by DK
"To turn natural sadness into depression, all you have to do is blame yourself for the disaster that has befallen you."
Dorothy Rowe
See also: Fritz Perls • Carl Rogers • Albert Ellis • Melvin Lerner • George Kelly
IN CONTEXT
APPROACH
Masculine psychology
BEFORE
1900s Freudian analysts describe the Oedipus complex, which states that sons feel naturally competitive with their father.
1950s French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan argues that the son sees the father as embodying the law.
AFTER
1991 In Iron John: A Book About Men, American author Robert Bly says that fathers fail to give their sons what they need to become men, and suggests that they need to reawaken the “Wild Man” within.
1990s American writers Douglas Gillette and Robert L. Moore publish five books exploring Jungian archetypes and the male psyche.
Before French-Canadian analyst Guy Corneau published Absent Fathers, Lost Sons in 1991, psychology had given little attention to emotional communication between men. Corneau’s book examined the difficulties of intimate conversations between the male generations. He recounts his attempts to make an emotional connection with his own father: reaching out, seeking approval, but receiving only silence.
Communication between fathers and sons is often characterized by silences. While sons long for recognition and approval from their fathers, fathers are reluctant to give this approval freely.
Withholding approval
Corneau recognizes that this sequence of events is a familiar pattern in men, who are often unable to shower their sons with the praise, affection, or recognition craved by their offspring. When the son experiences this silence, he may try harder to impress, or he might withdraw, but the silence remains irrevocably imprinted in his mind, according to Corneau. The phenomenon may stem from a competitive interplay of male egos; a man who showers his son with praise would somehow be compromising his own power, making it less valuable. From the son’s point of view, if approval is given too easily, without some degree of withholding, the father is then no longer worthy of impressing. It appears that in most forms of society there is a belief that men cannot be both strong and open.
Corneau says that this behavior does a disservice to men. They are denied the opportunity to express affection toward their sons—and the sons are forced to go without that affection.
See also: Sigmund Freud • Carl Jung • Jacques Lacan
INTRODUCTION
The first half of the 20th century was dominated by two strands of thinking in psychology: behaviorism (which concentrated on learning theory) and psychoanalysis (which focused on the unconscious and development in early childhood). The mental processes that had preoccupied psychologists in the previous century, such as perception, consciousness, and memory, were largely neglected.
There were inevitably some exceptions. Psychologists Frederic Bartlett of the UK and Bluma Zeigarnik of Russia were both studying the process of memory in the 1920s and 30s, anticipating the work of later cognitive psychologists. In Germany, Wolfgang Köhler’s work on problem-solving and decision-making drew on Gestalt psychology—a German school of thought that concentrated on perception and perceptual organization—and was also a precursor of cognitive psychology.
The cognitive revolution
What eventually swung the balance from interest in behavior to the study of mental processes came from outside psychology. Improvements in communications and computer technology, and possibilities opened up by artificial intelligence—then a growing field thanks to advances made during World War II—led to a new way of thinking about the brain: as an information processor. The mental processes, referred to as “cognitive processes” or “cognition,” which behaviorism would not or could not examine, now had a model for psychologists to work from. At the same time, advances in neuroscience led to a greater understanding of the functions of the brain and nervous system. This allowed psychologists, notably Donald Hebb, to examine mental processes directly, rather than merely inferring them from observations of behavior.
One of the first to apply the information-processing analogy to psychology was a student of Frederic Bartlett’s at Cambridge, Donald Broadbent, who had been inspired by the work of computer scientist Alan Turing and communications expert Colin Cherry in the 1940s and 50s. But the turning point came in the US, where behaviorism began to be criticized for its limitations, leading to a so-called “cognitive revolution” in the late 1950s. In the vanguard of this dramatic shift of approach were the Americans George Armitage Miller and Jerome Bruner, who in 1960 co-founded the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard University.
A new direction
Miller and Bruner’s ground-breaking work led to a fundamental change of direction in psychology. Areas that had been neglected by behaviorists, such as memory, perception, and emotions, became the central focus. While Bruner incorporated the concepts of cognition into existing theories of learning and developmental psychology, Miller’s application of the information-processing model to memory opened up the field, making memory an important area of study for cognitive psychologists, including Endel Tulving, Elizabeth Loftus, Daniel Schacter, and Gordon H. Bower. There was also a reappraisal of Gestalt psychology: Roger Shepard reexamined ideas of perception, and Wolfgang Köhler’s work on problem-solving and decision-making resurfaced in the theories of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. And, perhaps for the first time, cognitive psychologists, including Bower and Paul Ekman, made a scientific study of emotion.
But it wasn’t only the theories of behaviorists that were overturned; Freud’s psychoanalytic theory and its followers were also criticized for being unscientific. Aaron Beck found that cognitive psychology could provide a more effective therapy—and that it was more amenable to objective scrutiny. The cognitive therapy he advocated, later incorporating elements of behavioral therapy and meditation techniques, soon became standard treatment for disorders such as depression and anxiety, and led to a movement of positive psychology advocating mental wellbeing rather than just treating mental illness.
At the beginning of the 21st century, cognitive psychology is still the dominant approach to the subject, and has had an effect on neuroscience, education, and economics. It has even influenced the nature–nurture debate; in the light of recent discoveries in genetics and neuroscience, evolutionary psychologists such as Steven Pinker have argued that our thoughts and actions are determined by the make-up of our brains, and that they are like other inherited characteristics: subject to the laws of natural selection.
IN CONTEXT
APPROACH
Gestalt psychology
BEFORE
1890 Austrian philosopher Christian von Ehrenfels introduces the concept of Gestalt in his book, On the Qualities of Form.
1912 Max Wertheimer publishes Experimental Studies of the Perception of Movement, a landmark in Gestalt psychology.
AFTER
1920s Edward Tolman brings together ideas from Gestalt and behaviorist psychology in his purposive behaviorism (now cognitive behaviorism).
1935 Psychology of Productive Thinking by Karl Duncker—a German Gestalt psychologist—describes experiments in problem-solving and mental restructuring.
In the late 19th century, a group of German psychologists who disagreed with the prevailing schools of thought developed a new, scientific, and distinctly holistic approach, which they called Gestalt. Wolfgang Köhler, who founded the new movement along with Max Wertheimer and Kurt Koffka, explained that
the word means both “pattern” and, when applied to their theory, “organized whole.” Gestalt psychology (not to be confused with Gestalt therapy, a much later development) took as its starting point the idea that concepts such as perception, learning, and cognition should be considered as wholes, not studied by investigating their various parts.
"Insight has the appearance of a complete solution with reference to the whole layout of the field."
Wolfgang Köhler
Köhler thought the dominant branch of psychology, behaviorism, was too simplistic and overlooked the dynamic nature of perception. Pavlov and Thorndike claimed that animals learn by trial and error through simple stimulus—response conditioning, but Köhler believed they were capable of insight and intelligence. He was able to put this to the test when he became director of an anthropoid research center on Tenerife from 1913–20, where he studied chimpanzees tackling a number of problem-solving tasks.
Insightful learning
What Köhler observed confirmed his belief, and also demonstrated that problem-solving and learning could be explained in terms of Gestalt. When faced with a problem, such as how to reach food in an inaccessible place, the chimpanzees were frustrated in their initial attempts, but would then pause and apparently take stock of the situation before attempting some kind of solution. This often involved using tools—such as sticks or crates that were lying around in their play area—to reach the food. When subsequently faced with the same problem, they instantly applied the same solution. Köhler concluded that the chimps’ behavior showed a cognitive trial-and-error process rather than an actual one; they were solving the problem in their minds first, and only after an insight (the “aha” moment) tried out their solution. This is contrary to the behaviorist view that learning is conditioned by response to a stimulus, and reinforced by reward. The chimps learned by perceiving the problem, not by receiving rewards.
This was a demonstration of Köhler’s dynamic model of behavior, involving organization within perception, rather than passive learning through response to rewards. The pattern (Gestalt) of learning by insight—failure, pause, perception, insight, and attempt—is an active one; but this is not necessarily apparent to someone watching the chimps’ separate attempts to solve the problem, mainly because it is not possible to see the organization of perception in the chimp’s mind. What we call instinct, the apparently automatic response to solving a problem, is affected by this process of insight learning, and is itself an active, dynamic pattern.
Köhler studied chimpanzees solving task-related problems. He realized they could actively perceive several possible solutions before finding the answer through a moment of insight.
WOLFGANG KÖHLER
Wolfgang Köhler was born in Estonia, but his family returned to their native Germany soon after his birth. He studied at various colleges before completing a PhD in Berlin. In 1909, he and Kurt Koffka worked with Max Wertheimer at the Frankfurt Academy on his perception experiments; these formed the basis of Gestalt psychology.
In 1913, Köhler became director of the Prussian Academy of Sciences research station in Tenerife, where he became stranded at the start of World War I, remaining there until 1920. On his return to Berlin, he served as director of the Psychological Institute until 1935, when he emigrated to the US to escape the Nazi regime. He taught at several US colleges, and was elected president of the American Psychological Association for 1959. Ulric Neisser described him as “a genuinely creative thinker as well as a person of great dignity and honor.”
Key works
1917 The Mentality of Apes
1929 Gestalt Psychology
1938 The Place of Values in a World of Facts
See also: Ivan Pavlov • Edward Thorndike • Edward Tolman • Max Wertheimer
IN CONTEXT
APPROACH
Memory studies
BEFORE
1885 Hermann Ebbinghaus publishes his pioneering book, Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology.
1890 William James in The Principles of Psychology makes the distinction between primary (short-term) and secondary (long-term) memory.
AFTER
1956 George Armitage Miller’s The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two revives interest in the study of memory.
1966 Jerome Bruner stresses the importance of organization and categorization in the learning process.
1972 Endel Tulving distinguishes between episodic memory (of specific events) and semantic memory (of factual information unrelated to an event or situation).
While researching for her doctorate in Berlin, Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik was told by her professor, Kurt Lewin, that he had noticed waiters could recall details of orders that were still not paid for better than details of orders they had completed. This led Zeigarnik to wonder whether unfinished tasks have a different status in memory, and are remembered better, than finished ones. She devised an experiment in which participants were given simple puzzles or tasks to do. They were interrupted during about half these tasks. Later, when asked how well they could remember the activities, it became clear that they were twice as likely to recall details of the interrupted tasks, whether these were ultimately completed or not. Zeigarnik reasoned that this could be due to the task lacking closure, leading to the memory being stored differently, and more effectively.
This phenomenon, which became known as the “Zeigarnik effect,” had important implications. Zeigarnik proposed that students, especially children, retained more if they had frequent breaks while studying. But little notice was taken of her ideas until memory once again became a key subject for research in the 1950s. Since then, Zeigarnik’s theory has been accepted as a major step in the understanding of memory, and has found practical application not only in education but also in advertising and the media.
The “Zeigarnik effect” can be demonstrated by the fact that a waiter is more likely to remember details of an order that has not yet been paid for, than one that has been completed.
See also: Hermann Ebbinghaus • Jerome Bruner • George Armitage Miller • Endel Tulving • Daniel Schacter
IN CONTEXT
APPROACH
Neuropsychology
BEFORE
1890 William James puts forward a theory about neural networks in the brain.
1911 Edward Thorndike’s Law of Effect proposes that connections between stimulus and response are “stamped in,” creating a neural link, or association.
1917 Wolfgang Köhler’s study of chimps shows that learning by insight is longer-lasting than learning by trial and error.
1929 Karl Lashley publishes Brain Mechanisms and Intelligence.
AFTER
1970s George Armitage Miller coins the term “cognitive neuroscience.”
1980s Neuroscientists devise imaging techniques, allowing them to map brain functions.
In the 1920s, a number of psychologists turned to neuroscience for answers to questions about learning and memory. Prominent among these was Karl Lashley, who led the way in examining the role played by neural connections, but it was his student, the Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb, who formulated a theory to explain what actually happens during the process of associative learning.
Hebb argued that nerve cells become associated when they are simultaneously and repeatedly active; the synapses, or links, that connect them become stronger. Repeated experiences lead to the formation of “cell assemblies,” or groups of connected neurons, in the brain—a theory often summed up as “cells that fire together, wire together.” Similarly, separate cell assemblies can also become
linked, forming a “phase sequence,” which we recognize as a thought process.
This associative process, Hebb found, is especially noticeable in childhood learning, when new cell assemblies and phase sequences are being formed. In his book, The Organization of Behavior (1949), he gave the example of a baby hearing footsteps, which stimulates a number of neurons in its brain; if the experience is repeated, a cell assembly forms. Subsequently, “when the baby hears footsteps…an assembly is excited; while this is still active he sees a face and feels hands picking him up, which excites other assemblies—so the ‘footsteps assembly’ becomes connected with the ‘face assembly’ and with the ‘being-picked-up assembly’. After this has happened, when the baby hears footsteps only, all three assemblies are excited.” In adults, however, learning tends to involve the rearrangement of existing cell assemblies and phase sequences, rather than the formation of new ones.
Hebb’s theory of cell assembly was a cornerstone of modern neuroscience, and his explanation of neural learning, which became known as Hebbian learning, remains the accepted model.
See also: Edward Thorndike • Karl Lashley • Wolfgang Köhler • George Armitage Miller • Daniel Schacter