come to these conclusions earlier. In the end, I think the thing he did care about was children and the best way to educate them. He just went about it the wrong way.
3)
This story investigates the word “moron” and where it came from, concluding that we have Goddard to thank for it:
http://voices.yahoo.com/origin-word-moron-eugenics-racism-henry-474052.html?cat=38
This site talks about Goddard’s life, work, and the controversy that surrounds him:
http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3403200261.html
This website has a really nice summary of Goddard’s life and also mentions the Kallikaks sitcom on NBC.
http://www.bionity.com/en/encyclopedia/Henry_H._Goddard.html
Ergonomics
Ergonomics relates to the chapter specifically with Lillian Gilbreth, who became a pioneer in the field. She was married to Frank Gilbreth who was a bricklayer and studied the new field of time and motion. Lillian collaborated with her husband and equally contributed to their successful consulting business. She went onto complete her doctorate at Berkley with the writing of her dissertation called “The psychology of Management”. Even after her husbands death she went onto accomplish many things such as getting into the field of ergonomics with ideas of redesigning household tasks. I thought that the topic of ergonomics was interesting because I never realized what all went into the design of products as simple as chairs or can openers. Having a comfy bed, clothes that fit, and objects that are easy for me to use are all things I take for granted. I only tend to realize when things do not give me the same comfort like an old pillow that is basically doing nothing or how my dresser drawers stick and are hard to open because the dresser dates all the way back to my grandparents time.
Ergonomics (also known as human factors) is the scientific study that concerns human capabilities and limitations, which uses this knowledge to better design products people use and how they work. Ergonomics includes many disciplines such as psychology, computer science, industrial engineering, biomechanics, safety engineering and more. Ergonomists develop data and methods which are used to improve various things: office supplies, technology for assisting disabled individuals, spacecraft, educational and training materials, devices for the medical field, and consumer products.
In the US, ergonomics became needed during World War 2 to improve the performance and safety of military systems- aircraft, large-scale weapons, and naval ships. From the work of early researchers, people designing products realized how important it was to reflect on the characteristics of the operator in the designed equipment. After the war, research continued to expand into other fields that are studied today.
Ergonomists have to take into account different factors such as physical, cognitive, social, environmental, organizational, and other relevant factors. People in this profession work in specific application domains that are constantly evolving, new innovations are created and old ones take on new perspectives. It can be thought of three categories of physical, cognitive, and organizational ergonomics. Physical ergonomics deals with human anatomical, anthropometric, physiological, and biomechanical characteristics that relate to physical activity.
Topics in this field include repetitive movements, work layout, safety and health, materials handling, and working postures. One example that I read about was since the human body is not meant to be doing repetitive tasks; workers are required to take breaks and triathletes having their shoes be readjusted so they can very easily slip on after the swimming round.
Cognitive ergonomics is concerned with mental processes; perception, reasoning, memory, and motor response since they significantly affect the interactions among humans and other elements of a system. Topics in this field include: decision-making, skilled performance, mental workload, human-computer interaction, work stress, and human reliability. The third field of ergonomics is organizational ergonomics- which is concerned with optimizing sociotechnical systems such as organizational polices, structures, and processes. This includes dealing with communication, work design, teamwork, cooperative work, organizational culture, virtual organizations, and quality management.
This is a seemingly promising career to go into. Employment prospects for one trained in human factors psychology are great. There is a numerous amount of job opportunities. Along with that, salary and benefits are high. It was reported in one of my articles that graduates in this field have reported annual salaries between $80,000- $100,000.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAKlmdMHpdE
I enjoyed this video as they gave a lot of examples of how they are using ergonomics in different fields and the factors that go into it.
http://www.depts.ttu.edu/psy/graduate_programs/experimental_human_factors/overview.php
I choose this website since it included what the field includes and where the field is going today such as job market and salary.
http://www.apa.org/about/gr/issues/workforce/ergonomics.aspx
I liked this website since it included more about what ergonomics is about and how it got started in the US.
http://www.iea.cc/01_what/What%20is%20Ergonomics.html
I choose this website since it included the different domains of ergonomics and what topics were included in ergonomics.
I decided to write about Hugo Munsterberg because his studies on the workplace and efficiency were interesting to me and I wanted to read about more into him. The book mentioned some of these experiments, but I wanted to take a deeper look into his life and what else he contributed to the field of psychology.
Hugo Munsterberg was born in Germany on June 1, 1863. His mother died at the age of twelve, effectively ending what he considered his childhood and entered him into the more serious adult world. He graduated from the Gymnasium of Danzig and moved onto the University of Geneva for a semester, then the University of Leipzig. In 1883 he entered the psychological laboratory there under Wilhelm Wundt. This became his passion and he received a doctorate degree. In the 1890's he spent time between professorship at Harvard and back in Germany. Though he ended up back in the United States, he strove to keep good relations between the US and Germany, which caused tension as World War I began to unfold. Because of this, he was looked down upon by other leading American psychologists and has received less than his fair share of credibility. Nonetheless, his contributions are important to acknowledge.
Munsterberg's passion for experimental psychology helped him to lead experiments in industrial and organizational psychology: how monotony, attention and fatigue, and social interaction affect the workplace. He created tests to measure the ability, knowledge, and skills of workers in order to find the best worker for a particular job. He performed studies on ship captains, streetcar drivers, telephone operators, and salesman. These helped to separate potential employees into groups based on their ability to complete the tests efficiently, bringing insight in what firms should look for when hiring. Though I was originally targeting this area of study, Munsterberg's experiments in forensics ended up grasping me more.
Munsterberg published a work called On the Witness Stand. In this, he challenged traditional ways to pry a confession out of an alleged criminal. First, we'll loon into how he challenged eye-witness accounts. Munsterberg pointed out how every individual has their own biases and associations that affect memory. Furthermore, he showed that illusions can also be interpreted differently. To prove this, he performed two experiments. In one, he gave a picture of dots to several different people who stared at them for a period of time. They each wrote something different about what they saw. Second, Munsterberg reflected on a burglary in his home. His account of what he saw greatly differed from the actual scene. He described candle wax to be on the wrong floor, that burglars had entered through a basement window, when in reality it was the door. Based on his own associations and experiences, he could not correctly describe what he saw shortly afterward, let alone months later as many witnesses do. This occurs frequently, as witnesses provide differing descriptions of a crime scene that can be disproved upon revisit to the scene.
Furthermore, Munsterberg challenged tools such as cross-examination and intense interrogation that brought out false confessions. These confessions can come from sheer stress and intensity or wanting to submit to authority and please others. This threw a wrench into how forensics and trials were carried out at the time. Furthermore, his experiments have provided the springboard to find better ways to hire workers and give fair trials to the accused. Though largely unnoticed, Munsterbeg's contributions are quite important to the field of psychology.
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/munsterb.htm
This is a good biographical source outlining Munsterberg's life and providing details into some of his contributions to psychology.
http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesal/p/hugo-munsterberg.htm
This site describes a few controversial topics about Munsterberg's life.
http://faculty.frostburg.edu/mbradley/psyography/hugomunsterberg.html
I used this as a source for detailed information regarding some of his experiments, namely in criminal investigation.
1. A topic from the chapter that I chose to do more research on is the Binet-Simon scale. I would like to learn more about this topic because I would like to know how effective the scale is for measuring intelligence. I know that intelligence can be measured with overall intelligence or intelligence in one general area, I would like to know if there is a way to use this scale and find results of anyone being a genius in a certain area even if they do not have a high overall score. I also would like to compare it to the IQ test and see how similar or different the two testing systems are. This topic relates to the chapter in the section that the Binet-Simon scale is discussed.
2. The first article I read gave me more of an understanding of what the Binet-Simon intelligence testing system was intended for. They wanted to find a way to measure the mental age of children to see if they needed special education or not. I can relate to this testing, though I am not sure how similar the testing is, but before kindergarten children go through memory testing, stating the alphabet and other tests that are based off of memory and recalling what they have learned. I think that this is similar to the Binet-Simon intelligence testing, but I think the tests have been tweaked a bit and they are more modernized. The modernization would be the adding siting the alphabet, and other areas that are measured to understand their modernized thinking processes. I think that the idea of this scale and finding a mental age for a child were great contributions not only to psychology but to schools and teachers also. This allowed schools to be notified which children were to have special education before they even begin kindergarten, it is helpful because then the student is being taught to their mental age and they are able to understand information better than being put into the same class with students that can learn at higher levels.
The second article that I chose was about the different intelligence tests ranging from the Binet-Simon intelligence test, the army intelligence test and to the IQ testing. I chose this article because the two tests having information on the same site would be a good source to determine similarities and differences. The similarities between the two were that they both had a raw score, which would be considered the mental age. Although, the Binet-Simon test would just rank the students with their chronicle age and mental age to determine where they needed to be in school in order that best suits them. Instead, the IQ testing takes that score and multiplies it by 100 to get the total raw score, then there is a bell curve that determines if the person is a genius or so on. Another difference would be that the Binet-Simon test were based off of what the child was supposed to know at the time of their schooling, nothing pointed to where the IQ test would be testing on so it was more random. Overall, I think there is more benefit from the Binet-Simon test because it allows us to put students where they need to be so they can learn the most they can while they are in school. I do not see much benefits coming from an IQ test besides knowing where one falls on the curve, and if in order to pursue a certain job, they can base intelligence of being capable of doing a job by using the same method, although I do not think using the IQ test would be a good measure to see if one can perform certain tasks for a company.
The first thing that I noted while reading this article was that tests were based off of listening, comprehending and memorization which were all traits that can link most aspects of intelligence. I did not know how the tests were given, I would think if they relied on doing overall subject tests (ie. math, science) then the intelligence levels can be altered because a student that is a genius in math may not do well in English and reading. That was my main concern was how they would measure the difference of the knowledge of certain subjects, but with the method that the tests relied on answers my question. It would show intelligence because it would be looking at comprehension as a whole, not just the capability of doing math or English. The growth of the Binet-Simon testing in the United States was taken by Universities to measure intelligence levels of students. After they learned to alter it to a standardized test, which we see today as the SAT and ACT, then the idea of the IQ test came along. They would take the mental age of the participant and multiply it by 100 to get the overall IQ score. I did not like the IQ testing because there is almost no reasoning for most people to have an IQ test, the standardized testing however are a great use to colleges because it now has the capability to not accept students they find that will not do well at that facility due to their performance on a basic skills test.
3. http://childpsych.umwblogs.org/intelligence-testing-2/binet-simon-scale/
I found interest in this article because it explained how the scale and testing was used to measure children intelligence ages to see if they would need special education. I recall in the reading in the chapter about mental age, but I did not know that the testing that Binet intended to do was only for children. This article also made the scale make more sense to me rather than just a measure of intelligence.
http://users.ipfw.edu/abbott/120/IntelligenceTests.html
I chose this article because it had information about both the IQ testing and the Binet-Simon test. The reasoning that this article would be a good measure of comparing the two is because the information is coming from the same source, so the focus is on the same area making comparison to be an easier measure to understand similarities and differences.
http://psychology.about.com/od/psychologicaltesting/a/int-history.htm
This article discusses the types of questions asked and the areas measured in the Binet-Simon intelligence testing. Along with that it discusses how it was brought to America and the expanding of the test. This information was valid to what I wanted to know because of discussing what they were really looking for in these tests and how they used it to measure intelligence as a whole.
For this week’s blog I decided to research Robert M. Yerkes. I picked Yerkes to study because he relates to the chapter on testing mental IQ in the Army as discussed in this chapter. I found him interesting because he was interested in eugenics and did a lot of studies on primates and humans. He was more interested in comparative psychology but was forced to examine the “human side” if he expected to go anywhere. It also interested me that he was a researcher into the social behaviors of gorillas and chimpanzees. Yerkes also was amongst those studying arousal and performance. This man relates to the chapter in which bias occurs against immigrants and his studies support the use of sterilizing parts of the population that seemed “unfit.”
Robert Yerkes was born in Breadysville, Pennsylvania. He grew up on a farm in Pennsylvania, Yerkes wanted to say goodbye to his life as a farmer and pursue a career as a physician. He received some financial help and attended Ursinus College from 1892 to 1897. After Yerkes graduated, he received an offer from Harvard University to do graduate work in Biology. While attending Harvard, Yerkes became interested in animal behavior and wanted to put off his career in order to study comparative psychology. He earned his Ph.D. in the Psychology Department in 1902. After graduating from Harvard, he got a job as an assistant professor in comparative psychology. In 1907, Yerkes published his first book, The Dancing Mouse. Yerkes established friends at Harvard which included famous individuals such as John Watson. Later on in his life, Yerkes served as president of the American Psychological Association. He urged the APA into helping the war effort of World War I in which they would establish tests to study intelligence. These tests became known as the Alpha and Beta tests and ruled out those who were seen as mentally “unfit.” These tests were given to over 1 million soldiers and also served the purpose of finding those with high intelligence that could be trained for an officer position.
Yerkes claimed that the new way of immigrants were more ignorant than the preceding wave of immigrants to the United States. Yerkes thought that "no citizen can afford to ignore the menace of race deterioration." The wave of immigrants did score lower but later on there was a correlation found between the score and the amount of years that someone actually lived in the U.S. The results of the test of the Army intelligence division concluded that 47.3% of their troops were feebleminded in which the blacks and immigrants scored the lowest. Today, we can see the bias of these tests that were given because of the questions themselves that were administered. Some questions asked of Velvet Joe and other iconic advertising figures but these questions were challenged in whether they provide a good measure of intelligence.
Yerkes loved working with and studying chimpanzees. He began by purchasing two chimpanzees, Chim and Panzee, from a zoo. He brought the two chimps home, where they lived in a bedroom and ate with a fork at a little table. Chim was a particular delight for Yerkes, and the summer that chimp and Yerkes spent together is memorialized in Almost Human. Yerkes went on to find the Yerkes-Dodson Law of arousal. This law states that mental and physical performance increases as arousal increases. This happens to a point in which it makes a type of U curve on a graph. With too much arousal, mental and physical performance often decreases.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yerkes-Dodson_law
I used this site because it provided good general information into the life of Robert Yerkes. It seems to give a typical overview of his life and work in which anyone could understand.
http://www.yerkes.emory.edu/about/history.html
This site provides a more in depth look into Yerkes study of primates and how he interacted with them. I chose this site because I was interested with his strong connection to animals and why he chooses part of his career to study them more in depth.
http://www.intelltheory.com/yerkes.shtml
I chose this site because it provides some great quotes by Yerkes and also a timeline of his life. This site also mentions Yerkes publications and provides some great pictures as well.
1a) State what your topic is.
Henry Goddard
1b) Discuss how the topic relates to the chapter.
Goddard was discussed throughout the chapter and seemed to be of importance.
1c) Discuss why you are interested in it.
I’ve always found intelligence to be interesting, so reading the sections about Goddard and his intelligence testing was interesting to me.
2) Henry Goddard started out his career as a schoolteacher and principal and did not receive his PHD until he was 30 years old, making it seem as though he would not have a successful career in his field. In 1908 Goddard traveled throughout Europe and got his hands on some of the Binet- Simon intelligence scales, which he brought back to the United States. After bringing these scales back to America Goddard put a testing system in place at Ellis Island. The immigrants who were wishing to become American citizens would have to take this test and get a certain score on it to be allowed into the country. This testing resulted in the rejection of an estimated 80% of potential immigrants. Goddard believed that intelligence was passed on through genetics and did a study on a family which he called the Kallikak’s. Henry Goddard’s book that he had written off of his research of the Kallikak family became a best seller in Germany while it was under the Nazi regime. Goddard believed that “feebleminded” individuals should be kept from reproducing through sterilization or institutional isolation, this is also known as eugenics. Goddard believed that sterilizing the so called feebleminded would help get rid of the mental defects in America. But Goddard knew that this idea would not be popular with Americans so he came up with the idea of putting the feebleminded into a separate population. While learning more about Henry Goddard and eugenics I constantly found myself shocked. Intelligence is an interesting topic to study but I do not believe that Goddard’s ideas were even remotely ok.
http://www.intelltheory.com/goddard.shtml
I picked this link because it had a brief biography and gave an idea of Goddard’s
Ideas.
http://www.apa.org/monitor/2009/01/assessment.aspx
I chose this link because the site provided quality information.
http://voices.yahoo.com/origin-word-moron-eugenics-racism-henry-474052.html
This link had a lot of interesting information.
1a) State what your topic is.
Ergonomics
1b) Discuss how the topic relates to the chapter.
Well in this chapter it discussed business psychologists and Lillian Gilbreth, who made many contributions to ergonomics.
1c) Discuss why you are interested in it.
I thought it was an interesting concept to study how people work better and also discover techniques to help them be more efficient and she also produced many items for disabled people to make their lives easier.
2) Next, we would like you to take the information you read or viewed related to your topic, integrate/synthesize it, and then write about the topic in a knowledgeable manner. By integrating/synthesizing we mean taking what your read/experienced from the internet search organize the information into the main themes, issues, info, examples, etc. about your topic and then write about the topic in your own words using the information you have about the topic.
Well during the short time researching I learned quite a bit about ergonomics. There are many areas of ergonomics that people can use to improve themselves or their work place. One area of ergonomics is physical ergonomics. These could be things like working postures, repetitive movements, or musculoskeletal disorders. The ergonomics part of it is that an ergonomist works to find out the best working posture, so that the worker can be productive, and the find the best things to do for repetitive movements so that workers don’t get injured, that would also work with people who have a musculoskeletal disorder and see what stretches work best for them or what positions are less hurtful for their bodies. Then there’s cognitive ergonomics. For that an ergonomist would help them find good ways to make a decision, and would also find ways to decrease work stress. Then finally there is organizational ergonomics. For this area of ergonomics the ergonomist finds the best times for people to work or go to school so they are well rested and efficient. They also can help discover ways to help groups work more productively and get groups to cooperate best.
Ergonomics still I around today. For one groups of ergonomists they directly worked with some jewelers. After working with them, asking questions, and having them help in every aspect they created a jewelry polishing ergonomic work station. This new work station has many advantages. This new workstation should help reduce repetitive motion injuries, improve airflow, and also lessen the noise. This station in the long run is cost effective and increases worker productivity. The worker should also be able to work longer because of a lessened risk of injury, and with this new machine it should also take less time to train new employees. So in this case ergonomics is great. It has many advantages for a jeweler. So the group of ergonomists that designed this new machine ended up winning the Stanley H. Caplan User-Centered Product Design Award. So this would be more of a psychical area of ergonomics. It helps to reduce the physical strain but on the workers and also decrease to amount of time to polish a product.
I also learned that ergonomics is very beneficial in the workplace. I will have an internship next semester, and I know that for some of it, I will be answering crisis calls. Ergonomists can work on ways to increase productivity and decrease physical strain at an office job. For instance, it is suggested that you have a comfortable chair that supports the spinal curve, this chair should also be at a good height, to where your feet touch the ground, and your thighs are parallel to the floor. The also recommend headsets to reduce the strain on your shoulders and necks if you are answering phones. The monitor of a computer should also be at least a good arm’s length away from you. It’s also important that your desk is tall enough and wide enough to have your legs fit under the desk comfortably. There is even a way to position your keyboard so that you do not get carpel tunnel. These small suggestions could make a big difference in the workplace.
I found it extremely interesting to look at these websites and research this. I think this field could be a very powerful and rewarding one. I think it can make a great impact. I helps businesses but it also helps employees. Employees can make simple changes to improve their health and their overall work performance so they can keep their jobs, and businesses can make more money because workers are more effective.
https://www.hfes.org//Web/DetailNews.aspx?Id=320
this site talked about the new jewely machine that increases efficiency.
http://www.iea.cc/01_what/What%20is%20Ergonomics.html
this site talked about the three different areas of ergonomics
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ergonomics.html
this site gave a definition of ergonomics and also ideas of office ergonomics
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/office-ergonomics/MY01460/METHOD=print
the site expanded on workplace/office ergonomics
For my topical blog post this week I decided to look more into Hugo Munsterberg and forensic psychology in general. The chapter wasn’t all that interesting to me, but the short section on forensic psychology seemed worth looking more into. The chapter was about applying psychology, and I find relating it to preventing crimes and catching criminals to be more interesting than applying it to an industrial setting, finding proper motivation for menial tasks in the workplace.
My mom used to watch a lot of crime shows around the house so I’ve been exposed to a lot of network television portrayed forensic psychology. Criminal profiling in particular always looked so awesome. I used to watch Silence of the Lambs with my dad and I thought being a profiler, aside from being super dangerous apparently, looked like such an awesome job. In the chapter we saw that Hugo Munsterberg had tried to apply psychology to legal issues. He was one of the first people to ever make this association and is often referred to as the father of forensic psychology. Munsterberg died in 1916, but is still thought to have substantial influence on a case in 1956. The case I am referring to is that of the Mad Bomber, who over the course of 16 years set off more than 30 bombs in New York City. The reason Munsterberg’s name comes up is because he is the one who laid the foundation for the profiling work of criminologist Dr. James Bussel. Bussel looked into all of the crime scenes and found patterns between them. He hypothesized that the Bomber would be single, living alone, foreign, and self-educated. He also claimed that the bomber would be suffering from extreme paranoia. Since paranoia tends to peak around age 35, and the first bomb had gone off in 1940, then he deduced the Bomber must be in his 50’s when Bussel was examining the case in ’56. The police put this description in the newspapers, which immediately followed with the arrest and confession of George Metesky, the Mad Bomber. Because of the efficacy of Bussel’s tactics, criminal profiling gained some credibility and was adopted by the FBI. Current uses of profiling separate murderer’s behavior into four crime phases: Antecedent (Why the killer acted when they did, what their plan was), Method and Manner (What type of victim did the murderer select, how did they administer the murder), Body Disposal (did the murder and body disposal take place in the same location, or different locations), and Post offense behavior (Did the murderer try to interject themselves into the crime via media, or did they try to lay low). The same criteria are used for profiling rapists, with additional information coming from the living victims. The scientific validity of profiling has been questioned before. Initially, FBI profilers based their information on past experience and hoped the trends they found were generalizable enough to help them in their other cases. Nowadays, they are implementing a more grounds up psychological approach to training profilers and are focusing on empirical, peer reviewed research, rather than just investigative experience. They have developed the organized/disorganized dichotomy that separates murderers into two categories. Organized criminals are generally antisocial, but understand the difference between right and wrong and do not feel remorse. Disorganized criminals generally don’t plan ahead, leave obvious evidence, and are often under the influence of drugs or alcohol or are mentally ill. The information about being a profiler is incredibly fascinating so I looked up what it is exactly to be a forensic psychologist. To be a forensic psychologist you must first get your Ph.D. and then get further specialized training. From that point on it’s not all catching serial killers and writing up profiles. The program to become a forensic psychologist teaches students to understand the civil and criminal justice systems without actually becoming a law enforcement officer. The primary duties of a forensic psychologist are typically much more mundane. A forensic psychologist may be responsible for determining if inmates eligible for parole actually show that they are reformed, or they may determine if a suspect’s insanity plea is valid, or they may simply offer counseling to inmates or civil professionals such as judges and lawyers. It’s not as exciting as the forensic jobs on television, but it still sounds like a great profession to pursue, assuming you have an interest in legal issues.
http://www.apa.org/monitor/julaug04/criminal.aspx
I used this link to read about modern profiling techniques and how they’ve developed in the field.
http://forensicpsychology.umwblogs.org/when-women-kill/impact-on-forensic-psychology/
This link told me a little more about Munsterberg’s contributions and gave me an in depth look into the Mad Bomber case and how that in turn contributed to the success of forensic psychology
http://www.forensicpsychology.net
This link showed me what one would have to do to actually become a forensic psychologist, and what exactly it is that they would do.
1a) 1b) 1c)
My topic is the history of gifted education. It relates to the chapter and the textbook because Sir Francis Galton sort of started the movement, with his belief in eugenics. Eventually, Alfred Binet developed an intelligence test, which Lewis Terman changed into an IQ or intelligence quotient test. He started a longitudinal study with over 600 gifted students in California and studied them throughout their lives. Leta Hollingworth wrote the first gifted textbook and worked to dispel stereotypes about gifted children, as well as performing an 18 year longitudinal study about gifted children. I am interested in this because it is such a specific aspect of history that most people would never learn about it in a general history class in grades K-12 or in most history classes in college. I also was part of my school district’s TAG program in elementary, middle, and high school so this topic relates to me personally as well.
2) Children who are gifted have been noticed for centuries, as far back as China’s Tang Dynasty, but for the purposes of this blog post I am going to start in around 1888. In 1888, Sir Galton began testing eugenics. He was one of the first psychologists to experiment with human’s intelligence abilities. Much of the information we have about gifted students comes from research on children with special needs—Sir Galton was trying to prove that some bloodlines are weaker and create people who are unintelligent, verses other bloodlines that create more intelligent family members. Intelligence testing is also being developed during this period of time, creating the ability for psychologists and other qualified individuals to test students to see if they would benefit from special needs education within the school system. When Lewis Terman changes the intelligence test to the IQ test, psychologists are able to categorize students with special needs or who are gifted. Terman conducted a longitudinal study with 643 children in California who scored at or above 140 on the IQ test—he wanted to study their behavior and how they would fare in life. At the time, some people believed that gifted children were often mentally or physically ill or sickly, and that their giftedness faded with age. Because of Terman’s study, he was able to disprove much of these beliefs and in fact found that many gifted children became successful later in life. Around this time, Leta Hollingworth opened the Spayer School for gifted children. Hollingworth taught two different classes of students, both classrooms having high average IQ’s. She believed that gifted students should be grouped together and taught the same information as students in normal classrooms, as well as enriched/extra information. She also performed a longitudinal study on gifted students and wrote the first textbook for gifted students.
During the Cold War, the U.S. realized a need for intelligent problem-solvers, so the government started funding gifted programs in public schools. The students enrolled in these programs were identified by IQ testing. Later, between 1969 and 1983, several studies including the Marland Report and A Nation At Risk, showed the need for more resources and education for gifted students. Many teachers were not trained to deal with gifted students, who became bored in the classroom and were occasionally disruptive due to boredom or developed poor study habits. Due to these studies, the U.S. starts to develop more grants and guidelines for gifted programs. Currently, many school districts have specialized teachers to teach gifted students. Each state sets it’s own guidelines for gifted programs, so they vary by state. The current goals for gifted programs are to provide students with maximum opportunities for self-fulfillment and to increase society’s supply of problem-solvers.
http://www.nagc.org/index.aspx?id=607 This page is from the National Association for Gifted Children. It gave a timeline of important dates for gifted education.
http://prezi.com/gffbckonyhx_/the-history-of-gifted-education/ This is a Prezi created by a college student studying gifted education. It matched a lot of the information I learned from the timeline and gave more detailed information.
http://www.slideshare.net/brianhousand/history-of-gifted-education This is a powerpoint with lots of detail created by a professor at the University of East Carolina.
At the beginning of this chapter, a man named E.W. Scripture was mentioned. Unlike some of the psychologists in this book, I had never heard this name before associated with psychology. I was curious to see what he did in the field. Upon further reading, I saw that E.W. Scripture was actually an early pioneer in sports psychology. I have always been interested in sports psychology, so this week, I decided to further research E.W. Scripture and sports psychology. Being an athlete, the field of sports psychology and how athletics and psychology can relate to one another is very interesting to me. I wanted to read more about the history of this part of psychology and what the science all entails.
Edward Wheeler Scripture, better known as E.W. Scripture, was born in New Hampshire on the 21st of May in 1864. I thought it was surprising and interesting that when I was looking for information on E.W. Scripture, it was not as easy as I thought it would be. There are not that many websites or information on him. I did find out that Scripture grew up mainly in NYC and after graduating, he studied in Germany. Scripture’s main focus in his studies dealt with speech. Scripture was married with three kids and him and his wife travelled between Germany and the US a couple times before splitting up. Scripture was hired by G. Stanley Hall at Clark University as a professor. He worked there for a year before heading over to Yale University. Scripture then worked at Yale for a while before being fired because of disagreements with the chair of the department. Scripture is also credited with being a cofounder of the American Psychological Association.
E.W. Scripture is considered an early pioneer in sports psychology because of his work with reaction time. Scripture did some studies with runners’ reaction times and thought time in school children. These experiments, while seen as a start to sports psychology, are not actually considered the first study concerning sports psychology. The first recognized study in sports psychology was conducted by a man named Norman Triplett. Triplett found research that showed and supported that cyclists performed better with a pacemaker or a competitor. After Triplett’s study in 1898, many other studies were conducted on sports, athletes, and psychology but America did not have its first sports psychologist until Coleman Griffith. Griffith also did work with reaction times, along with athletes’ muscular tension and relaxation, and their mental awareness. He published many books concerning the psychology of sports and how to carry out research in the field. Griffith also was the first person to lay out information concerning what sports psychologists did. With his work, along with the work of many others, sports psychology is now an interesting and growing field today.
Sports psychology became very popular during the 1984 Olympics when teams started hiring sports psychologists for their athletes. Sports psychology is ultimately a combination of kinesiology and psychology that studies how psychological factors affect performance and how participation in sports and exercise affect psychological and physical factors. Sports psychology offers a few major specialties in their field including applied sports psychologists, clinical sports psychologists, and academic sports psychologists. Applied sports psychologists tend to work on teaching skills to enhance athletic performance such as goal setting and imagery. Clinical sports psychologists combine mental training strategies from sports psychology with psychotherapy to help people that suffer from mental health problems like eating disorders. Academic sports psychologists tend to work with colleges and universities while conducting research. A career in the field of sports psychology requires a lot of work and schooling because many career paths require higher than a bachelor’s or master’s degree. Sports psychologists don’t always work with professional athletes like some people think. Sometimes they work with people to increase their mental well-being or athletes that have suffered an injury and are soon returning to competition.
I think that a job in sports psychology would be very fun for me. I have grown up around sports and have had to deal with my own injuries, especially recently returning from an ACL tear. After having done that, and now researching this field of psychology, I am very drawn to what these psychologists study and research. I would be very interested in learning more about this career and possibly seeing what it could have in store for me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sport_psychology
This website gave me a lot of information on sports psychology. It helped explain what the science was all about and the history behind it. This website gave me information on Scripture along with Triplett and Griffith. I used a lot of the information from this website in my blog post for this week.
http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~duchan/history_subpages/scripture.html
I used this website a lot in my blog post for information on E.W. Scripture. This website gave me a lot of background knowledge on Scripture and his history. While this website had a lot of information on his life, something I could not find easily, it did not give a lot of information on sports psychology. This website gave more information on Scripture’s work with speech than on the work he did with sports psychology.
http://psychology.about.com/od/psychologycareerprofiles/p/sportspsyc.htm
This final website gave me information on careers in the field of sports psychology. I found this website the most interesting and it gave me a real life look at sports psychology in the real world. I used a lot of this information in my blog post when I talked about career paths in the field of psychology.
1a) State what your topic is.
- Alfred Binet
1b) Discuss how the topic relates to the chapter.
- Because this chapter looks into intelligence, and intelligence testing. Alfred Binet was one of the first to research intelligence.
1c) Discuss why you are interested in it.
- Because I knew about the Simon-Binet Intelligence test, had heard Binet’s name before, and wanted to know more about him as a person.
2) Alfred Binet was born in France, in the town of Niece (as it is now known), to a father who was a physician and a mother who was an artist. Binet had an aptitude for education, and started studying medicine, and law at the age of fifteen. However, these fields did not hold his interest and he moved on to other things. It was after he gained access to the “Bibliothèque nationale de France” that he learned about psychology. Binet began to read everything he could get his hands on, studying the early psychologists, as well as the routes of psychology. However, this lone pursuit of education was not without its downfalls. Because Binet had no formal education in psychology he was looked down upon within the community. It wasn’t until he was introduced to Jean Charcot that Binet began to apply his knowledge to the real world. Working under Charcot’s supervision Binet began work at the “Salpetriere” a clinic in Paris (also referred to as Salpêtrière Hospital). It was here that he gained that valuable knowledge Binet was lacking, and his education expanded under Binet’s new mentor. Binet stayed at La Salpetriere for seven years, and meet Fere a co-worker. Fere and Binet discovered the ideas of perceptual and emotional polarization within their clients, and viewed their findings as phenomenal attributions to the field. However, review by others provided the insight that the patients at the clinic were action on experimenter expectations. After this tragic blow (probably to his ego) Binet left the clinic. Binet also learned about the discipline of hypnosis from Fere, but moved away when scrutiny was placed on them. In 1884 Binet got married to Laure Balbiani, and together they had two daughters; Madeleine and Alice. Binet began to use his children’s development as the process for many new studies. Although Binet also volunteered at the Laboratory of Physiological Psychology at the Sorbonne; and was eventually named director. It wasn’t until late 1899 and early 1900 that Binet came into the field that would make him famous. His fame is due in part to a new law mandating that children ages six to fourteen attend school. During this same time period Binet was asked to become a member of the “Free Society for the Psychological Study of the Child”. Together these two factors pushed Binet into studying school aged children; and he took a particular interest in separating “normal” children from “abnormal”. L'Etude experimentale de l'intelligence (Experimental Studies of Intelligence) is the book that Binet wrote to explain and dictate his IQ testing methods. It wasn’t until after the release of the book that the Binet-Simon test was founded; because the book drew the attention of a medical student named Theodore Simon to study under Binet. Together they formed the Binet-Simon Intelligence Test. This was not the first intelligence test created but it was the best, and had a unique way of classifying the children who participated in it. The children would take a test specific to their age or grade level. If an eight year old child scored 100% on the 12 year old test their IQ would be 125 (10/8 x 100). Binet's work set of a popular movement of testing children with standardized test that can still be seen today. it also influenced army testing in the United States during WWI; and unfortunately gave (unfounded) argument for eugenics; because so many G.I.'s scored below proficient.
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/binet.htm
This website provided great information into the psychological history of Binet; his contribution, and flounders. This was the primary site I referred to.
http://www.goodtherapy.org/famous-psychologists/alfred-binet.html
This site gave a good, brief description of Binet, and provided some information not found in my primary source.
http://www.famousscientists.org/alfred-binet/
I used this site for Binet’s earlier life, but it did provide details on his later life as well.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/dh05te.html
This site provided a very brief overview of Binet’s life, but It did provide some good information on the Binet-Simon Scale.
After reading the chapter, I was very interested in Lillian Gilbreth and her contributions to modern management. I know she did a lot of things with her husband, and I think it is great that they could work together and form a career together.
Lillian Moller was born in Oakland, California on May 24th, 1878 (the same year John B. Watson was born). She was the oldest of nine children, and her parents gave their children a good life with a lot of privileges. With all of these privileges, however, she was very shy and timid, so her parents decided to have her be homeschooled for the first part of her life until she was nine years old. She not only learned her typical curriculum, but also learned French, German, and took piano lessons. Moller’s mother was very ill a lot of the time, so being the oldest sibling, she took over the responsibility of caring for all of her 3 brothers and 5 sisters. In high school, she did very well academically and her main interests were music and poetry, so she spent a lot of her free time writing her own songs and verses.
Although she was very bright, her parents did not expect that she would go to college, and her father was against higher education for women. He thought women just needed to be educated enough to be able to keep up with their duties as wife and homemaker. Moller was able to persuade her parents, and she ended up going to the University of California at Berkeley, as long as she would live at home and continue her services. While at Berkeley, Moller studied English literature as well as foreign languages and philosophy. She also took some psychology courses to prepare herself for a career in teaching. She graduated from Berkeley in 1900 with her B.A. and was the first woman to speak at commencement.
After Berkeley, Moller went to Columbia University in New York to begin her graduate work. She got to study with Thorndike, but after a year she was forced to return home. She did continue to work on her Masters studies at Berkeley once she returned home, and received her degree in Literature in 1902. She continued her education at Berkeley by working towards her doctorate degree in English with a minor in psychology.
Before starting to work on this degree, however, she planned a trip to celebrate her accomplishments thus far. She was going to tour around Europe, but spent some time in Boston first with a friend, who introduced her to Frank Gilbreth. He was the wealthy owner of a construction company, and one could say that it was love at first sight. When Moller returned from her Europe trip, Frank was waiting for her with flowers. He soon met her family and they were engaged, then married, in 1904.
After they got married, they moved back to Boston, where Moller (now Gilbreth) was able to continue her studies. Frank, who never went to college, stayed busy with his company and focused on efficiency in the workplace. He convinced Gilbreth to change her major to psychology, for a slightly selfish reason; he believed this would allow her to help manage his business.
And that it did. Not only were they life-long partners, but they were business partners as well. Frank’s continued interest in workplace efficiency and Gilbreth’s psychological knowledge allowed them to begin studying scientific enhancement principles together. They did motion studies, and Frank was able to reduce brick-laying motions from 18 to about 4.5. They worked together to increase efficiency of the business, but also originated micro-motion, which focused on breaking down work into fundamental elements, which are now called therbligs (Gilbreth, spelled backwards).
They applied their findings on efficiency in the workplace and also in their home. They had 12 children together, one of whom authored Cheaper by the Dozen. Sometimes his tactics were a little unorthodox, but it lead to more support for his findings (or disproved them). When Frank died in 1924 due to a heart attack, Gilbreth knew that she should carry on as he would have done with her research. This was difficult to do, however, because many companies did not want to do business with a woman, so the contracting company soon failed in Frank’s absence. She was, however, able to have manager training workshops out of her home, and she became in high demand.
Gilbreth did not retire until she was in her 80s, after teaching at a few different institutions and receiving numerous awards for her work with time management and improving the modern standard of living.
http://www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWomen/gilbreth.html
This site had a lot of detail into Lillian’s early life and her academic life (not just teaching).
http://www2.webster.edu/~woolflm/gilbreth2.html
This site also had a lot of detail about Gilbreth’s early life and how she met Frank, her husband.
http://gilbrethnetwork.tripod.com/bio.html
This site did a great job of reviewing the work that Frank and Lillian did together. I used this a lot toward the end of my blog, when I wrote about their contributions.
1a) I would like to research a little more on James Cattell.
1b) The topic of Cattell relates perfectly to the chapter because they had a write up concerning his contributions to the field of psychology.
1c) I am interested in this psychologist for several reasons, the first is because of his interesting in experimenting with recreational drugs. While this may seem very controversial to many, this realm his not often talked about from a personal perspective, save for a few entry level writers for VICE magazine. Not too many people would admit to experimenting with drugs, especially someone with the creditability of a college professor. The second reason I wanted to learn more about Cattell has to with the fact that he was fired from a University for publishing information that went against war propaganda that supported WWI efforts. I would like to see how he handled this and what impact it had on his career.
The first thing I learned about Cattell while searching for information on his life was that he initially founded the psychology laboratory. It was here in the first lab referred to by this title that he would administer psychological tests to his subjects. He also coined the term “mental test”. I found it interesting that his test was later proven to unreliable and was replaced by the Binet-Simon Scales. I didn’t recall chapter 8 talking about this so I think it was interesting to see the relation to another major part of history and how the two kind of tied together.
“I seemed to be two persons one of whom could observe and even experiment on the other”. –Cattell
If that doesn’t perfectly describe the experience he had while researching his personal use of various substances, I don’t know what does. According to several sources, Cattell would record his experiences that he would have while on various drugs that included morphine and opium. He was not your average stoner, he was looking to see what effects these substances had on personal experience and emotion. He viewed drugs as a key to unlocking new ideas and different experiences. While nothing that I researched directly said this, I would have to imagine he was curious as to why these substances could have the effect they do on the human brain if we weren’t supposed to experience them at some point in life. I admire his balanced approach to this somewhat taboo topic of recreational drug use. He was obviously an intelligent man, he did graduate with a Ph.D. as well as being a professor and researcher. He didn’t let recreational drug use over take his life, but he didn’t keep from questioning and experimenting with it just because of the subject itself. He was willing to take some risks to experience something new in life.
With the looming threats of WWI on the American home front, there were antiwar protests even back then. James Cattell was one such member of society that did not believe in war or the method the U.S. had in place at the time of having the young men register for the draft. He and another faculty member of Columbia University both lead antiwar protests and were very vocal in their disagreements with the war efforts. As a result of their pacifist approach to the issues that faced our country at the time, they were both fired from their positions as professors at Columbia. Cattell stood up for what he truly believed however and when he went to sue the school for lost income etc. he actually won and was awarded compensation for the whole ordeal. I was a little surprised that the courts would side with him on the issue especially during war time when social unity would have been so important to the war efforts. However, I think it admirable that he took a stand for what he believed even if it meant loosing his job or worse yet, losing credibility in the eyes of other professionals within the psychology field as well as other high up individuals within the academic community.
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/cattell.htm
This website had good background information of the personal contributions that James contributed to the study of psychology. It was helpful also, because it mentioned a few things concerning his mental tests that none of the other sources did.
http://faculty.frostburg.edu/mbradley/psyography/jamescattell.html
This source had some information that the other sites didn’t have on Cattell’s experiments with recreational drugs.
http://books.google.com/books?id=6x3S8eM3spAC&pg=PA295&lpg=PA295&dq=james+mckeen+cattell+opposing+wwI&source=bl&ots=i4CLGCBDqP&sig=ykrd7iYj5K9AOaGa2acp8dyECiA&hl=en&sa=X&ei=nYNoUoOLNMSwyQGfrYDwBw&ved=0CDQQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=james%20mckeen%20cattell%20opposing%20wwI&f=false
This source had some information concerning Cattell’s antiwar efforts that led to him being terminated from his position as professor at Columbia University.
1a-c)
The topic that I decided to do further research on this week was Leta Hollingworth, a woman who made huge contributions to the psychology world during her time. Leta Hollingworth had about as much to offer to the world of psychology as her husband Herry Hollingworth, if not more than what he had to offer. She had faced so many problems with going to school, teaching, and getting her doctorate degree. One of the main reasons why I am so interested in Leta is because she stood up for herself and proceeded to gain knowledge in the area of gifted children even though she was faced with some pretty tough situations being a female back in her time.
Leta Hollingworth relates to the chapter just because she is simply a great attribute to the world of psychology; she went around all things that were normal back in her time and became a successful teacher, along with this she was a huge advocate for the teachings of gifted children. Gifted children were known to be children with a more advanced way of thinking and a having a larger knowledge for certain subjects. She was discussed in the chapter in the “close-up” portion of the text, so I began to read the section about her and was quite interested in the fact that she had an issue with the myths about females so she decided to debunk those myths and prove people wrong.
2) Leta was born on May 25th 1886, where by her fourth birthday both of her parents had died and she was left to be raised by her grandparents. She studied at the University of Nebraska Lincoln at the age of only 15. There she had gotten her teaching degree and began to teach, when upon meeting her husband Harry he wanted to move to New York and there everyone knew that a married female could not teach; so there she had to stay home as a housewife for the next three years. After that she broke free and began doing research and broke out of her shell.
Leta Hollingworth as we know did a lot for the world of psychology along with her husband, but a few things that I did not know about her popped up in the various readings that I had come across. Her and her husband had done some experimenting with the Coca-Cola company to figure out the psychological effects that caffeine had on a person and then she got a job helping administer the Binet intellectual tests that we read about in chapter 8.
After taking a class on the gifted children it had sparked a thought in her mind about working with such children and figuring out what they were about. So at the time she decided to look deeper into the minds of the gifted children and find out how to create a better atmosphere in the classroom for them rather than placing them in a grade level higher than what they should be in just because of their intellectual abilities. She decided to place all of the gifted children in a higher learning class where they all could work together to combine their thoughts and not have to either dumb down themselves or be pushed to a higher thinking level then they should be pushed to. She found that this was a great idea.
She also worked a lot with trying to figure out the ideas of a female and why they were so degraded and put down. Under the teachings of Thorndike, which we have read about in the previous chapter, she had looked into the variability hypotheses, which goes into discovering why females are so doomed in life and why men are on both ends of the totem pole and women have no room for advancement in anything. She did not like what she was finding and figure out that females were inferior to men.
3) At the end of your post, please include working URLs for the three websites. For each URL you have listed indicate why you chose the site and the extent to which it contributed to your post.
http://www.feministvoices.com/leta-hollingworth/
This website gave me an overview of Leta in her personal life and what she devoted to the world of psychology.
http://www.hollingworth.org/
On this website it gave me more information about the center that was started up in her honor for the gifted children. I thought this was just a cool website to take a look at and get more information about the center for gifted children that she had an eye for.
http://faculty.frostburg.edu/mbradley/psyography/letastetterhollingworth.html
This website just continued to give me an overview or her life and what she had to offer, I found it a lot of help to write my topical blog post for this week.
I am interested in the eugenics movement because in a class last year we discussed how Hitler’s propaganda was largely based on eugenics but then we talked about how one of the first places that the eugenics started was right here in America and this is was major surprise me and most people. Henry Goddard was an early American psychologist who administered psychological testing at Ellis Island when new immigrants would arrive to America. If you failed the tests you were sent packing back to your old life. Henry Goddard was just part of a larger problem, eugenics. Eugenics is commonly thought of as the Nazi ideology and eradicating the Jewish population. Hitler however did not come up with the idea of eugenics himself even though he did write about it and expand upon the idea in Mein Kampf. The idea of eugenics has been around since 1883 when Francis Galton sought to come up with a solution for the perfect race after reading his cousin Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. The idea took major ground with the evolution rush into America and still has some remains today. During WWII the Nazi party adopted the ideas and some laws that 33 states in America had implemented into operation. These included sterilization of people for being deemed “feeble minded”, this included a 17 year old girl who was sterilized due to her feeble minded child and mother and hers “promiscuous” ways. It was even quoted by an American journalist at the early onset of WWII that “Germany was beating us at our own game” in regards to raiding our nation of the lesser class.
Outside of the dark shadow that can be casted over America for potentially giving the base eradication idea to Nazis, there are still are processes of eugenics in America today. One interesting topic that surfaced was that from 2006-2010 148 women who were all held in California prisons had illegally coerced women into sterilization. How can this happen one may ask, well one reason many include that the supreme court ruling of Buck v. Bell, the ruling allowing the 17 year old girl to be sterilized, has yet to be over turned in the eyes of the courts. What will happen with modern technologic advancements may have much larger severity. With the “old ways” of eugenics a child was born and deemed unfit at that point, now we are able to look into the genotype of an unborn child and see what problems they may have i.e. Downs Syndrome. Once we know that child may have a problem parents can decide to abort a child. This can change the whole idea of eugenics by empowering the idea of a prefect or better race of human beings simply by eradicating someone before they have a chance to step foot on this earth. If we were able to do this years ago we may have never seem some great minded people such as Stephen Hawking, who is arguably one of the greatest theoretical physicist and cosmologist to ever live.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/10/opinion/sunday/douthat-eugenics-past-and-future.html?_r=0
I chose this sight because it gave me insight into relating old to new ways of eugenics and it helped me understand and learn about the idea of looking at a child genotype before birth.
http://ideas.time.com/2013/07/10/eugenics-are-alive-and-well-in-the-united-states/
This article talked about and showed me that even within the 2000’s people are still being sterilized in a eugenics manner, this was a great example of eugenics still existing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaH0Ws8RtSc
This video told me a lot about the history of eugenics and pointed out how we sort of gave the idea to the Nazis. I also learned off this video about the 17 year old who was sterilized and the fact that so many states had implanted eugenic policies.
1a) State what your topic is.
James McKeen Cattell
1b) Discuss how the topic relates to the chapter.
James McKeen Cattell was discussed in this chapter for a couple of reasons. First this chapter discusses how Cattell played an important role in the professionalization of psychology in America. Cattell had editorial work in science and helped find science journals. Also Cattell created the mental test. This test was elaborated in Columbia with ten students.
1c) Discuss why you are interested in it.
I found James McKeen Cattell interesting for several reasons. I found it interesting that Cattell became enthused in mental testing and the study of individuals through Galton’s work. Next I found it interesting that Cattell’s fellowship was not renewed at John Hopkins; instead it was given to John Dewey. I found this assuming because I wrote about John Dewey last week for my topical blog. Lastly I found Cattell’s quote in the text book inspiring.
“Psychology cannot attain the certainty and exactness of the physical sciences, unless its rests on a foundation of experiment and measurement”
James McKeen Cattell played an important role in the professionalization of psychology. Cattell was the first professor of psychology in the United States. He had editorial work in science and helped find science journals. He also created the mental test after being enthused through Galton’s work.
James McKeen Cattell was born in 1860 in Easton, Pennsylvania. His parents were known as William Cattell and Elizabeth McKeen. His father was a minister and his mother lived off her inheritance. This inheritance made the Cattell’s family very wealthy. There family was also well known because of their father’s brother (uncle). Alexander Gilmore Cattell was the senator for New Jersey.
Shortly after James was born, his father became president of the Lafayette College. Growing up Cattell showed great talent in mathematics and English Literature. Cattell spent a year in Europe with his father at age nine. Then at age fourteen, Cattell was attending classes from his father’s permission at Lafayette. Cattell was then pressured to attend Lafayette College at the age of sixteen. He graduated four years later with the “highest honors”. Cattell stayed at Lafayette and continued to receive is M.A. in English literature. During this time Cattell became inspired by Francis March who was involved with philosophy. Cattell started to become more involved with science but still graduated with his M.A. in English literature four years later.
Cattell decided to move to Germany and first attend the University of Gottingen. He later relocated to the University of Leipzig. This is where Cattell became introduced to William Wundt, the founder of experimental psychology. Cattell became extremely interested in psychology and wrote several impressive papers. These papers won him a fellowship later at John Hopkins. Cattell became more involved and took a psychology course with G Stanley Hall. After finishing his first year at John Hopkins, the fellowship was not offered again. Instead the fellowship was offered to John Dewey. Cattell decided to go back the University of Leipzig and became Wundt’s assistant. They worked well together and studied human intelligence. During this time Cattell published his first book discussing individual differences in human intelligence. Cattell’s interest in psychology and philosophy expanded during this time. Cattell decided to do his own experimentation with drugs. Cattell decided to test the effects drugs had on him. He recorded morphine, hashish, opium, and etc. Cattell believed he was making “brilliant discoveries”. He also said “I seemed to be two persons one whom could observe and even experiment on the other”. In 1886 Cattell received his PHD.
Cattell worked hard to establish psychology as a science. He felt the growth of psychology depended of the growth of “quantitative methods”. During this time Cattell taught at several universities. Cattell decided to teach at the University of Cambridge where he met Francis Galton. Cattell soon realized they both had the same interests in individual differences. They did not work together, however they were very friendly towards one another. Galton did not further his interests in individual differences. However Cattell “took over” and developed the mental test.
Cattell’s mental testing relied on physical measurements and results of simply sensory and tasks. Cattel was able to summarize the results from testing 10 Penn students. There were 10 different tests the students had to participate in. Some of the tests were known as; dynamometer pressure, rate of movement, time for naming colors, judgment of 10 seconds, and pressure causing pain.( I decided to pick one of the tests and talk more in-depth about it). Pressure of causing pain was for fourth test the students had to participate in. Cattell believed he could record pain by using the tip of a hard rubber being pressed into the forehead. Cattell recorded when the pressure became painful and also the signs at which pain were showing.
Later Cattell was appointed to the University of Columbia’s department of psychology and philosophy. Cattell was able to award more doctrine degrees to psychology students than any other U.S. graduate school. He was also rewarded as the president of the Association of Psychology in America.
James McKeen Cattell played an important role in the professionalization of psychology. Cattell was the first professor of psychology in the United States. He had editorial work in science and helped find science journals. He also created the mental test after being enthused through Galton’s work.
http://faculty.frostburg.edu/mbradley/psyography/jamescattell.html
I chose this website because it provided information on his childhood and adult life
http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~duchan/new_history/hist19c/subpages/cattell.html
I chose this website because it provided information on the mental tests
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/cattell.htm
I chose this website because it provided information on his background and experiment with drugs
B.H.
My topic relates to Yerkes and Binet army intelligence testing program and other testing programs. This relates to the chapter because they made up the alpha tests and beta tests and other testing exams which measured intelligence in the army and in child development so they could accurately place individuals where they needed to be. I am interested in this topic because I want to know why testing is done, and see if the project still showed that mental testing could still be successful even with a large number of participants. I wanted to elaborate on different tests and the importance of testing reflecting children and military placement.
Alfred Binet had the first successful test of intelligence. This responded to a request by French public school officials for a test that could identify school children at risk of falling behind their friends in academic accomplishments. The Binet-Simon test consisted of many items that intended to reflect knowledge and skills the average French child would have. The items were graded in difficulty according to age. The average 12 year old would be able to answer a question that a younger child would tend to miss. This testing took 2 hours and was one on one to test individuality. A child’s mental age is what was tested, and it reflects the level at which a child performed on the test, if the child performed at the level of the average ten year old the child would be administered the age of 10 even if their physical age was not 10. If age was the same as the chronological age the child was average. If mental age is higher than chronological age the child was considered advanced. If the mental age was lower, the child is mentally retarded or behind in intellectual development. These tests measured intelligence by assessing intellectual skills and knowledge. The assumption made is that an individual has the opportunity to learn theses skills and knowledge. But if the person is granted the opportunity to learn them and didn’t, then it reflects deficit in intelligence.
The army’s use of intelligence tests during World War I advanced new reliability to the emerging profession of psychology, even as it ignited community debate about the validity of the tests and their implications for American democracy. Intelligence testing influenced American society long after the war that had launched it. The tests were revised for use in schools and promoted the “tracking” systems of separating students into ability groups according to test results. Intelligence testing fueled eugenics programs and was also widely invoked by those who pressed successfully to restrict immigration to the United States. During WW1, the Army saw a need for a intelligence test when deciding what sort of advanced training a recruit would receive. The Army Alpha and the Army Beta tests were then made. The Alpha test emphasized verbal abilities and was given to everyone. The Beta test emphasized non-verbal abilities and was given to those who performed poorly on the Alpha and were suspected of having language problems. Results were surprising; the average recruit had a mental age of 13 which exemplified a mild level of retardation. This reflected the level of education of the recruits rather than low native intelligence.
http://users.ipfw.edu/abbott/120/IntelligenceTests.html
This website provided me with education on Binets testing and the end results and how it all started for him.
http://knowledge.sagepub.com/view/organizationalpsychology/n12.xml
This website provided me a brief summary of the alpha and beta testing materials.
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5293
This website provided me with information on how army testing advanced reliability in psychology, and how it fueled eugenics.
1a) State what your topic is.
Robert M. Yerkes
1b) Discuss how the topic relates to the chapter.
Robert Yerkes is related to this chapter in that he was one of the developers of the Army’s mental tests that evaluated potential soldiers.
1c) Discuss why you are interested in it.
This topic was interesting to me because I served four years in the Army and it was a topic that was close to home. Yerkes also studied intelligence in primates and was a supporter of eugenics among other things. Yerkes was a very ambitious and interesting man who was a prominent figure in psychology for a long time.
2) Robert Yerkes was born May 26, 1876 and died February 3, 1956, he was an American psychologist, ethologist, and primatologist but he best known for his work in intelligence testing with the US Army and in the field of comparative psychology. Yerkes became interested in comparative psychology at a young age growing up on a farm in Pennsylvania but Harvard wasn’t as interested due to expensive research and bad smells coming from the lab. After writing a mainstream intro textbook about psychology Yerkes gained respect in the field and was elected APA President in 1917. That same year the US entered WWI and Yerkes was commissioned by the Army as a major to develop intelligence tests for recruits. Yerkes unlike Binet could not tests each soldier individually, he had to develop a tests for millions that could identify special skills so they could be put where they could best serve. The test Yerkes developed was known as the Army's Alpha and Beta Intelligence Tests, and was eventually given to over 1 million United States soldiers during the war. The development of these tests led Yerkes to favor eugenics because of the differences in intelligence among races. The tests were later criticized as very clearly only measuring acculturation, the test scores correlated nearly exactly with the number of years spent living in the US. After the war Yerkes was offered a position as professor of Psychobiology at Yale University, he accepted and served there for twenty years until 1944. While there he founded the Yale Laboratories of Primate Biology in 1929, and acted as its director until 1941. His work with John D. Dodson led them to develop what is known as the Yerkes-Dodson Law. The law states that performance increases with arousal, but only up to a certain point. His use of eugenics to interpret the results of his intelligence tests was wrong, his work in the field of intelligence testing and primotology also left a lasting mark on psychology.
3) http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesmz/p/robert-yerkes.htm
I chose this site because it spoke about Yerkes and his work at Yale with primates.
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Robert_Yerkes
This site was helpful with explaining the research involved within the intelligence testing that Yerkes was doing with the Army.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Yerkes
I used this site because it was one of the only sites that gave a good background about Yerkes life and how he became such a prominent figure in psychology.
1a) State what your topic is. 1b) Discuss how the topic relates to the chapter. 1c) Discuss why you are interested in it.
My topic for the topical blog is Lillian Gilbreth and Ergonomics. I thought that she was an interesting person because she took her role as a mother and mix her professional career. I found the idea of Ergonomics very profound because a lot of what we have today is because of what she founded. This relates to the new psychology that was coming forth.
2) Next, we would like you to take the information you read or viewed related to your topic, integrate/synthesize it, and then write about the topic in a knowledgeable manner. By integrating/synthesizing we mean taking what your read/experienced from the internet search organize the information into the main themes, issues, info, examples, etc. about your topic and then write about the topic in your own words using the information you have about the topic.
Lillian Gilbreth was a very smart woman, to say the least. She was an author, an industrial psychologist, but most importantly a mother of 12. To have enough time to do all of this is unimaginable, but she did that plus some. The household objects that we see in each one of our kitchens probably came from the idea of Lillian Gilbreth. She had ideas of the electric mixer, shelves that are found in a refrigerator, and something that we probably use day after day, the garbage can with the pedal. Not only did she invent these, but she always found something astronomical when it came to sleep and work. The less sleep that you would get the more stress you would have at a job. As we get older, the more this seems to be true.
Ergonomics is that of the workplace becoming more efficient for the worker. At the time, it was evolving that the workplace was more worried about the workers concerns. Coming from the industrial revolution to then this was a great change. Not only were employers worried about the conditions but they soon became worried about the well-being of the workers. They wanted to eliminate the body stress on the job such as bad posture, repetition of the body, and so forth. All of this was to alleviate the stress of the body and the worker.
While doing my research on the topic of Ergonomics, I came across that there are 3 types of Ergonomics. The first being Physical Ergonomics and that is the concern of the human body by the physical conditions. An example of Physical Ergonomics is the lifting of a heavy box and the position that you are in to lift of the box. Also another aspect of Physical Ergonomics is the safety and health of the workers.
Another aspect of Ergonomics is Cognitive Ergonomics. This is when there is a concern for the workers mental processes. An example of this is when a worker is making a decision; the worker has to be able to make a decision in a way that will positively affect the outcome. One major characteristic that tries to be avoided is stress at the job; however that is a very hard war to fight.
The last aspect of Ergonomics is Organizational Ergonomics. This means the layout, communication, or the rules. This is a very important in the company or job. We have to have rules to abide by so we can fully perform the job. Communication is probably the most important factor in a job. Without communication, the harder a job is.
3) At the end of your post, please include working URLs for the three websites. For each URL you have listed indicate why you chose the site and the extent to which it contributed to your post.
http://www.iea.cc/01_what/What%20is%20Ergonomics.html
This was a great site to see the types of Ergonomics that there are. They also give great examples of what each one is and how to see it in the real world.
http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blGilbreth.htm
This site was a good tool to get a brief biography of Lillian Gilbreth and what she all did in her professional career.
http://www.womeninscience.org/story.php?storyID=106
This was also a great site to see more of Lillian Gilbreth’s biography. This had more in depth content then the other one.
1a) State what your topic is.
Alfred Binet
1b) Discuss how the topic relates to the chapter. Alfred Binet was discussed in this chapter to discuss the birth of modern intelligence testing.
1c) Discuss why you are interested in it. I knew about these tests that he came up with like the completion test and the Binet-Simon scales but I didn’t know how or why they were developed and I wanted to learn more thoroughly about them.
2) Next, we would like you to take the information you read or viewed related to your topic, integrate/synthesize it, and then write about the topic in a knowledgeable manner.
Alfred Binet first became educated about psychology by reading works by John Stuart Mill and Charles Darwin. Alfred Binet is most famous for his work on the topic of intelligence. Binet and Simon developed tests to assess mental abilities. Binet mostly wanted to concentrate on mental abilities like attention, problem-solving skills, and memory. So, Binet and Simon developed the Binet-Simon Intelligence Scale. He didn’t believe that his tests would show a definite degree of intelligence but that scores can vary because of factors like motivation or other things can affect test scores. However; he realized that some children were able to answer more advanced questions than older children might have been able to answer so at this point Binet came up with the idea of mental age where you measure intelligence based on the average ability of children in the same age group. Binet did a third version of the Binet-Simon scale before he died but it was left unfinished. He wanted to continue to revise it but even though he died and can’t do so it is still well known and used around the world because it is easy and very short. Next after the Binet-Simon Intelligence scale Binet and collegue Lewis Terman developed the Standford-Binet intelligence test. For this test it used a single number which is known as the intelligence quotient better known as IQ. This number is used to represent their test score. This score is calculated by dividing the mental age by their chronological age, and then multiplying that number by one hundred. This test is still very much used but has experienced a lot of revisions.
http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesal/p/alfred-binet.htm
This website provided a lot of information about Alfred Binet and explained his contributions to psychology.
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/binet.htm
This website provided good information about Binet and the Binet-Simon intelligence scale.
http://www.intelltheory.com/binet.shtml
This website was helpful with providing thorough information about his intelligence tests and how he came about them and who helped him to develop these ideas.
1. State what your topic is.
I decided to do some more research on Yerke’s Army Alpha and Army Beta tests. I thought it was interesting to learn how psychology began being incorporated into many different aspects of life. I also thought it was interesting to learn more about how “survey” testing began to be used on individuals.
2. The military has long been a proving ground for different psychological studies. None, however, have had as great of an impact on military testing as the various intelligence tests that have been and still are conducted. When intelligence testing first began, it quickly became apparent that there were some very large issues with the studies. Robert M. Yerkes’ Army Alpha and Beta tests effectively changed how the testing was conducted in order to fix the issues.
When the rise in psychological studies occurred during World War I, Many psychologists wanted to test the intelligence levels of military personnel. There was one very large problem with the initial testing phases: many military men were illiterate. Since the tests composed by psychologists at the time could only be taken by literate men, it skewed the results of the tests.
Yerkes’ Alpha and Beta tests accounted for both the illiterate and the literate members of the military. He created a written test composing of the standard intelligence testing material for all members who were literate enough to take the Alpha test. The Beta test was designed for those members who were illiterate, uneducated or could not speak English. These tests had the test taker look at pictures and tell the test administrator what was wrong with each picture. Often times, the pictures would be missing something such as a nose on a person’s face, a stamp on an envelope or something similar.
As with many psychological experiments, the first attempts were not perfect and excluded large groups of people that would have contributed much statistical data. However, Yerkes’ Alpha and Beta tests fixed the problems and allowed for both literate and illiterate members of the military to be tested. This laid the groundwork for modern day intelligence testing in the military and can be accredited for part of the success of the current military ASVAB tests.
3. http://en.copian.ca/library/research/adlitus/page20.htm
I decided to use this website because it seemed very knowledgeable about the Alpha and Beta tests. It also didn’t have a lot of extra information that I didn’t need.
http://www.studymode.com/essays/Army-Alpha-Testing-63298.html
This site had a lot of information about the tests. I thought it gave a lot of background knowledge that I didn’t read other places.
http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/367145?uid=3739640&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21102801531491
This website was gave a lot of in depth information about the testing and how it was administered. I thought it was very helpful when writing this paper.
1a. For this week’s Topical blog I decided to dig deeper on information about Robert Yerkes who was involved in the Army testing program.
1b. Yerkes related to this chapter because he was discussed in how he was one of the main developers in creating the Army’s mental testing for future soldiers. He created two different tests because some people were still very illiterate during that time and they didn’t understand the original test.
1c. Robert Yerkes and Army testing really caught my interest because my brother was in the Army and died three years ago in March so anything that has to do with the military is something I like to read up upon further. Intelligence testing soldiers to see if they were fit in the military is something I find to be important and interesting in that same aspect. What they are capable of and how they can be useful in the service is important instead of just sending whoever over to serve.
2. Robert Yerkes was an American Psychologist who was also known for being a primatologist, and an ethologist. Yerkes is mainly known for creating and evaluating intelligence tests to the Army soldiers. His tests was developed to see if the soldiers had any specific or special skill that could benefit the Army. This test helped place soldiers in the position that suited them in the best and most beneficial manner. There was two tests that he created and they were called the Army’s Alpha and Beta intelligence test. Beta test was used for the soldiers that were not literate in English and Alpha tests were used for the soldiers who could read, write, and speak in English. Between these two tests, over 1 million soldiers in the United States of America, took either one of these tests during the war. These tests, over the time period were found to not be accurate and only measuring acculturation. Even though he wasn’t successful with these tests per say he went onto more research on different issues. He developed a law known as Yerkes-Dodson Law while he held a position at Yale University. The Yerkes-Dodson Law stated that performance increases greatly with arousal, but that stopped at a particular time period. And when arousal levels become too high, performance actually decreases, which is a finding that is so interesting. This research is still talked about in the field of primatology. Robert Yerkes was an intelligent man who encountered roadblocks in life, but still overcame with other research projects.
Sources:
http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesmz/p/robert-yerkes.htm
I liked this source because it gave me background on Robert Yerkes life in detail and it also gave brief information about his research as well. I found this website to be very useful in finding out who Robert Yerkes actually was and how he became who he was.
http://newlearningonline.com/new-learning/chapter-6-the-nature-of-learning/yerkes%E2%80%99-army-intelligence-tests/
I really liked this source because it went in depth about Yerkes intelligence testing that he created and it talked about how it got started and how the testing ended as well. What the results were and detail about the research.
http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/yerkes-robert-m.pdf
This was probably one of the best sources because it gave me everything that I needed to know about him and his research projects. It went into great factual depth and I learned a lot from this source.
AS
1a) State what your topic is.
Applying Psychology
1b) Discuss how the topic relates to the chapter.
Applying psychology is part of the chapter. For example Walter Scott was the first to apply psychology to business. He wrote books on improving business practices, and on advertising. Psychology is also applicable when choosing employee for certain positions within a company. The chapter also discussed how Van Bingham developed programs to train employees for retail and sales positions.
1c) Discuss why you are interested in it.
I own a business and want to apply psychological techniques to better myself and improve my business.
2) Next, we would like you to take the information you read or viewed related to your topic, integrate/synthesize it.
Applied psychology is the use of psychological principles and theories to overcome problems in real life situations. Mental health, organizational psychology business management, education, health, product design, ergonomics, and law are just a few of the areas that have been influenced by the application of psychological principles and findings.
The nature of applied psychology was too demanding for Walter Dill Scott to continue his research on human behaviors, which lead his focus to establishing his own theories. Scott developed laws of suggestibility as a critical mechanism of advertising. Early emphases in applied psychology included vocational testing, teaching methods, evaluation of attitudes and morale, performance under stress, propaganda and psychological warfare, rehabilitation, and counseling. Educational psychologists began directing their efforts toward the early identification and discovery of talented persons. Walter Scott's role in Applied psychology eventually lead him to be considered one of the founders of Industrial/Organizational Psychology which is the application of psychological theories and principles to organizations. Industrial and organizational psychology, focuses to varying degrees on the psychology of the workforce, customer, and consumer, including issues such as the psychology of recruitment, selecting employees from an applicant pool which overall includes training, performance appraisal, job satisfaction, work behavior, stress at work and management. Organizational psychology is the application of psychology to the workplace, or business.
3) Resources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Dill_Scott
This link discusses who walter scott is, his role in applied psychology, and why he was involved with applied psychology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applied_psychology
This link discusses what applied psychology really is, where it is applicable, and how it is being applied.
http://www.businesspundit.com/12-practical-business-lessons-from-social-psychology/
This link give practical ways on how to apply psychology in business dealing and determinations. I’ve also included an example from the site, because it really is interesting and, it does work.
Perceived Trustworthiness
The Concept: Trustworthiness of the speaker is another factor critical to any kind of visual marketing. No trust, no sale. Fortunately, how trustworthy you look can be controlled almost entirely by you.
How You Can Use It: Our outward behaviors have a lot to do with whether someone trust us or not. One behavior that seems to carry a lot of weight is eye contact. Researchers have found that if video-taped witnesses in court looked their questioner straight in the eye rather than down or around, they were seen as more trustworthy.
You can also appear more trustworthy by seeming like you’re not trying to influence an audience. “Hidden camera” TV commercials utilize this tactic all the time. Social psychology experiments have found that people who don’t think they’re being watched are comfortable being completely honest.
People also find others trustworthy when they argue against their own interest. Thus, a message about risks of cigarette smoking seems much more sincere coming from the tobacco companies than it would if were given by an anti-smoking politician up for re-election. People might link the politician’s anti-smoking speeches to his political agenda, whereas they cannot do this with the tobacco companies and are much more likely to absorb the message as true.
1a) State what your topic is.
Alfred Binet's Intelligence Testing
1b) Discuss how the topic relates to the chapter.
Part of chapter 8 was about the mental testing movement. The approach to mental testing was first thought of by Galton and brought over to the states by James McKeen Cattell. The theory of mental testing was emphasized by basic physical and sensory measures. Although his test failed at, he played a major role in the professionalization of psychology in America. Alfred Binet was another psychologists that found interest in intelligence testing. The difference between mental testing and intelligence testing was that intelligence testing emphasized measuring cognitive processes, rather than sensory.
1c) Discuss why you are interested in it.
This topic interested me because intelligence testing is still very prevalent today. Although there have been modifications towards the Binet - Simon scale and the name has been changed, the concept of the test is still the same. I always think that theories or studies or testing that still are recognized 100+ years later are interesting. Using a mixture between images and words was brilliant to test intelligence and now special programs have been made for children that need a little more help.
2) Next, we would like you to take the information you read or viewed related to your topic, integrate/synthesize it.
Darwin's theory of evolution provided the framework for the debate over whether intelligence was fixed by genetics or could be modified by circumstances. Wilhem Wundt proposed the idea of an intelligence quotient and made attempts to measure it. This inspires Binet to research human intelligence. Binet's desire to study human intelligence grew out of his fascination with the development of his own two daughters. He noted that the speed and ease that his children absorbed information varied from each daughter. He studied the functional intelligence of children and noted that they became capable of certain skills at specific ages. Example, young children are not capable of abstract thought. He began publishing his articles and the governments asked Binet to devise a method of assessing learning potential in infants.
The Binet - Simon scale is what came out of what he was asked to develop by the government. The first test was made in 1905 and the test eventually was made for children ages 3-13 by 1908. Binet believed that there were limitations of the scale stating that the scale simply ordered children from their performance of intellectual tasks in relation to other children of similar age. He also said that mental development progressed at different rates and could be influence by environmental factors. He emphasized that intelligence testing can only measure an individual's mental ability at a particular time and in a particular context. Abilities change within short periods of time and they also change over the long-term as part of the development process. He stressed that intelligence of an individual was not a fixed quantity.
http://www.indiana.edu/~intell/binet.shtml
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/binet.htm
http://www.famousscientists.org/alfred-binet/
These websites gave me information about Binet's life and his process into intelligence testing. They talked about in which he developed the Binet - Simon scale and they also talked about his thoughts and process of the Binet - Simon scale.
1a) Alfred Binet
1b) Alfred Binet relates to chapter eight in many ways. In this reading intelligence and intelligence testing are brought up and Binet is one of the first to do research on these topics.
1c) I am interested in learning more about Alfred Binet and his findings on intelligence testing because his findings relate so much to today’s world. Finding out more about his background and why he was so interesting in this topic always fascinates me. Digging deeper in this research and how he came to his findings is something I want to learn more about. I also love how he cared so much about identifying which students needed special help in school to focus more on them in different areas.
2) Binet went to law school and got a degree yet found science very important in his life. He self-educated himself by reading psychology texts and he choose to do this because he was not into formal schooling. He worked for John-Martin Charcot at Salpetriere Hospital as associate director and researcher at the laboratory of experimental psychology. He conducted his early research on hypnotism which did not turn out in his favor. Following the birth of his two girls he then turned to the study of developmental psychology. He studied, observed and did research on his own two daughters which lead him to the subject of intelligence. “Binet's research with his daughters helped him to further refine his developing conception of intelligence, especially the importance of attention span and suggestibility in intellectual development.” I find this interesting because every parent observes their children he just noticed things in a different point of view and also that his daughters were part of his experiment and research is different. The French government asked Binet to identify students with learning disabilities which Binet and Simon did so by creating a series of tests known as the Binet-Simon Intelligence Scale. His focus on mental abilities such as attention and memory is what made his intelligence tests differ from others which focused on math and reading, also known as learned information. I find it shocking that this concept came to America because Goddard translated the scale into English and changed the name. Binet published many books in his period and is well known in today’s world for inventing the first practical intelligence test. I loved his goal with trying to identify students who needed special help with school this is huge and has such an impact in today’s curriculum.
3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Binet - wikipedia always has an easy layout to follow through topics outline
http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesal/p/alfred-binet.htm - narrows the topic down to make it more clear
http://www.indiana.edu/~intell/binet.shtml - very descriptive and good layout of information
The topic I am writing about is over Henry Goddard. Goddard has a lot to do with this chapter and psychology in general. In this chapter he did research over mental age and proposed a classification system based on Binets mental level concept. Im interested in writing about Goddard because I have read about a lot of his work but not necessarily about his past and how he grew up. Goddard was obviously a psychologists, and also a eugenicist. He was born in Main and had 4 siblings, which he was the youngest of. His father was a farmer who died when Goddard was only 9 years old from injuries on the farm. After that Goddard lived with his older sister, but then went to boarding school. Eventually Goddard grew up and went to college at Haverford College. He played on the football team there. He decided to take 1 year off from school and instead teach in Maine. Then he finished his school and went to California to visit a sister of his. In California he got offered a job position at USC as a teacher. He eventually returned to school to earn a Masters Degree in math. He continued to move around and teach in different areas and even earned a doctorate in Psychology. Goddard had many contributions to psychology. Some of his major ones were translating Binets intelligence scale to English and distributing 22,000 copies of it in the U.S., coming up with the words for the mentally retarded people scale, and was a huge advocate for having special education for these people. These weren’t only contributions to psychology, but also to society. I think it is very important that they have special education for different mental levels because not everyone learns the same way, and not everyone can learn as easily, but it is still important that they get an education so they can still have opportunities in life so it is good that there can be an education system specifically designed for them.
Another one of Goddards famous works is The Kallikak family which is a book that Goddard wrote about feeble-mindedness. To sum it up there was basically one man who had children with an intelligent woman and a “feeble-minded” woman and Goddard found all the children and determined that the children from the feeble minded woman were all also feeble-minded and had signs of retardation and said that they were all bad children. The children from the intelligent women were also intelligent and seemed to all be well behaved and grew up to be prosperous. So the point of this book was to “show” that feeble-minded people can lead to having children with retardation and who would grow up to be poor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_H._Goddard
I used this site because it had a lot of information about Goddards early life.
http://www.indiana.edu/~intell/goddard.shtml
I used this site because it clearly listed Goddards major contributions to psychology and society.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kallikak_Family
I used this site because it had information about the Kallikak Family.
1a) Military Testing
1b) This topic relates to this chapter because this chapter deals with intelligence testing. During the First World War a test was needed to measure intelligence in the military.
1c) I’m interested in this because the book mentioned that a lot of people in the military couldn't read or write very well so I am curious the how intelligence was measured.
2) During WWI intelligence testing was created for the U.S. Army in 1917. This test was created by Robert Yerkes. He teamed up with a group of psychologists. These group of psychologist were called the “Experimentalist”. An interesting fact was the Yerkes was actually opposed to the War, and was forced into creating this test for the military. In 1919, the Army Division of Psychology was created at in Georgia at the medical training camp. At this location test was being done. During this era was when “shell shock” and the effects of war were being studied.
The two tests that were created were the Army Alpha and Army Beta. These tests were created to help the military commanders measure the aptitudes of their recruits. When creating these tests it was known that one could be very intelligent and smart without being uneducated or not skilled in the English language. This was take in account when creating the tests, because the recruits could still be crucial for the military. The Alpha test was used to measure “verbal ability, numerical ability, ability to follow directions, and knowledge of information.” (ASVAB) This test was done in a group setting. The second test was the Beta. This was non-verbal portion of the intelligence test. This test was used to evaluate “aptitude of illiterate, unschooled, or non-English speaking draftees and volunteers” (ASVAB). Over 1.5 million soldiers were subjected to this test throughout WWI. These test were used to see where recruits should be placed, what jobs they would fit best with, and also identified leaders. Both of these tests were based on the idea that intelligence was an inherited trait, and that a person’s native intelligence was what was being tested. The tests were then different for those that were literates, illiterates, or non-English speakers.
The Alpha and Beta tests were not used again after the First World War. Instead for the Second World War the Army General Classification Test and the Navy General Classification Test were used instead. These tests were used to place recruits in different military jobs. The AGCT test was used to test general intelligence and learning ability. Also tests were added to measure technical areas, administrative, radio code, language, and driver tests were conducted. I think the difference between these was that they became more complex and have become modified and expanded to fit different needs of the military.
3) http://en.copian.ca/library/research/adlitus/page19.htm
This site was great in explaining why the test were created and their use.
http://official-asvab.com/history_res.htm
This was used for looking at the history of military testing and explain different tests used and their purposes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_psychology#Yerkes_and_war
This site was great at looking at the different types of tests used and Yerkes influence.
1a) State what your topic is.
Hugo Munsterberg
1b) Discuss how the topic relates to the chapter.
Hugo Munsterberg is related in the chapter because he made mental test for workers. The main focus on this chapter is mental testing and it seemed like most of it went over the IQ test.
1c) Discuss why you are interested in it.
I am interested in Munsterberg because I wanted to know how the testing for a person to end up with a job came about, because in reality most of us are trying to go to college to gain a job so we can live in this society suitable to our needs, not to just learn in general, college cost too much. In a sense overall general intelligence does not seem to be as important as it should and employers only care if you can do your job and nothing else.
2) Next, we would like you to take the information you read or viewed related to your topic, integrate/synthesize it, and then write about the topic in a knowledgeable manner. By integrating/synthesizing we mean taking what your read/experienced from the internet search organize the information into the main themes, issues, info, examples, etc. about your topic and then write about the topic in your own words using the information you have about the topic.
Hugo Munsterberg, was born in Danzig, Germany in 1863. His mom died when he was 12 years old this made him become more serious afterward. He started with social psychology, but then became more interested in medicine. He attended lectures by Wilhelm Wundt, this changed his life to enter the psychological laboratory at Leipzig. Munsterberg received his Ph. D. in psychology in 1885 and he also received a medical degree in 1887. Munsterberg accepted to be a lecturer at University of Frieburg. He published a small book called Activity of the Will. William James was impressed by his ideas especially because the supported his own theory of emotion. William James also asked Munsterberg to take charge of the psychology lab at Harvard. In 1909 he wrote a paper titled “Psychology and the Market” which used for industrial applications such as management and advertising, job performance, and employee motivation. His work was later summarized as his book Psychology and Industrial Efficiency. In this book he focused on workers that had the best personalities and mental abilities that would be best suited and qualities that would help are increase motivation, performance and retention. He also focused on the problems that occur in the work life such as attention and fatigue, monotony, also physical and social influences on the working power. There were three main sections in his book, the best possible man for the job, the best possible work and the best possible effect. Best possible work dealt with factors that would increase work efficiency. Best possible effect, focused on the marketing aspect.
Hugo also studied forensic psychology, he wrote a book called On the Witness Stand in 1908. This book focused on how psychological factors can influence the outcome of a trial. Some problems he focused on were eyewitness testimony, false confessions, and interrogations. Illusions he stated affected false eyewitness testimonies. Sometimes when someone is under a lot of stress or in a stressful event their perception on things tend to play tricks on them like illusions.
3) At the end of your post, please include working URLs for the three websites. For each URL you have listed indicate why you chose the site and the extent to which it contributed to your post.
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/munsterb.htm
I choose this website because it showed all of Hugo Munsterberg’s works that was published.
http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesal/p/hugo-munsterberg.htm
I choose this website because it showed what Hugo Munsterberg’s careers where and I was wondering what type of personal experiences he had, to give him the idea of mental testing for jobs.
http://legacy.earlham.edu/~dominel/webpage.htm
I choose this website because it goes into further detail on some of his work like on the witness stand and Industrial Organizational psychology.
1a) Hugo Munsterberg
1b) Hugo Munsterberg was talked about in this chapter for bringing psychology to the business world in employee selection.
1c) I’m interested in him because I want to be in Human Resources and I would like to know more about the guy who brought psychology to business.
2) Hugo Munsterberg was a German born psychologist who made his name in applied psychology, but mainly he focused in Industrial/Organizational psychology. The big part in Hugo’s life was when his mother died when he was 12 years old, he then turned his life in a whole different direction. He wanted to get his education to make a difference in his life, he started studying psychology at the University of Leipzig. With that said, it didn’t take long for him to realize that he has a love for medicine, and he changed his direction of his study to medicine. Even though he did that, it didn’t last long, he was confronted by Wilhelm Wundt, who we learned about earlier in the semester. Wundt showed how gifted Munsterberg was in psychology, so he then switched back to psychology, and the rest was history for the differences he made in psychology and the business world. He earned his PhD in psychology, but then later went back to school and got a degree in medicine which he always had a love for.
Munsterberg was a very influential in the psychology field, but what he is most remembered for is what he did for the business world. He brought the thinking and teachings of psychology to business, mainly the human resource side, but he did touch on other areas. For instance he did a lot of studies on how advertisements effected the human brain, he also looked at how eye witnesses are effected by what they saw and how they recreate the actions that transpired and how each person can view things differently. I thought that was interesting because he was mainly remembered for the employee selection changes he made. This was a cool change to the employee selection process, he changed how people looked at the hiring process, and he wanted to look at the employee as a fit to the organization and the job, rather than the HR person liking the candidate. I like the way he brought in the new way of thinking for an old job, he revolutionized the position and the changes are still relevant today.
Hugo Munsterberg did make his most lasting impression in industrial psychology, he wanted to improve efficiency as a whole in the organization. He wanted to improve how the management was run and also how the marketing team was ran. He showed how the human mind was effected by different things in the environment. He also focused on the motivation factor of the workplace, he knew that there were some external and internal factors that motivate the person. He knew he could tap into this for different people and improve efficiency.
http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesal/p/hugo-munsterberg.htm
This was a good website showing his influences and the beginning of his life.
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/munsterb.htm
This was a good website showing the work he did besides the employee selection work, it was interesting all of the fields he went into with his psychology work.
http://psych.answers.com/industrial-organizational/hugo-munsterberg-father-of-industrial-psychology
This website showed how Munsterberg got his ideas and what he wanted to focused on with his theories.
1a) State what your topic is.
The topic I chose to research further was Robert M. Yerkes.
1b) Discuss how the topic relates to the chapter.
In relation to chapter eight of our book, Yerkes plays a huge role in the advancement of mental testing. It also relates to the chapter in means of the growth he was contributing to the field of intelligence testing.
1c) Discuss why you are interested in it.
I am was first intrigued by his work because I am very interested in army life, and was wondering what influence, if any, he had on the testing the army uses today.
Robert Yerkes first started his career in psychology by attending Harvard University. During his childhood Yerkes grew up on a farm and always being surrounded by animals. His love for animals influenced his work in what would be known as comparative psychology. He had a great influence on behavior and intelligence studies of animals throughout his career, but specifically had a love for studying primates. Before he would go on to research primates further, he was asked to head intelligence testing in soldiers during WW1. He held the title of president for the American Psychological Association, and agreed to the task set before him. He soon developed a testing method known as the Army Alpha and Army Beta tests. If soldiers were literate they would take the Alpha test, and if they were illiterate they would take the Beta test. These tests differed from previous test, like the Binet tests, because they did not have to be administered one-by-one, and could be taken by huge groups of people at once. During the war this method of testing was given to 1.75 million soldiers and helped give rank between those who were capable of leading others or those who were seen as incompetent. This method of testing made its greatest impact after the war, with the huge growth in intelligence testing that was now seen in schools. After his work with testing, he returned to study his primates and eventually was the founder of the Lab of Primate Biology at Yale.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Yerkes
This site helped to understand the timeline in which Yerkes studies and contributions were made, and gave a brief overview of them.
http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/yerkes-robert-m.pdf
This was a biography of Yerkes life that was very in-depth and helpful to know his specific contributions.
http://psychology.jrank.org/pages/658/Robert-Yerkes.html
This site went into detail about the contribution Yerkes made specifically on the army and its contribution today.
1a) This week I decided to do more research regarding Alfred Binet.
1b) This week we dove into the world of intelligence testing and its movement. It included a section on Binet, explaining a bit about the birth of modern intelligence testing which we can thank him for. It also got into the Binet-Simon scale which is so famous today.
1c) Intelligence testing is such a prevalent thing today. I wanted to learn a little bit more about Binet’s life personally. I found many aspects of him and what he did neat such as using his daughters to explore development.
2)
French psychologist, Alfred Binet was born as Alfredo Binetti in Nice, France in July of 1857 as the only child of a physician father and a mother who was an artist. His parents separated when he was still very young so he then moved to Paris with his mother. Binet attended law school in Paris, earning his degree in 1878. He then went on to study natural sciences, with a desire to attend medical school but his interest in psychology took over and changed his direction. As he was very introverted and more of a longer he became more of a self educated psychologist. He began reading books at the National Library in Paris by people such as John Stuart Mill and became very fascinated with his ideas which in turn had much influence on his work.
Eventually he went on to being a researcher as well as associate director of the Laboratory of Experimental Psychology at the Sorbonne from 1891-1894. He never held the title of professor with any institution as he did not have any type of formal education within the study of psychology. During this time as well he co-founded the French Journal of Psychology where he met Jean Charcot, french neurologist. Charcot then became his mentor and also had a heavy influence on Binet who went on to publish several articles concerning his work regarding hypnotism. This led to the embarrassing public admission he had to make stating that he was wrong in support of Charcot. Later on in life he as well had to admit his wrongs dealing with transfer and polarization. Even with such embarrassments he was still able to establish his name internationally.
Binet finally made his way into the study of development, sparked by births of his two daughters, Marguerite and Armanda who were two years apart. Here he developed the concepts of introspection and extrospection. Published work from his observations which included studies of emotion, memory, attention and problem solving. Binet was many things over the years including the inventor of the first practical intelligence test, the Binet-Simon Scale. He published more than 200 books, articles and reviews for several areas within the field including experimental and development as well as educational and social. He influenced many people, including well known Jean Piaget. His work with his daughters went on to aid him in refining his conception of intelligence, especially attention span significance. To this day though he is most commonly known for the contributions he made with intelligence.
He became interested in the work of Sir Francis Galton regarding quantifying cognitive capacity through testing. His main focus regarding the intelligence scale was to identify students who needed special help in their curriculum at school. A main concern at the time came about as to what sort of test could be given to children thought to have learning disabilities which could place them within a special sort of classroom. From here, Binet made it his goal to establish difference separating normal and abnormal children and then measuring these. In order to describe methods he used he published Experimental Studies of Intelligence in the year of 1903. Simon was a medical student and had volunteered himself to assist Binet in the research, working with him on developing such tests. They spent many years observing children in their natural settings. Two years later a new test they created was officially named the Binet-Simon Scale. The scale tests children over a variety of tasks such as abstract problem solving. The scale was revised again in 1908, including children from the ages of three to thirteen. The overall score reflects the child’s mental age. In 1911 the scale had its last revision with Binet dying this same year.
In the year 1908, the Eugenics movement was taking place and champion, H.H. Goddard found some utility in mental testing which could be used as evidence to support white superiority. He brought the Binet-Simon scale to American and translated it into english where Lewis Terman revised it in 1916 for its use. Today the scale is widely popular all around the world and since his death many have honored Binet.
3)
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Binet
This website included a ton of information, starting at the beginning of Binet’s life. It discussed his education and how he began his career, the publications he worked on, contributions he made and went into great depth concerning the Binet-Simon Scale.
2. http://www.faqs.org/health/bios/34/Alfred-Binet.html
Overall it was a great large summary of Binet’s life which included a lot of good information. Like the Wikipedia site it started off from his earlier years and education and then got into more of his major contributions and ideas. It also included texts he published and the influence he had on the field.
3. http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/binet.htm
This website was nicely broken up into sections. It stated off with a biography, giving an overview of his life. It also included a section of theory discussing how his ideas of mental intelligence came about. It ended with a timeline which is always nice to have laid out for you to see.
1a) State what your topic is.
The Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales
1b) Discuss how the topic relates to the chapter.
The chapter explores psychology's application to real world aspects, including sport psychology and business psychology, however a large portion of the chapter is an overview of using psychology to determine an individual's intelligence levels.
1c) Discuss why you are interested in it.
Intelligence is a word that is thrown around a lot, whether by parents trying to cushion their child's life or by being a stated goal that a student is trying to reach, I am interested in learning what the procedure is that has been said to accurately depict the intelligence level of an individual.
2) The Stanford-Binet intelligence scale is a test determining the cognitive ability of individuals, through the testing of five aspects of: knowledge, quantitative reasoning, visual-spatial processing, working memory, and fluid reasoning. The test is originally derived from the Binet-Simon scale and meant for diagnosis of intellectual ability/disability in children.
Binet and Simon had created a baseline for which they would determine an average intelligence through a long procedure of continuously testing multiple children from varying backgrounds. Test scores were compared with age ranges and in turn, a certain level of knowledge was correlated with a specific age, and whether or not the child had scored above or below the average had depicted a high intellectual ability or intellectual deficiency. A professor at Stanford University by the name of Lewis M. Terman had later localized a version of the test in the United States, renaming it to the now well-known name of Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale.
Terman's influence had spread throughout the country, allowing intelligence testing to be promoted throughout schools and even the military. But with huge success, Terman began suggesting controversial and rash ideas, such as sterilizing low IQ adults to inhibit the spread of children with genes that correlated with low intelligence, and prejudice between low IQ and high IQ individuals in the form of job placements. Current day uses include assistance in placement for education, clinical, neurological, and psychology assessments, career planning, and forensics.
As far as reliability goes, the newest edition of the Stanford-Binet has had multiple reliability tests performed on it, ranging from split-half reliability, where a test is split into two sections and the same individual's scores are compared; standard error of measurement, where the repetition of a test allows the individual to come closer to his true score; plotting of test information curves; test-retest stability, where reliability is measured through having individuals take the same test over a period of time, and correlating the scores to evaluate stability; and inter-scorer agreement, a degree of agreement amongst test scorers.
3)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7febdavF1M
Gives an overview on the factors being testing, and types of questions that correlate to the determining areas of intelligence.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford%E2%80%93Binet_Intelligence_Scales
Vast summary over the history of the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale, offers insight towards its development and reliability.
http://www.assess.nelson.com/pdf/sb5-asb1.pdf
A very long, extensive, overview of the history of the SB scale, goes over reasons for revision and changes from the earlier editions and today's Fifth edition.
The topic that I chose to explore in a little more depth is the work of Hugo Munsterberg specifically in industrial psychology. I chose this topic because I plan on being in human resource, so the topic of industrial/organizational psychology is fascinating to me. I tend to lean more to the organizational side of I/O, but employee selection and placement is still an interesting topic for me as well. This topic relates to the chapter because Munsterberg had his greatest impact in industrial psychology. This is a form of applied psychology which is what chapter eight is all about.
Hugo Munsterberg was known for many accomplishments in his lifetime, but one of the greatest would have to be his work in industrial psychology (Goodwin 2012). After hearing a lecture from the famous Wilhelm Wundt, he decided to pursue a degree in psychology (Psych Answers). It wasn’t until his later years that he really started working on the topic of industrial psychology (Muskingum).
Munsterberg, throughout his career, was a prolific writer and publisher of scientific works on many different topics. In 1912, his writing took him to the world of jobs when he published Vocation and Learning, and later, in 1913, when he published Psychology and Industrial Efficiency. These two works became very important to the study of not only the industrial side of I/O, but also to the organizational side as well. To the industrial side, Munsterberg’s works led extensive work on employee selection and placement. After his works were published, Munsterberg began working on applied psychological theories inside the workplace. His work with employee morale and motivation really set the foundation for what was later to be called the field of Industrial/Organizational Psychology (Psych Answers).
In his work Psychology and Industrial Efficiency, Munsterberg set out three questions that he wanted to answer. These questions are as follows: “How can we find the men whose mental qualities make them the best fitted for the work which they have to do; under what psychological conditions can we secure the greatest and most satisfactory output from every man; and, how can we produce most completely the influences on human minds which are most desired in the interest of business.” The goal of those three questions was to find the best possible man to do the best job and get the best results (Reference for Business). This last statement, minus the “only men tone,” is exactly what Industrial/Organizational psychology is about today. It has been 100 years and his words are still relevant.
http://psych.answers.com/industrial-organizational/hugo-munsterberg-father-of-industrial-psychology
I chose this website because it gave a general foundation to the background of Munsterberg, and helped me understand what he researched.
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/munsterb.htm
I chose this website because it gave a general timeline of Munsterberg’s life and accomplishments.
http://www.referenceforbusiness.com/knowledge/Hugo_M_nsterberg.html
I chose this website because it tied the business perspective and the psychological perspective together.
1a) Lewis Terman and the Stanford-Binet IQ test
1b) The chapter speaks quite a bit about IQ and intelligence. Terman was a man who further researched the topic. Terman elaborated on Binet’s intelligence test and produced a test, Stanford-Binet IQ test, which is still in place today and used throughout research.
1c) I was interested in learning more about Terman an the Stanford-Binet IQ test because I enjoy clinical psychology. This is a test that has been around for years, and when I first briefly learned about the test I didn’t know who or where it derived from.
2) Lewis Terman was known for his work within the education psychology realm. Terman worked at Clark University, where he deepened his ideas on intelligence. He read many different books and articles in classes and he found inspiration in men who he admired. A few men he admired, Galton and Binet, were focused on the topic of intelligence. Terman was intrigued by what it brought about and decided to study it in more depth. It was then he published The Measurement of Intelligence, which gave him a renowned status in the public eye. In this book he spoke of the new and improved Binet-Simon scale he had produced and gave a great detail of the revised version. This scale led to the development of the Stanford-Binet IQ test. The test broke up individuals into different levels based on their intelligence ability. One of the main reasons he produced the test was a way to pick out the individual children who may need more help, and in turn help these individuals with more special training. The test made a big impact within schools, and even an impact when it came to military recruiting. It was a way to pick individuals who would be best suited for the particular jobs open. One major contrast between Terman’s view and Binet’s view on intelligence was the environmental and biological factors. Terman believed environmental factors had no bearing on intelligence, but Binet believed it was a combination of both biological and environmental factors that could predict IQ levels. Terman used the test to predict further achievement down the road. By using these tests within the school, it was possible to pinpoint the children who needed extra attention and help, and gave them a chance to be placed somewhere else to receive that help or attention. Terman believed he was doing well. He was allowing children and military personnel the chance to become better based on their specific needs. Also, allowing kids to take part in special educational classes at an early age, may allow them to catch up to the class and produce higher IQ levels later in life even with a little set back. It is interesting because we still do this today. We are separated in school and given the proper educational classes to help us succeed. We have in place reading tests and spelling tests at an early age to allow us more help if necessary. If children are in need of more help their in special times set aside for them to go meet with another teacher one on one to work in a more private setting with extra attention in order to help the child. Even though the Stanford-Binet IQ test is still in place today, it is a revised version from the one published by Terman.
I chose this website because it gave me insight on Terman’s studies and how he used children to figure out their further achievement levels based on their IQ levels at the time.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/beautiful-minds/200909/the-truth-about-the-termites
I chose this website because it spoke of the role of intelligence based on Terman’s studies.
http://sitemaker.umich.edu/356.loh/lewis_terman
I chose this website because it gave a good biography of Lewis Terman.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Terman
1a) State what your topic is.
My topic is Lillian Moller Gilbreth.
1b) Discuss how the topic relates to the chapter.
This topic relates to the chapter because the chapter talks about applied psychology, and Lillian Gilbreth was the first true industrial organizational psychologist. Her husband and her paved the way for other psychologist interested in the business field. The term ergonomics came form Lillian and her husband Frank.
1c) Discuss why you are interested in it.
I am interested in Lillian Gilbreth because you do not hear too much about female psychologists. I was surprised when I stumbled upon her in the reading because all of the founding psychologists prior to this chapter have been strictly male. It is inspiring to read about a female to earn her Ph.D. after being shot down once before. Lillian ended up writing two separate dissertations at two different colleges. I can only imagine how discouraging it would be to concoct the first dissertation, and being shot down. Lillian did not let that discourage her from her pursuit to happiness. She was determined to get her Ph.D. and started back a square one in an attempt to finally obtain it.
Mrs. Lillian Moller Gilbreth was born in late May of 1878. She was the second of ten kids born into the Moller family in Oakland, California. Lillian’s father was a retail storeowner, and her mother was a homemaker. Lillian’s mother was often sick, so she was in charge of tending to her younger siblings. She spent her early education at home, being homeschooled by her mother. At the age of nine, she was put into her first formal school setting. Even though she was homeschooled, she was required to start at first grade in public school. While Lillian’s grades during her public school career were outstanding, she found it difficult to make friends. She was a shy, and introverted child. She was interested in music and poetry. Lillian was often known to write her own lyrics, and poems. Lillian eventually graduated Oakland High School, and was elected vice president of her senior class. After graduating high school, Lillian decided to attend the University of California, Berkeley. Her parents did not believe Lillian would go to college after high school. They wanted her to marry rich, and become a homemaker. Lillian and her parents agreed on her attending Berkeley because her cousin went there, and she could commute from her house in Oakland. While at Berkeley, she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English Literature. It was not until she was at Columbia, studying for her masters, did she discover psychology. Edward Thorndike was the one who introduced Lillian to psychology. He taught her psychology courses while she was at Columbia University. During her time at Columbia, Lillian became very sick and went home. Lillian ended up finishing her masters in Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Around this time, Lillian met Frank Bunker Gilbreth. Sixteen short months after they met, the couple was hitched. Lillian then went on the pursuit for her doctorate. She attempted her doctorate at the University of California, but was her dissertation was shot down. After she was not awarded her Ph.D. for her first dissertation, Lillian went to Brown University where she was awarded her Ph.D. after writing a second dissertation. It was the first degree granted in industrial psychology. Lillian died in January of 1972. She had 13 children, which only 11 lived until adulthood. Her children wrote the book Cheaper By the Dozen, along with a few other successful ones. Lillian Gilbreth lived a successful life. She was an American psychologist and industrial engineer. She was also one of the first female engineers with a doctorate degree. Lillian will go down in history as the first true IO psychologist.
http://www2.webster.edu/~woolflm/gilbreth2.html
This article had a lot of great information. It provided me with detailed information about who Lillian was, and her early life.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lillian_Moller_Gilbreth
This source also had a lot of information. It mainly provided me with Lillian’s major contributions to psychology, and IO psychology.
http://www.feministvoices.com/lillian-gilbreth/
This last source provided me with a timeline of Lillian’s milestones. It also offered an assortment of facts regarding her career.
1a) Leta Hollingworth
1b) Leta Hollingworth was important to this chapter because she saw the struggle of what it takes to be a female educator of this time. She helped psychology in finding ways to help children who were not being educationally stimulated to become educated in a way that gave them a challenge. She also worked to debunk theories of why women were not as good as men through psychological means and actually studies; something that was merely ignored at this time.
1c) I am interested in it because Leta was a woman who was faced with many challenges but turned them around to accomplish better education for children who were gifted and helped women to move up in society; proving that there is no legit difference in what a women is capable to do versus a man.
2) Leta Hollingworth was born in Nebraska in May of 1886. Leta’s mother died when she was young and her father remarried and moved the family to Valentin Nebraska when Leta was 12. At 16 Leta began her education at University of Nebraska in Lincoln Nebraska. Leta did extremely well academically and found a passion for creative writing. While at the University of Nebraska Leta also met her future husband, Henry Hollingworth. While still attending the University of Nebraska Henry and Leta were married, shortly after being married Henry moved to New York to work on his graduate degree and Leta remained in Nebraska to finish her undergraduate. After graduation Leta moved to DeWitt, Henry’s hometown, and began teaching, but after two years Henry had saved enough money to bring Leta to New York so she left DeWitt and moved to New York with Henry. It was in New York where her challenges began, in New York Leta was unable to find a job because during that time women were not seen as adequate teachers. Finally in 1911 Leta returned to school and began a slow course of attending graduate school; Leta struggled to find means to pay for school but made it through and graduated with her master’s in 1913. Leta then found a position working for the Clearing House for Mental Defectives. It was while working here that she received her Doctorate and became an educational Psychologist. Around the same time that she received her PhD she was offered a job to teach at Columbia Teaching College, while there she continued to work at Bellvue and established a Classification Clinic for Adolescents.
Leta’s main focus of study upon entering the psychology field was education of children, first starting with infants because they were not able to alter themselves in order to give different impressions. Later she found her passion in studying gifted children, children who were being educated but their education was not enough of a challenge to keep them interested in their studies. Leta began to study what makes these children gifted and was able to create a test that would lead them to be able to identify giftedness earlier in their education in order to help these children receive a proper education; an education that would actually stimulate the children’s mind. Leta went on to write three books that replaced the older version of psychological education text books. As a result of Leta’s studies and education on gifted children she was able to create Speyer School in 1936.
Not only was education a major part of Leta’s life though, but after her struggles of dealing with sexism while attempting to find a job after moving from Nebraska. Leta went on to write multiple articles about sexism and became a feminist advocate. Leta actually set out to discover what it was that created the idea that women were inferior to men. She went on to test a theory that had been lurking around for a extended amount of time and that was that while women were menstruating they were not able to think clearly or absorb material so were therefore stupid for that period of time. The results of the test after a 3 month period in comparing men to women found no difference and therefore proving this to be completely wrong.
3) http://www2.webster.edu/~woolflm/letahollingsworth.html
I used this site because it was very informative about Leta’s life, where she was born, her background, education and what made her who she was.
http://www.feministvoices.com/leta-hollingworth/
I used this site because it was very informative about Leta’s achievements in working with gifted children and what happened in her studies of them.
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Leta_Stetter_Hollingworth
This site was very informative about Leta’s work in feminism. This site talked about her study about the theory of why women are inferior to men.
1a) State what your topic is.
Edward Thorndike
1b) Discuss how the topic relates to the chapter.
Edward Thorndike was discussed heavily in the chapter due to his advancements in maze testing and animal testing. He coined trial and accidental success as a method of learning. He has multiple laws notably the law of effect and the law of exercise. He greatly advanced psychology as a field.
1c) Discuss why you are interested in it.
His history seemed interesting, and when the book talked about his debate with Wesley Mills and how he was not taking his elders studies and findings I found this interesting and humorous. This is the initial interest, and I decided to pursue this topic.
Edward Thorndike was an American Psychologist who focused primarily on animal learning and whether or not animals were truly brilliant creatures. His most notable study involved the puzzle box, of which he would place a cat, or similar animal, in and then observe how long it took for the animal to release itself from the box. He then graphed the results of his experiments and the controls and different scenarios to come to the conclusion that it wasn’t learned or insight, instead it was trial and error that was taking place. This theory of his, trial and error, is what he believed was learning that was done by making a connection of a stimulus and a response; this is how his theory is sometimes called connectionism. His theory was heavily fought against however against the older psychologists of the time, such as, Wesley Mills, because Thorndike discounted the “truths” that previous generations had laid down and was seen as defiant towards them. This defiance towards them is what started this debate, however his evidence and research was sounder than any fragile ego may have been.
Another major contribution was his laws in learning. These include, the law of effect, exercise, and also readiness. Law of effect states that if a good response happens after an action the bond between the two stimulants would be strengthened and the converse is also true, where if a negative response happens the bond would weaken and disassociation would tend to happen. The law of exercise states that the more a person or animal does something, the stronger the bond will become, and the less an action is taken, the weaker the bond will happen. This is similar to studies, the more you study the stronger your learned knowledge will be, and if you don’t study a subject for years then the connection of that knowledge diminishes. A third law was one the book did not discuss at all or even mention was the law of readiness. This law states that in order for the best learning to take place the subject must be ready in many different areas to succeed. These areas include being emotionally, physically, and mentally ready. If a subject or animal is expected to do a task that is reliant on one of these categories, and they are not ready or near the best shape they could be in, learning will be inhibited and be much more difficult.
These are just a few of Thorndike’s contributions to the field of psychology; he revolutionized ideas of animal psychology and helped lead to the Stimulus-Response experiments of BF Skinner. He was defiant and his defiance granted him a name that has been handed down for a century.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Thorndike - This site gave a full detailed explanation of life and studies of Thorndike.
http://www.simplypsychology.org/edward-thorndike.html - This site has a video and describes at a basic level the cat in the box experiment.
http://www.instructionaldesign.org/theories/connectionism.html - This site further explains connectionism, Thorndike’s learning model.
1a) State what your topic is.
Lillian Moller Gilbreth
1b) Discuss how the topic relates to the chapter.
Lillian Gilbreth and her family were discussed in the chapter. She and her husband are known for their efficiency studies, and they were involved in the progression of applied psychology in business.
1c) Discuss why you are interested in it.
I thought she was interesting because of all she was able to accomplish while being an educated, working mother of 12.
Lillian Moller Gilbreth was born on May 24th, 1878. She had always done well in school, but her father did not believe in higher education for women. She was able to convince him to let her attend the University of California to study literature while still living at home. Two years later, she received her masters in literature.
Two years later, she married Frank Gilbreth, a successful construction company owner who never attended college. He was very interested in increasing efficiency in the workplace, and Lillian developed an interest in it also. In 1910, Lillian, Frank, and their four young children moved to Rhode Island so Lillian could obtain her doctorate at Brown University with a minor in psychology. She wrote Psychology of Management that focused on the human aspects of industry.
Frank and Lillian’s household resembled a mini-industry. Within 17 year, the had 12 children. They would record and time the children doing everyday tasks (washing dishes, brushing their teeth), analyze the footage, and see what would make things more efficient by measuring and counting their movements. This may seem slightly invasive, but Frank’s passion outweighed everything.
Frank and Lillian wrote many books together, but Lillian did not have her name on any of them. At the time, it was seen as socially unacceptable for a woman to be an author because it would reduce the credibility of the work. (Note: Frank did not have a college education, but he was seen as more credible.) Together, they created a consulting business to help managers better treat and manage their employees.
In 1924, Frank died suddenly of a heart attack, leaving Lillian with a business, a house, and 12 children to take care of. For most, this feat would impossible, but for Lillian Gilbreth, nothing was impossible. She continued her consulting business at home where she was still able to care for her kids. Eventually, she consulted for Macy’s in New York. Later, she consulted for a number of universities, one of them being Purdue. In 1935, she became a professor at Purdue where she taught in the engineering department.
Lillian Gilbreth continued consulting for the rest of her life. She was also an inventor. She created the pop-open trashcan lid and the shelves on refrigerator doors. She accumulated numerous awards such as the Hoover Metal for her work in engineering. Lillian Gilbreth died on January 2nd, 1972.
https://www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWomen/gilbreth.html
This source is a biography of Lillian Gilbreth’s life.
http://www.feministvoices.com/lillian-gilbreth
This site is another well-written biography. One thing I used from this site specifically was the information about their family being a mini-industry.
http://www2.webster.edu/~woolflm/gilbreth2.html
This source is also a biography that discusses Gilbreth’s life.
All of the sources are very similar, and the information was consistent throughout all three. Although they are written a little differently, the majority of the content I used was located in all three sources.
This week I chose to discuss the manipulation that’s taking place that most of us are barely aware of. Adding taxes and creating tax credits affect all of us in America and while they are producing revenue, they are shaping our behavior as well. I know I have thought of this before, but it must have been years since I’ve put much thought into this topic. After reading about this in this week’s text, I began wondering of ways this affects us. You mentioned things such as cigarettes, so I decided to go explore others. I’ve always been interested in politics and government, and have always tried to stay up to date with things going on. I like the debate aspect in these areas, and knew researching this topic would bring up plenty of information from both sides of the spectrum.
Last year was the 100th anniversary of the modern tax. Yes there was a time when April had another meaning other than tax month. Before a price sticker wasn’t really what it cost, and before participating in certain purchases could give you money back. We are told that tax revenue is what our country runs on, with that in mind a time without taxes seems impossible, but yet it was. Before February 1913 there was a very different system; A very simple one. Before 1913 the government got its money from one main source, tariffs. A tariff is a tax that is placed on imports and exports. That one tax was able to cover the nation’s expenses, and it was actually able to get the nation out of national debt. Why does this still not work? Well many reasons why this wouldn’t work in these times. We now have a much larger expense as a nation. We now include things like welfare, social security and medicaid in our expenses. We also have a much larger population. Add a large population and a huge amount of extra expenses, and taking care of that with tariffs alone would be impossible. So okay we see there is a need for taxes, but how much? How far do we have to go to cover these expenses or could it be the government is trying to do more than one thing with taxes? While you mentioned cigarettes, and the sin tax that is applied to things like cigarettes and alcohol because they’re bad for our health. The government is hoping adding an extra cost to something it will keep you from emitting the behavior, because ‘they’ve’ decided it isn’t good for you. What they have decided was morally bad for us, they thought it was morally okay to make money off of. So basically, we’re taking moral advice from somebody with no morals. Other ways taxes affect us is things such as charity. You don’t have to count money you’ve given to charity on your taxes, which makes giving to charity more alluring. You’ll get tax breaks on buying energy efficient cars, solar panels, and other things that are good for the environment. Well you may not have thought of buying a Prius before, now it may not sound like such a bad idea. I am not one to decide whether what the government is doing is ‘bad’ or not. You taught us in the beginning of the semester that just because it’s manipulation doesn’t mean it’s bad. Looking through material especially during election time brought plenty of biased cut throat information. Whether it’s truly to be beneficial to society, or just to make money, we’ll be paying come April either way.
Terms: Manipulation, behavior, shaping, emit,
http://reason.com/archives/2014/04/09/tax-code-manipulation
The above link was useful by pointing out how exactly the government manipulates us into certain behaviors.
http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/history/item/14268-before-the-income-tax
This was very informational in the historical part of my writing, discussing times before we paid taxes and how things were handled.
https://www.udel.edu/htr/American/Texts/macro.html
This website went much more in depth about how the government works and the taxes we’ve acquired.
ahh shit wrong class! Ill repost it in bmod
1. Goddard and the Immigrants
2. This topic relates to the chapter because iq testing has had a huge impact on today's society as well as determining who was fit to enter America and who wasn't.
In 1913, just a few years prior to World War 1, American psychologist Henry Goddard developed an intelligence-testing program to identify “feeble-minded” immigrants attempting to enter America. If an immigrant was seen “unfit” they were then denied entry and returned to their country of origin. An immigrant could be denied entry into America for numerous reasons: being a moron (a word he invented as a sub-category to feeblemindedness), being “obviously normal”, and any cognitive disability. Goddard believed that these people posed a serious threat and according to npr.org he also claimed that there was a link between low intelligence and criminal behavior. During this time in Ellis Island, Goddard sent assistants to recognize these “unfit immigrants” by sight and sight only. Before the mass movement of immigrants to the United States, goddard distributed iq testing to over 75% of people entering the U.S. During this time, he was held in high esteem and looked at as a very prominent and credible psychologist to Americans, so why not go with what he says. Goddard was held accountable for denied entry of estimated 80% of immigrants because of his invention of this intelligence program. In the beginning this was a very resourceful way of combing through those entering the states, but as time went on and he began to deny entry to those by sight is when the entire operation became obsurd. Now looking back in history most would say that Goddard is the “moron” and would question, “who in their right mind would allow this?” But at the time, goddard was held in such a high psychological esteem that no one questioned his processes or motives.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_H._Goddard
This website gave me the basis of all information in the paper
http://www.apa.org/monitor/2009/01/assessment.aspx
This website gave me more detailed and accurate information of what happened at Ellis Island
http://education.stateuniversity.com/pages/2011/Goddard-Henry-H-1866-1957.html
this website provided more information about the IQ testing and how it was used on the immigrants.
This week I will be discussing Henry Goddard and his intelligence testing at Ellis Island. Goddard is not only known for studying intelligence, but for also for his very well known view of not letting the morons of society reproduce more little morons. Goddard was a topic of discussion this week due to his classification system and testing in the intelligence field. While he wasn’t the actual inventor of the Intelligence Quotient test, he is known for administering the tests throughout key historical event. I am not a big fan of history, mostly because I feel we go over the same stories over and over, but not with this subject. Out of all the times reading about Ellis Island over the years in school I not once read about intelligence being tested, or the big numbers that were associated with it.
The intelligence Quotient test had many contributors; or to the idea at least. Before Goddard came Cattell’s mental test, a series of tests designed to tell your mental capability, but more so judged other things, like grip strength and reaction speed. After Cattell’s test being proved un-useful in intelligence testing, Alfred Binet revised intelligence testing into what is now known as the Intelligence Quotient. He came up with different mental levels, which is a type of classification to where a person should be at. Binet believed you were able to grow and expand within your intellectual abilities and there was no set ‘smart’ or ‘stupid’ kind of thing. His testing was a way to see who was behind and needed help. Henry Goddard on the other hand did not feel intelligence was something you could obtain. Goddard felt intelligence was passed down and that by allowing morons to breed, the more corrupt society will become. In 1913 Goddard took Binet’s IQ test to Ellis Island in New York, where immigrants were coming through from other countries, and added it to the entry requirements. The results from the IQ test at Ellis Island were terrifying and thousands got sent away each month. The cultural differences between groups and testing wasn’t put into account very well and end results put as much as 80% of immigrants as the ‘unacceptable’ intelligence. Many believe this data and Goddard’s views on intelligence and society corruption led to the immigration act put into effect by the government.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_H._Goddard
Wilipedia was very useful in Henry Goddard’s life story. It gave details and additional information about his beginning life.
http://psychology.about.com/od/psychologicaltesting/a/int-history.htm
A brief overview on all the intelligence tests over the years.
http://www.apa.org/monitor/2009/01/assessment.aspx
goes deep into how Goddard feels about the feeble minded and what he thinks should be done.
My topic for this week is Hugo Munsterberg. I chose this topic because my roommate told me before I even read the chapter that she had heard in one of her classes that he was a spy. Espionage and psychology? What more could someone want?
Hugo Munsterburg was born in Germany to an art-loving family. His father was a merchant and his mother was an artist. Munsterberg’s mother passed away when he was only twelve years old and that played a huge role in his life; he became a much more serious person. In 1882 he enrolled in the University or Leipzig where he studied social psychology and medicine. It was here that he met the famed William Wundt and began to study under him. In 1887 he took a job as a private tutor and wrote his first book, “Activity of the Will.” His book was highly criticized by Wundt and Edward Titchner but William James supported his ideas. Because of later correspondence with James, Munsterberg was asked to take over the psychology lab at Harvard. He was elected president of the American Psychological Association in 1898.
Munsterburg is most known for his work in applied psychology. He made significant contributions forensic, industrial, and clinical psychology. His book “On the Witness Stand” talks about how different psychological factors can influence a criminal trial. His basic premise was that eyewitness testimonies were not reliable, and interrogations and false confessions were a leading cause of error. However he also had some highly disagreeable ideas as well. He thought that women were too incapable of rational understanding to serve on a jury as well as that graduate studies were too complicated for women.
Munsterberg was also very interested in experimental research and mental health as he believed it had a psychological basis. He had started a medical practice in Germany and then moved it to the United States with him. His method of treating patients was that they would meet him in his laboratory instead of in the clinic. His patients never had to pay for his services and he also only saw patients that had scientific interest to him. His method of diagnosis was to observe his patients and then interview them with things such as word association. If after this tentative diagnosis he thought that the patient was seriously ill, he would treat them with more medical means. He was also fan of autosuggestions where he would tell his patients things like if they went home that night and got a really good night’s sleep that they would feel better.
http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesal/p/hugo-munsterberg.htm
I chose this source because it provided a good biography for him.
http://legacy.earlham.edu/~dominel/webpage.htm
I chose this as a source because it has links to just about anything that you could want to know about Munsterberg.
http://faculty.frostburg.edu/mbradley/psyography/hugomunsterberg.html
This site had biography bits as well as information about his career.
1a) State what your topic is.
The Kallikak family
1b) Discuss how the topic relates to the chapter.
Henry Goddard studied Deborah and the Kallikak family in depth to understand ‘feeble-mindedness’ and tracing back her family’s lines for years in order to get to the root of the cause of the family’s problems. This supported Goddard’s theory that feeble-mindedness was inherited and supported his eugenic beliefs.
1c) Discuss why you are interested in it.
I am interested in this because the way the book presented Goddard searching into this girl’s background seemed almost obsessive, and so I’m curious as to how he actually got his information, and if the book that came from this is actually accurate information, and what kind of effect it had on the world. I know that the book mentions that this had an impact on Nazi Germany, who were originally wanting to exterminate those who were feeble-minded for eugenic purposes.
‘Deborah Kallikak’ was living at the Vineland Training school in which Henry Goddard worked, and Goddard took a special interest in her and sent research assistants out into the field and to her home to gather as much information as they could through questioning. Deborah’s name was actually Emma Wolverton, who came to the Training School because her mother, who had a lot of illegitimate children, married a farmer whose condition upon agreeing to the marriage was that the children that were not his had to be sent away. The researchers traced Deborah’s family tree back to a man named Martin Kallikak, who was a solider in the Civil War. According to what the researchers could find, Martin had sexual relations one night with a ‘feeble-minded’ girl he met at a tavern on his way home from war. He then went home and married a ‘respectable’ woman, and had seven children with her. Unbeknownst to him, the bar girl became pregnant and gave birth to a son, who she named after Martin. Thus, there was two family trees splitting off, one of which raised prominent members of society, the other of which were degenerates and ‘feeble-minded.’ Deborah herself, as later research shows, that it was more likely that she was actually learning disabled and not mentally retarded, because she could do many other things, and merely was delayed in reading and writing. Other present-day theories to what the Kallikaks‘ actually suffered from are effects of malnutrition and fetal alcohol syndrome, which can cause problems that are very similar in what Goddard described. Goddard used his findings of the Kallikaks to write a book, The Kallikak Family: A Study In The Heredity Of Feeble-Mindedness, which was very popular and even published in other countries, including Germany. The Nazis, once they came into power in 1933 reprinted the book and used it as a foundation for extermination. Photos were also used in the book, and some experts now believe that these photos may have been shaded and touched up in order to make the degenerate side of the Kallikak family look scarier than they really did. This book was also used to increase funding for institutions like the Vineyard Training School, but because of Goddard’s beliefs at the time of publication, many people did not see the benefit in these schools, and instead wanted things such as forced sterilization of people who were viewed as ‘feeble-minded’. Although Goddard, later in life, revoked a lot of his earlier opinions on those who were feeble-minded, saying that they were able to be taught, and that they should be able to have children and shouldn’t be separated (all of which he had said prior), most people still associate him with his earlier work, and this casts him in a negative light. His research on the Kallikaks, upon further research, is largely shown to be false, and the only one who ever took an intelligence test in the family was Deborah, and many of her family members went on to be prominent and well-off, not just on this one side of the family, as Goddard tried to state, but some researchers believe that he needed a family that more easily fit into what he needed to push the eugenics agenda, and so he fabricated one.
http://www.intelltheory.com/kallikak.shtml
Photos, general background info
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kallikak_Family
Sterilization, possible other disorders Kallikak’s could have had
http://aaiddjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1352/1934-9556-50.2.169
Study of Deborah Kallikak, or Emma Wolverton, alternative ideas about Goddard’s study
I chose Hugo Munsterberg as my topic this week. We have briefly mentioned Hugo Musterberg in this class before and I have heard of him in social psychology and applied psychology, but we have never gone into depth about him. I feel he is important to psychology due to the fact that his research extended from I/O psychology to clinical psychology.
Munsterberg grew up in Germany, and this is where he first became interested in psychology. It was after sitting through one of Wilhelm Wundt’s lectures, whom he later became an assistant to. Munsterberg ended up receiving his Ph.D in psychological psychology in 1885 at the age of 22. Munsterberg then went on to study medicine at the University of Heidelberg.
Munsterberg later attended the First International Congress where he met William James who invited him to Harvard in 1892. While there, his classes became very popular with the students. Unfortunately, after the war broke out Musterberg found himself in a tight spot stuck between his homeland and America.
He stuck it out in America at this time, and he ended up making many different contributions to psychology, and was later elected to be the president of the American Psychological Association. He also made contributions to applied psychology and forensic psychology.
Munsterberg wrote a paper titled ‘Psychology and the Market” in 1909. This paper suggested the psychology could be utilized for job performance, employee motivation, vocational decisions, and management. He also suggested that if people hire others with personality and skills the best suited the job would increase their motivation, performance, and retention. To me, this seemed slightly obvious, but it is what he wrote about.
Musterberg also wrote ‘On the Witness Stand’ in 1908. This book detailed how different factors related to psychology could change the course of a trial. He discussed that there are problems with eye-witness testimony, interrogations, and confessions during trials.
During the war, Munsterberg tried to stick up for Germany while he was still living in America. This caused him to be criticized and almost hated by the country. This made his findings seem irrelevant to the population.
http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesal/p/hugo-munsterberg.htm
Clear details about his writings.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_M%C3%BCnsterberg
Good detail about life/early life.
http://legacy.earlham.edu/~dominel/webpage.htm
Whoops! I forgot to hit submit when I went to bed last night!
1a) State what your topic is.
I’m going to look at the Zeigarnik effect.
1b) Discuss how the topic relates to the chapter.
This relates to the chapter because it is one of the studies that Lewin and his students did about an observation they made while at a café about how a waiter would know their orders without writing anything down, and then forget what each person ordered after the bill was settled and the tension was released. The Zeigarnik effect shows that people remember better when they have been interrupted as opposed to uninterrupted tasks, and that was because there was unrelieved tension about the task that was incomplete.
1c) Discuss why you are interested in it.
I am interested in this because I find it to be a fascinating concept, and I have experienced this myself with shopping without my bank ledger. I can remember the exact amounts I spent at each store before I write them down, but once I write them down and walk away, I have a hard time remembering what the amounts were after I put them in. This is because the there is no longer a real need to remember the amounts (at least for me) after I have written them down.
The Zeigarnik effect is sometimes referred to as the Ovsiankina effect and demonstrates how Gestalt psychology is also present when it comes to cognition and was studied in 1927. Zeigarnik effect is concept that people remember tasks in which they were interrupted or did not get a chance to complete better than those that were completed. It is named after Bulma Zeigarnik, a Russian psychologist who studied under Kurt Lewin. It started when Lewin noticed how a waiter could remember everyone’s specific orders without writing anything down, and then after the check were all sorted and everyone had paid, he could no longer remember the details of the orders. However, the reliability of this has come into crossfire over the years. Some repeat studies have not been able to find differences that were statistically significant between incomplete and completed tasks and memory. Lewin believed that we have tension when we begin a task, and that the tension is relieved when it is completed, and thus, when we are interrupted or unable to complete a task, the tension remains and we are more able to recall details about that task rather than something that we have completed. This is best represented in short-term memory, where we repeat things so that they do not disappear, and the more things we must repeat, the harder it can become, and once things are completed, we tend to drop those things and remember new ones. This can also happen longer-term when there is some conflict in which we cannot get to or solve, such as a problem in the workplace over the weekend, or a question on a test you weren’t sure about. The Zeigarnik effect can be applied to studying, and relates to the importance of breaks in between study sessions in order to remember things more clearly. It can also be applied to stress and how to reduce it, ending procrastination, working more effectively, as well as a variety of other topics which are still very prevalent today. John Gottman, a relationship psychologist, applied the Zeigarnik effect to relationships, and how after a couple reaches an understanding of one another, the relationship grows and the argument is forgotten. However, if the argument is not settled in a proper way, the hurt feelings resurface over and over, and can cause an increase in negative attitudes towards one-another.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluma_Zeigarnik
General background information, alternate name, contradictory study results, John Gottman example
http://changingminds.org/explanations/memory/zeigarnik_effect.htm
Short-term memory, waiters, date it was studied
http://www.sevencounties.org/poc/view_doc.php?type=doc&id=37538&cn=117
http://99u.com/workbook/28021/end-procrastination-with-the-zeigarnik-effect
http://blog.sandglaz.com/zeigarnik-effect-scientific-key-to-better-work/
http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2014/05/work-smarter-use-the-zeigarnik-effect.html
All different examples of the Zeigarnik effect in use today.
(I really love John Gottman and his work, and so I had to include his specific example of the Zeigarnik effect in this.)
1a) State what your topic is.
Alfred Binet
1b) Discuss how the topic relates to the chapter.
This chapter focuses on intelligence testing, and Alfred Binet made major contributions to this with his Simon-Binet Intelligence test
1c) Discuss why you are interested in it.
I had heard about him in other psychology classes, but only briefly. I wanted to learn more about his personal life and any other discoveries he might have made.
2) Alfred Binet, originally named Alfredo Binetti, was born in Nice, France in 1857. His mother worked as an artist and his father was a physician. After his parents divorce at a young age, Alfred moved to Paris with his mother. He went to college at Sorbonne. Surprisingly, he did not study psychology in college, but studied law instead and graduated in 1878. After graduation, he went on to study medicine. However, psychology did fascinate him and he studied this subject on his own. Some of his favorite people to study were Charles Darwin, Alexander Bain and John Stuart Mill. After realizing his passion for psychology, he decided not to finish medical school and further pursue this passion. Binet then began working under Jean Carcot at La Salpetriere Hospital in Paris, France. There, he studied hypnotism, transfer, and perceptual and emotional polarization. Unfortunately, years of research would go to waste once his findings on transfer, polarization and hypnotism would be embarrassingly discredited because of flaws in experimentation. After this, he resigned from the hospital and began studying development and intelligence in his two daughters: Alice and Madeleine. After receiving elite status in his research from a promotion as a Director at the Laboratory of Physiological Psychology at the Sorbonne and as editor-in-chief for the French psychology magazine, L'Annee psychologique, the French government requested his help in creating a test to help classify students needing help in school. Once Binet began research on creating an intelligence test, Theodore Simon self-selected himself to be Binet’s assistant and worked along side him. Binet felt it was more important to measure mental abilities, such as memory and concentration, rather than academic skills, such as reading and math. In 1905, their research would culminate into the Simon-Binet intelligence scale. They would modify this in 1908, and once more before Binet died in 1911. Binet felt that scores received on this test were not necessarily fixed, and could absolutely be improved upon. He feared that these tests would be used incorrectly in that administrators would treat these scores as fixed and attribute these scores to students this way. Unfortunately, Binet was right to fear this because many teachers did exactly that. Freshman year of college, I took this test in one of my college courses and found it very interesting. I had taken tests like the CoGAT when I was younger, but never took any test like this. This surprised me because many of my classmates remembered taking a test like this while they were in elementary school. It made me wonder what made their teachers decide to administer this test and why my teachers chose not to.
3)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xTz3QjcloI
(I love these crashcourse videos and really wanted to use one for a post at some point. This video discusses intelligence testing as a whole in psychology. It points out Binet’s contribution to intelligence testing and how he wished for his test to be used)
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/binet.htm
(This source had a lot of great information, and was more comprehensive than psychology.about.com. However, I was concerned that some of the information between the two websites conflicted each other. This website said that Binet resigned from working at the hospital, and psychology.about said that he kept this job until his death. Anyway, this website talked about his work at the hospital, and working with Theodore Simon)
http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesal/p/alfred-binet.htm
(I love using psychology.about.com. It always provides a great summary. This website had information on his early life, studying at the hospital, and information on the Simon-Binet Scale)
I decided to do this week’s blog on Henry Goddard and the intelligence studies that led up to his research. This chapter talked about Goddard and the studies that he did, and I thought that they were all interesting. I especially enjoyed reading about his research on the Kallikak family. However, Goddard’s research would not have been possible without the inventions of some other methods of intelligence testing. I was also interested in how these first methods of intelligence testing compare to the intelligence testing that we do today. I did research on Goddard and his Kallikak family study, some of the first measures of intelligence, and how we measure intelligence today.
Goddard grew up in a Quaker family, and even started out in a Quaker college when he began his education. He did a lot of teaching in Quaker schools as well, and was even the football coach of one. He was interested in psychology though, which was what led him to do research at Clark University. While there, he learned how to scientifically approach the study of human behavior. He didn’t like that many places did not implement the use of science in psychology, so he accepted a position as director of research at the New Jersey Home for the Education and Care of Feeble-Minded Children in Vineland. Goddard is best known for his work that was done here. Goddard was very interested in separating the “feebleminded” from the “normal” people. To determine which category a person was in, Goddard used the Binet-Simon intelligence test. He was the one who translated this test and began using it in America. One of Goddard’s most famous contributions to psychology was the Kallikak family. He wanted to figure out if feeblemindedness was hereditary, and this was his chance to do it. The study began with a Vineland student, Deborah. When studying her family, Goddard and his researchers found that there were some feebleminded Kallikaks and some normal Kallikaks. By further investigating this, they found that Deborah’s great-great-great grandfather had an illegitimate son with a feebleminded woman before he settled down, got married, and had children with a normal woman. They found that feebleminded generations came from the child that he had with the feebleminded girl, and normal/ accomplished generations came from the children he had with his wife. Goddard believed that this was enough to prove that feeblemindedness was completely hereditary. This study did have its flaws, however. After being published, it got a lot of criticism. People thought that it was not done well and that the research techniques were flawed. They also thought that his conclusions from his data were very imprecise. After a while, Goddard even began to believe that his research was unreliable.
Intelligence testing has been around for a long time. Alfred Binet was recruited by the French government in the early 1900’s to help with identifying children who would need extra help in school. At this time, all of the children in France were required to go to school, so they wanted to figure out which ones would need extra assistance. Binet and his colleague, Theodore Simon, came up with a series of questions that would test the children on their abilities in attention, memory, and problem solving skills. By giving this test to children they figured out which questions on the test were the best predictors of success in school. They eventually realized that some children could answer more difficult questions than other children of the same age. They quantified this difference and called it a mental age. This is the test that is known today as the Binet-Simon test, and has been the basis for more current forms of intelligence testing. Lewis Terman took the Binet-Simon test and standardized it. This is now known as the IQ test, which is still discussed today.
Today, we have many different ways of testing intelligence. When I think of the ways that intelligence is tested today, I think of standardized tests. In Iowa, it usually starts with the Basic Skills tests that all students take every year through elementary and middle school. Once we get to high school, then we start taking the more advanced version of Basic Skills. Then it comes time for college. Students who plan on attending college usually have to take either the ACT or the SAT, depending on the college. If students plan on going to graduate school, then there are even more standardized tests that you have to take. The MCAT, GRE, and LSAT are just a few examples. Some jobs even require you to take another test after graduate school to see if you are qualified for the job. I feel like most of these tests are like the first intelligence tests, they just have different questions and test you in different areas. They still tell you how you did in each of the sections and how you compare to everyone else that has taken the test.
http://education.stateuniversity.com/pages/2011/Goddard-Henry-H-1866-1957.html
This website had a lot of information about Goddard’s background and his research on the Kallikak family.
https://library.missouri.edu/exhibits/eugenics/kallikaks.htm
This website had more information about the Kallikak family.
http://psychology.about.com/od/psychologicaltesting/a/int-history.htm
This website had information about the first methods of intelligence testing.
Henry Goddard, immigrants, Ellis Island, intelligence, Kallikak family, feeblemindedness, scientific study, Vineland, Binet-Simon intelligence test, heredity, Alfred Binet, Theodore Simon, academic success, mental age, Lewis Terman, IQ test, modern intelligence testing
1) For my assignment, I decided to do more research on James McKeen Cattell because I thought that he was very interesting and his work contributed a lot to the field. This chapter was really the first time I was able to learn about Cattell in depth and I just wanted to explained my knowledge on the subject with a little more detail. Cattell was covered in the chapter mainly for his work with mental test, but I found his work on the effects of drugs and reaction time to be more interesting.
2) The three aspect of the topic I am going to talk about are his studies, his contributions to the field of psychology, and his legacy within psychology.
3) James McKeen Cattelle was described as passionate and an out of the box thinker. Being the first American student of Wundt’s to have a dissertation published, Cattell was very bright and strived to help develop the field of psychology and have it be accepted by the general public. One of the major ways to get it accepted was to discover useful results that would improve one’s daily life. Cattelle felt the he would be able to do so with learning more about human’s mental ability with such things as reaction times. Cattle believed that if people were able to distinguish their intellectual weakness at and earlier age they would be more capable of compensating for them. So he began work on measuring simple mental processes like how long it took subjects to perform simple mental acts like naming objects of colors. He was able to compile vast amounts of data and look for correlations. In more extreme test, he used a wide variety of drugs, such as hashish, morphine, caffeine, and even chocolate, to measure their effect on the human’s mental ability. The results of his studies were of personal and professional interest and were considered to be very ground breaking.
Being so passionate and eccentric, Cattell was able to contribute a lot to the field of psychology. His main contributions involved some type of development within the experimental side of things. Cattell is credited with having American psychology move and focus more towards the use of objective experimental methods and mental testing. As well as moving more toward practical, test-oriented approaches to the study of mental processing. He played a major role in having psychology be applied to benefit other fields such as education, business, industry, and advertising. He was very determined on promoting the use and the importance of quantification, ranking and ratings within his work. Significantly, Cattell’s use of statistical methods and quantification of data sparked American psychology to develop into an experimental science.
Cattell had developed a lasting legacy within the field of psychology that is still standing today. Even though his work in developing a mental test and testing humans’ mental process was deemed unreliable after newer discoveries were made, he was still widely admired for breaking ground on the topics and being able to develop it so much at the time. His legacy mostly focuses around his huge impact on strengthening American psychology. One of Cattell’s goals was to have psychology be viewed as a science and many refer to him as the major vocal link between psychology and the larger scientific community. Cattell left behind the legacy of an organizer, executive, and administrator of psychological science and experimental practice.
4) URLs:
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/cattell.htm
This website gave me most of my information on Cattell’s contributions to the field of psychology and also gave me a few of the details surrounding how his work is viewed today.
http://www.intelltheory.com/jcattell.shtml
The second website I am using provided most of my information about Cattell’s legacy, as well as his studies and theories.
http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/cattell-james-m.pdf
The final website I found linked me to a journal article that gave me more information about Cattell’s studies and experiments.
5) Terminology Used: James McKeen Cattell, reaction time, mental test, intellectual/mental ability, correlations, Wundt, objective experimental methods, experimental science, rankings, ratings, quantification, statistical methods,
Hugo Münsterberg was a German-American psychologist who was born in 1863. He was a great psychologist and had interests in many types of psychology, though his work kind of lost some credibility during the first world war, when he seemed to defend the Germans. Which in all actuality he was simply keying people into the German way of life and thinking. Not defending them, but explaining their choices. He actually became interested in psychology when he attended one of Wilhelm Wundt’s lectures at the University of Leipzig. He actually received his Ph.D in physiological psychology.
Münsterberg took an interest in the work of Frederick Winslow Taylor and I/O Psychology. Now he is recognised in I/O as one of the founders of i/o psychology… mostly on the I psychology. He wrote many books that dealt with a variety of topics such as personality assessments for pre employment, assessing mental capabilities for certain positions, how to motivate people and performance, how to decrease turnover rate, and make work more efficient.
Many people don’t know about I/O psychology as a field so i also did some research at SIOP. They say that “Industrial and organizational psychologists direct consulting and executive search firms, work for leadership centers, corporations and companies as well as universities”. Which basicly means that these psychologists try and hire the right people for the job and try to keep those people happy at the job so they stay there and in doing so those people make the company money.
Another thing SIOP sez it that at this point in “ U.S. economic history... industrial and organizational psychologists are in position to play major roles in aiding corporations and companies manage their workforces.” So basicly this is the field to go into to make some nice money. This field is one of my back up plans, as i am completing the I/o Psych certificate program at UNI. It honestly is a very lucrative field to go into and a lot of people get hired by fortune 500 companies. And you really only need a Masters degree to get one of those good jobs. I work at Starbucks and corporate gave me a $500 scholarship when i switched to getting the certificate in hopes that i will come to their corporate partner resource management once i am finished with school, which who knows that is a possibility. His books dealt with many topics including hiring workers who had personalities and mental abilities best suited to certain types of vocations as the best way to increase motivation, performance, and retention, methods of increasing work efficiency, and marketing and advertising techniques
I/O psychologist are allowed to do many interesting research studies on a variety of subject such as “stigmas in organizations (weight, physical attractiveness, sexual orientation, disability, religious beliefs, race); sexual harassment; the role of personality traits in the hiring process; barriers to successful employment of workers with disabilities; workplace culture, particularly when companies merge; selection of law enforcement officers; reducing absenteeism, workplace aggression; what attracts individuals to certain organizations, and the leadership behaviors of women as managers are just a few of the studies being done by I-O psychologists.” With all this research still to be done there are plenty of openings in the field for new I/O psychologists. And you have the opportunity to travel all over the world. My teacher said when he was in his grad program one of his fellow students was asked to open a huge headquarters over in china for a multinational company, this grad student didn’t even have her Masters yet. That goes to show if you put a little time and effort into this field that you can go far and fast.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_M%C3%BCnsterberg
http://www.siop.org/media/What.aspx
1) The topic that I wanted to further research was Robert M Yerkes, the book talks about him and his contribution with the army testing program. That during this movement in mental testing this is what he did in comparative psychology. That his army alpha tests look at practical judgement and analogies, whereas the army beta test look at digital symbols and has various maze test. I wanted to know what other contribution has he made? This fits into the chapter really well, we keep getting introduced to this people who at the time may have or may not have really pushed psychology. These people worked towards a goal and it truly paid off. I want to know more, of what kind of person he is.
2)
The main things I that I wanted to further research were, more background information about Robert Yerkes, what other contributions has he made in psychology and finally if his army testing methods are still used today. I feel that mental testing is such a huge part in psychology today, we are constantly looking at it and coming up with new ideas and theories. That’s one of the things the chapter does really push, and explain in detail, how this push started.
3) So who is exactly Robert M Yerkes? He was born May 26, 1876 in Breadysville, Pennsylvania. The beginning of his education career started at Ursinus College, where he wanted to become a medical doctor. Soon after he had graduated, Harvard offered him a spot doing graduate work in biology. He soon took an interest in animal research and thus began his journey into comparative psychology. Here is where the book, talks about how he necessarily cared for the animal research, that he did not care for the smell. We already know that he when he was working part time in the Psychopathic Development of Boston state, is where he became first familiar with intelligence testing. Instead of him going to Minnesota to fill in his newly accepted position, he got recruited to help the army. He did not particularly have a desire to do so, but did it out of duty. Fast forward in October of 1917, he started testing his Army Alpha and Army Beta. But what did he do besides this? What other contributions has he made? One of the amazing things he has done is that, he founded the first primate research laboratory in the United States. He was the director from 1929 until 1941. Later down the road, the lab would be renamed the Yerkes National Primate Research Center. The beginning of this lab originally started from an article Robert Yerkes had published in Science in 1916. In the article, Robert Yerkes called for “the establishment of a primate research institute for the systematic study of the fundamental instincts and social relations of primates”. He believed that primates, because of their evolutionary closeness to humans, could shed the most light upon the roots of human behavior. Because of his research on two apes he eventually convinced Yale University, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation to fund the establishment of the Yale Laboratories for Primate Biology. The Center officially opened in 1930 in Orange Park, Florida. The Center at the time had a chimpanzee colony. It included four animals that Dr. Yerkes himself had in Connecticut, 13 chimpanzees that were donated by a Cuban citizen and 16 apes that were a gift from the Pasteur Institute of France. The same year, the first chimpanzee birth occurred at the Center. The offspring was named Alpha, this provided Dr. Yerkes with the first detailed observations of a primate’s development and reproductive processes. Another contribution he made was the Yerkes-Dodson Law. This law states that performance increases with arousal, but only up to a certain point. That when arousal levels become too high, the performance actually decreases. John Dodson helped develop this concept 1908. The way that I understood this is, sometimes nervousness could be used as a reason to study harder for that first test, or to become more prepared for that interview. Now comparing that to someone who has stage fright, the stage fright inhibits their performance, it does not truly aid it. Finally, I want to talk about whether or not Army Alpha and Army Beta are still being used today. After the war, the army still did not truly have all the information form these tests, that when certain people administer the test the results vary. So the army discontinued the use of it. But it did shape way for a new scientific method. Of course in todays world, there are still screening test, to figure out whether or not someone is fit for the title. The army uses, MEPS, it is a physical exam. They will take height and weight measurements, hearing and vision examinations. They will take urine and blood tests. Next they will test the muscles group and how the joint maneuvers. This is to test flexibility. This is only one of the many screening tools used today.
4) This website gave insight on how his life was, it did not go into too much detail about his younger years, but it went across the main points that shaped him to who he was. http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesmz/p/robert-yerkes.htm
This website gave me more background information on lab for the primate research. It is the official website of Yerkes National Primate Research Center. They offer background knowledge to the founder. The also give examples by dates of all exactly the lab has produced.
http://www.yerkes.emory.edu/about/history.html
This website was a full detailed, laid out biography of Robert Yerkes, whatever information the first two websites did not provide, I found the detail here.
http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/yerkes-robert-m.pdf
Finally this last source, gave me the information I needed to understand what other kind of screening and testing process the army used in today’s standards. http://todaysmilitary.com/videos/meps-physical-exam
5) Terminology: Robert M Yerkes, Army beta, Army Alpha, Army Testing, Comparative psychology, animal research, MEPS, primate research
1) Once you have completed your search and explorations, I would like you to say what your topic is, how exactly it fits into the chapter we have covered this week, and why you are interested in it.
I choose to look at Terman’s Study of the gifted. This topic is very relevant to this chapter because the study was done to be applicable and be more than just a study to get information. Terman wanted to be able to apply what he found to the leaders of the country that they were actually qualified to lead based on their intelligence. It also carries into the next decade and into todays psychology.
2) What are three aspects of the topic you want to talk about for this assignment?
I would like to talk about what his testing was, why he did it. What the results or outcome of doing this was along with the biases in the study, and finally any additional research not int the text.
3) Next, I would like you to take the information you found from the various sources and integrate/synthesize them into the three aspects of the topic, and then write about the topic.
Terman was not the engineer of the tests that he administered to the gifted. The Intelligence testing that he performed was from Simon-Binets original test. We learned in our reading this week what that test was and how both Binet and Simon worked to create it. Terman then with the help of faculty modified and made improvements to their test. The works that Binet and Simon accomplished greatly influenced him and some of the reason behind his works were related to his beliefs in meritocracy which our text talks about. In my additional reading I was able to learn that Terman believed that society would work best if society was ranked and placed in groups with the same native ability. This was implemented into schools (which is the applied part), and then used to find those who were intelligent enough to be leaders in our community. Terman collected a group of children from California and studied them, then did follow up studies with them some 30 years later. Not included in our text this week was the fact that while gathering his participants for the study he also measured other traits they possessed such as personality etc. He had prerequisites for who was included in the study and made sure that the students already had an IQ of at least 135. The results of these studies would have an impact on the rest of his life and influence others to do the same kind of work. In one of my readings it was stated that his works are sometimes viewed as not valid due to his assistance and advise he offered the children in his studies. Though the book mentioned that he looked at them differently because he viewed them as americas next leaders it never indicates that his works were discredited due to this fact. After his finding in the gifted he went on to do further work regarding gender and personality differences. After the studies were done both my additional readings and our text agree that he was able to prove that just because someone was intelligent they didn’t necessarily lack physical strength or ability, in fact it seems that he proved the opposite that they almost went hand in hand. Though our text highlights the work of Terman’s longitudinal study of the children over a long period of time, this was not his only work that studied the gifted. In one study he compared two groups of boys to each other using a variety of tests not the Binet-Simon IQ test that was done in the text that was previously stated. In this study there were tests of math and invention but also tests of language reading and memory. In this study students were chosen from both groups of intelligence of high and low groups and by this test was formed to be able to distinguish exactly what the difference was between the two groups in their abilities. The works of Terman’s influenced people past this and was implemented into schools and for these reasons many people credit him with the innovation of this kind of testing.
4) Finally, at the end of your post, please include working URLs for the three websites. For each URL you have listed indicate why you chose the site and the extent to which it contributed to your post.
http://education.stateuniversity.com/pages/2499/Terman-Lewis-1877-1956.html
I used this to gain information about the study and what his purpose was in doing it. I also gained information on why he did these studies.
http://www.nndb.com/people/478/000165980/
I used this to find out what the effects of his study were after the fact.
http://www.intelltheory.com/terman.shtml
I used this to discover what other research he did that was not in our text but still related to the studies of gifted children.
The topic that I am going to type my essay on is Army Alpha and Beta testing. This fits into chapter 8, because it is one of the works of Robert Yerkes. He was one of the important psychologists in this chapter that helped organize these tests, and implement them in to the military of World War I. I am interested in this topic, because it is one of the first mass intelligence tests that was given to a group of people. I have taken several mass intelligence tests, so it was something I wanted to learn about, and see how things from then relate to now.
In this assignment, the three aspects that I would like to talk about are what and who the Army Alpha and Beta tests are for, how useful they were, and how they led us to where we are with intelligence tests today.
During the time of World War I, the US military needed a way to measure the intellectual and emotional intelligence of nearly 2 million soldiers. Robert Yerkes, who was originally a comparative psychologist, was asked to take on this role, and he developed the Army Alpha and Army Beta test. There wasn't much of a difference between tests, except for Army Beta was administered to those soldiers who were illiterate. The Army Alpha was comprised of eight different tests including; commands test, arithmetic problems, practical judgment, synonym-antonym, disarranged sentences, number series completion, analogies, and information. The Army Beta had seven different subtests. These were: maze test, cube analysis, X-O series, digit symbol, number checking, pictorial completion, geometrical construction. They essentially both tested the same thing, just in different ways. The reason that they did these, was because Yerkes hoped that by creating these tests it would enable the army to identify those with special skills so they could be placed where they could serve best, based on the results. At the time, people had been using the Binet test to measure intelligence, and it was working well, however, that had to be one on one with someone, and that would take way too long with nearly 2 million soldiers. That is why Yerkes had to develop a way so that many soldiers could take it at the same time.
While knowing the intelligence level of every person and being able to classify where they should be in the military is very useful, there is a lot of limitations to letting the results of these tests dictate where a soldier should be, and how good of a soldier they will be. Critics argued that soldiers should be more so judged on reliability, ability to lead, ability to carry on, rather than their mental intelligence and mental capacity. So, even after these tests proved to be reliable tests of knowledge and intelligence, they weren't used much after World War I because people thought there was a lot more to military positions than intelligence.
Even though these tests weren't used for very long in the military, they had a big impact on the rest of society. The 1920s soon became known for the era of mental testing. Mental testing moved into schools, clinics, businesses, industries, and was used a lot for immigration purposes. Many tests were developed off the Army Alpha and Beta, because people wanted a way to know what people know in a mass testing form. So, tests like the Army Alpha and Beta are still used today. Not so much for military purposes, but to see where students are at in their educational abilities, or where people are at in terms of what business they are applying to. These tests help show what a person knows, or where they are lacking, and lets the administrator know what area that person may need to work on. Either way, the test is designed to help further people's intelligence, and place them in a spot where they can help, or learn best.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army_Alpha
I used this website to tell me what some of the limitations to the army alpha and beta testing were.
http://newlearningonline.com/new-learning/chapter-6/yerkes-army-intelligence-tests
I used this website to tell me what these tests led to in the society we live in today, and even what they led to back in the era that they started.
http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095424949
I used this website to tell me approximately how many soldiers at a time were taking the army alpha and beta tests.
Terms: Army Alpha, Army Beta, Robert Yerkes, Binet Tests, mental intelligence testing
1) Once you have completed your search and explorations, I would like you to say what your topic is, how exactly it fits into the chapter we have covered this week, and why you are interested in it.
I would like to learn more about Robert Yerkes’ army testing. He relates to the chapter because the chapter was on testing mental IQ and he did that in the Army. I found him interesting because if his interest in eugenics and the studies that he did on primates and humans. He was more interested in comparative psychology but was forced to examine the “human side” if he expected to go anywhere. Yerkes was a very ambitious and interesting man who was a prominent figure in psychology for a long time.
2) What are three aspects of the topic you want to talk about for this assignment?
I want to know more about who Robert Yerkes was and what the significance of his work was and whether it is still being used today and also how it maybe being used present day.
3) Next, I would like you to take the information you found from the various sources and integrate/synthesize them into the three aspects of the topic, and then write about the topic.
Robert Yerkes was American Psychologist who was also known for being a primatologist, and an ethologist. He was born on May 26, 1876 and grew up on a farm in Breadysville, Pennsylvania. He wanted to leave his life as a farmer and chase a career as a physician. He received some financial help and attended Ursinus College from 1892 to 1897. After graduating, he got an offer from Harvard University to do graduate work in Biology. While at Harvard, Yerkes became interested in animal behavior and wanted to put off his career in order to study comparative psychology. He received his Ph.D. in the Psychology in 1902. And immediately got a job as an assistant professor in comparative psychology. His first book, The Dancing Mouse, was published in 1907. Yerkes served as president of the American Psychological Association. He insisted the APA into helping the war effort of World War I by establishing tests to study intelligence, tests became known as the Alpha and Beta tests which ruled out those who were seen as mentally “unfit.” Beta test was used for the soldiers that were not literate in English and Alpha tests were used for the soldiers who could read, write, and speak in English. These tests were given to over 1 million soldiers and also served the purpose of finding those with high intelligence that could be trained for an officer position.
Yerkes claimed that the new waves of immigrants were more ignorant than the previous wave of immigrants to the United States. Yerkes thought that no citizen could afford to ignore the threat of race deterioration. He found that the wave of immigrants did score lower but later, there was a correlation found on the score and the amount of years that someone had actually lived in the U.S. The Army intelligence division concluded that 47.3% of their troops were feebleminded or unintelligent in which the blacks and immigrants scored the lowest. Even today, we see the bias of these tests that were given and how even the questions themselves were administered in a bias way. The questions were challenged in whether they provided a good measure of intelligence.
Yerkes could not tests each soldier individually, he had to develop a tests for millions of people that would be able to identify special skills so they could be put where they could best serve. It was eventually given to over a million United States soldiers during the World War I. After the war Yerkes was offered a position as professor of Psychobiology at Yale University which he accepted and served there for twenty years. He founded the Yale Laboratories of Primate Biology in 1929, and acted as its director until 1941.
Yerkes loved studying chimpanzees. He bought two chimpanzees, Chim and Panzee, from a zoo. They lived in a bedroom and ate with a fork at a little table. Yerkes went on to find the Yerkes-Dodson Law of arousal. A law that states that mental and physical performance increases as arousal increases. On a graph the points make a U shape. This happens because as performance increases arousal increases but to a certain point. After that point it the arousal becomes too much and mental and physical performance often decreases. This research is still talked about in the field of primatology.
4) Finally, at the end of your post, please include working URLs for the three websites. For each URL you have listed indicate why you chose the site and the extent to which it contributed to your post.
http://www.yerkes.emory.edu/about/history.html
This site provided an in-depth look into Yerkes study of primates and his interacted with them. I picked this site because I was interested with his connection to the animals and his choosing part of his career to study them.
http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesmz/p/robert-yerkes.htm
I liked this source because it gave me background on Robert Yerkes life in detail and it also gave brief information about his research as well. I found this website to be very useful in finding out who Robert Yerkes actually was and how he became who he was.
http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/yerkes-robert-m.pdf
This was one of my favorite sources because it talked about everything that I wanted to know about him and his research projects. It went into great detail and provided a lot of great information.
Terms: Robert Yerkes, Psychologist, Primatologist, Ethologist, Comparative Psychology, The Dancing Mouse, American Psychological Association, Alpha tests, Beta tests, Yerkes-Dodson Law of arousal
1) Once you have completed your search and explorations, I would like you to say what your topic is, how exactly it fits into the chapter we have covered this week, and why you are interested in it.
The topic I decided to look further into this week is intelligence testing in children and special education classrooms. This fits into chapter 8 because it is all about applied psychology and mental intelligence testing. I am interested in this particular area because I’ve always been interested in individual psychology and learning how and why we differ from the people around us. The ability to learn more about one’s cognitive self has always proved to be intriguing to me.
2) What are three aspects of the topic you want to talk about for this assignment?
I would like to discuss Alfred Binet’s impact on intelligence testing in children, the labeling of intellectually disabled children then and now, and what treatments or programs we currently have in place for children who may need assistance for educational purposes and daily living purposes.
3) Next, I would like you to take the information you found from the various sources and integrate/synthesize them into the three aspects of the topic, and then write about the topic.
Alfred Binet started out observing the cognitive developments of his two young daughters. This sparked an interest to study and measure individual differences in the form of a long-term case study. Alfred Binet was familiar with the work of Francis Galton and even used a few of Galton’s sensory tests on his daughters. He was quick to realize that Galton’s sensory tests failed to truly capture an individual’s ability to higher mental processes. This unveiled a new area of psychology we refer to as individual psychology. But to be able to recognize and study these individual difference, we must be able to measure them. Binet began to construct tests. His first challenge was to discover a way to identify the students who has lower ability in the classroom. Binet categorized those with lower mental capacities into three different groups, idiot, imbecile, and debiles. Idiots were those who were severely disabled and unable to take care of themselves. Imbeciles were those who were a little more capable but were still independent. And debiles were those who were capable of learning but were not very good at doing so. In order for a child to be placed into one of these three categories, they would have to be examined by a doctor and then diagnosed. I find it slightly odd how insensitive they were when they named the categories. In today’s culture, we use the words idiot or imbecile for those who are just plain stupid but are not necessarily mental handicapped. Fortunately, this idea transformed into a more reliable way of differentiating these intellectually disabled children from the typical intellectually developing children. This is point in history when the birth of the intelligence tests took place.
With the help of his research assistant, Theodore Simon, he made revision after revision until it was nearly perfect. They developed a test which could help them examine an individual’s mental age. The mental age represented the age one was cognitively functioning at. One’s mental age could differ from their true physical age. For example, if a seven year old boy had a mental age of three years old, he would then fit into one of the three categories of the intellectually handicapped. One admirable belief of Binet was that he in fact believed with guidance and structure, mental levels could increase. This way of thinking is very unlike Henry Goddard who believe those with lower intellectual levels should not reproduce, Binet was a little more empathetic. At this point in history, Binet thought he made a great discovery but it was limited to only educational contexts at the time. Boy was he wrong. We currently use measures similar to these all over the world. The biggest difference between Binet and how we categorize those with intellectual disability, is our choice of words. Previously, in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, we referred to this type of disorder as mental retardation. This word was changed in revised editions of this book due to the stigma and misuse of the word “retarted” or “retardation” has collected. Today, with someone displaying the symptoms Binet saw years and years ago in the “idiots”, “imbeciles”, and “debiles” we now refer to this as some who has an intellectual disability. In today’s terminology, we define someone who has intellectual disability as someone with a low IQ and limited ability in adaptive behaviors. Such as driving, cooking, toileting, taking medication, speaking, writing, dressing, etc. There are currently four severity levels which are mild, moderate, severe, and profound. Generally speaking, the more severe the case of intellectual disability, the earlier it can be recognized and diagnosed.
For those with intellectual disability, their IQ is relatively stable over time. Depending on the severity, some might experience an increase in abilities, others may experience no increase. Treatments for those with intellectual disability include cognitive behavioral therapy and family oriented strategies. It is so important to include the families because they are often times the ones spending the most time with these children. There is no cure for this disorder, just treatments. As I was reading about Binet’s categories and diagnosis, it made me wonder if the children who fit into the category of a debile, if they really did have overall intellectual impairment or what if they really just had a learning disability in one main area taught in school. Learning disabilities are learning problems that occur in the absence of other obvious conditions like intellectual disability. Usually these kids have a normal IQ but have an unexpected weakness in one specific area. Most common learning disabilities include reading comprehension, math, and writing. Obviously this was one area lacking in Binet’s time period. Looking back we can see where we have evolved from calling children idiots, imbeciles, and debiles to understanding more completely what intellectual disorder is and what learning disorders also are.
Children who experience learning disorders can have a para educators to assist them in their learning disabilities. Para educators are unformal educators who come into the classroom to assist students who may need help with educational tasks. I like this approach a lot more when compared to how they used to approach children with intellectual disabilities or a learning disability. Previously, they would remove the child from the classroom and separate them from their peers. This gave them a social disadvantage and seemed to further the stigma the child was already experiencing. The idea of an IEP (individualized education plan) or a para educator entering the classroom is to provide the child with the least restrictive form of support. This way the child can feel like they are still a part of their classroom while receiving the assistance they need to thrive.
4)
URL 1: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/dh05te.html. This website provided me with additional personal information about Alfred Binet that the book did not touch base on. It proved to be a great supporting reference.
URL 2: http://aaidd.org/intellectual-disability/definition#.VicLEn6rSM8. This particular website provided me with great, up to date information about what an intellectual disability looks like.
URL 3: http://www.helpguide.org/articles/learning-disabilities/helping-children-with-learning-disabilities.htm. This particular website gave me a great in depth insight on treatment options and how important it is for the parents and school system to be actively involved in a child’s life in order to help them succeed despite their learning disability.
Terminology: intelligence testing, special education, applied psychology, individual psychology, Alfred Binet, case study, Francis Galton, higher mental processes, idiot, imbecile, debiles, Theodore Simon, mental age, DSM 5, intellectual disability, IEP.
Word Count: 1290
1) Once you have completed your search and explorations, I would like you to say what your topic is, how exactly it fits into the chapter we have covered this week, and why you are interested in it.
My topic is Hugo Munsterberg. He was mentioned in the chapter as an influential psychologist in different fields. His two most important fields were industrial psychology and forensic psychology. For industrial psychology he was interested in figuring out the best way to figure out who is the best candidate for a job opening. He did experiments to see if he could break down the skills needed or if he should test them as a whole. He found that for some jobs you could break it down into smaller skills but for others you would have to test the skills as a whole to get the correct results. He was also influential in forensic psychology. He came up with theories that showed that eye witness testimonies could be faulty. He was one of the first to try and challenge this concept. I am interested in him because he did a lot in his career to help advance different fields of psychology. I am hoping to learn a little more about his different theories and how he came up with them.
2) What are three aspects of the topic you want to talk about for this assignment?
I will talk about Munsterberg’s education, his forensic psychology, and his industrial psychology.
3) Next, I would like you to take the information you found from the various sources and integrate/synthesize them into the three aspects of the topic, and then write about the topic.
Hugo Munsterberg had many interests growing up. It wasn’t until he attended the University of Leipzig in 1883 that he became interested in psychology. While he was there he got to study under Wilhelm Wundt. He later became Wundt’s laboratory assistant. In 1885 he graduated with his PhD in physiological psychology. In 1887 he graduated from the University of Heidelberg with a medical degree. After that he went on to lecture at Freiberg. While at Freiberg he started a psychological laboratory and produced research on varying topics. In 1891 he was promoted to assistant professorship and was allowed to attend the First International Congress of Psychology. While at the conference he meets William James. In 1892 William James invited Munsterberg to come to Harvard and run the psychology lab. While Munsterberg was at Harvard his career was very successful. His work with applied psychology made him famous in the public as well as in the school setting. In 1898 he became the president of the American Psychological Association. In 1908 he became the president of the American Philosophical Association. Working with Wundt and James helped Munsterberg become interested in different aspects of psychology.
In 1908 Munsterberg published one of his famous writings titled “On the witness Stand”. In it he showed how eye witness testimony could be swayed by the way questions were asked and by the way the jury viewed the situation. He was one of the first to advocate for jury research. To study his theory he did an experiment with is college students. He told them that he would show them an image and they would have to write down what they saw. Munsterberg would then show them a picture with black dots spread around on it. He would let them view the picture for five seconds, then he would ask them how many black dots there were. He found that his students would all be wrong with their numbers. Some would over estimate and others would under estimate. He concluded that if his talented students who were ready to see the picture couldn’t get it right how could an average person.
Munsterberg is considered the father of industrial psychology. His books “Vocation and learning” and “Psychology and Industrial Efficiency” are considered the beginning of industrial psychology. In these two books he highlighted different principals that he believed could help industry work better. He talked about topics such as hiring workers to marketing and advertisement techniques. Munsterberg was interested how to get the right person for the job, increasing their work productivity, and improving their work outcomes. Munsterberg tried to make selecting a person for a job scientific. He tried to make tests and measurements that would tell a person what job they would be good for. He tried to look at psychological conditions to help to improve the workers’ productivity. To help try and make better work outcome Munsterberg experimented with advertising and the psychology of buying and selling. He thought if he could come up with answers to those questions he could help business become more efficient. Munsterberg was a big influence on industrial psychology and forensic psychology. His work in both of these fields was ground breaking and paved the way for many more psychologists to follow. Munsterberg was a head of his times with some of his ideas but many of them are still valid in today’s society. Without Munsterberg the fields of forensic psychology and industrial psychology might look very different today.
4) Finally, at the end of your post, please include working URLs for the three websites. For each URL you have listed indicate why you chose the site and the extent to which it contributed to your post.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_M%C3%BCnsterberg I used this site to help with his education and forensic psychology.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eejQygFqPIQ This site helped with his ideas for industrial psychology.
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/munsterb.htm this site helped with his education and with his ideas on industrial psychology.
- Hugo Munsterberg, Wilhelm Wundt, William James, Industrial psychology, Forensic Psychology, “Vocation and learning”, “On the witness Stand”, “Psychology and Industrial Efficiency”, American Psychological Association, American Philosophical Association
1) After reading the chapter and researching more, I chose to write about Robert M. Yerkes. In the chapter it talks about him having intelligence testing for the military and that helped them a lot. I am interested in this because I know a lot of people that were either in the military or they are now. I like how the testing was available for everybody because even if they did not fit the standards for one test there was a backup to make sure they got the help and testing they needed.
2) For Robert Yerkes I would like to talk about his first findings with comparative psychology, how he turned to intelligence testing and what he found there, and what the law he discovered with Dodson is.
3) Robert Yerkes graduated from Harvard in 1902 with his PhD and became an instructor and Assistant Professor in Comparative Psychology. He was interested in animals and started off researching the different behaviors of invertebrates. With his early research on small invertebrates he helped establish the use of mice and rats as the main laboratory subjects. After that he got involved with larger mammals, especially apes. He founded the first primate research laboratory in the United States and was the person to turn to when anyone had questions about chimpanzees and apes. Based on his findings he wrote his book, The Great Apes, which was used for many years on the work with primates.
Once he realized that the topic of comparative psychology was really expensive, along with other factors, he turned to intelligence testing. Along with his help with eugenics, his main contribution was the form of intelligence testing in the military. He knew that intelligence testing and psychology did not have much credibility yet and wanted to prove to people that those two fields were actually interesting and correct. He found a chance to prove psychology and intelligence testing to be important during World War I. He came up with three different type of tests to test military personnel; army alpha, army beta, and individual examination. Yerkes made up three different types of tests so that way everyone was able to take it and for it to be effective. The army alpha test was the first one administered that tested literacy. A form of this test is actually still used in certain IQ tests. The second test, army beta, was used if the individual failed the alpha test because they were illiterate. Then the third and final test, individual examination was used if the army beta was failed. In the military, the tests were used to measure native intellectual ability which were then used to promote people to officers and other specialized positions if they were not classified as ‘morons’.
Along with researching key points in the fields of comparative psychology and intelligence testing, he also helped come up with the Yerkes-Dodson law. Working with John Dillingham Dodson in 1908, they came up with the conclusion that physiological and mental arousal can help increase performance levels, but when there is too much arousal the performance decreases. Yerkes and Dodson came to this conclusion by doing a study on rats. They would give the rats different frequencies of shocks to motivate the rats to complete the maze they were in. However, when the shocks were too strong the rats would not focus on the maze, but run around aimlessly. A good example of this is exams. If there is a little stress present when taking the exam, this theory states it will help you focus more and help retain information better.
4) http://www.britannica.com/biography/Robert-M-Yerkes - I was interested in what this website had to say because it helped me learn about what different contributions Robert M. Yerkes made in psychology
http://www.holah.karoo.net/gouldstudy.htm - I chose this URL because it gave me a lot of information about Yerkes’ main contribution to the psychology field which deals with army intelligence testing.
http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesmz/p/robert-yerkes.htm - I chose this URL because it gives a lot of information about the different findings Yerkes had. I also liked how it gave information about all of the contributions he had.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yerkes%E2%80%93Dodson_law - I chose this URL because it gave me an understanding about what the Yerkes-Dodson law was.
Terms: Robert M. Yerkes, comparative psychology, eugenics, army alpha, army beta, intelligence testing, moron, Yerkes-Dodson law, IQ test, John Dodson
1) For this assignment, I chose to do more research on Henry Goddard’s research with the Kallikak family. This fits in the chapter because IQ testing was a major topic in this chapter, and Goddard focused on IQ testing to determine “feeblemindedness” in this family who was supposably “hereditarily feebleminded”. I am interested in this topic because the fact that they could categorize someone or a family as “feebleminded” is crazy to me, so I would like to learn the understanding behind it. Goddard’s research just sounds interesting to me since it is not necessarily something that would be possible today.
2) Three aspects of this assignment that I would like to talk about are how Goddard came across this “feebleminded” family, how he conducted research on them, and what the implications and results meant for the future of intelligence testing, education of “feebleminded” people, and psychology.
3) Like Goddard’s work with Immigrants and testing them for “feeblemindedness” before entering the US, his work with a family known as the Kallikaks, was controversial and still is today. Goddard believed that intelligence was strictly hereditary, and that environment did not play a role in someone being “feebleminded”. Goddard used the work feebleminded to describe people with a variety of mental disabilities such as: mental retardation, learning disabilities, and mental illness. In order to test his theory that feeblemindedness was strictly hereditary, Goddard used one of his patients at the Vineland Training School for Feebleminded Children as his subject. Deborah Kallikak(Kallikak is not the families real last name, it was a name created to protect their true identity) was 22 years old at the time the study was started, she had been in Vineland since she was 8 years old because her mother and her mother’s husband had believed she was feebleminded. Goddard sent out research assistants to collect information from relatives on the family's history and blood line. This is where Goddard’s research gets a lot of criticism, because he did not use information that was supported by evidence, but only used information that family members had given him. What Goddard found was that there were 2 branches of the Kallikak family. One side of the family came from an affair with a barmaid(which is considered the feebleminded or “bad” side of the family), and the other side of the family came from the legitimate marriage of a “respectable” woman.
Goddard found that most of the children from the “bad” side of the Kallikak family ended up being mentally unstable, criminals, and not respected people of the community. While the “good” side of the Kallikak family were all respected members of their community, and there were no reports of feeblemindedness on this side of the family. Goddard explained this as a product of the two separate women that the family branched off from, and their differences in genes. However, there was also a major difference in the environment that the two sides of the family grew up in. Another problem with Goddard’s data collection process was his classification of what a feebleminded person was. Any Kallikak from the “bad” side of the family with questionable morals or a criminal record, was considered moranic by Goddard and his assistance. Because they did not use intelligence testing on every member to determine, if they really did have intellectual disabilities, this puts into question the validity of this research. Goddard also did a lot of work with eugenics, and believed that feebleminded people should be prevented from breeding and carrying on their genes to the next generation. He believed this could be achieved by placing feebleminded people in institutions from a young age, where they could be monitored and prevented from breeding. He also suggested sterilization of these individuals, but this was a relatively new procedure and its long-term effects were not entirely known.
While I think that Goddard had the right idea that intelligence does have a hereditary component, I don’t think he was entirely correct to assume that environment played no part in intelligence. His work is not necessarily considered to be valid by today’s standards, but I do think that it lead the way for improvements in intelligence testing and how we categorize people with mental disabilities.
4)Sources:
http://psychology.jrank.org/pages/356/Kallikak-Family.html
This was the main source I used for this assignment, it didn’t give much detail but it did give a good amount of basic information that helped me understand Goddard and his research.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kallikak_Family
I used this source as a good starting point for understanding this topic. It gave a lot of similar information that I found in the other two sources, but also gave additional information that I found helpful.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3987907/
I did not end up using this source as much as I thought, but I did use it to gain some knowledge on the book that Goddard wrote about the Kallikak family. I chose it because it gave good information on the book written about this research.
Terminology: Henry Goddard's, Kallikak family, IQ testing, “feeblemindedness”, IQ testing with immigrants, mental retardations, intellectual disabilities, eugenics.
What we would like you to do is to find a topic from what we have covered in this week's readings that you are interested in and search the internet for material on that topic. You might, for example, find people who are doing research on the topic, you might find web pages that discuss the topic, you might find youtube clips that demonstrates something related to the topic, etc. What you find and use is pretty much up to you at this point. But use at least 3 sources (only one video please and make sure it adds to the topic).
1) Once you have completed your search and explorations, I would like you to say what your topic is, how exactly it fits into the chapter we have covered this week, and why you are interested in it.
Psychology in business
2) What are three aspects of the topic you want to talk about for this assignment?
• History of psychology in business
• How it has evolved and the dynamics of it now
• What sort of jobs are possible
3) Next, I would like you to take the information you found from the various sources and integrate/synthesize them into the three aspects of the topic, and then write about the topic.
As we found it in our book, it is referred to as psychology in business. In various articles I looked at it is referred to as Industrial-Organizational Psychology as well so throughout this I will talk about it interchangeably. Psychology of business was intended to inform people interested in society’s evolution. It is advancing psychology as a science. By having this, it allowed there to be a creation of a code of ethics. It created specific departments within the area of study allowing psychologists to further understand how to apply it to business. Basically they wanted to look into how it was possible to make people as well as organizations more effective. It shows how to align the needs of both the people along with how the workplace operates. It is trying to make the relationship between the two to make it benefit both parties. It uses both qualitative and quantitative methods in order to prove this type of evidence. Typically in business psych, employers use surveys, groups, interviews, as well as questionnaires to develop their analysis. In order to be an industrial-organizational psychologist, you must have a graduate degree. Along with that, there is a licensure that varies from state to state. As of now, it is a rather small field. It is expected to grow more within the upcoming years. With it increasing, it creates some more jobs for people although most companies will most likely hire one per company. The psychologist works with the leaders to improve strategies such as hiring or training. They assist in telling the employees why this is coming into play and how it will help it all.
4) Finally, at the end of your post, please include working URLs for the three websites. For each URL you have listed indicate why you chose the site and the extent to which it contributed to your post.
https://www.siop.org/History/historynew.aspx
This site gave me the information of the background history. It explained how it went from business psychology into industrial organizational psychology. It explained how they relate the two wording.
http://www.theabp.org.uk/about/what-is-business-psychology.aspx
This site gave me information on what exactly the psychology of business is. It showed me what they do within the work force and how it implements the employers to employees.
http://study.com/articles/Business_Psychologist_Career_Info_Job_Duties_and_Requirements.html
This site told me the requirements of becoming a psychologist of business. It stated the licensure of things. It also provided the job out look showing that it will increase in coming years.
Next make list of the terms and terminology you used in your post.
• Psychology in business
• Industrial organizational business
• Qualitative
• Quantitative
• Interviews
• Questionnaires
1) The topic that I chose to research and look more into is IQ testing and it’s implementation of evaluating immigrants at Ellis Island. I decided to go with this topic because the topic of Ellis Island has always interested me. I knew that we had tested the immigrants coming into America, but I never knew the reasoning behind it or what started the whole thing. The chapter that we read this week talked about intelligence testing and mentioned how IQ testing got put into place at Ellis Island but I wanted to know more about everything that set things into motion and what actually happened for the immigrants that tried to get into America.
2) The three aspects I am going to talk about for this topic are how intelligence testing came about, Henry Goddard and the coining of the term moron, and how IQ tests got involved with immigration admittance into America. These elements are important to look into because without them, it would be difficult to understand why exactly intelligence testing was found important enough to evaluate a person, and why it matters how well immigrants coming into our country do on the tests.
3) It was Europe that first started looking into measuring human intelligence and putting into place a test that could tell a person’s mental age. Henry Goddard was an American interested in discovering ways to assess children's intellectual functioning, but he was unsure of how he could actually do this. In the summer of 1908, Goddard went to Europe for a couple months to study methods other researchers used in working with mentally challenged children. It was there that he learned of the intelligence test that a French psychologist named Alfred Binet had developed a few years earlier. Upon his return to America, Goddard translated the Binet test and began to use it with the children that he was studying, as well as children from public schools.
But Goddard’s ideas and influences didn’t stop there, he went on to change the way America thought and acted about human intelligence. While before he had mainly focused on looking at the way a child’s mind works, he expanded his thinking beyond children, and onto a person’s mental age and how they affect society. Since Goddard was mainly a eugenicist, he started looking into how people with cognitive disabilities could be controlled in our growing population.
At the time, psychologists lumped people with cognitive disabilities into three broad categories: idiot, imbecile and feeble-minded.Goddard argued that society should keep dim-witted people from having children, either through institutional isolation or sexual sterilization. However, he didn’t think that any of these terms accurately or scientifically explained these people with cognitive problems so Goddard came up with a new word for them. He created the word moron from an ancient greek word meaning dull. Goddard thought that these morons posed a serious threat to America’s growing society. . He claimed there was a link between low intelligence and criminal behavior and he also noted that crimes often seemed foolish or silly. Goddard and his colleagues were worried about the future quality of American stock. They all believed that the character of a nation is determined primarily by its racial qualities; that is the hereditary physical, mental, and moral or temperamental traits of its people. Goddard and his colleagues wanted to implement laws to establish better breeding and hopefully rid America of its flaws because of it.
Intelligence testing started to gain popularity in America, becoming popular among many American psychologists. Things started to happen suddenly and the use of the Binet test spread rapidly, largely due to Goddard's eager promotion. Goddard quickly convinced American physicians to use the test in their practices, and not soon after he had introduced the test to public schools. It wasn’t long until he got the test to be used on the immigrants coming in at Ellis Island. Those who were discovered to have a too low of a mental age were deported from the country and not allowed in. But Goddard’s influence didn’t stop there. Just because the immigrants coming into the country were smart enough, doesn’t mean some American’s didn’t still have issues of not being the cream of the crop. So of course the next step was when Goddard introduced results from Binet tests into a court of law.
This is all very interesting, and Goddard’s work and influence is almost like a dark chapter of America’s history. There are several ethical issues and moral problems that come about from Goddard and his work. In fact, Goddard's research findings were eventually challenged and disproved. He even admitted that some of his best known works were faulty. Seeing how this event changed the way America thought about intelligence is not only interesting, but important to learn and know about because it helps show the mistakes we made, so we can continue to improve our knowledge. This is a great example of why we should study history.
4) Links:
http://www.intelltheory.com/goddard.shtml
This link I used to help me understand more about Goddard and all of his interests and ideas about intelligence testing and an individual’s mental age
http://www.apa.org/monitor/2009/01/assessment.aspx
This link I used to help me understand more of what influenced Goddard into thinking the way he did, and how he was able to spread his ideas and convince others
http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/02/10/267561895/it-took-a-eugenicist-to-come-up-with-moron
This link I used to help me understand more about how Goddard felt about the feebleminded, and how he came up with the term moron. It also talked a lot about the implementation of intelligence testing at Ellis Island.
Terms: IQ testing, Ellis Island, intelligence testing, Henry Goddard, moron, immigrants, mental age, Alfred Binet, Binet test, cognitive disability, ethics, feebleminded, eugenicist
1)my topic this week is going to be Henry H Goddard. this person fits into this weeks chapter in the sense that he was involved in the use and development of the movement for intelligence testing in America. there is a whole section in the book about him and I just found it interesting how he did things and wanted to learn more about what he did and the effects that it had on the field of psychology.
2/3) Goddard grew up in a devout Quaker family and his first educational experience was at Haverford University a Quaker institution in Pennsylvania. at points during his education he took various teaching and administrative jobs in Quaker schools. at one point he taught at the newly founded university of southern California where he was the universities first football coach but his interest in psychology lead him to Clark University to study with G Stanley Hall where he gained an appreciation for scientific approaches to studying human behavior. after graduation with his doctorate Goddard began teaching at a college in Pennsylvania where he quickly became irritated with the lack of emphasis on scientific psychology and pedagogy. due to this in 1906 he accepted the position of director of research at The New Jersey Home for the Education and Care of Feeble-Minded Children in Vineland. Goddard is best known for the work that he did while with this institution. at Vineland he was charged with Making a psychological study of the feeble-mended children. he was interested in figuring out a way to assess the children's intellectual functioning but didn't know about how to do so. due to this in 1908 he took a two month trip to Europe to learn methods other researchers used in working with mentally challenged children. it was there that he learned of the intelligence test of French psychologist Alfred Binet had developed a few years earlier. he then translated the test and began to use it with the children at Vineland and school children. in December 1908 he published his version of the test called The Binet and Simon Test of Intellectual Capacity. the use of this test spread quickly largely due to his promotion of it. he quickly managed to convince people to use this test. by 1911 he had introduced it to public schools. by 1913 he had tested immigrants at Ellis island. by 1914 he became the first psychologist to introduce evidence from Binet's test in a court of law. he was also very involved in the army's Psychological testing program during world war one which further legitimized intelligence testing. intelligence test quickly became popular in America and Goddard was the one who created the industry. due to this he is known for making popular scientific psychology in America and providing practitioners with their chief assessment tool. due to all of this his work at Vineland lead him to a conclusion about feeblemindedness. he expressed his views in his most popular book The Kalikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeblemindedness. this was a story of a man that had relations with a normal person and one that was a feeble minded tavern girl. the result of these relationships is that with the normal Quaker woman there were generations of normal function people while the one with the feeble minded girl lead to the production of intellectually inferior descendants and even criminals. goddard even argued that due to his research that society should keep feebleminded people from having children. although some say that he ignored things in his research that did not fit his views. during the midst of his work Goddard even created a classification system for people on the intelligence scale. people with an IQ of 0-25 would be considered idiots. those with and IQ between 25 and 50 would be imbeciles, and those with an IQ between 50 and 75 would be Morons. Goddard actually is credited with the creation of the word moron. this is just the bottom half of his classification system but as you can see the terms then were not phrased like they are today to take into consideration peoples feelings.
4)
http://education.stateuniversity.com/pages/2011/Goddard-Henry-H-1866-1957.html
this site is where I found information about the early life and education of Goddard
http://www.apa.org/monitor/2009/01/assessment.aspx
on this site I got a lot of information about Goddard and intelligence testing along with some of the work that he managed to do while he was at Vineland
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002751783
this is where I found some information on the Kalikak family and the work moron along with the bottom of Goddards own classification scale for intelligence test.
1) My topic is the Army Alpha and Beta tests used by the military for recruit placement. This topic is related to the chapter because these tests were discussed but there were some questions that I had so I wanted to write about it. Why I am interested is because I find intelligence testing interesting in the fact that I question its ability to accurately calculate intelligence as well as what we define intelligence. This was a question that I had while reading this subject, how well did this test place soldiers.
2) Three aspects of this subject that I will be discussing are what were some of the criticisms of the Alpha and Beta test, how these tests have had applications through the years in the military, and how some of the results effected American policies.
3) When the Army Alpha and Beta tests were introduced the idea was that they would be able to place soldiers in positions that would benefit them the most based on their intelligence. While this started out like a sound concept and about 1.5 million soldiers took these tests, there were criticisms about these tests. One of the concerns was that how accurate these tests could be at placing soldiers just based on intellect alone. Other psychological examiners argued that traits such as temperamental characteristics, reliability, and ability to lead and carry on in a variety of conditions should be considered when placing these soldiers. Although these two tests became discontinued after the war, there were results that were found after administering the tests that went beyond the scope of the military. The data was used to help support the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924. Three main points that the data indicated were; the mental age of the average American adult was just above moronity, European immigrants can be graded by their country of origin (eastern and southern countries were not as smart), and blacks lie at the bottom of the scale. Why these points were influential was many immigrants were coming into the country at this time. Eugenicists used these points to lobby for immigrant restriction which they ended up winning. This type of thinking plays on the work of Francis Galton who coined the term eugenics. Galton wanted to stop the breeding of the inferior class to help advance society. Eugenicists used the data of immigrants coming from certain areas are detrimental to American society and should not be allowed it. The Alpha and Beta tests have made an impact in an area that most people did not think it would have an impact in but looking ahead these tests evolved and have continued to be implemented in the military throughout the years. These two tests evolved into the Army General Classification Test (AGCT) and the Navy General Classification Test (NGCT) which were used during World War 2. These tests were used to assign recruits to certain jobs much like the Alpha and Beta tests except being more expansive. After World War 2 ended each branch of the military began to create their own aptitude tests. These types of tests have been evolving up till 1979 on how to better place soldiers in certain jobs.
4) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army_Alpha#Criticism
This site gave me information on the criticisms over the Alpha and Beta tests
http://official-asvab.com/history_res.htm
This site explained how aptitude tests have evolved and been used since the use of the Alpha and Beta tests.
http://newlearningonline.com/new-learning/chapter-6/yerkes-army-intelligence-tests
This site explained how the data gained from the tests was used as support for immigration reforms
Terms: Alpha and Beta tests, Francis Galton, eugenics, intelligence testing, traits, aptitude tests
1) My topic this week is the Army Alpha and Beta tests. We learned about the Army Alpha and Beta tests this week in our chapter. Yerkes developed these tests to help assign soldiers to their jobs within the army.
2) I would like to talk about what the Army Alpha and Beta tests are and how Yerkes came up with them. Then I would like to talk about how the military used these tests. Finally I would like to talk about what happened to the tests and how they developed.
3) Robert Yerks was a professor at Harvard and President of the American Psychological Society when he decided to bring together major players in psychology together to compose the Army Alpha and Beta tests. This was the first group of intelligence tests that the military would encounter. In these tests, there were different portions. These portions included analogies, number-completion, synonym, and antonym tests. The Alpha test was written, and was made for soldiers who were literate. If the men had failed the Alpha test, or were illiterate, they would be given that Beta test. This test was purely pictorial. If the men failed the Beta test, they would be individually tested, usually with a form of Binet scale.
The army used these tests to place their men. The Beta test would help them determine who would go where if they were illiterate or unable to speak English. The tests measured what the recruiters believed was the recruits IQ. The recruiters would then use these results to choose what job the recruit would be serving, such as a military job or a leadership position. The results of these tests were top secret until the end of the World War I. Approximately 1,750,000 recruits took one of these tests over a year. They found that the average age mentality of the white test takers was 13, while the African-American test takers had an average of 10.4. Many took this as the belief that the intelligence of men was decreasing due to poor breeding. Instead, these researchers should have looked at the average years of school that these men had gone through.
These tests were the first intelligence tests the military used. After this the Army developed their own test, the Army General Classification Test (AGCT). The Marine Corps. also used this test to assign jobs. The Navy also broke apart and developed their own test, the Navy General Classification Test (NGCT). These tests were used during World War II. The AGCT and the NGCT were used to test a combined 15 million men. These tests had more specialized tests that further tested the recruits and sorted them into different job fields. Some of these tests were related to fields such as technical fields, administrative, and clerical fields, and some language tests. After WWII all of the services developed their own tests, however in 1950 they all began using the same test again. This test was the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT). This test was specifically a screening test. In 1974, all services followed the AFQT with the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB). In 1997 a new version of the ASVAB, called the CAT-ASVAB, was put into place and is used throughout all military services. The Army Alpha and Beta tests were the pioneers that paved the way for new ways to place people in jobs. The Alpha and Beta tests were also a first variation of tests that were used widely in schools, called the National Intelligence Test.
4) http://oxfordindex.oup.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095424949 I chose this website because it gave a brief overview of the tests. I used this website in describing the history of these tests and how the army used the tests.
http://official-asvab.com/history_res.htm I chose this website because it gave a history of military testing. I used this website to describe the history of the military using the tests and how these tests developed.
http://newlearningonline.com/new-learning/chapter-6/yerkes-army-intelligence-tests I chose this website because it gave a look at how Yerkes developed the tests. I used this to discuss how Yerkes developed the tests and the history of the tests.
5) Alpha Army and Beta tests, Robert Yerkes, Binet scale, AGCT, NGCT, AFQT, ASVAB, National Intelligence Test.
1.My topic for this specific blog about chapter eight will focus on mental testing. Along with this, I will be discussing a few of the major contributors to mental testing. These people include Alford Binet, Henry Goddard, and Lewis Terman. Mental testing is not only an important component of psychology, but it is also important to know how by applying these mental tests it helps us to make progress in the field of psychology. Since this chapter focuses on applying psychology, I thought it would be appropriate to discuss how mental tests have been applied in the past, and how they have come to help us today in psychology. I am very interested in mental testing because there have been so many different ones across time made by different people. Some of them worked very well, and some did not. I want to know why some work better than others, and do their results really mean the truth about ones mental intelligence?
2.The first topic I would like to discuss is Alford Binet and his intelligence test. He is most well-known for coming up with the first intelligence test, so it is important to know his methods and the research he has done. The next aspect I would like to discuss in relation to mental testing is Henry Goddard and his theory of eugenics and how he took Binet’s test and translated it to use on Americans. Lastly, I would like to discuss Lewis Terman and his work with gifted children and intelligence testing.
3.Alford Binet is most famous for inventing the first intelligence test. I thought it was very interesting how he researched and studied his young daughters in order to find ones mental capacity. He focuses on individual differences in his research. He tested his young daughters about sensory skills and compared them to those of adults he had tested. His results found that there was not much difference between the young girls and the adults. I found this really hard to believe, although when he focused on individual differences in the study instead of overall findings, he found that there was differences. One difference is that his daughters did poorly naming colors compared to adults, but they did very well on color matching. His early research might not seem interesting or important, but the research he did on his daughters motivated him to continue his work with intelligence testing. One thing that he did believe is that intelligence is based on hereditary. I do not believe that this is true. I think that hereditary plays a small role in how intelligent someone will be, but this is not the only factor that contributes to this. Binet believed it to be the only factor.
Henry Goddard is also an important man to note. He brought Binet’s intelligence test to America by translating it and distributing it to people. He worked at a place called Vineland, which housed those who were considered feebleminded, or those who suffered mentally. Another huge role he played was distributing the test to immigrants at Ellis Island who were looking to become U.S. citizens. Those who did not pass his test were not allowed in the country. Goddard, like Binet, believed that intelligence was a product of hereditary. Those who were feebleminded should not be allowed to produce, a concept called eugenics, was one of his beliefs also. To me, this is a huge problem the idea of this played a huge role in World War 2. The Nazi’s believed in an Aryan race, that this race was superior to all others. Those who did not fit into this category, like Jews, should be killed and/or not allowed to reproduce. Goddard’s idea of eugenics was not a good one and has had many bad effects around the world, including the Holocaust.
Lewis Terman, also a man who studied the mind and intelligence, focused mainly on gifted children. He wanted to know what made them so much different than ordinary school children. His research resulted in the fact that those gifted children were a result of their parents, hence hereditary played a role in intelligence. He found gifted children were the products or doctors and lawyers, their parents had good careers. Children who were feebleminded were often the product of parents who did not hold good jobs, and were mostly of the working class.
4. www.intelltheory.com/binet.shtml
This web page helped me in getting a better understanding of Alford Binet. It explained a lot of his back ground and the research he had done before coming up with his intelligence test which was very helpful.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZZNUclaA5w
This video was very helpful in understanding Goddard’s theory of eugenics and why he thought it should be used. This idea has had major consequences around the world like the Holocaust, and has caused many unnecessary deaths.
Sitemaker.umich.edu/365.loh/lewis_terman
Using this webpage was helpful because it provided a biography of Terman, and listed all of his work and research that was not mentioned in the textbook.
5.Alford Binet, Intelligence Testing, Henry Goddard, Eugenics, Lewis Terman, IQ
Psychology was now its own field in America. It had established its own discipline in school and gained recognition in the community. Research was common and techniques were spreading. However, the people wanted to know what the point of research was. Sure, it gave results and it allowed us some better understanding. What wasn’t known yet was how it could be applied to our everyday lives. Thus, the push for applied psychology came. For this week’s blog, the topic I chose was Lewis M. Terman. Terman was one of the contributors to applied psychology. I chose Terman because he expanded many common concepts of his time. For example, intelligence tests, created by Alfred Binet, were a commonly used tool in the field of psychology. Henry Goddard had already translated it into an American English version, but Terman didn’t want it to just stop there. He took it further. The intelligence test was not the only thing Terman wanted to go the extra mile with and that is what I researched. The three topics I researched were English intelligence test standardization, the idea of meritocracy, and Terman’s genetic studies of genius.
The first aspect that I researched, was Terman’s contributions to intelligence testing. While working as the head of the Psychology Department at Stanford, Terman did research on mental testing. He worked on a revision of Alfred Binet's scale of intelligence. Terman added some new tests to Binet’s scale of intelligence, revised other, and took some out. He didn’t just stop there. He standardized the newly revised test. This made it easier to apply to everyone, across ages, and with different scales. Terman's revision was published under the name of the "Stanford-Binet." Another feature of the Stanford-Binet, added by Terman, was term "Intelligence Quotient" or IQ. The IQ is an index that took into consideration of mental age and chronological age, a new concept. Terman borrowed the idea from William Stern, who used the term mental quotient. Terman believed that his IQ test could identify children in the school system who were at both ends of the intelligence continuum. Terman's revision of the Binet test became the most widely used individually administered intelligence scale. His accomplishment with the IQ test did not stop at that. Terman played a role in the development of the intelligence tests for the army during the war. His test was turned into a group-administered test by Robert Yerkes. Another area that his test was successful in was the school system. Terman strived to utilize the “group” form of administration in the schools. In collaboration with a committee of psychologists, he developed the "National Intelligence Tests" for grades three to eight. Terman was also a leader in the development of group achievement tests, which assessed school learning.
The second aspect of Terman that I researched was meritocracy. Terman believed that America should be run as a meritocracy, where the brightest people would be in positions of power and responsibility. To figure out those who should be put into the positions of power and responsibility, Terman suggested using his IQ test. Terman believed that by determining IQ, we could determine skill. This would allow us to effectively and efficiently place people within society accordingly. We would be able to identify, place, and train people; as easy as that! Terman also believed by doing this, we could identify those who were criminals or potentially criminals. Like other hereditarianists, Terman believed that criminal acts and mental ability were linked. Terman was not alone in this thinking. Other famous people wrote about similar ideas. This belief in a ruling class of the most meritorious was seen by Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson wrote a letter to John Adams of meritocracy.
The last topic I researched about was Terman’s genetic study of genius. Terman was obsessed with intelligence. He had deep sympathy for the gifted, identifying with their yearnings and frustrations. So, Terman decided to study the gifted. Using his Stanford-Binet, Termin identified 1,528 individuals aged 3 to 28 with an IQ of 135 or higher. Right off the bat, Terman found that there was a gender imbalance. Boy geniuses outnumbered girl geniuses; this puzzled Terman deeply. For each individual enrolled, Terman assessed great detail. He gathered information on physical health, interests, ancestry, reading habits, play, home life, household income and parental occupations. He sent out assistants to interview the families and evaluate their homes. From this data, he concluded that these were well-rounded, happy and healthy individuals. In 1925 he put his works into a book: The Mental and Physical Traits of a Thousand Gifted Children. Terman had achieved his goal of established the fact that bright people are normal people. The study was supposed to end there. However, Terman decided to follow his participants throughout their lives. What was originally a regular study became a longitudinal study. His participants didn’t seem to care. They showed cooperation, filled out questionnaires, revealed their earnings, talked about their physical and mental health, and described their satisfaction with life and marriage. Every five to 10 years, a new survey dropped into their mailboxes. Terman took the opposing route to studying intelligence. Just at he took the opposing route to many things. Terman took all of his work above and beyond expectations. For that, his work made strides in applied psychology.
http://education.stateuniversity.com/pages/2499/Terman-Lewis-1877-1956.html - I chose this website because it had a wide range of knowledge about Terman. I used the information to build on what I learned in class. I didn’t rely on this piece as much as the other two.
https://books.google.com/books?id=26nVLHEyickC&pg=PA49&lpg=PA49&dq=Terman+on+meritocracy&source=bl&ots=rWaxKfU2jl&sig=6QDOWIQz-8hsZN5Iqi-KDHpHV0w&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAmoVChMIh-Hf4NfUyAIVRe-ACh28yQKz#v=onepage&q=Terman%20on%20meritocracy&f=false – I chose this website because it was a book on Educational Assessment and it happened to mention Terman quite a bit. I used a moderate amount of information from this book.
https://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=40678 – I chose this website because it was from a source that would know a lot about Terman: Stanfod. It gave a lot of knowledge on him as well. Though it was a bit biased, I still found the information to be useful and relevant. I gathered the most information from this website.
Terms and terminology: Lewis M. Terman, applied psychology, Alfred Binet, Henry Goddard, intelligence test, meritocracy, genetic studies of genius, mental testing, Alfred Binet's scale of intelligence, "Stanford-Binet," "Intelligence Quotient" or IQ, William Stern, Robert Yerkes, The Mental and Physical Traits of a Thousand Gifted Children
1) My topic is Psychology in business. This fits with the chapter because this chapter talked about different things that psychological concepts could be applied to including the military and football. Business was included in this and I would like to learn more about business psychology and how psychology can be used in the work place. I am interested in learning more about this because I feel like I can see myself using psychology in the business field someday.
2) The three aspects I want to talk about are, what exactly business psychology is, what business psychologists do and a few concepts that psychology has that can be helpful to businesses.
3) Business psychology is an applied science that investigates how to make businesses and people more effective. It studies the workplace and helps them find ways to fix their issues and gives them different options about how to better their companies and adjust to certain needs that are not being met. People who practice business psychology give advice, diagnose their issues and problems, design solutions to their issues, and evaluate the effectiveness of the solutions they created. They work directly with the employees and the administrators of the companies to ensure what they are doing is best for them and what they are trying to accomplish.
Most of the issues they deal with are people related and how they can make the people more efficient. They use the research method in finding solutions to the businesses issues. They use both qualitative and quantitative statistics because they believe both are important. To collect research they commonly use case studies, interviews, surveys and focus groups. They also do analysis's of their current work and employees to have something to base their end results on. Some areas that business psychologists go into include talent management, coaching, leadership development, and organizational development. There are a lot of psychological concepts that are used in businesses everyday. The foot-in-the-door phenomenon is when a small request is asked of someone and once they have said yes to this a much larger request is asked of them which was the main objective. You see this all the time in the center kiosks in malls, they will ask you something small like do you want to smell or have a sample of this lotion then once they have your attention they will try and get you to buy something that you had no intention of buying. The serial position effect, which was developed my Ebbinghaus, says how we remember items we see or hear in lists, specifically the first and last items which is known as the primacy and recency effects. This can be applied to advertisements, advertisers should put what they want their target audience to remember at the beginning and end of their advertisements. Different types of persuasion are also important in the business field. Business can use the central path to persuasion which is the most direct way of getting information across and is best for people who care and understand what they are trying to be persuaded on. The peripheral route to persuasion is the round about way of persuading people. This is used on people who focus on the irrelevant parts of the advertisement, these are the commercials that people are not always sure what they are advertising.
4) http://www.theabp.org.uk/about/what-is-business-psychology.aspx
explains what business psych is and how it can be used
http://www.businesspundit.com/12-practical-business-lessons-from-social-psychology/?img=16290
this gives psychological concepts that can be applied to business
http://www.forbes.com/sites/work-in-progress/2010/11/18/psychology-behind-the-best-business-strategies/
this talks about business strategies that have a basis in psychology
Terms: Ebbinghause, Business Psychology, serial position effect, recency effect, primacy effect, applied psychology, foot-in-the-door policy, persuasion, central path to persuasion, peripheral path to persuasion
The topic that I would like to talk about this week is the controversy over intelligence. This fits into the chapter because of the different intelligence tests that are mentioned throughout the chapter. It's hard to exactly measure intelligence if there is no agreed upon definition of intelligence. I think this is extremely interesting because it's kind of cool hearing all of the different opinions and views of what intelligence is.
Three things that I want to talk about are the beliefs of Goddard, Terman, and Yerkes. They all had common grounds on what they believed intelligence to be, but they still had their own definitions of what it was.
The textbook gives us four of the shared beliefs of Goddard, Terman, and Yerkes. 1. Mental capacity was primarily due to genetics. 2. The environment had little to no effect on intelligence. 3. Intelligence may include a variety of skills, but the underlying all was "g", general intelligence. 4. This is what all intelligence tests measured.
Goddard was a eugenicist that found the Binet-Simon scale, translated it, and believed in it. Hr administered the test on children in Vineland and classifying them based on how they scored on the scale. Goddard's classification of what "morons" we're gave society someone to blame the problems of society on. Goddard "proved" his point that feeble mindedness was genetic in his book that was published in 1912, The Kallikak Family.
Terman believed that intelligence was the ability to carry abstract thinking. He also was interested in the Binet-Simon scale, that later turned into the Stanford-Binet test after Terman spent many years revising and administering the test to "make it better". Terman borrowed the idea of IQ from a German testing movement leader. This created the idea that mental capacity could be represented by a single number. The original idea of Binet was to identify children that needed special help, however, Terman thought IQ could help to identify children at both ends, ones that needed extra help, and ones that were excelling easily. The main reason behind identifying these talented individuals was to find people to lead America. Terman is given credit for being the pioneer of the gifted children.
Yerkes believed intelligence was a fixed quantity. As he was working at Harvard, he was placed in charge of developing mental tests for the possible soldiers. Not only did he did he want to identify those unfit to serve, he wanted to find a way to identify where the fitting soldiers would best fit within the Army. The war ended before these tests were effectively use, though. He didn't continue his research on mental tests, and he went back to working with animal behavior.
http://www.intelltheory.com/kallikak.shtml - more research on Goddard.
http://biography.yourdictionary.com/lewis-madison-terman - more research on Terman.
http://www.holah.karoo.net/gouldstudy.htm - more research on Yerkes.
Goddard, Terman, Yerkes, mental tests, IQ, Intelligence,
1) Once you have completed your search and explorations, I would like you to say what your topic is, how exactly it fits into the chapter we have covered this week, and why you are interested in it.
My topic for this weeks blog is Robert Yerkes. He is relevant to this chapter with his work of applying psychology to the military. I am interested in him because of his interests in many different fields of psychology.
2) What are three aspects of the topic you want to talk about for this assignment?
The three aspects of Robert Yerkes that I would like to talk about are his Army Alpha and Army Beta testing, his contributions to Psychology and Mental Testing
3) Next, I would like you to take the information you found from the various sources and integrate/synthesize them into the three aspects of the topic, and then write about the topic.
Something I find interesting is how the subjugate the differences in Army Alpha and Army Beta. From my understanding, Those who scored high on the Alpha test were equal to those who scored high on the Alpha test, which in my opinion skews the results initially. It sounds as though giving a senior in high school a test for a senior in high school and then giving another senior a middle school test and if they both scored 100's they would be considered equals. From a historical view this does make sense though because more people back then were illiterate compared to the amount of illiteracy today. I think if these tests were exactly the same, just one a person can take on their own and the other they are given a little more assistance on the questions but not the answers. Another thing about these tests that bothered me were how they were administered. From my understanding, the Army Alpha group were explained to why they were taking this test and the Army Beta group were told to sit down, shut up and follow directions. As we have learned in other classes, how information is presented to you and how you feel you do on a test prior to taking a test can greatly affect the yielded results. A criticism of these tests is that the purpose of these tests was to place soldiers in the right places in the military whereas this more so was just an intelligence test.
Robert Yerkes first love was comparative psychology and he made many contributions in this field. He was a very diversified psychologist. He created the first primate research facility which was later named after him. Being the president of the APA he also took the lead on contributing and applying psychology to the military and making psychology more than just guys in a laboratory studying humans and their behavior.
Henry Goddard is known for his work and research in IQ and mental testing. This is due largely to the efforts of Robert Yerkes and his efforts to incorporate psychology into the military. Although his efforts didn't go exactly has he had planned some of his influences are still used today in military mental testing.
4) Finally, at the end of your post, please include working URLs for the three websites. For each URL you have listed indicate why you chose the site and the extent to which it contributed to your post.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army_Alpha
This website went very in depth about the processes of Army intelligence testing and the differences between Army Alpha and Army Beta testing.
http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesmz/p/robert-yerkes.htm
This website touched on what his main contributions to psychology, most particularly intelligence testing. I would consider him one of the earliest frontiers of intelligence testing because of his (although unsuccessful) testing with military groups.
http://newlearningonline.com/new-learning/chapter-6/yerkes-army-intelligence-tests
This website also touched a lot on his work with Army intelligence testing. Interestingly, although his passion was comparative psychology, there isn't much on this.
Next make list of the terms and terminology you used in your post.
Robert Yerkes, Applied Psychology, Army Alpha, Army Beta, Mental Tests, IQ Testing, Comparative Psychology, Henry Goddard
1) Once you have completed your search and explorations, I would like you to say what your topic is, how exactly it fits into the chapter we have covered this week, and why you are interested in it.
I chose the topic of Robert Yerkes. I am interested in him because he is only mentioned a little bit in the chapter so I would like to know more about him. This fits in with this chapter because he is talked about because of his work with intelligence testing in the army.
2) What are three aspects of the topic you want to talk about for this assignment?
I would like to talk more about Yerkes background, the Yerkes-Dodson Law, and the Army Alpha and Beta IQ tests.
3) Next, I would like you to take the information you found from the various sources and integrate/synthesize them into the three aspects of the topic, and then write about the topic.
Robert M. Yerkes attended Ursinus College with the hopes of becoming a medical doctor. After he graduated he accepted a spot at Harvard doing his graduate work in biology. While at Harvard Yerkes became interested in the behavior of animals and started studying comparative psychology. He later graduated and earned his Ph. D in psychology. In 1917 he was elected president of the American Psychological Association. After the US became involved with WWI it was Yerkes who urged the APA to get form some sort of intelligence test for those who were joining the armed forces. This was done by forming a committee of men, Lewis Terman, Henry Goddard, Walter Bingham, and others who worked together to create the first intelligence tests known as the Army Alpha and Army Beta. The Army Alpha and Army Beta were administered to over two million men by time the war was over. Robert Yerkes was also influential to the field of comparative psychology. He founded the first primate research laboratory in the US and was the director of it for 12 years. It was later renamed after him, and is now known as the Yerkes National Primate Research Center.
During his career Robert Yerkes did some work with John Dodson. Together they discovered that arousal can help one’s performance, but only to a point. If there is too much arousal then one’s performance will decrease. This is known and the Yerkes-Dodson Law. This relationship between arousal and performance was found by using electrical shock to help guide rats through a maze. They found that when there was an excessive amount of electrical shock, the rats would just run around and make no progress in the maze, but when the electrical shock was more controlled the rat would perform much better when finding it way through the maze. Another good example of this would be shooting free throws during a basketball game. If it is the middle of the game, the shooter may be nervous, but not enough to hinder their ability to make the shot. However, if there is only 3 seconds left and they need to make both shots so their team can win, there may now be too much arousal and the shooter has a greater chance of missing the shot.
Robert Yerkes played a large role in the development of the intelligence testing of those in the army. The two test that were developed were the Army Alpha and the Army Beta. The Alpha test was was group-administered and measured verbal ability, numerical ability, ability to follow direction, and knowledge of information. The Beta test was the non-verbal version of the Alpha. It was used to evaluate the illiterate, unschooled, or non-English speaking draftees. These test were used to assign jobs to the draftees and to decide wish of them could hold leadership position.
4) Finally, at the end of your post, please include working URLs for the three websites. For each URL you have listed indicate why you chose the site and the extent to which it contributed to your post.
http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesmz/p/robert-yerkes.htm -- I used this site because it gave me good information and Yerkes background.
http://psychology.about.com/od/yindex/f/yerkes-dodson-law.htm -- I used this site because it gave a good defition of the Yerkes-Dodson Law and also gave good examples to better explain it
http://official-asvab.com/history_res.htm -- I used this site because its gave me information about military intelligence testing.
1) The topic I chose for this week was intelligence and some of the contributors to how intelligence tests/the concept of intelligence was applied in psychology. This fits in with the chapter because intelligence was talked about a lot as well as the controversy with it and which psychologists did what in terms of intelligence. I'm interested in this topic because I've always found intelligence to be pretty interesting as well as how it is tested. I think the ways intelligence was applied is interesting because there were so many different takes on intelligence and what it's true meaning was/is.
2) Three aspects I want to talk about for this are the beliefs of Goddard, Terman, and Yerkes, how they applied these tests, and what problems there may have been with their ideas.
3) Many psychologists at this time believed that mental capacity or intelligence was due to genetics and there was little environmental effect on intelligence. The main people behind these ideas were Goddard, Terman, and Yerkes. They all had the same idea about intelligence and also believed that intelligence tests were able to measure this well. Many other psychologists criticized this belief, however, saying that it is clear that environment did play a role in intelligence because of all the influences around children such as at home or in school. Although all three men agreed on what intelligence was, they all had some different ways of applying this or thinking about it. Goddard focused mostly on feebleminded individuals, or those who did not score well on the IQ test that had been developed. He thought that the public needed to know about these people so that they can be put in certain groups and hopefully be taught differently. Goddard used the Binet test to test many groups of people and identified them as lacking mental ability. He believed that this feeblemindedness was the result of a certain gene. He thought that sterilization may be a good way to help keep this gene out of future generations. Another idea he came up with was housing the feebleminded in institutions. Goddard later went on to use these IQ tests on immigrants trying to come to the United States. He gave the test to the immigrants and found that 80% of them scored in the category he called "morons." This made Goddard report that most of the immigrants had extremely low intelligence levels. The IQ test then became a part of the screening process at Ellis island and hundreds of immigrants were sent back to where they came from due to being feebleminded. . Lewis Terman was another main contributor with IQ tests. Terman learned about the Binet IQ test and added onto it, revising it and making it standardized. This helped give the test to more people. His test included 90 items. He came up with the "intelligence quotient" or IQ which put mental age over chronological age and multiplied it by 100 so that mental capacity could be represented easier. Although Goddard studied the feebleminded, Terman was the opposite. Terman was interested in learning about gifted individuals, those who scored high on the IQ test. He felt that there were leaders in the world who could help lead the United States and felt that this test would be a good way to find them. Terman took a group of students that were gifted and tested them to make sure. He found that these kids were gifted intelligence wise as well as in many other ways. This group actually became known as the "Termites." Much of Terman's research went on to learn more about these gifted individuals and some of his work still continues on today. The final person with this same view was Robert Yerkes. As I mentioned before, IQ tests were brought to the army. There were two forms of this test, army alpha and army beta. Army beta was for those who could not read as well as the rest of the group. Although these tests results were not really used, Yerkes did feel this was significant because they knew that these tests could be used with a large sample of people. We now know that many psychologists believe that this test was not good because when the test went on to be given to men in the army, many of them fell into a moron category as well. This showed that there was perhaps something wrong with Goddard's standards since Americans could not believe that the U.S. was becoming a place with so many feebleminded people. All of these applications of IQ tests eventually led to these tests going into schools, businesses, etc. All of these psychologists, although not completely correct, helped apply IQ tests and show how they could be used in good ways. Many of their ideas still live on today although some have been changed because we have now realized not all of them were 100% correct. We now know that behavior and environment has a lot of effect on intelligence and mental processes. A lot of psychologists at this time also were beginning to show how behavior was a very important part of not only intelligence but also psychology in general, as we have seen in other chapters. Overall, these psychologists did contribute a lot and did help show how IQ tests have come to be where they are now.
4) http://education.stateuniversity.com/pages/2499/Terman-Lewis-1877-1956.html - I used this website to learn more about Terman and his research on gifted people and his longitudinal study.
http://www.intelltheory.com/goddard.shtml - This website talked in more detail about Goddard and how he tested immigrants and his ideas on feeblemindedness.
http://www.indiana.edu/~intell/yerkes.shtml - This website gave more information about Yerkes and his contributions involving the army.
5) Goddard, Yerkes, Terman, IQ, Termites, feebleminded
1) Once you have completed your search and explorations, I would like you to say what your topic is, how exactly it fits into the chapter we have covered this week, and why you are interested in it.
For the topical blog this week I have chosen to research gifted children.
2) What are three aspects of the topic you want to talk about for this assignment?
I want to know more about the definition and characteristics of gifted children, how teachers balance low level, middle level, and higher level students (i.e. how does their teaching style change). I would also like to do a bit of research to see if there are more pros than cons to being a gifted individual (i.e. does it affect peer relationships, social interactions, etc.).
3) Next, I would like you to take the information you found from the various sources and integrate/synthesize them into the three aspects of the topic, and then write about the topic.
When I began my research I had no idea where to begin. I have studied disorders where children are not mentally on the same level as their peers (i.e. they may have an intellectual disability, autism, etc.), but have not learned too much about “gifted children.” To begin this week’s topical blog I thought I would research the defining characteristics of what it means to be “gifted.” One source I found explored defined gifted children and listed common characteristics that these children have. The National Association for Gifted Children website defined gifted children as children with “minds [that] are often ahead of their physical growth” (Link 3). Some state definitions of giftedness use an IQ-like comparison with the average range of children in the same age group. I found this point to be relevant to the discussion last Thursday about the education system needing an update. Our professor made a valid point when he asked the question of why school age children were grouped by age rather than by intelligence or reasoning skills or ability level. The list of characteristics that are common linked to gifted children include: excellent memory, high sensitivity, intense feelings and reactions, advanced comprehensions of abstract thought processes, highly developed curiosity, etc. (Link 3).
In my quest to find an article related to teaching in a “normal” (i.e. typical) classroom, I stumbled upon tips for teachers on how to stimulate the minds of the higher-level learners without negatively affecting the other students. One of the tips I found was to allow students to take on independent tasks (Link 2). This will allow for an advanced and individualized approach for all students so that it is also fair to the majority of students. Another tip that I found was that teachers can implement a multi-level curriculum (Link 2). In other words, they can adjust the learning by assigning topics that have varying levels. One last tip that I thought was relevant and important for teachers to keep in mind is that these children should not be pressured with unrealistic expectations or extra work (Link 2). This type of pressure could backfire and cause gifted children to not express the full extent of their ability or abilities. Although I found this list of tips and recommendations helpful I feel that teachers already have multiple tasks that they must manage (as well as to teach a variety of different learning capabilities). I agree that assisting gifted children is important, but not at the cost of other students. This is where I might be slightly biased and think that a paraprofessional should be hired to assist the teacher. Putting all of these responsibilities on one teacher is ridiculous and not fair to that educator.
I was also curious about whether or not there were any downsides to being considered a “gifted child.” When I think of this term I visualize bright and energetic children who are eager to learn and appreciate challenging activities. In an article I found, the author mentioned that for every strength a child demonstrates there is a potential problem. The author of the article provided a chart with a few examples. One of the examples was “creative in thinking,” with the potential problem being not following a teacher’s instructions exactly; the student may have the same end product but not in a way the other students completed it or the route that the teacher was expecting (Link 1). Another strength provided in the chart was “intense focus on particular passions,” with the potential problem of not being able to interact with same-age peers (Link 1). This chart had examples that included irritations that could deter peers and the teacher. Although being a “gifted student” is a pro overall, the higher ability level is not without its cons.
Link 1: http://www.greatpotentialpress.com/living-with-the-ups-and-downs
I used this link to compare the pros and cons of being a gifted child (or adult for that matter).
Link 2: http://www.education.udel.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/GiftedStudents.pdf
I used this link to research tips and recommendations for teachers in increasing the learning capabilities of their gifted students, without negatively affecting the rest of the class.
Link 3: https://www.nagc.org/resources-publications/resources/definitions-giftedness
I used this link to define the term “giftedness” to better understand my topic. I also wanted to find a list of common characteristics among gifted individuals (although the ones listed are common it does not necessarily mean that every individual will express all of the traits).
Terms: gifted children, peer relationships, educator relationships, education system, average student versus gifted student, memory, sensitivity, intensity, advanced comprehensions, processing abstract thoughts, c
1) Once you have completed your search and explorations, I would like you to say what your topic is, how exactly it fits into the chapter we have covered this week, and why you are interested in it.
The topic I choose is industrial psychology. I choose this topic because the chapter talks about how Hugo Munsterberg started it and what was included in it. I was interested in this topic because I think it is important and I like applying it to our time period. Some of the findings in industrial psychology can make a big difference in job satisfaction and job satisfaction is a big part of all of our lives.
2) What are three aspects of the topic you want to talk about for this assignment?
The three aspects I want to talk about are Hugo Munsterberg’s contribution to industrial psychology, mental tests and how they are related to industrial psychology, and how industrial psychology is being applied to our time period vs. how it was applied when it first came about.
3) Next, I would like you to take the information you found from the various sources and integrate/synthesize them into the three aspects of the topic, and then write about the topic.
Hugo Munsterberg is known for his contributions to clinical, educational and forensic psychology, but he was also the father of industrial psychology. Industrial psychology was one of the first applications of laboratory findings to the real world and Munsterberg was the first person to put a name to it. He released a book called, Psychology and Industrial Efficiency, which looked at his thoughts and findings on monotony, attention and fatigue in the workplace. Munsterberg believed that the best way to improve efficiency in the workplace was to match employees to jobs that they would be best at. He also found that spacing employees so they couldn’t talk to each other would improve their attention.
One way to match an employee to a job was to subject them to a series of mental tests. These tests are used to test mental processes and capability. The tests were not always accurate though. Intelligence testing started with Galton, who thought intelligence was passed through genetics. Luckily, Munsterberg based his tests off of Robert M. Yerkes’ Army Alpha and Army Beta tests that looked at how well people could pay attention and carry out commands. Munsterberg’s’ tests would test how well a person could sort cards or do word associations or touch a pencil to crosses drawn on a page in order to see if a person was fit to be a phone operator. In industrial psychology today, we do individual testing to see the personality traits of future employees, to see if people are going to do well in a certain line of work (working in a government job), and seeing what kind of training a person is going to need to go through according to their mental capacities and capabilities.
Munsterberg’s main goal with industrial psychology was to reduce fatigue, and create a happy environment; all while making production levels go up. Back when I/O psychology was founded, making production levels go up was the biggest focus. Munsterberg talks about separating people so they will pay more attention to their tasks than each other. He also created the employment tests to see who would be better and faster at their jobs. Today, one of the main issues is trying to lower the stress levels of employees in hopes of raising production levels. In the article I found called, “Why Sweden is Shifting to a 6-hour Workday,” it talks about how some companies are changing to 6-hour work days to reduce the stress of the employees while paying the same salary they were for 8-hour days. This includes cutting some meetings, stopping extra emails and Facebook time. If they are creating emails and doing things on social media sites, it is all done on the clock during their 6 hour days. It mentions how staying focused during an 8-hour work day is very hard to do and you can get the same amount of work done in 6 hours that you can do in 8 because you are more energized and ready to work by the time you come in during the morning and you are not totally worn out by the time you leave creating a much happier work environment and happy employees. Many employers also have trouble keeping employees but the 6-hour work days draws new candidates for employment in and keeps the employees that they already have. The main issue with changing the days to 6-hour days is that it costs more but the quality of work is better so the cost balances itself out.
Industrial psychology has come a long way since it started. From taking inspiration from the Alpha and Beta army tests to create employment tests, refining those tests to accurately measure mental capability to deciding how long our workdays and work weeks should be, I/O psychology has exploded into the giant field it is today. If it were not for Hugo Munsterberg, I think we would still have some form of workplace psychology but it wouldn’t be as advanced as it is today. Even though we have come a long way with it, we still have a good long way to go.
4) Finally, at the end of your post, please include working URLs for the three websites. For each URL you have listed indicate why you chose the site and the extent to which it contributed to your post.
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Hugo_Munsterberg
I used this site to get a better grasp on Munsterbergs life and to see what his contributions to I/O psychology were and to see what other things he worked on. This site also gave me insight to how I/O psychology was applied and what they were more focused on when it first appeared.
https://books.google.com/books?id=aTfAyel2u-gC&pg=PA194&lpg=PA194&dq=mental+tests+and+industrial+psychology&source=bl&ots=t-tx8HRrue&sig=mJ2wnb7aLtC6-RyZoExhVB4Qkn0&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CEMQ6AEwA2oVChMIrJbBrM_UyAIVRlk-Ch1WpQji#v=onepage&q=mental%20tests%20and%20industrial%20psychology&f=false
I used this site to get a better understanding of how mental tests were used and are still used in industrial psychology today. This also gave me an idea about how mental tests have changed to become more valid and reliable.
http://www.fastcoexist.com/3051448/why-sweden-is-shifting-to-a-6-hour-work-day
I used this site for an example of how industrial psychology is being applied in this day and age. The article talks about how a company in Sweden is shifting to a 6 hour work day and the results of the change.
Terms: Hugo Munsterberg, industrial psychology, mental tests, Psychology and Industrial Efficiency, Robert M. Yerkes, Army alpha and army beta.
1) Once you have completed your search and explorations, I would like you to say what your topic is, how exactly it fits into the chapter we have covered this week, and why you are interested in it.
I decided to research sports psychology further to better understand how it works. Sports psychology was discussed with Walter Miles as reviewed in our text.
2) What are three aspects of the topic you want to talk about for this assignment?
Its origins, its role today, and what it is.
3) Next, I would like you to take the information you found from the various sources and integrate/synthesize them into the three aspects of the topic, and then write about the topic.
Sports Psychology in America has its roots in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when several psychologists started conducting sports-related studies. Then, in the 1920s a psychologist named Walter Miles focused his attention on football. They wanted to find out the quickest way for offensive linemen to move in harmony after the center hiked the ball. Miles created his own equipment for the experiment to ascertain the players’ reaction times. This device tested the individual reaction times of seven linemen at the same time. When a lineman moved, he triggered the release of a golf ball that fell onto a rotating drum. The drum was covered with paper stretched over a wire mesh, and the ball made a definite impression on the paper that allowed measurement of the lineman's quickness. Coaches agreed that the initial charge of the line was a great advantage for the offense, and they were interested in ways to quicken that movement. The main contributor to sports psychology was Coleman R. Griffith and is credited as the founder.
Sports psychology is an interdisciplinary science that depends on the knowledge from many different fields such as, biomechanics, physiology, kinesiology, and psychology. It involves studying how psychological factors affect performance and how participation in sport exercise affect psychological and physical factors. It can also be geared towards working with athletes regarding injuries, rehabilitation, communication, team building, and career transitions.
Today sports psychologists work in many different settings. They may have their own private practices, offer consulting services, help professional sports teams, conduct research and hold positions at the NCAA, among other roles. According to the APA they can help with enhancing performance, coping with the pressure of competition, recovering from injuries, keeping an exercise program, and enjoying sports.
4) Finally, at the end of your post, please include working URLs for the three websites. For each URL you have listed indicate why you chose the site and the extent to which it contributed to your post.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sport_psychology
I used this for general information my topic.
http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2011/07/15/sport-psychology-and-its-history/
I used this site to get information on its origins and how it is used today.
http://www.apa.org/monitor/2008/07-08/sport-psych.aspx
I used this site to learn more about Walter Mile’s role in sports psychology.
Next make list of the terms and terminology you used in your post.
sports psychology
Walter Miles
Coleman R. Griffith
biomechanics
physiology
kinesiology
psychology
psychological factors
1. My topic is Leta Hollingworth and her work. This topic interests me because of her determination and views on debunking myths on women's mental capacity and her interest in gifted children.
2. The three aspects I would like to discuss are her work with gifted children, her work as a feminist, and what methods she developed in educating gifted children.
3. Leta Hollingworth was from Nebraska, and moved with her husband to New York, where she got her doctorate in educational psychology. It was here Leta more or less stumbled into the field of gifted children when she was administering IQ tests and found a child with the results of a 180 IQ. This fired her passion in developing proper education for these children who had so far simply fallen through the cracks of the educational system. Leta went on to write the first text book on gifted children and develop several methods for teaching them other than the norm at the time of just moving them up a few grades. It is interesting to see that most of these ideals are what our current education systems try to aim for today such as: moveable desks, P.E., art/music appreciation, are a few of the areas of study she emphasized on. Some of her innovations in education for the gifted were: individualized curriculum, reduction of drill in curriculum, thematic learning, education for creativity and leadership. While education for the gifted was Leta's main passion, she also had an interest in debunking much of the myths of the time about women and their mental competency. One of her areas of research was on the variability hypothesis which basically said, in layman's terms, men were smarter than women. Leta found that there was little to no concrete data on this subject, leading to her own research of nearly 2000 newborns. Her findings were that boys were in fact larger than girls but the variability in size of both genders was the same. Not satisfied with this one study, Leta went on to study women's periodic function. In her research with 23 women and some men as the control group the findings were that there was no difference in the learning ability or understanding between the genders at any time in a woman's cycle. Leta is a fascinating woman to study in the field of psychology and it is interesting that she only got a short side section in the book on her life and work.
4.http://www.gifteddevelopment.com/highly-and-profoundly-gifted/leta-hollingworth-birthmother-pg Gives a detailed account of her professional work with gifted children and women's rights..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JH0933uJTqo Gives a brief overview of Leta's personal life, work, and education.
http://www.intelltheory.com/lhollingworth.shtml Gives a list like summary of professional works/ achievements throughout her life.
Terms: Leta Hollingworth, gifted children, variability hypothesis, periodic function
IQ stands for Intelligence quotient. The testing that is done dates back to a man by the name of Alfred Binet, Binet designed the first IQ tests in hopes of finding an effective way to measure the intelligence of the general population. Here the tests we compiled of problem solving answers. What researchers have found recently is that problem solving questions were too simplified to really generate an efficient number.
Three aspects. My three aspects of why the IQ tests are inaccurate are short term memory, reasoning skills, and verbal ability.
Short term memory. Researchers have looked at why short term memory is a good measure of intelligence. Short term memory is actually called active memory as well. This active memory we use in our daily lives and it makes a huge contribution to the quality of life as well as our ability to maintain and look at the world in new perspectives. Short term memory is what we connect to as the first thing of our brain activities. These connections can be measured on CAT scans as well as looked into on a deeper level where we need to actively call things to cognition seemingly from nowhere in a matter of seconds. This ability can be measured and comprehended on a level of timing in which we can then measure the intelligence. The IQ testing does not test this dynamic of Intelligence.
Reasoning Skills
Reasoning can come in different forms. Thing of reasoning as comprehension. This comprehension can tie into things like spatial, numbers, or simple logic to name a few. This has shown to be a good measure of intelligence due to the ability to comprehend these different dynamics. We use reasoning skills to measure the ability to connect what we know to what we can comprehend and even predict. Being able to connect the skills of reasoning to the skills of comprehension we can form a deeper understanding of patterns and thus enhance our cognition of future events. Reasoning skills was not a specific focus of the IQ testing
Verbal ability
Not only is it important to be able to comprehend things on different dynamics it is equally important to be able to decipher and listen on an active level to different stimulus as well as different verbally skilled events. Being able to connect to the verbal cognition of the brain has been proven in different areas that include the intelligence functioning of the brain. Verbal ability is not only limited to an active comprehension but as well as a learning tool that can further our pure relation to knowledge. When we can understand language and connect word with other words we form new cross connections in the brain in which we can enhance our short term memory as well. This dynamic of intelligence was not addressed in the dynamics of IQ testing.
http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/human-brain/question455.htm
This web source provides information that pertains to the IQ testing and what the test looks at. From this website you can determine what you are good at depending on the IQ that you have. The site breaks down the components that are involved in IQ testing and how they can be measured. The site then provides ways in which you can alter your own IQ or even your Child’s IQ score. I used this site to provide my paper with a good framework as well as develop my aspects.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbnD7vIi-Gg
This video shows support for the idea that the IQ test is not a good measure of intelligence and that the test should be fundamentally flawed. What the video states is that researchers believe that the tests don’t measure the 3 main components of intelligence. What they believe that the test only shows is how well you might do in westerner schools. I used this video to develop my aspects and provide opinions to my presentation.
http://www.medicaldaily.com/iq-test-accurate-way-measure-intelligence-or-are-mental-abilities-something-you-cant-put-297244
This web source I decided to use to provide some concrete facts of why the IQ tests shouldn’t me used today. This site gives information regarding who invented the tests and what the tests originally tested for in the first place. What I took from this site is the involvement of new trends and growing intelligence.
Terminology: Binet, Learning, Mental tests, IQ tests
1) Once you have completed your search and explorations, I would like you to say what your topic is, how exactly it fits into the chapter we have covered this week, and why you are interested in it.
My topic is Ellis Island and mental tests, which relates to the chapter because of the testing done by Henry Goddard. I am interested in it because I have minimal background knowledge on Ellis Island and wish to know more.
2) What are three aspects of the topic you want to talk about for this assignment?
General overview of Ellis Island
Process of mental testing on Ellis Island
Why, today, mental testing on Ellis Island is viewed negatively
3) Next, I would like you to take the information you found from the various sources and integrate/synthesize them into the three aspects of the topic, and then write about the topic.
Ellis Island was the main screening station for immigrants from 1892 to 1954. It was originally a welcoming station for the surplus amount of immigrants entering the United States. Then, it became a place to test immigrants for physical and mental diseases and impairments that were potentially contagious or harmful to the current citizens of the United States. If these diseases or impairments were detected, the immigrants would either stay on Ellis Island until they healed or they would be sent back to their homeland.
The process total process for screening on Ellis Island was on average 2 to 3 hours per immigrant. However, those suspected of having a mental impairment, were taken to another screening room for further tests and observation, which could take from 24 hours to a whole week. Quick screening by observation was completed by several Ellis Island employees. They observed eyes, scalps, breathing, and behavior. If they noticed anything unusual, they would mark the immigrant with a label in chalk. This label, for mental defect was an X. If the mental defect was determined "definite," the X was circled. Initial signs of a mental defect, according to the employees of Ellis Island, included talkativeness, calmness, nervousness, slurred speech, laughing, friendliness, frustration, and confusion. Further mental testing often included counting, adding, and puzzles. Many of these tests involved speaking, writing, and/or the assistance of a translator, which is why the tests today may seem problematic.
For many of the immigrants, English was not their first language, or a language they spoke at all. Some were illiterate. Because of the language barrier, some of the mental tests were inaccurate and unfair. Another issue involved in screening at Ellis Island was the process of suspecting a mental defect by observing, simply glancing at a person. Items considered were race, gender, and physical appearance. This sort of judgement, or profiling, can get officers today into trouble. It is something we are discouraged from doing on a regular basis, in a general sense. "Don't judge a book by it's cover." Did this present view exist during the mental testing of Ellis Island or did it develop after the irrational screening conducted at Ellis Island. Many of the "symptoms" of mental defect could also be easily explained by other factors. For example, an immigrant is suspected to be mentally defected because they are emotional. This could also be explained by the fact that they left their homeland, possibly left family behind, probably had a long, difficult trip to America, and then were being questioned and examined by people who do not speak their native language. It would be very understandable for a person in this situation to be emotional. It is also interesting that potential mental defects were treated equivalently to contagious diseases. Employees of Ellis Island did everything they could to keep those with mental impairments out of the United States, as if their mental defects would infect the country, which is probably related to the influence of eugenics. Needless to say, Ellis Island no longer in use as a screening station for immigrants. It is now a museum because Ellis Island and mental testing played an important role in American history.
4) Finally, at the end of your post, please include working URLs for the three websites. For each URL you have listed indicate why you chose the site and the extent to which it contributed to your post.
http://www.powayusd.com/online/usonline/worddoc/ellisislandsite.htm
This site was very useful for a general overview of Ellis Island.
http://www.dumas-k12.net/socst/K-5/Grade_5/Supplements/12_Ellis%20Island.pdf
This site was useful for the process of screening for illness at Ellis Island.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/4574515?seq=16#page_scan_tab_contents
This was extremely useful in the explanation of the mental tests conducted at Ellis Island.
Terms: mental tests, Ellis Island, eugenics
1) Once you have completed your search and explorations, I would like you to say what your topic is, how exactly it fits into the chapter we have covered this week, and why you are interested in it.
-I chose Walter Van Dyke Bingham. He fit into the chapter since he was one of the psychologists that proved that “new science” could be practical in the business field. I was interested in this since I am emphasizing in I/O psych and signed my final offer doing HR management for a fortune 500 company. The book that the bureau he established produced as a helpful guide helped aid interviewers on how to test and interview applicants in the best way possible to hire the right people. I would love to read his book on it so that I could possibly learn more about how to recruit better in my career.
2) What are three aspects of the topic you want to talk about for this assignment?
-The first aspect is about his biography and how it shaped the man he became famous for. The second aspect is about the book “Aids in the Selection of Salesmen.” The last aspect is about his other achievements, especially working with Yerkes with the Army Alpha and Beta testing program.
3) Next, I would like you to take the information you found from the various sources and integrate/synthesize them into the three aspects of the topic, and then write about the topic.
-I have never heard of Walter Van Dyke Bingham and his contributions to business psychology has impacted my life personally for my career and that is why I have selected him. He was born in 1880 and died in 1952. What is also interesting about this man is that he was even born in Iowa in Swan Lake City! He was an American industrial and applied psychologist. He helped popularize intelligence and aptitude testing in industry. He was a student of Edward L. Thorndike. He received his Ph. D.in psych at the University of Chicago under Angell. He was also John Watson’s student assistant. Cattell and Thorndike were the ones who got him interested in mental testing and educational psych. He also founded the first university department of applied psych at Carnegie Institute of Technology. He established the Bureau of Salesmanship Research where they came up with a guide called “Aids in the Selection of Salesmen.” This included a standardized application form, a set of questions for interviewers, and recommendations for tests to be given to applicants. The Research Bureau for Retail Training prepared employment tests, training manuals, merchandise manuals, and specific procedures for correcting defects of sales personality and of supervision. When he served with Yerkes in WWI, he helped with the Army testing programs. The U. S. Army saw a need for intelligence tests to be used when deciding what sort of advanced training a recruit would receive. They developed two versions of the test. The Alpha test emphasized verbal abilities and was given to everyone. Recruits literate enough to read and follow written directions were those who took the Alpha. The Beta test emphasized non-verbal abilities and was to be given to those who performed poorly on the Alpha test and were suspected of having language problems. Each test took just under an hour to administer. A large number of Army recruits took the Alpha version of the test and after the war, the data was analyzed, with a surprising result. It showed that the average recruit had a mental age of around 13, which was considered a mild level of retardation. The reason for this had to do mainly with the level of education of the recruits rather than low native intelligence. Yerkes and others who helped like Bingham, concluded incorrectly that the intelligence deficit was real, sounding alarm bells about the "menace of the feeble-minded." Around two million soldiers took the test, but the war ended before they could really be used in an effective way. During the war, the military embraced the tests and thought they were more efficient than other methods for placing soldiers. Others though however were more stubborn and negative about the test results. Some did not cooperate with the examiners giving the tests. They also thought that the testing conditions were poor, so found the results useless. The program though did help give psychology a boost and to help show that this new science is practical. Bingham was a very accomplished psychologist, and I think that his contributions have helped shape even my career.
4) http://elo.sha.nemart.in/profiles/397- This site was somewhat helpful since it gave me a timeline of his accomplishments and his biography that supports my aspects for this topic. There unfortunately is not much on the internet about him.
http://siris-archives.si.edu/ipac20/ipac.jsp?&profile=all&source=~!siarchives&uri=full=3100001~!290288~!0#focus- This site was also helpful for my three aspects and was credible enough of a resource.
http://users.ipfw.edu/abbott/120/IntelligenceTests.html- This site helped me with more understanding on the Army testing programs which was my third aspect.
-http://sitemaker.umich.edu/jscarson/files/army_alpha_army_brass.pdf- This site was the most helpful to learn more about the Army testing programs since it was a thirty three page research paper over this type of intelligence testing.
Terms- Walter Bingham, Yerkes, Army testing program, Army Alpha, Army Beta, Thorndike, Cattell, Thorndike, Watson, applied psychology
1). For my topical blog this week I am going to be talking about Alfred Binet and his intelligence tests. I think this is a very interesting topic because there are so many different types of intelligence tests. I think they are very important to our society and many peoples future successes. This is relevant to what we read for this chapter because it directly correlates to the reading about Alfred Binet.
2). My first topic for my topical blog is going to be about Alfred Binet. My second topic is going to be what he accomplished during his career. My last topic is going to be about his theory and his tests/scales that he came up with.
3). Alfred Binet was born on July 11, 1857 in Nice, France. His parent separated when he was young and he was primarily raised by his mother who took him to Paris so he could attend a school there when he was 15, in 1978 Binet got a license to practice law but decided to follow his father and transition into medicine more or less psychology. He learned from reading books by Darwin, Bain and many others. His self-teaching method hurt him in the long run because he never attended a university for formal education about psychology. He got under the wing of Jean Charcot at a clinic in Paris. That was the beginning of his psychology degree. He started to pursue the mental process and that is when he started his research in intelligence tests. Binet accomplished many things through out his career. In the last 21 years of his career he published over 200 books. He first stated working at a neurological clinic to get his feet off the ground and get some experience in the field of psychology. He then went on to become a researcher in the laboratory of Experimental Psychology at Sorbonne University. Just a short three years later he became the director of the laboratory at Sorbonne University. The French Ministry of Public Instruction appointed him in 1904 as a member on the Commission on the Education of Retarded Children. The Binet-Simon scale was developed in 1905 by f Binet and Theodore Simon and revised twice after that. This scale was formed to measure children’s intelligence. The average age that this scale is used for is three to twelve. Between the two men there was a mutual agreement that a child’s intelligence is different from an adults. This scale was devised to determine which children needed special education. In consisted of between four and five subtests. The child was scored based on the subtests and then scored total and that is combined to determine if the child needed special education. They classified the children into three categories: Average, Advanced, and Retarded. The subtests that they used included some common topics such as verbal communication, comprehension, memory, abstract thinking, and repetition.
4). Alfred Binet, Binet-Simon Scale, Intelligence, Intelligence testing,
5). http://www.intelltheory.com/binet.shtml
This site gave me great information about his careers and intelligence and his life. It helped me with all aspects of this blog.
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/binet.htm
This site gave me great background information on Binets life and helped me understand him better. It also helped me understand his research and work.
http://childpsych.umwblogs.org/intelligence-testing-2/binet-simon-scale/
This site gave me very good information on the Binet-simon scale that I talk about.
1)
My topic is intelligence in heredity. I was influenced by Robert Yerke and his army alpha and beta tests and how the results and the nativism of the time shaped the interpretation of iq testing and what they would do with its continuation since it didn't support their ideas of meritocracy. I began to wonder what was the main driving factor for their beliefs, which was explained through their biological approach; they believed that intelligence was inherited and unaffected by environment.
2)
The three aspects I will be focusing on are studies that have suggestions as to the nature of intelligence. The first will be basic observational twin studies, the second will be twin studies based on correlation between myelin sheathe structure, and the third is the effects on mental retardation of parents on offspring’s IQ.
3)
When talking about psychological studies, it is common to use a technique called twin studies. Twins give us valuable insight on nature versus nurture in the environment versus biological approach toward behaviors. Specifically for the question of intelligence, we can see the genetic role played by comparing mono and dizygotic twins' intelligence quotients, and to check the environmental influence, we use the same comparison of those twins that are raised separately from each other. They check the correlation coefficient between the IQs of identical twins raised in the same home and of the twins raised in separate homes and of fraternal twins and found that the correlations got weaker with environmental separation, but had a much greater deviation when the children weren't entirely genetically similar. Adoption studies between biological twins gave better evidence for environmental factors however. These monozygotic twins who were raised separately by parents with higher IQs than the biological parents tended to have higher IQs than their twin; although the child still didn't appear to be given the capabilities that their adoptive parents had. This suggests at least that environment can bring out the intellectual capabilities of the child, whose parents may not have fully reached their capabilities. These capacities are possibly passed down from generation to generation and only fully realized through the environment, which is reflective of the equality based opinion on nature vs nurture that many psychologists today stand by. There are some limitations for these studies however. They do not account for a shared important environment that all twins share, the womb. Whether the twins are separated or not, the womb provides a shared environment for the two during some of the most influential developmental periods of their lives. Furthermore, the postnatal environments that the twins have after adoption is generally somewhat similar to each other. Also most intelligent kids, based on mental level, come from parents who only have average IQs. There are other important factors that play a role in the environment that have shown clear correlations with intelligence. Food nutrition before birth and into the early years of development have been positively correlated to intelligence and other personality factors. Similarly, toxic substance use negatively correlates with intelligence. Despite early environment or biological disposition, early intervention appears to have immediate gains that can be kept long term via follow-ups in the early years that cater to the apparent natural abilities. In fact, the importance of all early schooling is very prevalent in studies that show IQ increases compared with other cultures that simply don't have the same public school access. The next aspect that has recently been studied is the effectiveness of myelin sheath structure on intelligence. Researchers have been trying to prove that thicker myelin sheathing improves mental speed, thus increasing the intelligence. Armed with a common sense hypothesis and a small pool of test subjects, researchers were able to show that myelin formation originated in parts of the brain associated with intelligence. While this may not sound likely to correlate well with intelligence, researchers have high hopes in using this information in the future to determine which genes are specifically associated with myelin stability, and to hopefully strengthen them and our intelligence as a whole. Finally, we analyze heredity’s influence on intelligence through studies involving parents with low mental ages and studying inherited effects on their children. Studies appeared to show that these children turned out to be somewhat average in IQ, which wasn't entirely to be expected for those hoping for a biological approach to intelligence. However, with these cases they did find that fifty percent of the children did have behavioral problems, although not very strongly correlated and possibly influenced by environment being raised by their disabled parent. Another longitudinal study, that didn't appear to suffer from attrition found that intelligence was more effected in these situations in the long run. They concluded that heredity accounted for sixty percent of the influence on intelligence. This was coupled with best-case environmental atmosphere and how it reportedly only showed a raise in IQ of twenty to twenty five points.
3) nativism, army alpha test, army beta test, meritocracy, intelligence quotient, mental level, mental age, attrition
http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/more-proof-that-intelligence-is-85134
I chose this link because it came from a university that puts their reputation on the line with everything that they post. This link gave me my information on the myelin sheathe studies.
http://www.education.com/reference/article/effects-heredity-environment-intelligence/
this link is a well known educational website that gave me most of my information on the twin studies.
https://books.google.com/books?id=A7L86cXOIdIC&pg=PA236&lpg=PA236&dq=mental+retardation+effects+on+%22offspring%22+intelligence+iq+-inbred+-inbreeding&source=bl&ots=GhfUCPT-M0&sig=fHvTIP4Mjzvs57GAebWz0s0EzB8&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CE4Q6AEwBmoVChMI7qyIsbTVyAIVAVYeCh2U9QcM#v=onepage&q=mental%20retardation%20effects%20on%20%22offspring%22%20intelligence%20iq%20-inbred%20-inbreeding&f=false
this link comes from a well published book and gave me some of my information on mentally disabled offspring.
https://books.google.com/books?id=ODGsAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA140&lpg=PA140&dq=mental+retardation+effects+on+%22offspring%22+intelligence+iq+-inbred+-inbreeding&source=bl&ots=hfKLzvUPev&sig=QpinOUVsna_s8zSFlaZlmHfn8ms&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CFIQ6AEwB2oVChMI7qyIsbTVyAIVAVYeCh2U9QcM#v=onepage&q=mental%20retardation%20effects%20on%20%22offspring%22%20intelligence%20iq%20-inbred%20-inbreeding&f=false
this link comes from a well published book and gave me some of my information on mentally disabled offspring.