Psych 100

PSYCHOLOGY 100

Chapter 1: What is Psychology?

The science and study of the relationship between brain activity and behavior.

Less about findings and more about thinking, asking, and answering.

Important names in the history of psychology:

Wilhelm Wundt established the first psychology laboratory at the University of Leipzig, Germany.

Sigmund Freud  The controversial ideas of this famed personality theorist and therapist have influenced many people’s self-understanding.

William James and Mary Whiton Calkins  James, legendary teacher-writer, mentored Calkins, who became a pioneering memory researcher and the first woman to be president of the American Psychological Association.

Margaret Floy Washburn  The first woman to receive a psychology Ph.D., Washburn synthesized animal behavior research in The Animal Mind

Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.) theorized about learning and memory, motivation and emotion, perception and personality.

John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner  Working with Rayner, Watson championed psychology as the science of behavior. Together, they demonstrated conditioned responses on a baby who became famous as “Little Albert.”

B. F. Skinner  A leading behaviorist, Skinner rejected introspection and studied how consequences shape behavior.

James Randi A very wealthy man that debunks scientific phenomenon, such as "healing-hand therapists." His offer of $1,000,000 to anyone that can successfully prove these types of phenomenon still stands today.

Eric Erikson Psychosocial analyst made the following graph for developmental stages

Stage	Basic Conflict	Important Events	Outcome
Infancy (birth to 18 months)	Trust vs. Mistrust	Feeding	Children develop a sense of trust when caregivers provide reliabilty, care, and affection. A lack of this will lead to mistrust.
Early Childhood (2 to 3 years)	Autonomy vs. Shame and Doubt	Toilet Training	Children need to develop a sense of personal control over physical skills and a sense of independence. Success leads to feelings of autonomy, failure results in feelings of shame and doubt.
Preschool (3 to 5 years)	Initiative vs. Guilt	Exploration	Children need to begin asserting control and power over the environment. Success in this stage leads to a sense of purpose. Children who try to exert too much power experience disapproval, resulting in a sense of guilt.
School Age (6 to 11 years)	Industry vs. Inferiority	School	Children need to cope with new social and academic demands. Success leads to a sense of competence, while failure results in feelings of inferiority.
Adolescence (12 to 18 years)	Identity vs. Role Confusion	Social Relationships	Teens need to develop a sense of self and personal identity. Success leads to an ability to stay true to yourself, while failure leads to role confusion and a weak sense of self.
Yound Adulthood (19 to 40 years)	Intimacy vs. Isolation	Relationships	Young adults need to form intimate, loving relationships with other people. Success leads to strong relationships, while failure results in loneliness and isolation.
Middle Adulthood (40 to 65 years)	Generativity vs. Stagnation	Work and Parenthood	Adults need to create or nurture things that will outlast them, often by having children or creating a positive change that benefits other people. Success leads to feelings of usefulness and accomplishment, while failure results in shallow involvement in the world.
Maturity(65 to death)	Ego Integrity vs. Despair	Reflection on Life	Older adults need to look back on life and feel a sense of fulfillment. Success at this stage leads to feelings of wisdom, while failure results in regret, bitterness, and despair.

Jean Piaget also had many developmental theories. The following is from Wikipedia:

"Piaget's theory of cognitive development is a comprehensive theory about the nature and development of human intelligence first developed by Jean Piaget. It is primarily known as a developmental stage theory, but in fact, it deals with the nature of knowledge itself and how humans come gradually to acquire, construct, and use it. To Piaget, cognitive development was a progressive reorganization of mental processes as a result of biological maturation and environmental experience. Children construct an understanding of the world around them, then experience discrepancies between what they already know and what they discover in their environment. Moreover, Piaget claims the idea that cognitive development is at the center of human organism and language is contingent on cognitive development. Below, there is first a short description of Piaget's views about the nature of intelligence and then a description of the stages through which it develops until maturity."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piaget%27s_theory_of_cognitive_development

* Use the scientific method to obtain knowledge in this field. Use the objective side of your brain. Objective meaning free from emotion and opinion. Focus on the known facts and then theorize the cause and effects.

Dr. Dalley has his own suggestion: The DEPC method.

D- Description                   Survey and question

E-Explain                              Research

P-Predict                             Hypothesize

C-Experiment                    Experiment

Psychologists describe behavior using:

·         case studies- one person is studied in detail

·         surveys- the population of a certain area is asked the same questions and then reported

·         naturalistic observation- observing people or animals in their natural habitat

·         random sampling- experimenting with different people at random and trying to eliminate bias

1. Case studies

·         can be misleading

·         difficulty with external validity

2. Survey- a technique for ascertaining the self-reported,  attitudes, opinions, or behaviors of people usually done by questioning a representative , random sample of people.

·         wording effects can change the results of a survey

3. Naturalistic observation- observing and recording the behavior of animals in the wild and recording self-seating patterns in a multi-racial school lunch room constitute naturalistic observation.

4. Methods/ Statistics correlation- when one trait or behavior accompanies another, we say the two correlate.

·         when using ratios:  r = correlation coefficient

·         correlation does not mean causation!

·         example:       low self-esteem-----------does not cause-------------> depression

5. Experimentation- if the behavior under study changes when a factor is manipulated, we can then say that the manipulated factor has caused the behavior to change. Now we have cause and effect!

Cause and Effect

independent variable- manipulated, influential, experimental factor, a potential cause.

dependent variable- a factor that can be changed in an experiment.

·         association does not prove causation!

·         Remember: correlation indicates the possibility of a cause- effect relationship, but it does not prove causation.

illusory correlation- a perceived but non-existent correlation.

hindsight bias- the "I-knew-it-all-along" phenomenon.

overconfidence- sometimes we think we know more than we actually know.

The Scientific Attitude

The scientific attitude is composed of curiosity (passion for exploration), skepticism (doubting and questioning), and humility (ability to accept responsibility when wrong).

Nature Versus Nurture- One of the greatest debates in psychology!

Where the two sides of the debate agree: "Nurture works on what nature endows."

-Chapter 2 -

Neural Communication

·         neurons and how they communicate

·         how neurotransmitters influence us (keep us stable!)

The Nervous System

·         Includes Peripheral Nervous System (hands, arms, legs) and

·         Central Nervous System (brain, spinal cord)

·         Reptilian part of the brain: the brain stem

·         Limbic  System (glands of all kinds)

·         Franz Gall was an explorer in this study

 

 

Neurons

Neurons travel at about a speed of 2mph to 200mph!

cell body- life support center of the neuron

dendrites- branching extensions at the cell body. They receive messages from other neurons.

axon- long, single extension of a neuron, covered with a myelin sheath to insulate and speed up messages through neurons.

action potential- neural impulse

SSRI- selective serotonin

sodium + potassium = electricity

medulla- controls heartbeat and breathing

thalamus- brain's sensory switchboard (5 senses)

reticular formation- controls arousal, consciousness

cerebellum- "little brain" coordinates voluntary movements

limbic system- doughnut- shaped, emotions, fear

amygdala- fear and anger "alarm system"

hippocampus- remembers dangers, loading dock for explicit (conscious recall) memories

Developmental Psychology

·         developing through the life span: conception --> death

·         focuses on prenatal to toddler and middle-aged to death

·         Erik Erikson (trust versus intrust)

·         Piaget and his theories

·         continuity and stages

·         stability and change

·         reflections on two developmental concerns

How do genetic inheritance and experience influence our behavior?

Is development a gradual, continuous process or a sequence of separate stages?

                Erikson said we were like a butterfly with evolutionary stages while Piaget says otherwise.

Do our early personality traits persist throughout life, or do we become different people as we age?

It all boils down to the question, "Can we change?"

The Conception

Zygote Embryo Fetus

2 wks      9 wks       to birth

·         Zygote attaches to the mother's womb through the placenta

·         Embryo stage is where spine organs and are formed

·         3rd to 8th week the heartbeat, liver, red blood cells

placenta- acts like a filter for the baby and transfers nutrients

teratogens- actually translates into "monsters." agents, such as chemicals and viruses that can reach the embryo or fetus during prenatal development and cause harm. Passes through placenta because they might be too strong for the placenta to filter

Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS)

·         symptoms are a distorted face, lifelong brain abnormalities, learning, and behavioral problems

·         they have a smooth philitrium, which is the groove between the nose and upper lip

·         they have a thin upper lip and eyes further apart from each other

·         brains are smaller in size

Fetal Alcohol Effects (FAE)

·         no appearance issues, but have cognitive issues such as the learning and behavioral problems

Jean Piaget

·         his first focus was sensory-motor development

·         age 6 or 7 they start seeing things as interchangeable

·         maturation- the brain unfolds in time, like sitting before crawling, standing before walking

·         "When do they remember self?" was a big question for him

schema-  a concept

assimilation- incorporating new ideas into our schema

accommodation- process of adjusting and modifying a schema

Preoperational Stage

Piaget said that from 2yrs to about 6 or 7yrs old, children are too young to perform mental operations.

The different stages:

0-2                       2-7                       7-11                     12-adolescence

Sensory Motor                  Preoperational                  Concrete                              Formal Operational       

law of conservation- ability to measure. example: the same amount of orange juice poured in different sized cups will look like unequal amounts to a 5-yr-old, no matter how much you try to prove the amounts are equal.

CHAPTER 8: Memory

How do we gain and retain knowledge? How do we forget?

There are many ways to learn and retain knowledge in order to retrieve that knowledge in a later time. One of the most effective ways is the Spacing Effect. Space out your time to study so that you don't cram all of the information in at one time. Your brain needs time to digest what you have taken in.

Your memories work like spider webs. Each memory starts at an anchor and then follows cues to get to another part of the memory.

The process of learning is: encoding, storing, and retrieval.

The different types of memory are: sensory, short-term, and long-term.

·         Some information bypasses the first two types and enters directly into long-term memory.

·         Selective attention is very important because it helps sort out the most important information.

·         Working Memory, also called Effortful Processing, is studying and working hard to remember something. Requires rehearsal and conscious repetition.

·         Auto Processing is information that we absorb automatically, such as the space, time, and frequency of study sessions.

Spacing Effect

·         We retain information more easily and effectively as we space out our study time over the course of a few days, months, and years.

·         This may be why doctors go to school for a very long time. They need the continued practice

Serial Position Effect

·         When listening or reading a list of words, we tend to most likely remember the first and last parts of the list and not so much the middle. 

encode by meaning---semantics

encode by images---visual and/or auditory

encode by organization---mnemonics

VOCABULARY

psychology-the study of responsive behavior to certain situations. ALSO- the science of behavior and mental processes.

cognitive neuroscience-the study of brain activity linked with mental activity.

cognitive revolution- importance of how our mind processes and retains information.

behavior- anything that an organism does- any action we can observe and record.

mental processes-subjective experiences: sensations, perceptions, dreams, thoughts, beliefs, and feelings.

survey- a technique for ascertaining the self-reported,  attitudes, opinions, or behaviors of people usually done by questioning a representative , random sample of people.

naturalistic observation- observing and recording the behavior of animals in the wild and recording self-seating patterns in a multi-racial school lunch room constitute naturalistic observation.

methods/ statistics correlation- when one trait or behavior accompanies another, we say the two correlate.

independent variable- manipulated, influential, experimental factor, a potential cause.

dependent variable- a factor that can be changed in an experiment.

illusory correlation- a perceived but non-existent correlation.

hindsight bias- the "I-knew-it-all-along" phenomenon.

overconfidence- sometimes we think we know more than we actually know.

cell body- life support center of the neuron

dendrites- branching extensions at the cell body. They receive messages from other neurons.

axon- long, single extension of a neuron, covered with a myelin sheath to insulate and speed up messages through neurons.

action potential- neural impulse

schema-  a concept

assimilation- incorporating new ideas into our schema

accommodation- process of adjusting and modifying a schema

law of conservation- ability to measure. example: the same amount of orange juice poured in different sized cups will look like unequal amounts to a 5-yr-old, no matter how much you try to prove the amounts are equal.

FURTHER READING: IMPORTANT PEOPLE

NOTE: NOT A COMPLETE READING

Jean Piaget

Harry Beilin described Jean Piaget's theoretical research program as consisting of four phases:

1. the sociological model of development,
2. the biological model of intellectual development,
3. the elaboration of the logical model of intellectual development,
4. the study of figurative thought.

The resulting theoretical frameworks are sufficiently different from each other that they have been characterized as representing different "Piagets." More recently, Jeremy Burman responded to Beilin and called for the addition of a phase before his turn to psychology: "the zeroeth Piaget."

Piaget before psychology

Before Piaget became a psychologist, he trained in natural history and philosophy. He received his doctorate in 1918 from the University of Neuchatel. He then undertook post-doctoral training in Zurich (1918–1919), and Paris (1919–1921). The theorist we recognize today only emerged when he moved to Geneva, to work for Edouard Claparede as director of research at the Rousseau Institute, in 1922.

The sociological model of development

Piaget first developed as a psychologist in the 1920s. He investigated the hidden side of children’s minds. Piaget proposed that children moved from a position of egocentrism to sociocentrism. For this explanation he combined the use of psychological and clinical methods to create what he called a semiclinical interview. He began the interview by asking children standardized questions and depending on how they answered, he would ask them a series of nonstandard questions. Piaget was looking for what he called "spontaneous conviction" so he often asked questions the children neither expected nor anticipated. In his studies, he noticed there was a gradual progression from intuitive to scientific and socially acceptable responses. Piaget theorized children did this because of the social interaction and the challenge to younger children’s ideas by the ideas of those children who were more advanced.

This work was used by Elton Mayo as the basis for the famous Hawthorne Experiments. For Piaget, it also led to an honorary doctorate from Harvard in 1936.

The sensorimotor/adaptive model of intellectual development

In this stage, Piaget described intelligence as having two closely interrelated parts. The first part, which is from the first stage, was the content of children's thinking. The second part was the process of intellectual activity. He believed this process of thinking could be regarded as an extension of the biological process of adaptation. Adaptation has two pieces: assimilation and accommodation. To test his theory, Piaget observed the habits in his own children. He argued infants were engaging in an act of assimilation when they sucked on everything in their reach. He claimed infants transform all objects into an object to be sucked. The children were assimilating the objects to conform to their own mental structures. Piaget then made the assumption that whenever one transforms the world to meet individual needs or conceptions, one is, in a way, assimilating it. Piaget also observed his children not only assimilating objects to fit their needs, but also modifying some of their mental structures to meet the demands of the environment. This is the second division of adaptation known as accommodation. To start out, the infants only engaged in primarily reflex actions such as sucking, but not long after, they would pick up actual objects and put them in their mouths. When they do this, they modify their reflex response to accommodate the external objects into reflex actions. Because the two are often in conflict, they provide the impetus for intellectual development. The constant need to balance the two triggers intellectual growth.

The elaboration of the logical model of intellectual development

In the model Piaget developed in stage three, he argued the idea that intelligence develops in a series of stages that are related to age and are progressive because one stage must be accomplished before the next can occur. For each stage of development the child forms a view of reality for that age period. At the next stage, the child must keep up with earlier level of mental abilities to reconstruct concepts. Piaget concluded intellectual development as an upward expanding spiral in which children must constantly reconstruct the ideas formed at earlier levels with new, higher order concepts acquired at the next level.

It is primarily the Third Piaget that was incorporated into American psychology when Piaget's ideas were "rediscovered" in the 1960s.

The study of figurative thought

Piaget studied areas of intelligence like perception and memory that aren’t entirely logical. Logical concepts are described as being completely reversible because they can always get back to the starting point. The perceptual concepts Piaget studied could not be manipulated. To describe the figurative process, Piaget uses pictures as examples. Pictures can’t be separated because contours cannot be separated from the forms they outline. Memory is the same way. It is never completely reversible. During this last period of work, Piaget and his colleague Inhelder also published books on perception, memory, and other figurative processes such as learning.

Theory

Jean Piaget defined himself as a 'genetic' epistemologist, interested in the process of the qualitative development of knowledge. As he says in the introduction of his book Genetic Epistemology (ISBN 978-0-393-00596-7): "What the genetic epistemology proposes is discovering the roots of the different varieties of knowledge, since its elementary forms, following to the next levels, including also the scientific knowledge."

He believed answers for the epistemological questions at his time could be answered, or better proposed, if one looked to the genetic aspect of it, hence his experimentations with children and adolescents. Piaget considered cognitive structures development as a differentiation of biological regulations. In one of his last books, Equilibration of Cognitive Structures: The Central Problem of Intellectual Development (ISBN 978-022666781), he intends to explain knowledge development as a process of equilibration using two main concepts in his theory, assimilation and accommodation, as belonging not only to biological interactions but also to cognitive ones.

Stages

The four development stages are described in Piaget's theory as:

• Sensorimotor stage: from birth to age 2. Children experience the world through movement and senses (use five senses to explore the world). During the sensorimotor stage children are extremely egocentric, meaning they cannot perceive the world from others' viewpoints. The sensorimotor stage is divided into six substages:

1. "simple reflexes;
2. first habits and primary circular reactions;
3. secondary circular reactions;
4. coordination of secondary circular reactions;
5. tertiary circular reactions, novelty, and curiosity; and
6. internalization of schemes."

Simple reflexes is from birth to 1 month old. At this time infants use reflexes such as rooting and sucking.

First habits and primary circular reactions is from 1 month to 4 months old. During this time infants learn to coordinate sensation and two types of scheme (habit and circular reactions). A primary circular reaction is when the infant tries to reproduce an event that happened by accident (ex: sucking thumb).

The third stage, secondary circular reactions, occurs when the infant is 4 to 8 months old. At this time they become aware of things beyond their own body; they are more object oriented. At this time they might accidentally shake a rattle and continue to do it for sake of satisfaction.

Coordination of secondary circular reactions is from 8 months to 12 months old. During this stage they can do things intentionally. They can now combine and recombine schemes and try to reach a goal (ex: use a stick to reach something). They also understand object permanence during this stage. That is, they understand that objects continue to exist even when they can't see them.

The fifth stage occurs from 12 months old to 18 months old. During this stage infants explore new possibilities of objects; they try different things to get different results.

Some followers of Piaget's studies of infancy, such as Kenneth Kaye argue that his contribution was as an observer of countless phenomena not previously described, but that he didn't offer explanation of the processes in real time that cause those developments, beyond analogizing them to broad concepts about biological adaptation generally. Kaye's "apprenticeship theory" of cognitive and social development refuted Piaget's assumption that mind developed endogenously in infants until the capacity for symbolic reasoning allowed them to learn language.

• Preoperational stage: from ages 2 to 7 (magical thinking predominates; motor skills are acquired). Egocentrism begins strongly and then weakens. Children cannot conserve or use logical thinking.

• Concrete operational stage: from ages 7 to 11 (children begin to think logically but are very concrete in their thinking). Children can now conserve and think logically but only with practical aids. They are no longer egocentric.

• Formal operational stage: from age 11-16 and onwards (development of abstract reasoning). Children develop abstract thought and can easily conserve and think logically in their mind.

The developmental process

Piaget provided no concise description of the development process as a whole. Broadly speaking it consisted of a cycle:

• The child performs an action which has an effect on or organizes objects, and the child is able to note the characteristics of the action and its effects.
• Through repeated actions, perhaps with variations or in different contexts or on different kinds of objects, the child is able to differentiate and integrate its elements and effects. This is the process of "reflecting abstraction" (described in detail in Piaget 2001).
• At the same time, the child is able to identify the properties of objects by the way different kinds of action affect them. This is the process of "empirical abstraction".
• By repeating this process across a wide range of objects and actions, the child establishes a new level of knowledge and insight. This is the process of forming a new "cognitive stage". This dual process allows the child to construct new ways of dealing with objects and new knowledge about objects themselves.
• However, once the child has constructed these new kinds of knowledge, he or she starts to use them to create still more complex objects and to carry out still more complex actions. As a result, the child starts to recognize still more complex patterns and to construct still more complex objects. Thus a new stage begins, which will only be completed when all the child's activity and experience have been re-organized on this still higher level.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Piaget

Erik Erikson

Biography

Erik Erikson was born in Frankfurt, Germany, on June 15, 1902. There is a little mystery about his heritage: His biological father was an unnamed Danish man who abandoned Erik's mother before he was born. His mother, Karla Abrahamsen, was a young Jewish woman who raised him alone for the first three years of his life. She then married Dr. Theodor Homberger, who was Erik's pediatrician, and moved to Karlsruhe in southern Germany.

We cannot pass over this little piece of biography without some comment: The development of identity seems to have been one of his greatest concerns in Erikson's own life as well as in his theory. During his childhood, and his early adulthood, he was Erik Homberger, and his parents kept the details of his birth a secret. So here he was, a tall, blond, blue-eyed boy who was also Jewish. At temple school, the kids teased him for being Nordic; at grammar school, they teased him for being Jewish.

After graduating high school, Erik focussed on becoming an artist. When not taking art classes, he wandered around Europe, visiting museums and sleeping under bridges. He was living the life of the carefree rebel, long before it became "the thing to do."

When he was 25, his friend Peter Blos -- a fellow artist and, later, psychoanalyst -- suggested he apply for a teaching position at an experimental school for American students run by Dorothy Burlingham, a friend of Anna Freud. Besides teaching art, he gathered a certificate in Montessori education and one from the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. He was psychoanalyzed by Anna Freud herself.

While there, he also met Joan Serson, a Canadian dance teacher at the school. They went on the have three children, one of whom became a sociologist himself.

With the Nazis coming into power, they left Vienna, first for Copenhagen, then to Boston. Erikson was offered a position at the Harvard Medical School and practiced child psychoanalysis privately. During this time, he met psychologists like Henry Murray and Kurt Lewin, and anthropologists like Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Gregory Bateson. I think it can be safely said that these anthropologists had nearly as great an effect on Erikson as Sigmund and Anna Freud!

He later taught at Yale, and later still at the University of California at Berkeley. It was during this period of time that he did his famous studies of modern life among the Lakota and the Yurok.

When he became an American citizen, he officially changed his name to Erik Erikson. Erikson's son, Kai Erikson, believes it was just a decision to define himself as a self-made man: Erik, son of Erik.

In 1950, he wrote Childhood and Society, which contained summaries of his studies among the native Americans, analyses of Maxim Gorkiy and Adolph Hitler, a discussion of the "American personality," and the basic outline of his version of Freudian theory. These themes -- the influence of culture on personality and the analysis of historical figures -- were repeated in other works, one of which, Gandhi's Truth, won him the Pulitzer Prize and the national Book Award.

In 1950, during Senator Joseph McCarthy's reign of terror, Erikson left Berkeley when professors there were asked to sign "loyalty oaths." He spent ten years working and teaching at a clinic in Massachussets, and ten years more back at Harvard. Since retiring in 1970, he wrote and did research with his wife. He died in 1994.

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Theory

Erikson is a Freudian ego-psychologist. This means that he accepts Freud's ideas as basically correct, including the more debatable ideas such as the Oedipal complex, and accepts as well the ideas about the ego that were added by other Freudian loyalists such as Heinz Hartmann and, of, course, Anna Freud. However, Erikson is much more society and culture-oriented than most Freudians, as you might expect from someone with his anthropological interests, and he often pushes the instincts and the unconscious practically out of the picture. Perhaps because of this, Erikson is popular among Freudians and non-Freudians alike!

The epigenetic principle

He is most famous for his work in refining and expanding Freud's theory of stages. Development, he says, functions by the epigenetic principle. This principle says that we develop through a predetermined unfolding of our personalities in eight stages. Our progress through each stage is in part determined by our success, or lack of success, in all the previous stages. A little like the unfolding of a rose bud, each petal opens up at a certain time, in a certain order, which nature, through its genetics, has determined. If we interfere in the natural order of development by pulling a petal forward prematurely or out of order, we ruin the development of the entire flower.

Each stage involves certain developmental tasks that are psychosocial in nature. Although he follows Freudian tradition by calling them crises, they are more drawn out and less specific than that term implies. The child in grammar school, for example, has to learn to be industrious during that period of his or her life, and that industriousness is learned through the complex social interactions of school and family.

The various tasks are referred to by two terms. The infant's task, for example, is called "trust-mistrust." At first, it might seem obvious that the infant must learn trust and not mistrust. But Erikson made it clear that there it is a balance we must learn: Certainly, we need to learn mostly trust; but we also need to learn a little mistrust, so as not to grow up to become gullible fools!

Each stage has a certain optimal time as well. It is no use trying to rush children into adulthood, as is so common among people who are obsessed with success. Neither is it possible to slow the pace or to try to protect our children from the demands of life. There is a time for each task.

If a stage is managed well, we carry away a certain virtue or psychosocial strength which will help us through the rest of the stages of our lives. On the other hand, if we don't do so well, we may develop maladaptations and malignancies, as well as endanger all our future development. A malignancy is the worse of the two, and involves too little of the positive and too much of the negative aspect of the task, such as a person who can't trust others. A maladaptation is not quite as bad and involves too much of the positive and too little of the negative, such as a person who trusts too much.

Children and adults

Perhaps Erikson's greatest innovation was to postulate not five stages, as Freud had done, but eight. Erikson elaborated Freud's genital stage into adolescence plus three stages of adulthood. We certainly don't stop developing -- especially psychologically -- after our twelfth or thirteenth birthdays; It seems only right to extend any theory of stages to cover later development!

Erikson also had some things to say about the interaction of generations, which he called mutuality. Freud had made it abundantly clear that a child's parents influence his or her development dramatically. Erikson pointed out that children influence their parents' development as well. The arrival of children, for example, into a couple's life, changes that life considerably, and moves the new parents along their developmental paths. It is even appropriate to add a third (and in some cases, a fourth) generation to the picture: Many of us have been influenced by our grandparents, and they by us.

A particularly clear example of mutuality can be seen in the problems of the teenage mother. Although the mother and her child may have a fine life together, often the mother is still involved in the tasks of adolescence, that is, in finding out who she is and how she fits into the larger society. The relationship she has or had with the child's father may have been immature on one or both sides, and if they don't marry, she will have to deal with the problems of finding and developing a relationship as well. The infant, on the other hand, has the simple, straight-forward needs that infants have, and the most important of these is a mother with the mature abilities and social support a mother should have. If the mother's parents step in to help, as one would expect, then they, too, are thrown off of their developmental tracks, back into a life-style they thought they had passed, and which they might find terribly demanding. And so on....

The ways in which our lives intermesh are terribly complex and very frustrating to the theorist. But ignoring them is to ignore something vitally important about our development and our personalities.

http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/erikson.html

 

Franz Joseph Gall

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Franz Josef Gall (9 March 1758 – 22 August 1828) was a neuroanatomist, physiologist, and pioneer in the study of the localization of mental functions in the brain.

Claimed as the founder of Phrenology, Gall was an early and important researcher in his fields, and always controversial. His work was later misused to create this pseudoscience.

Life

Gall was born in Baden, in the village of Tiefenbronn to a wealthy Roman Catholic wool merchant. The Galls had been the leading family in the area for over a century. As the second eldest son, he was intended for the priesthood but chose instead to study medicine at the University of Strasbourg. He later completed his degree in Vienna, Austria.
He died in Paris, on 22 August 1828. Although married he had no direct descendent. However, direct descendants of his brothers lived in Germany until 1949. A collection of his skulls can be seen at the Rollet Museum in Baden bei Wien, Austria, where several of his relatives now live.^[2]

Work

Around 1800, Gall developed "cranioscopy", a method to determine the personality and development of mental and moral faculties on the basis of the external shape of the skull. Cranioscopy («cranium»: skull, «scopos»: vision) was later renamed to phrenology («phren»: mind, «logos»: study) by his follower Johann Spurzheim.
In spite of many problems associated with his work, Gall made significant contributions to neurological science. In 1823, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Influence

Gall's concepts on brain localization were revolutionary, and caused religious leaders and some scientists to take exception. The Roman Catholic Church considered his theory as contrary to religion (that the mind, created by God, should have a physical seat in brain matter was anathema). Established science also condemned these ideas for lack of scientific proof of his theory. His ideas were also not acceptable to the court of Franz Josef II (the brother of Marie Antoinette). Due to this opposition, Gall left his lecturer position in Austria. He sought a teaching position in Germany and eventually settled in Paris. Revolutionary France was most likely the most hospitable place for Gall's theories. However, Napoleon Bonaparte, the ruling emperor, and the scientific establishment led by the Institute of France, pronounced his science as invalid. Despite all this, Gall was able to secure a comfortable existence on the basis of his speciality. He became a celebrity of sorts as he was accepted into Parisian intellectual salons.
Gall's phrenological theories and practices were best accepted in England, where the ruling class used it to justify the "inferiority" of its colonial subjects. It also became very popular in the USA from 1820 to 1850. The misuse of Gall's ideas and work to justify discrimination were deliberately furthered by his associates, including Johann Spurzheim. Later, others tried to improve on his theories with systems such as characterology.
Gall's theories had an influence both on the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso and on his French rival, Alexandre Lacassagne.