Schools of Psychology

during the last section we finished by talking about individuals who had major impacts in learning in this section we begin talking about schools of psychology and the major players that made psychology what it is today we begin by starting with slide two the first group that we shall start talking about is the structuralists the structuralists were one of the first groups as a particular school that studied psychology and there are a couple of major players in this group the first individual was wundt who is considered to be the first psychologist and a true psychologist that we have today titchener was one of his students and he's considered to be the first united states psychologist the structuralists were the first real school or group of psychologists these individuals were impressed by what was going on in the physical sciences such as chemistry and biology especially chemistry where people were breaking down complex things into simple things the classic example is what we talked about last time molecules to atoms the structuralists thought they could do the same kind of thing with mental thoughts the main idea was to basically try to figure out what was going on in someone's head to do that we needed to think about what was the smallest subjective unit that was out there for the structuralists as we see in slide three these were the elementary elements of consciousness now how do you get at these elementary elements of consciousness say the structuralists well what we have to do is kind of sit down and think and use what they called introspection basically what you would do is train an observer to reflect on and analyze a particular mental experience it required someone who was very highly trained this individual would sit down and basically think of a concept the classic example would be a table and as we see in slide four that person would take the table and break it down into its basic elements so it would include things such as the legs the top the back etc then what you would do is go to the next concept that next concept might be the legs so you would take the legs and you would break that down it would long and cylindrical it may be made of wood and on and on and on until ultimately you would get down to the very underlying basic concepts of what that leg was and so you would go all the way back to the basic start of a concept now for the structuralists as we see in slide five there were some things that were extremely important number one experience was extremely important with a concept if you have no experience with some kind of particular concept it's very difficult to break it down number two the mind is passive that is when one thought comes it is followed by another thought and on and on and on as we can see here this is the classic model of associationism that we talked about in earlier sections number three the structuralists believed that you could break down complex thoughts into very simple thoughts and study these in essence each thought was the sum of the other thoughts that is all the other thoughts that you had in your system finally they were empiricists that is they gathered information by observation and recording now what was the problem with the structuralist school the classic thing that we see here is starting on slide six let's take the concept of love what i'd like you to do is stop the slide here for a minute and break down the concept of love what is love break it down into its elementary elements after you do that then restart the material well a lot of people put down lots of different things for love for example they might put down intimacy sex and lots and lots of other things such as caring compassion and all these kinds of things however another group might put down a couple of those and put down other things such as relationships and children and on and on and on and i'll always put down that there are three main concepts of love that is sex drugs and rock and roll ok so which of those groups is right what we would have then is a conference we would have nine or ten different groups from nine or ten different labs all coming together we would then have this debate about which concept of love was right people would say well my concepts are better than your concepts and on and on so the first problem is with the structuralist's model is that it had no reliability that is you should get the same results over and over and over again that is one lab should get the same kind of results as another lab that did not happen in the structuralist school as a consequence it really couldn't test what it was supposed to be testing so it had no validity as well and as a result of these problems and others it received a lot of major criticism the first major group that that criticized the structuralists is shown in slide seven this is the second school of psychology and is called the gestalt school there are three major players in the gestalt school and this is not the same gestalt psychology that we talk about in later times in more of the clinical area the three major players in the gestalt school were kohler werner kofka and wertheimer this school developed as a reaction to the structuralists and also the behaviorists which we'll talk about a little bit later they disagreed with the structuralists that complex thoughts could be broken down into simple thoughts and they also disagreed with the behaviorists that complex behavior could be broken down into simple behavior the problem with the structuralists contend the gestalt school proponents is this when you break down the elementary elements of consciousness or break down elementary behaviors into its very small units you take out the meaning so for the gestaltists the saying developed the whole is greater than the sum of the parts in addition and as we see here on slide nine the gestaltists said you needed naïve observers that is people who were not trained what the gestalt group ended up trying to do was explain perception consequently they developed lots of major and clever experiments that were major problems for the structuralists ultimately the gestalt school gives rise to other fields of psychology such as sensation and perception and cognitive psychology in relation to attacking the behaviorists they tried to knock learning by examining insight learning where things basically just come to you out of the blue however overall the gestaltists had little impact on the behaviorist school because of the objectivity that the behaviorists were going to show we'll talk about that in a little bit the gestaltists also had major influences in social psychology where as we see in slide 11 behavior of individuals or groups can be controlled by the whole situation so what they argued was when you had lots of things together you put some kind of new meaning to it and as a result of that you are able to determine and make new things again points to note for the gestaltists on slide 12 the whole is greater than the sum of the parts i'll give you a final example and see if you can come up with the product here we go what is this substance carbonated water high fructose corn syrup and/or sucrose caramel color phosphoric acid natural flavors and caffeine now if you might think about that a lot of things come to mind however if we could add one more word to the product rum what do come up with well the first thing is that it's a coke and when you say coke there is a perception that you develop when you put rum with that a rum and coke you develop a perception or a thought about what a rum and coke is however if you put something different to that such as a rum and pepsi it's just not quite the same it's a little different from the idea that you have of a rum and pepsi a rum and coke is totally different and if you have consumed both products and tested them side by side you will know what i'm talking about so as a school the gestalt school did not have much impact at it's time but it had major influences in other areas that will be used by other psychology areas later in the future now a third school also developed around this time and this as we see on slide 13 is the functionalism school or the functionalists there are several major players they include people like james hall cattell and angel they also developed as a reaction to the structuralists and were basically a united states phenomenon as we see in slide 14 the functionalists weren't really concerned with the elementary elements of consciousness they were more concerned with how the mind works what mediated between the external world and the internal events that were located inside the body that is what is the function of things what is the function of the cortex the hypocampus the hypothalamus and on and on and on in addition to that from a little less physiological measure how does an organism adapt and survive what are the things that allow an organism to adapt within its environment that is what is the function of certain things such as your thumb or a big toe or whatever it may be as a result the functionalists examined both humans and animals to try to determine what the function of some particular thing was and as we see in slide 15 the key for the functionalists is what is the function of some behavior we could take an example of that what is the function of love so the importance is not on the components that make up the behavior but what is the function of that particular behavior what is the function of doing something as a result they studied real life events and ultimately they allowed psychology to be applied into industry education medicine and many other areas and that is where it's primarily used today the next major model that develops in reaction to the structuralists is the behaviorist school and as we see in slide 16 there are many players that will be involved in this school there's some that i'll just list here watson rescorla hull and many many many many others but behaviorism as a school of psychology did not really develop until watson's publication of psychology as a behaviorist views it for watson as we see in slide 17 the only legitimate object of psychological study was objective behavior that is what you can see don't give me this elementary element of consciousness stuff says the behaviorists how do you know what it is it's not objective science really can't study the mind you can't study consciousness images or whatever because they're not really observable instead what you should try to do is study objective behavior so the goal for watson and behaviorists as we see in slide 18 was to develop a science of behavior it's very similar to what we talked about with the structuralists how they wanted to break things down however the behaviorists were more concerned with the science of behavior in that you could predict and control it so how do you predict how do you control behavior and that is really the main focus for behaviorism and as we see in slide 19 there are a lot of real important people such as skinner and pavlov and many others who are involved in behaviorism who made major contributions and major discoveries to that school of thought the behaviorists were concerned with environmental influences on behavior that is to say how does the environment influence what you do it was very focused on conditioning and learning there was an idea that we could condition people and they could develop certain kinds of responses and those responses could be observed and in a sense predicted so the goal here was to focus on the predictability of behavior and understanding the behavior and that's really what you get with the behaviorist school of thought finally another important school that develops during this time is the psychoanalytic school as shown on slide 20 the psychoanalytic school was primarily developed by freud and others such as adler and jung it's a very famous and well known school the psychoanalysts believed that our behavior is determined by unconscious motives and conflicts so there's a lot of attention on these unconscious motives and conflicts for freud one of the most famous theories is his model of the personality consisting of three different structures and that is id ego and super ego the id is the most basic primitive part of the personality that seeks immediate gratification the ego is the part of the personality that mediates between the demands of the id and the superego and the superego represents the moral conscience and societal standards the psychoanalysts were more focused on how unconscious factors influence behavior and mental processes it's really important in understanding personality development and mental disorders psychoanalysis is well known for its focus on early childhood experiences and how these shape the individual's personality so in summary we've discussed several schools of psychology including the structuralists, gestaltists, functionalists, behaviorists, and psychoanalysts each school brought unique perspectives and methods to the study of psychology and their influences can still be seen in modern psychology today

Applications of Classical Conditioning

during the last several sections we have examined a variety of concepts that are associated with classical conditioning we have talked about variables that influence a conditioned response we have talked about schedules and we have even talked about some theories that relate to classical conditioning in this section we are going to begin to examine some applications of classical conditioning and the first real application of classical conditioning begins with the study of phobias that was conducted by john watson let us begin by a discussion with slide 2 watson worked in a hospital although it was also in an academic setting and in this hospital this was a kind of a progressive hospital for its time it had a day care because there were lots of nurses and the nurses wanted to have their kids close to them one of these little kids in the day care was little albert albert was a bright little boy like all other little boys and he had a lot of curiosity and he liked furry things and one of the things that was also in the room was a rabbit watson decided to test the hypothesis that phobias were not in fact caused by some underlying psychological process that was unconscious à la from the writings of freud and other psychoanalytic theorists but instead were learned behaviors and the way that watson believed that these phobias were learned was through classical conditioning one of the ways that he decided to test that was through a very specific stimulus that stimulus was a gong when you ring a gong around young children they invoke a very large fear response what watson would do is that when little albert reached over to touch the rabbit watson would ring the gong so you have an unconditioned stimulus of a gong causing fear in a child you pair the rabbit with the gong getting a fear response and after two or three pairings the rabbit alone elicited a full blown fear response not only was little albert afraid of the rabbit the rabbit was also afraid of little albert so watson's hypothesis that phobias were in fact learned behaviors was true however watson also found some other things that related to generalization not only did little albert fear the rabbit but little albert also began to fear things that were associated with the rabbit little albert became afraid of white furry things and of things with whiskers and white things and what the nurses wore in hospitals they wore at that time white uniforms and that would cause an anxiety response in little albert now ultimately before watson had the opportunity to desensitize little albert little albert's mother took him away from the hospital and moved to a different area of the state and so what we can believe that happened is that initially although little albert would be afraid of the rabbit and other types of things over time as little albert was continually exposed to the rabbit or white things or whatever without the gong he would begin to demonstrate an extinction response and so over time little albert was probably ok even though we do not know that for sure today from that particular model a different set of theories and techniques have been developed the first technique that i really want to talk about is shown in slide 3 and that is called systematic desensitization and this is in essence used to help reduce fears and phobias this was developed by wolpe the first thing that you do within systematic desensitization is to develop a hierarchy of fears so let's say that you are afraid of spiders and so what you do is you find the thing that is the most anxiety provoking thing about spiders and that may be having spiders crawl all over you and then you have things on the other end what doesn't cause you to have an anxiety response about spiders and it might be when the spider is squished and then you have everything in between so in essence what you have is a hierarchy going from low response to the most fearful thing that is out there once you have that hierarchy developed you train the person to relax and there is a variety of different techniques that one can do with that but in essence you train the person to relax once the person is in a relaxed state you then present the first thing in the hierarchy and so you might present a squished spider when the person can no longer demonstrate or show a fear response or an anxiety response you then move up to the next level until you basically go all the way through the list the idea behind systematic desensitization and with the next technique called counter conditioning is that you cannot be relaxed and afraid at the same time they work on different aspects of the nervous system so as a result of that you are able to basically recondition the person to not be afraid within this environment how effective is systematic desensitization it is exceptionally effective in fact it is one of the few things in psychology from the clinical side that we know works and works exceptionally well a similar technique was developed by mary cover jones who was a student of john watson at the time jones developed a different type of approach to alleviating fears and phobias she called this counter conditioning what you do is present a calming unconditioned stimulus in the presence of the fear the classic example is using food to help with for example rat phobia you first give the food which causes a relaxing response you then present the rat very far away and continue to give food and over a period of time you gradually move the rat closer and closer to the person until finally you have the food and the rat together with the person and they are no longer afraid of the rat even though it is sitting right next to them or snakes crawling on them or whatever this technique also works exceptionally well it just takes a little longer but it has good effectiveness rates now we have talked about a variety of aspects of things that go along with phobias in this next section i want to talk a little bit about applications in other areas and the classic place is in the immune system and if we look at slide 5 there is a classic immune system suppression experiment and this was done by ader and cohen what ader and cohen had observed is that environmental events seem to suppress immune system functioning so they decided to test that particular model what they did was they paired saccharine à la cs with cyclophosphamide ucs cyclophosphamide basically causes severe nausea and vomiting so they paired the cs and the ucs together and then they are only presenting the cs ultimately as we know it goes on extinction when they extinguished the saccharine à la cs some of the animals died the question was why as we see in slide 6 what they found is that the animals after they extinguished from the saccharine produced fewer antibodies for immune suppression so in essence what we can do is use cyclophosphamide to suppress the immune system for things like lupus where the immune system in essence attacks the body now we don't usually use cyclophosphamide to suppress it we use other drugs but the key is the same kind of model you are having some drug basically paired with something else and as a result of that can help the body finally as we reviewed in this section you can use classical conditioning in a variety of contexts i have only listed a couple here but it can be used in a wide variety of things including treatment for addictions and other kinds of things in the next section we will begin talking about other things related to instrumental conditioning so until that time we hope you have a great day and we will see you soon