The Psychology Book
Page 4
Galton turned to traveling and inventing. His marriage in 1853 to Louisa Jane Butler lasted 43 years, but was childless. He devoted his life to measuring physical and psychological characteristics, devising mental tests, and writing. He received many awards and honors in recognition of his numerous achievements, including several honorary degrees and a knighthood.
Key works
1869 Hereditary Genius
1874 English Men of Science: Their Nature and Nurture
1875 The History of Twins
See also: G. Stanley Hall • John B. Watson • Zing-Yang Kuo • Eleanor E. Maccoby • Raymond Cattell
IN CONTEXT
APPROACH
Neurological science
BEFORE
1900 BCE The Egyptian Kahun Papyrus recounts behaviorial disturbances in women caused by a “wandering uterus.”
c.400 BCE Greek physician Hippocrates invents the term “hysteria” for certain women’s illnesses in his book, On the Diseases of Women.
1662 English physician Thomas Willis performs autopsies on “hysterical” women, and finds no sign of uterine pathology.
AFTER
1883 Alfred Binet joins Charcot at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, and later writes about Charcot’s use of hypnotism to treat hysteria.
1895 Sigmund Freud, a former student of Charcot, publishes Studies on Hysteria.
Known as the founder of modern neurology, French physician Jean-Martin Charcot was interested in the relationship between psychology and physiology. During the 1860s and 1870s, he studied “hysteria,” a term then used to describe extreme emotional behavior in women, thought to be caused by problems with the uterus (hystera in Greek). Symptoms included excessive laughing or crying, wild bodily movements and contortions, fainting, paralysis, convulsions, and temporary blindness and deafness.
From observing thousands of cases of hysteria at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, Charcot defined “The Laws of Hysteria,” believing that he understood the disease completely. He claimed that hysteria was a lifelong, inherited condition and its symptoms were triggered by shock. In 1882, Charcot stated: “In the [hysterical] fit… everything unfolds according to the rules, which are always the same; they are valid for all countries, for all epochs, for all races, and are, in short, universal.” Charcot suggested that hysteria’s similarity to a physical disease warranted a search for a biological cause, but his contemporaries dismissed his ideas. Some even believed that Charcot’s “hysterics” were merely acting out behavior that Charcot had suggested to them. But one student of Charcot, Sigmund Freud, was convinced of hysteria’s status as a physical illness, and was intrigued by it. It is the first disease Freud describes in his theory of psychoanalysis.
Charcot gave lectures on hysteria at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. He believed hysteria always followed ordered, clearly structured phases, and could be cured by hypnotism.
See also: Alfred Binet • Pierre Janet • Sigmund Freud
IN CONTEXT
APPROACH
Medical psychiatry
BEFORE
c.50 BCE Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius uses the term “dementia” to mean “being out of one’s mind.”
1874 Wilhelm Wundt, Kraepelin’s tutor, publishes Principles of Physiological Psychology.
AFTER
1908 Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler coins the term “schizophrenia,” from the Greek words skhizein (to split) and phren (the mind).
1948 The World Health Authority (WHO) includes Kraepelin’s classifications of mental illnesses in its International Classification of Diseases (ICD).
1950s Chlorpromazine, the first antipsychotic drug, is used to treat schizophrenia.
German physician Emil Kraepelin believed that the origins of most mental illnesses are biological, and he is often regarded as the founder of modern medical psychiatry. In his Textbook of Psychiatry, published in 1883, Kraepelin offered a detailed classification of mental illnesses, including “dementia praecox,” meaning “early dementia,” to distinguish it from late-onset dementia, such as Alzheimer’s.
Schizophrenia
In 1893, Kraepelin described dementia praecox, now called schizophrenia, as consisting “of a series of clinical states which hold as their common a peculiar destruction of the internal connections of the psychic personality.” He observed that the illness, characterized by confusion and antisocial behavior, often starts in the late teens or early adulthood. Kraepelin later divided it into four subcategories. The first, “simple” dementia, is marked by slow decline and withdrawal. The second, paranoia, manifests in patients as a state of fear and persecution; they report being “spied upon” or “talked about.” The third, hebephrenia, is marked by incoherent speech, and often by inappropriate emotional reactions and behavior, such as laughing loudly at a sad situation. The fourth category, catatonia, is marked by extremely limited movement and expression, often in the form of either rigidness, such as sitting in the same position for hours, or excessive activity, such as rocking backward and forward repeatedly.
Kraepelin’s classification still forms the basis of schizophrenia diagnosis. In addition, postmortem investigations have shown that there are biochemical and structural brain abnormalities, as well as impairments of brain function, in schizophrenia sufferers. Kraepelin’s belief that a great number of mental illnesses are strictly biological in origin exerted a lasting influence on the field of psychiatry, and many mental disorders are still managed with medication today.
See also: Wilhelm Wundt • R.D. Laing
IN CONTEXT
APPROACH
Experimental psychology
BEFORE
5th century Ancient Greek philosophers Aristotle and Plato claim that animals have a low level, distinctly non-human consciousness.
1630s René Descartes says that animals are automata without feeling.
1859 British biologist Charles Darwin links humans to animal ancestors.
AFTER
1949 Konrad Lorenz changes the way people see animals by showing their similarities to humans in King Solomon’s Ring.
2001 American zoologist Donald Griffin argues in Animal Minds that animals have a sense of the future, complex memory, and perhaps consciousness itself.
The idea that nonhuman animals have minds and are capable of some form of thought dates back to the ancient Greek philosophers. Aristotle believed that there are three kinds of mind: plant, animal, and human. The plant mind is concerned only with nutrition and growth. The animal mind has these functions, but can also experience sensations, such as pain, pleasure, and desire, as well as initiating motion. The human mind can do all this and reason; Aristotle claims that only humans have self-awareness and are capable of higher-level cognition. The similarity of humans to animals was a critical issue for philosophers, but even more so for psychologists. In the 15th century, the French philosopher René Descartes claimed that animals are no more than reflex-driven, complex machines. If Descartes was correct, observing animals could tell us nothing about our own behavior. However, when Charles Darwin asserted some 200 years later that humans are linked to other animals genetically, and that consciousness operates from the creatures at the very lowest end of the evolutionary scale to ourselves, it became clear that experiments on animals might be revealing. This was the position held by the German physician, philosopher, and psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, who described a continuum of life from even the smallest animals to ourselves. In his book Principles of Physiological Psychology, he claimed that consciousness is a universal possession of all living organisms, and has been since the evolutionary process began.
To Wundt, the very definition of life includes having some kind of mind. He declared: “From the standpoint of observation, then, we must regard it as a highly probable hypothesis that the beginnings of the mental life date from as far back as the beginnings of life at large. The question of the origin of mental development thus resolves itself into the question of the origin of life.” Wundt went on to say that even simple organisms such as protozoa have some form of mind. This last claim is surprising today, when few people would expect a single-celled animal to demonstrate even simple mental abilities, but it was even more surprising when first stated more than 100 years ago.
Wundt was keen to test out his theories, and he is often called “the father of experimental psychology” because he set up the world’s first formal laboratory of experimental psychology in Leipzig University, Germany, in 1879. He wanted to carry out systematic research on the mind and behavior of humans, initially through subjecting the basic sensory processes to close examination. His laboratory inspired other universities in the US and Europe to set up psychology departments, many of which were modeled on his original laboratory and were led by pupils such as Edward Titchener and James Cattell.
Wundt’s laboratory set the style for psychology departments around the world. His experiments moved psychology out of the domain of philosophy and into science.
Observing behavior
Wundt believed that “the exact description of consciousness is the sole aim of experimental psychology.” Although he understood consciousness as an “inner experience,” he was only interested in the “immediately real” or apparent form of this experience. This ultimately led him to the study of behavior, which could be studied and quantified by “direct observation.”
Wundt said that there are two types of observation: external and internal. External observation is used to record events that are visible in the external world, and is useful in assessing relationships such as cause and effect on physical bodies—for example, in stimulus and response experiments. If a nerve fiber in a dead frog is given a small electric shock, the connecting muscles twitch, causing the legs to move. The fact that this happens even in a dead animal illustrates that such movements can occur without any consciousness. In living creatures, such actions are the basis of the automatic behavior that we call “reflexes,” such as immediately moving your hand when you touch something hot.
Wundt’s second type of observation, termed “introspection” or “self-observation,” is internal observation. This involves noticing and recording internal events such as thoughts and feelings. It is crucial in research because it provides information about how the mind is working. Wundt was interested in the relationship between the inner and outer worlds, which he did not see as mutually exclusive, but as interactive, describing it as “physical and psychical.” He began to concentrate on the study of human sensations, such as the visual sensation of light, because these are the agencies that link the external physical world and the internal mental world.
In one experiment, Wundt asked individuals to report on their sensations when shown a light signal—which was standardized to a specific color and a certain level of brightness, and shone for a fixed length of time. This ensured that each participant experienced exactly the same stimulus, enabling responses of different participants to be compared and the experiment to be repeated at a later date, if required. In insisting upon this possibility for replication, Wundt set the standard for all future psychological experiments.
In his sensory experiments, Wundt set out to explore human consciousness in a measurable way. He refused to see it as an unknowable, subjective experience that is unique to each individual. In the light-response experiments, he was particularly interested in the amount of time between a person receiving some form of stimulus and making a voluntary reaction to it (rather than an involuntary one), and he used various instruments to measure this response exactly. He was also just as interested to hear what his participants reported in common as he was in apparent individual differences.
Pure sensations, Wundt suggested, have three components: quality, intensity, and “feeling-tone.” For example, a certain perfume may have a sweet odor (quality) that is distinct but faint (intensity) and is pleasant to smell (feeling-tone), while a dead rat might give off a nauseating (quality), strong (intensity) stench (feeling-tone). All consciousness originates in sensations, he said, but these are not internalized as “pure” sensory data; instead, they are perceived as already collected or compounded into representations, such as a dead rat. Wundt called these “images of an object or of a process in the external world.” So, for example, if we see a face with certain features—mouth shape, eye color, nose size, and so on—we may recognize the face as a person we know.
"The exact description of consciousness is the sole aim of experimental psychology."
Wilhelm Wundt
Our sensations provide details of shape, size, color, smell, and texture, but when these are internalized, Wundt says, they are compounded into complex representations, such as a face.
Categories of consciousness
Based on his sensory experiments, Wundt claimed that consciousness consists of three major categories of actions—representation, willing, and feeling—which together form an impression of a unitary flow of events. Representations are either “perceptions,” if they represent an image in the mind of an object perceived in the external world (such as a tree within eyesight), or “intuitions” if they represent a subjective activity (such as remembering a tree, or imagining a unicorn). He named the process through which a perception or intuition becomes clear in consciousness “apperception.” So, for example, you may perceive a sudden loud noise and then apperceive that it is a warning sign, meaning that you are about to be hit by a car if you don’t get out of the way quickly enough.
The willing category of consciousness is characterized by the way it intervenes in the external world; it expresses our volition, or “will,” from raising an arm to choosing to wear red. This form of consciousness is beyond experimental control or measurement. However, Wundt found that the third category of consciousness, feeling, could be measured through subjective reports from experimental participants, or through measuring levels of behavior such as tension and relaxation or excitement.
Cultural psychology
For Wundt, the psychological development of a person is determined not only by sensations but also by complex social and cultural influences, which cannot be replicated or controlled in an experimental situation. He included religion, language, myths, history, art, laws, and customs among these influences, discussing them in a ten-volume work, Cultural Psychology, which he wrote during the last 20 years of his life.
Wundt saw language as an especially important part of culture’s contribution to consciousness. Any verbal communication begins with a “general impression”, or unified idea of something we wish to say. Having “apperceived” this general starting point, we then choose words and sentences to express it. While speaking, we monitor the accuracy of the intended meaning. We might say, “No, that’s not right, I mean…,” and then choose a different word or phrase to express ourselves better. Whoever is listening has to understand the meaning that the speaker is trying to convey, but the actual words may not be as important as the general impression, especially if strong emotions are involved. As evidence of the fact that we use this process, Wundt points out that we often remember the general meaning of what a person has said long after we’ve forgotten the specific words that were used.
Th
e ability to use true language, as opposed to just exchanging limited signs and signals, is today considered by many psychologists to be a key difference between human beings and the rest of the animal kingdom. There may be a few exceptions, including nonhuman primates such as chimpanzees, but language is generally considered to be a human ability that is very important in consciousness.
"In the course of normal speaking… the will is continuously directed to bringing the course of ideas and the articulatory movements into harmony with each other."
Wilhelm Wundt
Consciousness and species
The definition of consciousness continues to be debated, but it has not fundamentally changed since Wundt. The level of consciousness within animals has not yet been established, and this has led to the formation of special Codes of Ethics for animal experiments, intensive farming, and blood sports such as fox hunting and bull fighting. Of particular concern is whether animals experience discomfort, fear, and pain in ways that resemble the form in which we feel them ourselves. The fundamental question of which animals have self-awareness or consciousness remains unanswered, although few psychologists today would assume, as Wundt did, that it applies even to the microscopic protozoa.
"The beginnings of a differentiation of mental function can be found even in the protozoa."
Wilhelm Wundt
Even single-celled organisms have some form of consciousness, according to Wundt. He suggested the amoeba’s ability to devour food items indicates a continuity of mental processes.