Historical Overview
In a very real sense, psychology is probably as old as humanity. In fact, some scientists have argued that one of the defining characteristics of human beings is the ability to study the behavior of others, imagine oneself in their positions and make predictions about their future behavior based on these insights. Certainly, there is evidence that humans have done just that at least since the dawn of recorded history. Ancient writings from China, Egypt, India, Persia, and Greece all display an intense curiosity about the nature of thought, memory, emotion, sensation, and motivation.
The scientific study of psychology is a much more recent development, however. Many historians date the birth of modern psychology from the founding of the first experimental psychology laboratory by Wilhelm Wundt in 1879. As a science, then, psychology is still relatively young. Yet, over the course of little more than 120 years, it has managed to make a tremendous impact on both the academic world and society at large. Psychology has given rise to influential schools of thought ranging from psychoanalysis to behaviorism, and from Gestalt psychology to cognitive psychology.
Forerunners of Psychology
Philosophical roots Questions about mental life and human behavior have fascinated philosophers through the centuries. In seventeenth-century France, the great philosopher and mathematician René Descartes conceived of a system of true knowledge that was modeled on mathematics and supported by a philosophical approach called rationalism. This approach held that knowledge was derived from the use of reason and logic. Descartes' system was summed up in his famous pronouncement: "I think, therefore I am." Descartes also viewed the mind and body as two separate entities. The mind belonged to the spiritual sphere, while the body belonged to the physical world of science.
Descartes was an intellectual giant, but his was not the only voice of the day. Toward the end of the Renaissance period in Europe, some philosophers were starting to look at the world from a more science-based perspective. It was a heady time for science. In Italy, Galileo proposed a sun-centered theory of the solar system to replace the older earth-centered model. In England, Francis Bacon argued for use of the scientific method to solve problems, and William Harvey demonstrated that the heart was actually nothing more than a pump for circulating blood.
The stage was set for the rise of a philosophical approach called empiricism, which held that all factual knowledge came from experience. One of the founders of English empiricism was Thomas Hobbes, who, not coincidentally, served briefly as Bacon's secretary and numbered Galileo among his friends. Hobbes saw the world and everything in it as bodies in motion. For him, mental processes were merely the byproducts of motion inside the brain. In addition, Hobbes believed that all knowledge was derived through the senses. Although Hobbes' writings were sometimes incomplete or inconsistent, he succeeded in planting the seed of empiricism.
The approach soon blossomed into a more organized school of thought, thanks to John Locke, aseventeenth-century English philosopher. Locke believed that the mind at birth was like a blank slate, just waiting to be written upon by experience. Therefore, there were no innate ideas. Instead, all ideas came from two forms of experience: sensation, which referred to information received from the senses; and reflection, which referred to the mental processes involved in sifting through all that sensory information. Much later, Locke's influence could still be seen in behaviorism, a twentieth-century school of psychology that focused on conditioning and learning—in other words, experience—as the determining factors in behavior.
In addition, Locke introduced the term "association of ideas." In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a group of British philosophers took up the term and applied it to a new theory called associationism. This theory started with the notion that knowledge is acquired through experience, but it then went a step further, attempting to explain how that knowledge is organized. Associationism held that the process involved the association of ideas within the mind. Proponents believed that the way these associations were formed could be described by fundamental laws.
Associationism reached its height in the work of British philosopher James Mill and his son, John Stuart Mill. James Mill believed that ideas were added together to form more complex ideas. However, there was a basic flaw with this philosophy: It required that consciousness be able to hold an implausibly large number of ideas, since even a not-too-complex idea such as "brick" would require a vast number of eversimpler ideas to define it. To address this flaw, John Stuart Mill revised his father's position. He described a process called mental chemistry, by which complex ideas could be greater than the sum of the simpler ideas making them up. This concept was later echoed by Gestalt psychology. The younger Mill also was enthusiastic about the prospect of establishing a true science of human behavior, and his enthusiasm may have influenced Wundt, who founded his lab just six years after Mill's death.
Physiological roots For centuries, as we have seen, philosophers had mused over the nature of the mind and its relationship to outward behavior. Yet their musings were pure speculation, since the technology to study the inner workings of the brain and nervous system was not yet available. In the nineteenth century, however, physiologists made great advances in the tools and techniques for studying the nervous system. These advances laid the groundwork for the development of a new discipline: psychophysics, or the study of the relationship between the physical properties of stimuli and the psychological impressions that those stimuli produce.
One of the scientific giants of the era was Hermann von Helmholtz, a German physicist. Helmholtz rejected the common idea that physiological and psychological processes in organisms needed to be explained in terms of mysterious forces or energies. Instead, he believed that the processes within a living thing could be explained by the same kinds of laws that applied to nonliving matter. Among other contributions, Helmholtz measured the speed of nerve impulses, conducted important research on sound perception, revised a theory of color vision, and invented the ophthalmoscope, an instrument used to examine the interior of the eyes. By achieving such impressive results, Helmholtz showed that the nervous system was indeed amenable to scientific study.
Around the same time, other scientists were making discoveries about the localization of specific functions in particular parts of the brain. For example, French neurologist Paul Broca came across a patient who apparently understood everything that was said to him, but who could only reply by saying "tan, tan." When the man died of an infection in 1861, Broca's autopsy revealed that there was a large lesion on the left side of the frontal lobe of his brain. Thus, this area of the brain, which became known as Broca's area, was identified as important for speech production. A little more than a decade later, German neurologist Carl Wernicke identified another area in the temporal lobe of the brain that was crucial for speech comprehension.
Still another pioneering figure was Ernst Weber, an anatomist and physiologist at the University of Leipzig in Germany. Weber studied the sense of touch by mapping what became known as the two-point threshhold. This was the smallest distance at which touching the skin at two different points was felt as two sensations rather than just one. Weber found that touch sensitivity varied for different parts of the body, with the tongue, for instance, being much more sensitive than the back.
One of Weber's younger colleagues at the University of Leipzig was Gustav Fechner. In 1860, Fechner published a book called Elements of Psychophysics, which was destined to become a classic. In the book, he described several methods of measuring responses to stimuli. The development of a practical research methodology paved the way for the first experimental studies in psychology.
Birth of a Science
German beginnings German scientists—such as Hermann von Helmholtz, Ernst Heinrich Weber, and Gustav Theodor Fechner—had already developed many of the tools and techniques that would be needed if psychology were ever to stand on its own as a science. It is little wonder, then, that the first experimental psychology lab was established at the University of Leipzig. In this hotbed of scientific discovery, Wundt found fertile ground for his studies on topics such as attention, sensation, perception, and reaction time—the split-second needed for mental processing between the time when an event occurs and the time when the muscles start responding to it.
Wundt was trained in medicine and physiology, and he held professorships in philosophy. Yet, more than any of his predecessors, he not only melded these interests, but also expanded on them to create a brand-new science of psychology. In addition to actively pursuing research in his lab, he founded a journal and trained a steady stream of graduate students. He also wrote an influential two-volume book entitled Principles of Physiological Psychology.
American Beginnings
The birth of psychology in Germany was closely watched in the United States. No one observed the developments with keener fascination than William James, an American scholar who went on to make his mark on both psychology and philosophy. Like Wundt, James had been trained in medicine and physiology, but his true calling lay elsewhere. In 1890, he published Principles of Psychology, a lengthy text that became an instant success and influenced generations to come. In this book, James argued the psychologists should base their studies not on isolated sensations, but on complete conscious experiences. Thus, he expanded the rather narrow borders of early German psychology to include a much wider range of mental processes.
Another towering figure of the same period was G. Stanley Hall. During his career, Hall racked up an impressive number of firsts. As a young man, he received the first U.S. doctoral degree in psychology. He earned the degree at Harvard University, where he studied with James. Afterward, Hall also studied for a time in Germany, where he was the first American student in Wundt's lab. Returning to the United States, Hall founded the American Journal of Psychology, the first English-language journal devoted exclusively to the new field. He also set up the first experimental psychology lab in the United States at Johns Hopkins University. Soon after, in 1889, he was named the first president of Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he promptly established a world-class psychology department. The glory days at Clark were short-lived, since most of the outstanding faculty and students left a few years later over a dispute with the university and Hall. Yet Hall still had enough clout to become the driving force behind the founding of the American Psychological Association (APA), and it should come as no surprise that he served as that group's first president. Finally, Hall's last graduate student was also a notable first: Francis Sumner, the first African American student to earn a PhD in psychology in the United States.
It is perhaps less remembered that Hall was instrumental in giving the American public its first taste of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis. In 1909, Hall invited Freud to give a series of five lectures at a conference held at Clark. The lectures were well received by both fellow psychologists and the press. Hall also published Freud's lectures in the journal he edited, reaching an even wider audience. As an interesting sidelight, a second speaker at the same conference was a then-obscure psychologist who also went on to make a name for himself: Carl Jung.
Psychoanalysis
Freud's theory Modern psychology began as an experimental science. However, it was not long before a clinical offshoot of the new science appeared. Today, clinical practice is a very important part of the field. No figure looms larger in the history of clinical psychology than Freud. His method of psychoanalysis had an enormous impact, both on those who loved it and on those who hated it, some of whom reacted by offering up equally influential alternatives.
Freud was an Austrian physician whose ideas came out of his clinical experiences rather than a lab. When he first began presenting his ideas in the 1890s, they met with harsh criticism, in part because of his heavy emphasis on sexuality. By the early 1900s, however, he had attracted an international following. Freud theorized that there were three aspects of personality—id, ego, and superego—that existed at different levels of consciousness. He believed that instincts in general, and sexual instincts in particular, were at the heart of human behavior. He also thought that personality development proceeded through five stages: oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital. Failure to successfully pass through the early stages in childhood could lead to emotional problems later in life.
Before Freud, there had been philosophical discussions of the differences among people. However, there was no psychological theory to explain exactlywhat made individuals who they were. As the first to advance such a theory, Freud opened the door to a host of other personality theorists who followed.
Psychoanalysis was not only a theory, however, but also a treatment approach. As such, it was the first true form of psychotherapy. Freud developed a therapeutic technique called free association, in which a patient was encouraged to say anything that came into his or her conscious mind without trying to censor the thoughts first. Freud also stressed the importance of dream interpretation for understanding a patient's mental life. In fact, many consider The Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1900, to be his most important book.
Neo-Freudian approaches Since Freud's day, a number of followers have attempted to pick up where he left off. Perhaps his most devoted disciple was his own daughter, Anna Freud. She became one of the leading figures in psychoanalysis after her father's death. Her major contribution was the detailed description of defense mechanisms, which are methods that the ego uses to defend itself when faced with conflicting demands from the id and superego.
Among Anna Freud's notable contemporaries was Karen Horney, a German-born psychoanalyst who moved to the United States in 1932. While Horney accepted many of Sigmund Freud's ideas, she criticized his views on the psychology of women. Freud had claimed that women felt inferior to men because of penis envy, and that this inevitably had a negative effect on their personality development. Horney disagreed strongly. She believed that, when women did lack self-esteem, it was due to their experiences living in a male-dominated culture rather than to their sexual anatomy.
One thing on which Freud and his followers all agreed was that the interactions between children and their parents played a critical role in molding the children's personalities. This led to research on how children form healthy emotional attachments. For example, Canadian psychologist Mary Ainsworth conducted studies in which she placed a mother and her infant in an unfamiliar room with toys. The mother would twice leave the room briefly and then return, and a researcher would observe the infant's reaction. Ainsworth noted that securely attached infants were distressed when their mothers left and comforted when their mothers returned. Other reactions signaled less healthy attachments.
Beyond psychoanalysis Psychoanalysis was just the start, of course. Numerous other theories of personality and schools of psychotherapy have emerged over the past century. Two early members of Freud's inner circle who eventually broke away to found their own analytic psychologies were Alfred Adler and Carl Jung.
Adler was an Austrian psychiatrist who joined Freud's discussion group in 1902. In 1911, however, he had left the fold to pursue his own theory of psychology. Called individual psychology, Adler's theory downplayed sexual instinct. Instead, it emphasized the importance of overcoming early feelings of inferiority. By focusing on the individual and the positive, goal-directed nature of humanity, Adler was a forerunner of the later movement known as humanistic psychology.
Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist who began an active correspondence with Freud in 1906. By 1913, however, the once-friendly relationship between the two men had turned into a bitter rift. Jung developed his own school of thought, which he called analytical psychology. Like Freud, he stressed the impact of unconscious ideas on behavior. However, Jung expanded this notion to include not only a personal unconscious, but also a collective unconscious—a deeper level of unconsciousness that he believed to contain emotionally charged symbols that were common to all peoples and had existed since the dawn of time.
In addition, Jung introduced a system for classifying personality types. He classified people based on their tendency toward an inward focus, called introversion, or an outward focus, called extroversion. In addition, Jung identified four functions of the mind: sensing, thinking, feeling, and intuiting. He believed that, while everyone used all four functions, people normally used one more than the others. Therefore, people could be grouped into categories based on their dominant mental function.
Legacy of psychoanalysis Freud was a rationalist in the tradition of Descartes, and he avoided experimental research. While this approach led to some brilliant insights, it also was a serious limitation. Some of Freud's specific concepts have not held up well to scientific study. Nevertheless, the psychoanalytic system as a whole has had an enduring and far-reaching impact on theory, therapy, and society in general. Terms such as id, ego, unconscious, Freudian slip, and Oedipus complex have become part of our everyday language.
In addition, modern versions of psychoanalysis continue to be used for treating mental illness. These modern therapies, often called psychodynamic therapies, all share a common focus on past experiences as an important cause of present problems. Using various techniques, therapists aim to help individuals gain insight into their emotional life, including influencesfrom the past. Therapists also try to help people uncover their unconscious conflicts and understand how these conflicts may be affecting their current experiences.
Behaviorism
Animal learning Adler and Jung devised alternatives to psychoanalysis, but their approaches still were based on the invisible and sometimes unconscious workings of the mind. From a scientific perspective, such approaches posed a big problem, since there was no objective way for scientists to validate the subjective thoughts and feelings that people reported having. In the early 1900s, the desire for greater objectivity led to the rise of behaviorism, a school of psychology that completely rejected the study of inner mental processes and focused instead on observable behaviors.
Like other schools of thought, behaviorism did not arise in a vacuum. Instead, it grew out of animal research on learning and conditioning. Early on, Wundt had written a book titled Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology, which helped establish animal research as a legitimate area of study for psychologists. By the turn of the twentieth century, animal research was a booming field. Around this time, William S. Small began using mazes to study lab rats, and Edward L. Thorndike tested the ability of cats to escape from puzzle boxes. Thanks to such creative experimental designs, a practical method for studying animal learning was rapidly developed.
One particularly prominent animal researcher was American psychologist Robert Yerkes. Although Yerkes later became known for his work with primates, he studied a wide range of species early in his career. In 1907, he published a book about the behavior, learning, and sensory capabilities of a particular type of mutant mouse. The next year, he coauthored a paper that presented the so-called Yerkes-Dodson Law, which originally related the strength of a stimulus to the speed of avoidance learning.
Meanwhile, a Russian physiologist named Ivan Pavlov had been studying the digestive process in dogs. He noticed that the dogs salivated when their keeper entered the room, apparently because they had come to associate the keeper's arrival with food. This led Pavlov to conduct his famous experiments on classical conditioning, the first form of learning to be studied experimentally. In classical conditioning, an association is formed by pairing a previously neutral stimulus (such as a bell) with an unconditioned stimulus (such as food) to produce an unconditioned response (such as salivation). Over time, the previously neutral stimulus becomes able to bring on the response all by itself.
Watson's theory Yet another scientist who was drawn to the study of animal learning around this time was American psychologist John B. Watson. In early work, Watson studied matters such as the cues used by rats to learn their way through a maze. Unlike most psychologists before him, however, Watson completely rejected the study of inner mental processes, even in humans. Instead, he believed that the only way to turn psychology into a truly objective science was to focus strictly on observable behavior. In a 1913 paper, Watson laid out his ideas forcefully. It was the opening shot in what became the behaviorist revolution.
Watson argued that the proper goal of psychology was the prediction and control of behavior. He believed that the same principles of learning and conditioning that were being used in animal research could also be used to explain all of human personality and behavior. For example, he believed that most fears were the result of unfortunate conditioning experiences. In one famous study, he showed how fear could be instilled through classical conditioning. The study involved an 11-month-old boy called Little Albert. Before the study began, Albert showed no fear of a white rat, but he appeared frightened and started to cry when a loud sound was made. In the study, researchers showed Albert the rat. Whenever Albert reached for the rat, however, they made the scary sound. After the researchers repeated this procedure several times, Albert began to cry as soon as he saw the rat, even without the loud noise. Afterward, Albert also began avoiding other objects—such as a rabbit and a fur coat—that resembled the rat in some way. It seemed that his conditioned fear response had generalized from the original stimulus to other similar stimuli.
Locke had described the mind of a newborn infant as a blank slate. Watson took this idea quite literally. He once boasted that, given a dozen healthy infants and his own specific world in which to raise them, he could pick any child at random and train that child to become anything. In other words, Watson believed that people were entirely products of their environment. It was an extreme position, but one that had a lasting impact on psychology. For decades after Watson, students were taught that the definition of psychology was "the study of behavior."
Radical behaviorism For half a century, behaviorism remained the dominant school of psychology in the United States. As had happened earlier with psychoanalysis, however, different factions soon developed within the ranks of the true believers. The most celebrated champion of behaviorism in the mid-twentieth century was B.F. Skinner. While Skinner was oftencontroversial, he was also extremely influential. His approach, dubbed radical behaviorism, helped define the course of modern experimental psychology.
Skinner is perhaps best remembered for his discovery of what he called operant conditioning. This type of conditioning occurs when a behavior is shaped by its immediate consequences. If the consequences are positive, the behavior is more likely to occur again in the future, given the same environment. If the consequences are negative, the behavior is less likely to occur again. To study operant conditioning in animals, Skinner developed the Skinner box. This was a special box in which the rate of some behavior, such as pressing a bar, could be continuously recorded. Skinner found that an organism's behavior could be shaped by providing positive consequences for actions that came closer and closer to a desired behavior.
Legacy of behaviorism Skinner envisioned a world in which behavioral techniques could be used to improve child-rearing, education, and society as a whole. In his book Walden Two, he described a utopian community based on operant conditioning, in which government rewarded socially appropriate behavior, and life was trouble-free. Skinner actually designed both a special crib and a teaching machine based on behaviorist principles, but neither achieved commercial success. Nevertheless, his ideas are still widely used in education, business, and other settings where the aim is to encourage appropriate behavior using rewards.
Behaviorism also gave rise to a popular form of psychotherapy, known as behavior therapy or behavioral modification. This type of therapy is based on the assumption that maladaptive behavior is caused by faulty or inadequate learning. The aim of the therapy is to reduce or halt the unwanted behavior by rewarding more helpful responses.
Gestalt Psychology
Three founders While behaviorism was the dominant school of American psychology for much of the twentieth century, it was far from the only one. Gestalt psychology, founded in Germany and imported to the United States in the 1930s, offered an important alternative. This school of psychology dealt with organized wholes that could not be explained by breaking them down into their component parts. As such, it was opposed to behaviorism, which sought to reduce complex human experiences to simple behavioral explanations.
Three German psychologists are credited with founding Gestalt psychology: Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, and Wolfgang Köhler. Gestalt is a German word that can be loosely translated as "a structured whole." The story goes that Gestalt psychology had its beginnings one day in 1910, as Wertheimer was taking a trip by train. Gazing out the train window, he was struck by the apparent movement of stationary objects, such as poles and buildings. Once back home, he began conducting experiments of apparent motion, which he called the phi phenomenon. His subjects were two younger colleagues, Koffka and Köhler. In 1912, Wertheimer published a paper about his experiments that is said to mark the official start of Gestalt psychology. Wertheimer and his two colleagues later moved to the United States to escape the Nazi regime.
Gestalt psychology flourished in the first half of the twentieth century. The three founders and their followers used Gestalt ideas to develop basic principles of perception, learning, and thinking. For example, the principle of proximity stated that elements that were close together in time or space would be seen as belonging together. The principle of similarity stated that similar elements would also be seen as going together in the mind. The principle of closure stated that, if there were gaps in an element, people would tend to mentally close those gaps to make the element complete.
Field theory Other psychologists sought to apply Gestalt ideas to areas such as motivation, personality, and social relationships. Among those who wanted to broaden Gestalt psychology was Kurt Lewin, a Prussian-born psychologist who was educated in Germany. Lewin also immigrated to the United States in the 1930s.
Lewin soon developed his own theory, known as field theory, first published in 1935. It stood out from earlier approaches that had focused single-mindedly on either internal mental processes or external rewards and punishments. Instead, Lewin's theory stressed the interaction of the person and the environment. In this way, it anticipated some popular approaches of the late twentieth century, such as Bandura's social-cognitive theory.
One of Lewin's key concepts was life space, which consisted of all the influences acting on a person at any given time. These influences might include personal and biological facts (a memory, fatigue), physical events (an aroma, a room), and social facts (another person, being a member of a family). Lewin referred to the positive or negative features of objects in the life space as valences. In general, objects that met a need had a positive valence, while those that gave rise to frustration or fear had a negative valence. The concept of valences helped explain people'sbehavior in the face of interpersonal conflict. In an approach-avoidance conflict, for instance, people had to decide what to do when a goal had both positive and negative valence. Lewin believed that their decision would be based on which of the two forces—the one pulling them toward the goal or the one pushing them away—turned out to be more powerful.
Psychometrics
Intelligence testing From its beginnings, psychology was grounded in basic lab research. However, it was not long before psychologists began seeking real-world applications for their research findings. After all, there was no better way to show psychology's value to society than by offering up practical solutions to vexing social problems. However, these practical applications often required classifying people into groups based on particular abilities, skills, or other characteristics. Such classification, in turn, required valid and reliable tests for measuring the characteristic in question. Thus was born the field of psychometrics, which involves the construction of psychological tests using statistical methods.
Intelligence testing, one very visible branch of psychometrics, began in France around the turn of the twentieth century. At that time, the French government enacted laws requiring that all children be given a public education. For the first time, mentally "subnormal" children—those who today might be called mentally retarded or developmentally disabled—were to be provided with special classes. However, this raised the question of how to identify those children who would benefit from special education. French psychologist Alfred Binet set out to solve the problem by devising a test for measuring mental abilities. In 1905, he introduced the Binet-Simon Scale, the world's first practical test of intelligence.
Binet's groundbreaking test soon attracted interest in the United States. When World War I arrived, an APA committee set out to devise a similar test that could be used by the U.S. Army to assess recruits. Yerkes, the noted animal researcher who had a side interest in intelligence testing, was APA president at the time. He headed up the committee, which eventually developed the first intelligence tests designed to be given in a group rather than individually. While the hastily thrown-together Army tests had many flaws, they introduced the idea of mass testing to the American public. Over the next several decades, standardized testing of vast numbers of people became common in schools and businesses nationwide.
Validity and reliability Through the years, test development methods have become much more sophisticated. Statistical techniques have been developed for assessing a test's validity and reliability. Validity refers to the extent to which a test measures what it is supposed to measure. Reliability refers to the extent to which the measurements are consistent or repeatable over time. Several psychologists have played key roles in refining the methods that are currently used for testing the tests to make sure they meet acceptable standards.
One innovator in the field was American psychologist Anne Anastasi, whose contributions included work on test construction and the proper use of psychological tests. Anastasi also had a deep interest in the way that psychological development was affected by the environment and individual experience. This interest undoubtedly shaped her views on testing as well, making her especially sensitive to the role that culture played in test results. Today, test fairness and culture loading—the extent to which a test reflects the vocabulary, knowledge, and traditions of one culture more than another—are still subjects of lively debate.
Humanistic Psychology
The Third Force By the mid-twentieth century, many psychologists were growing disenchanted with behaviorism. They were looking for an alternative to what some saw as the bleak behaviorist view of humans as little more than two-legged lab rats. In addition, they were eager to study psychological health rather than focus on emotional maladjustment, the way psychoanalysis did. With behaviorism and psychoanalysis as the first two forces in American psychology, the time was ripe for what became known as the Third Force. This approach, also called humanistic psychology, focused more on positive rather than negative aspects of the self. It was also more concerned with present choices than past events. Among the central concerns of humanistic psychology were free will, the lifelong search for meaning, and each person's potential to achieve self-fulfillment.
At the forefront of this movement was American psychologist Abraham Maslow. He is best remembered for the hierarchy of needs that he proposed. This was often depicted as a pyramid, with the most basic needs on the bottom. These included physiological needs, such as food and water, and safety needs. Only after those needs had been satisfied was a person free to focus on the next level, which consisted of needs for belonging and love. Once those needs, in turn, had been met, a person could move on to addressing esteem needs, such as achievement and independence. Finally, after all of the lower needs had been met, aperson could begin working on self-actualization, the feeling of fulfillment that comes from realizing one's potential.
Maslow believed that there was more to be gained by studying self-actualized individuals than by studying maladjusted people or nonhuman animals. This shift in focus opened the door to the psychological study of many subjects that had previously been considered off-limits, but that were clearly important aspects of the human experience. Such subjects included play, humor, love, aesthetics, personal values, and spiritual growth, among others.
Client-centered therapy Carl Rogers was another member of the humanistic movement who helped change the face of American psychology. In the 1950s, he described a new therapeutic approach that he named client-centered therapy. This approach called for the therapist to show congruence, empathetic understanding, and unconditional positive regard. Congruence meant that the therapist would be honest and willing to express his or her true feelings. Empathetic understanding meant that the therapist would really listen to the client (not patient) and then share his or her understanding of what the client had communicated. Unconditional positive regard meant that the therapist would respect the client as an individual and accept whatever the client had to say.
The therapist's job, in short, was to create an atmosphere that was conducive to change. However, responsibility for the change itself rested squarely on the client. Rogers had great faith in people's ability to take control of their own lives. His ideas still affect the way that psychotherapy is conducted today.
Humanistic psychology gave rise to the human potential movement of the 1960s and 1970s. People were encouraged to get in touch with their inner selves and realize their potential through such activities as encounter groups, meditation, and communing with nature. At the time, these were considered fringe activities, more suitable to hippie communes than middle-class living rooms. Today, however, they have gone mainstream along with the notion that people should strive for self-knowledge and personal fulfillment.
Social Psychology
Race and gender Humanistic psychology placed individual fulfillment above all else. However, humans are also social creatures who are influenced by those around them. Social psychology, which looks at the way that individuals are affected by social trends and events, provided another valuable perspective on the human condition.
Social psychologists study a wide range of topics, including societal norms, group conflicts, obedience to authority, and social roles. In addition, they have made key contributions to the study of race and gender issues. Such issues came to the forefront of psychology after World War II. Even before that, however, American psychologist Kenneth Clark had conducted studies of racial identity and self-concept. In a famous study from the late 1930s, Clark and his wife found that African American preschoolers preferred white dolls to black ones. Clark went on to become the first African American president of the APA in 1971.
In the area of gender studies, social psychologist Sandra Bem has challenged widely held notions about what it means to be male or female. Bem is best known for the Bem Sex Role Inventory, a popular scale for measuring how well a person conforms to traditional sex-role stereotypes. Historically, masculinity and femininity were viewed as opposite poles on a single dimension. However, research in the 1970s showed that masculinity and femininity were actually two separate traits. Bem used her scale to classify individuals of either sex as high in masculinity only, high in femininity only, high in both traits, or low in both.
Social-cognitive theory Another important topic in social psychology is observational learning, in which people learn to do something merely by watching others, without performing the behavior themselves or being directly rewarded for it. Pioneering work in this area was done by Canadian-born psychologist Albert Bandura of Stanford University. In the 1960s, Bandura conducted classic studies that looked at how observational learning affected aggressive behavior in children. A group of children were shown a film in which an adult punched, hammered, and kicked an inflatable doll, called a Bobo doll. These children were more likely to behave aggressively themselves when given a chance to play with the doll later. More than 40 years later, this research is still very relevant to the ongoing debate over violence in the media.
Bandura's Bobo doll experiments contained elements of both social psychology and learning theory. In the intervening years, Bandura has cast an even wider net in his research and theoretical interests. In the 1980s, he put forth a social-cognitive theory of human functioning that added elements of cognitive psychology, an approach that many consider to be the dominant school of psychology today. According to social-cognitive theory, human functioning results from the interplay of three forces: personal factors (such as thoughts, feelings, and physical states), the environment, and behavior. Cognition, or thought,plays a big role in people's ability to effectively manage their own responses to other people and the environment as a whole.
Cognitive Psychology
Cognitive development Psychologists have long been fascinated by cognitive processes, such as thought, perception, memory, and attention. Many noted psychologists, including G. Stanley Hall and Kurt Koffka, theorized about the development of such processes in children. However, no name became more closely linked to the study of cognitive development than that of Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget.
In the 1930s, Piaget developed his stage theory of child development. Piaget believed that infants were born with simple cognitive structures, called schemas. As children matured, they built new schemas on the existing ones. Piaget also described two mental processes for dealing with new information: assimilation and accommodation. If a new experience fit the child's existing schemas, then it was assimilated, or taken into the mind. On the other hand, if the experience did not match existing schemas, the schemas were altered to accommodate the perceived reality.
Piaget believed that cognitive development passed through four stages: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational. Later research has not always supported Piaget's descriptions of the stages in every specific detail. Nevertheless, Piaget's general concepts are still quite influential. It is now widely accepted that the mind of a young child differs from that of an older child or adult not only in the quantity of knowledge, but also in the quality of the thought processes.
While Piaget also wrote about the development of moral reasoning, it was American psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg who became the most influential figure in that field. According to Kohlberg's theory, there were three stages of moral development: preconventional, conventional, and postconventional. At the lowest stage, moral behavior was motivated by punishments or rewards. At the next stage, it was motivated by social rules. At the highest stage, however, people's moral behavior was guided by ethical principles that had become internalized.
Personal constructs Yet another take on the structure of the mind was offered by American psychologist George Kelly. In the 1950s, he put forth a personal construct theory, which stated that people construct their own theories about human behavior as they actively work to understand the world around them. As Kelly saw it, we are all personality theorists, developing a set of ideas for explaining and predicting our own behavior and that of other people.
Kelly's work foreshadowed some of the most important themes in modern cognitive and personality psychology. In recent decades, increasing attention has been paid to individual explanatory styles, or the habitual ways that people interpret the events in their lives. For example, some researchers have compared people with an optimistic explanatory style to those with a pessimistic one. In related research, Bandura has stressed the importance of self-efficacy beliefs, or people's beliefs about how capably they will be able to perform a specific behavior in a particular situation.
Cognitive therapy Cognitive theory has also produced a popular form of psychotherapy, known as cognitive therapy. Originally developed by American psychiatrist Aaron Beck in the 1960s to treat depression, it has since been applied to a wide range of emotional and behavioral problems. Among other things, cognitive therapy has been used to treat chronic stress, anxiety disorders, substance abuse, marital conflicts, and personality disorders.
The basic concept behind cognitive therapy is that people's feelings and behaviors are influenced by how they perceive situations. When people are in distress, their thoughts may be irrationally negative or otherwise distorted. Cognitive therapy aims to help people identify distorted thinking patterns and replace irrational thoughts with more rational ones. In practice, cognitive therapy is often combined with behavior therapy in what is called cognitive-behavioral therapy.
Now and then In the second half of the twentieth century, some cognitive researchers began using concepts from computer science to explain information processing inside the human brain. They soon discovered that the metaphor of the brain as computer could only be taken so far. It became apparent that there were fundamental differences between the inners workings of the human brain and those of computers. Nevertheless, the combination of cognitive psychology and computer science has led to some fruitful models for describing how information is processed within the brain.
In the twentieth-first century, cognitive psychology continues to evolve. Physiology is once again at the forefront of psychology, thanks to the development of sophisticated brain imaging technology that allows scientists to study the structure and function of the brain as never before. Such advanced technology is already providing fresh insights into age-old questions, such as how humans perceive sensory information, store information in memory, and use information tomake decisions and solve problems. Such findings have recently given rise to a high-tech specialty known as cognitive neuroscience.
It is interesting to note that this technological specialty has a pedigree going all the way back to psychology's earliest days. Wundt and Wertheimer, among others, used what were then cutting-edge techniques to study mental processes such as perception, memory, and thought. It seems that the science of psychology keeps returning to the same traditional themes with the latest tools and techniques. The complexities of thought, feeling, and behavior will undoubtedly remain a never-ending source of fascination and investigation.
Linda Wasmer Andrews, M.S.
