Psyc 4008 Test 4 Book Notes Chapter 6 Psychology in NineteenthCentury America o American psychology did not really begin until William James appeared on the scene o Prior to James, psychology was taught in courses called “moral philosophy” or “mental philosophy” and it was dominated by faculty psychology o Which derived from Scottish philosophical movement called Scottish Realism o Emphasized real existence of mind, which they believed held a number of innate attributes (“faculties”) , such as intelligence, and judgment o Thomas Reid and Thomas Brown o Scottish Realist philosophers o Took issue wit the extreme Humean view of reality on the grounds that such an idea simply violates common sense o They believed humans have an intuitive understanding that a real world truly exists —daily human life would have no foundation otherwise o They argued that the mind has an independent existence in reality and is composed of various innate powers that they called—faculties Reid divided these faculties into two broad categories • Intellectual • Active American Psychology’s First Textbook o Thomas Upham o Credited with authoring the first American psychology textbook o Elements of Intellectual Philosophy o The text eventually grew to three volumes and was given the broader title of— Elements of Mental Philosophy o The book was divided into 3 main division:
Intellect (cognition) Sensibilities (emotion) Will (action) ^^^”Trilogy of the mind”
The Modern University o The American universities began to develop shortly after the end of the Civil War o One major catalyst: the Morrill Land Grant of 1862 o Which gave every state a minimum of 30,000 acres of federal land ; if the state built a university on the land within five years, it could keep the land; otherwise it reverted to the government o Johns Hopkins University o Became the prototype of the new university in America o It was explicitly modeled on the German example that emphasized research and the creation of new knowledge o Its main focus was on graduate education o President: Daniel Coit Gilman
Attracted good students by creating the concept of the competitive “university fellowship”
Education for Women and Minorities o Women and minority students faced significant barriers when trying to become educated o Women in search of an education faced an entrenched set of beliefs referred to as the “women’s sphere”—an integrated set of concepts that centered on the idea of woman as wife and mother o In addition to the women’s sphere, another impediment was the widespread belief that women were intellectually inferior to men o This belief was maintained in part by the argument that women were intellectually incapacitated every month during menstruation—this handicap was referred to as the periodic function o Evolutionary theory provided additional fuel, producing what was called the variability hypothesis The idea that men had a greater degree of variability in most traits, compared to women, and were therefore at a selective advantage in evolutionary terms o One consequence of the prejudice against African Americans was inferior education and reduced opportunities for higher education o Francis Sumner o African American pioneer o Attended Pennsylvania’sLincoln University o Retuned to Lincoln to teach psychology and German o Went to Clark University to study “race psychology” with G. Stanley Hall o 1st African American to complete a Ph.D. in psychology at Clark University William James: America’s First Psychologist o Principles of Psychology o He made it clear in this book that in his opinion, psychology had a long way to go before it could claim the status of a science—it was only the hope of a science o James was crucial to the development of modern psychology in the U.S. and that his role was recognized not just by historians but also by his contemporaries The Formative Years o William James was raised in an unusual family o His father devoted himself to controlling the education and moral development of his five children o Loved art, wanted to be an artist, but wasn't that good o He used artistic metaphors in his Principles A Life at Harvard o At Harvard, William James first studied chemistry with Charles W. Eliot(soon to be Harvard’s most innovative presidents) o He quickly learned to hate the subject o James became a firm Darwinian o James enrolled in Harvard Medical School, but had no interest in practicing medicine o He contemplated suicide o Salvation came in the form of James’s discovery of the French evolutionary philosopher Charles Renouvier and his definition of free will o This insight enabled William James to continue studying physiology and psychology without being worn down by the implications
o This “pragmatic” approach to the concept of free will, in which the truth value of the
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idea was a consequence of its functional value or usefulness, would become a cornerstone of James’s philosophical position of pragmatism and a reason why he is considered a forerunner of those American psychologists who came to be known as functionalists Established Harvard’s laboratory of experimental psychology
Creating American Psychology’s Most Famous Textbook o William James married Alice Howe Gibbens, who would become a stabilizing force in his life o She helped him begin writing The Principles of Psychology o The book was an immediate best seller o Wrote a smaller version: Psychology: The Briefer Course o In the Principle’s opening sentence, James defined psychology as “the Science of Mental Life, both of its phenomena and their conditions” On Methodology o “Introspection Observation” is what we have to rely on first and foremost and always o By introspection he meant careful selfobservation, an examination and reflection on the states of consciousness that characterize one’s mental life o G. Stanley Hall referred to James as an “impressionist” in psychology o James later created a phrase that came to capsulate this laboratory approach, when he referred to it sarcastically as a brass instrument psychology Consciousness o The chapter on consciousness shows James at his most eloquent. o It is a central chapter, one in which James made it clear that he vehemently opposed the analytic approach that presumed to understand consciousness by reducing it to its basic elements o Consciousness: o Its personal o Its constantly changing o Its sensibly continuous o Its selective o Its active o Elaborating on this last attribute, James used an example that provides a compelling description of what has come to be known as the “tipofthetongue phenomenon” o James was affected by Darwinian thinking o He was interested in understanding the function of consciousness o For James, the answer was that consciousness served individuals by enabling them to adapt quickly to new environments, to learn new things, and to solve new problems that present themselves Habit
o Habits also had an adaptive function
Emotion o James borrowed his theory about emotion from a Dutch physiologist, Carl Lange o Today, its known as the JamesLange theory of emotion o Theory that held that the strong emotions were in essence the physiological reaction that followed the perception of some emotioneliciting event
o James’s argument was that the bodily changes that are the emotions are felt immediately upon the perception of an emotionarousing stimulus, prior to the awareness of a cognitively recognizable emotion James’s Later Years o After completing the Principles, James began to turn away from psychology and toward philosophy o He convinced the research psychologist Hugo Munsterberg to emigrate from Germany to America and run the psychology lab at Harvard, thereby separating James from the tedium of lab work o Began to support the American Philosophical Association o His works began to devote to philosophy and religion Spiritualism o James also became fascinated with spiritualism o He became interested after discovering the Society for Psychical Research while on a trip to London—He established a similar organization in the U.S. o James began an extended study on Mrs. Leonore Piper, a popular Boston medium Summing Up William James o William James was a prime mover in bringing about the emergence of psychology in American o His monumental Principles of Psychology stands at the transition point, artfully blending physiology, philosophy, and the new laboratory psychology G. Stanley Hall: Professionalizing The New Psychology o G. Stanley Hall o Vigorous promoter of the new field o Responsible for its evolving identity as a distinct academic disciple o Professionalized psychology in the U.S. by founding laboratories and journals o Institutionalized psychology’s professional status by creating the American Psychological Association o Most of Hall’s work can be classified under the heading of genetic psychology o Approach that emphasizes the evolution and development of the mind, including developmental psychology, comparative psychology, and abnormal psychology; associated with Hall Hall’s Early Life and Education o He went to Williams College and graduated with a strong interest in philosophy and history and a desire to imitate many of his peers by studying for an advanced degree in Europe o Taught English at Harvard o He met William James, took several courses with him, and completed a doctoral thesis on “the muscular perception of space” o 1st person to complete a doctorate in philosophy at Harvard o because the topic was in the area that would eventually become known as experimental psychology, Hall’s doctorate is sometimes considered to be the 1 st one in psychology o After he obtained his doctorate, he went to Germany and Leipzig o After Leipzig, Hall went to Berlin to study briefly with Helmholtz
o His big break was an invitation from President Eliot of Harvard to give a series of lectures on education
o His lectures caught the attention of President Gilman of Johns Hopkins o Hall was hired as a professor at Hopkins; his title—Professor of Psychology and Pedagogy From Johns Hopkins to Clark o At Johns Hopkins, Hall created the 1st true research lab of experimental psychology in America o He founded the American Journal of Psychology—the first journal for the new psychology published in the U.S. o Became President of Clark University, when Johns Hopkins began to dwindle Psychology at Clark o Psychology survived after the fiasco and struggles at Clark in part because Hall was deeply involved in the work of the department o Hall began supporting research in comparative psychology o One consequence was the creation of the first studies using what would become a standard piece of lab equipment—the maze o Hall created the American Psychological Association (APA) and became its 1st President Hall and Developmental Psychology o Hall contributed to American psychology by advancing his genetic psychology o He was a pioneer in developmental psychology, o promoting the child study movement, o writing the 1st textbook on adolescent psychology,Adolescence o 1st book devoted to the study of teenagers o Hall is the person most responsible for identifying adolescence as a distinct stage of development o The book also contains the most thorough description of Hall’s use of the theory of recapitulation Hall’s theory, taken from a similar idea in biology, that the development of the individual mirrors the evolution of that individual’s species o and near the end of his career, writing a book on aging—Senescence: The Last Half of Life o founded a 2nd journal, Journal of Genetic Psychology Hall and Psychoanalysis o A significant portion of Hall’s Adolescence concerned sexual behavior o Hall’s preoccupation with sex, combined with an interest in abnormal behavior, led him to become fascinated by Freud’s theories o Hall organized the Clark Conference o Talks given by Freud o Freud made his 1st and only visit to America and delivered five lectures that were published in the American Journal of Psychology o Hall published an autobiography, Life and Confessions of a Psychology Mary Whiton Calkins: Challenging The Male Monopoly Clakins’s Life and Work o Grew up in Buffalo, NY
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Her parents only spoke German to her during her childhood Went to Smith College in Massachusetts Taught Greek at Wellesley College Took a year off to learn the field of laboratory psychology so that she could teach it
Graduate Education for Females o Quickly learned that opportunities for advance training were limited for women o She attempted to become a student at Harvard, she also looked at Clark University—where she was told she would be an unofficial “guest” of the university o Women were not allowed in officially, but Edmund Sanford welcomed her into his new laboratory o Calkins later credited Sanford with being the true founder of the psychology lab at Wellesley o Calkins entered Harvard and encountered the educational opportunity of a lifetime o She entered in Physiologial Psychology with William James and four male students, but the male students dropped out o After a year of study at Harvard and Clark, she returned to Wellesley o She later worked in Munsterberg’s lab parttime Calkin’s Research on Association o She completed a series of experimental studies on association then writing an extended account as a Psychological Review Monograph paper o She invented pairedassociate learning o Popular learning procedure in which pairs of stimuli are presented; after a study time, stimuli are presented and the associated response must be given From Psychology to Philosophy o Calkins turned over the Wellesley lab to Eleanor Gamble, a new Ph.D. from Titchener’s lab at Cornell o Calkins’s publications became less researchoriented as she developed her major theoretical contribution to pychology—self psychology o 1st female elected president of APA o Calkins delivered a presidential address called “A Reconciliation between Structural and Functional Psychology” In it she argued that both views could accommodated within a system that recognized the self as the fundamental starting point o Like James, Calkins gradually shifted her interests over the years from psychology to philosophy o Calkins wrote The Persistent Problems of Philosophy o She was elected president of the American Philosophical Association o Making her the 1st women ever elected to each of the APAs Other Women Pioneers: Untold Lives o Untold Lives: The First Generation of American Women Psychologists o Scarborough and Furumoto Christine LaddFranklin o Vassar College
o Graduate education at Johns Hopkins in math—but Hopkins did not admit women as official students
o At Johns Hopkins, she met and married a faculty member in the math department, Fabian o o o o
Franklin She became interested in visual perception—a shift that led her to the new psychology She conducted research on vision in the Gottingen lab of G.E. Muller She developed a theory of color vision She directly challenged the “men only” rule of a group of psychologists known as the Experimentalists
Margaret Floy Washburn o Vassar College o applied for graduate studies at Columbia—ran into the same problems o She was welcomed as a serious student by Cattell, but was only permitted to attend his classes unofficially o Went to Cornell for graduate school (they accepted women) o There, she met Titchener o She was Titchener’s 1st Ph.D. student o 1st woman to earn a doctorate in psychology o became an APA president o coeditorship of the American Journal of Psychology o one of two women elected as a charter member of the new Experimentalist group o wrote: The Animal Mind George Trumbull Ladd o worked as a minister before being a professor of psychology at Bowdoin College o later hired at Yale o 2nd person elected president of the APA after Hall o his best known book—Elements of Physiological Psychology o established a psychology lab at Yale o brought in Edward Scripture to run it James Mark Baldwin o scandal—into exile o earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton o took his first faculty position at the University of Toronto o founded Canada’s 1st lab of experimental psychology o Went back to Princeton—founded his 2nd lab o Helped pioneer the field of developmental psychology with 2 books: o Mental Development in the Child and the Race o Social and Ethical Interpretations in Mental Development Based mostly on Baldwin’s application of evolutionary theory and the observations he made of his 2 daughters Had a direct effect on the developmental theorizing of Jean Piaget o Used terms assimilation and accommodation Along with Hall, Baldwin can justifiably be considered a founder of developmental psychology Feud with Titchener
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Also contribute to the professionalization of psychology Charter member of the APA and its 6th president With Cattell, he founded Psychological Review Psychological Index Psychological Abstracts Psychological Bulletin Left Princeton for Johns Hopkins Resigned abruptly after he had been arrested in a raid on a Baltimore house of prostitution