College Psychology Chapter 1 Key Ideas (Facts)

College Psychology Chapter 1 Key Ideas (Facts) Aristotle - ancient Greek philosopher who wrote about psyche and first broadly defined the subject matter of modern study of psychology Describe, Predict, Understand, Influence - Goals of Psychology; to...behavior and mental processes Observability - difference between behavior and mental processes Wundt and Titchener - studied and supported structuralism while developing method of introspection J. Henry Alston - conducted experiments with temperature; observed that if one was to touch two pipes, one with warm water running through it and one with cold water running through it, the outcome would be a feeling of intense heat because both the cold and hot nerve receptors are stimulated at the same time Max Werthheimer - established Gestalt psychology because he believed the human consciousness cannot be accurately observed or analyzed in its elements William James - leader of functionalism; relied heavily on Darwin's theory of evolution Structuralist vs. Functionalist - what mind is vs. what mind does Hermann Ebbinghaus - conducted 6-year long experiment in which he studied human memory by testing how well he could remember nonsense syllables; found that most of the forgetting that would take place occurred within 9 hours of learning it Mary Whiton Calkins - studied memory by conducting experiments in which her subjects were presented with series of paired numbers and colors and they were later showed only the colors to see how many numbers they could recall; developed paired associates method Ivan Pavlov - conducting experiments on digestion in dogs when he made observations and developed idea of conditioning Conditioning - an inherited reflex comes to be triggered by a stimulus that has nothing to do with that reflex; these inherited reflexes can be influenced dramatically by learning experiences John B. Watson and Margaret Floy Washburn - these behaviorists agreed with Pavlov's conditioning theory and believed that most human behavior was learned through classical conditioning B.F. Skinner - leading exponent and supporter of behaviorism until death in 1990 Albert Bandura - cognitive behaviorist who believed mental processes can't be ignored and established the idea behind social learning theory Sigmund Freud - unlike other founders of psychology, he actually worked with people who had serious psychological problems; by observing his patients, he developed the theory that the roots of their problems were motives in their unconscious mind Sexual and aggressive - two innate motives that are at the root of psychological problems