Psychology 1001 Lecture 5: History and Philosophical Foundations PDF

Psychology 1001 Lecture 5 The History and Philosophical Foundations of Psychology Frans Verstraten The School of Psychology acknowledges and pays respect to the traditional owners of the land, the Gadigal of the Eora Nation. It is upon their ancestral lands that the University of Sydney is built. Mo...

Psychology 1001 Lecture 5 The History and Philosophical Foundations of Psychology Frans Verstraten The School of Psychology acknowledges and pays respect to the traditional owners of the land, the Gadigal of the Eora Nation. It is upon their ancestral lands that the University of Sydney is built. Movements We discussed Structuralism Functionalism Gestalt Psychology Now Behaviorism Psychodynamic theories Cognitive Revolution Cognitive Neuroscience Movement Behaviorism: Parallel movements: based on animal research. Russia: Ivan Pavlov -> Classic Conditioning USA: B.F. Skinner -> Operant Conditioning About learning Stimulus – Response (S->R) Stimuli you can observe and Responses that you can observe. Russia: Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (late 19th century) Try it at home… http://www.nobelprize.org/educati onal/medicine/pavlov/pavlov.html John Watson (USA): Little Albert and Conditioned emotional response Rabbit doesn’t do much to him, he plays with the animal A loud sound scares him rabbit rabbit Loud sound rabbit rabbit Fear Loud sound Fear Fear John Watson (USA): Little Albert and Conditioned Emotional Response A loud sound scares him and the Rabbit now as well… Little Albert US Loud Noise CS Doggy UR Fear CR Advertising US Sexy Person UR Good feeling CR Advertising US Sexy Person CS Product UR Good feeling CR Advertising US Sexy Person CS Car UR Good feeling CR Intermezzo Is this appropriate in current times? Is it appropriate to discus this in a unit on the history of psychology? Is it appropriate to show examples from the past? https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=2SrpARP_M0o What about ‘hysteria’? Which was removed from the DSM in 1980 An 1893 depiction of a woman with hysteria John B. Watson The behaviour of a person is the product of all one has learned in the past! “Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggarman and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors”. What they don’t tell you.., he also said: “I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years”.(1930) John Watson can make anyone… Would you consider him an empiricist or a nativist? This all lead to a new movement: Behaviorism Again, animal research was very important Why? Easy access Good participants (aka ‘subjects’) Easy to work with Don’t have thoughts interfering with task Hardly complain…. Operant Conditioning before Skinner Edward Lee Thorndike Thorndike’s puzzle box Law of effect: “Responses that produce a satisfying effect in a particular situation become more likely to occur again in that situation, and responses that produce a discomforting effect become less likely to occur again in that situation (Gray, 2011, p. 108–109).” A text book representation of the results… Thorndike’s puzzle box: the actual results? Mr. Behaviorism: Burrhus Frederic Skinner. Not sure but probably the only academic psychologist that got on the cover of TIME magazine. Operant Conditioning So how does it work? Operant conditioning The master explains it: B.F. Skinner Explains Intermezzo: Learned helplessness based on uncontrollable and aversive events. Intermezzo: > Why do victims of domestic violence too often remain in those unsafe environments. > Some have suggested that terrorism is a result of the process of learned helplessness The idea that your actions have no effect can go to ways: 1. Learned Helplessness 2. Fight those that are not willing to give you ‘an ear’ for change Why behaviorism has a problem 1: meet Barnabus 1. Climb spiral ramp 2. Lower a bridge 3. Cross the bridge… 4. Go up the stairs 5. Go through tunnel 6. Go into an elevator 7. Turn on elevator 8. Rise a flag 9. Push lever 10. ….FOOD! All the individual steps are called ’Shaping’ Bringing them together for an action event is called ‘Chaining’ Why behaviorism has a problem 2: Latent Learning in Tolman’s rats Tolman allowed his rats to move around in a maze without being reinforced. They did this for several hours. Turned out that these rats were faster at finding food compared to those who had not been in the maze before. Problem: reinforcements were thought to be crucial / essential for learning. Clearly that was not the case. (rumor: When confronted with this blow for behaviorism he apparently said “at least we had fun?”) Why behaviorism has a problem 3: John Garcia and single exposure learning Challenges to Learning Theory - The findings that strong taste aversions could be acquired after only one pairing of a taste with illness, that tastes compared to other external cues seemed to be selectively associated with illness, and that taste-illness associations could be formed over long delays, violated what others believed to be the laws of learning. Garcia further antagonized the largely behaviorist establishment at the time by arguing that evolution had shaped these characteristics. Specifically, the ability to associate a taste with the effects of poisoning after a single exposure was highly adaptive in that it enabled animals to avoid the potentially fatal consequences of repeated sampling of toxins. Given that illness is often produced by toxic plants or decaying meat, animals that were able to selectively associate tastes with illness were at an evolutionary advantage. And chances of survival were also increased by the ability to bridge temporal gaps between ingestion of foods and the delayed onset of illness that resulted from the slow absorption of toxins during the normal digestive process. The Garcia effect is that the aversion develops more strongly for stimuli that cause nausea than other stimuli. This is considered an adaptive trait or survival mechanism that enables the organism to avoid poisonous substances (e.g., poisonous berries) before they cause harm. Old School, New School. Remember Kuhn? Also in Europa… Sigmund Freud Psycho-analytic (psychodynamic) approaches Next week… The emergence of cognitive science 1950’s – 1970’s 3 main influences: (applied) Research on human performance, under pressure of second world war) Developments in computer science, in particular artificial intelligence (Alan Newell & Herbert Simon) Developments in linguistics (Noam Chomsky) AND Very important conference on 11 Sept 1956 at MIT. (find it!) The cognitive revolution: 1950-1970 Information theory (Broadbent) Human Problem Solver (Newell & Simon) Psycholinguistics (Chomsky) Cognitive Psychology (Neisser) 7 +/- 2 (Miller)