Home / Summaries / Psychology vol. 1 / unconscious-stimulus-response

13 good questions on "The Early 1900s: Psychoanalysis and Behaviourism"

What did Jean Martin Charcot and Pierre Janet find when patients with hysteria were put under hypnosis?

Patients symptoms spontaneously resolved themselves while under hypnosis and returned when it was over

What did Sigmund Freud suggest about the unconscious?

Patient's current problems could be traced back to painful memories that were hidden in the unconscious

Psychoanalytic theory is a theory that emphasizes the influence of the ______ on feelings, thoughts and behaviours.

unconscious

How did Freud use psychoanalysis?

He used it to gain insight into the contents of the unconscious mind with the goal of uncovering how experiences relate to anxieties, conflicts and desires

What is a response?

An action or physiological change brought on by a stimulus

Why did John Broadus Watson believe that psychology should be limited to observable relationships between stimulus and response?

So that it could predict the response from the stimulus and visa versa

What did Watson do during the Little Albert study?

He Classically trained a child to fear rats by associating the rat with the noise of a hammer on a bar (which scared him)

What did Pavlov do during his dog experiment?

He taught,dogs to associate food with the sound of a metronome (stimulus) and discovered that they would salivate (response) to only the metronome when it was associated with food.

What was B.F. Skinners Theory of Behavioursims

Principle of reinforcement. We learn to operate on our environment by performing actions for which they're rewarded (reinforcement). Actions that aren't rewarded won't be repeated.

What experiment did B.F. Skinner perform?

Built a cage with a lever that rats could push to get food and observed them as they accidentally discovered this and learned to use it.

What are Teaching Machines (CAT)?

Machines that will give a harder question if you answer correctly and an easier one if you answer incorrectly

What are the major criticisms of behavioursim?

- Free will = an illusion
- ignored mental processes (ex. Language development)
- ignored evolutionary histories (ex. Fear of spiders might have been evolutionarily advantageous for our ancestors)

How did Skinners and Pavlov's contributions differ?

Pavlov's experiments were about how animals respond to stimuli in the environment
Skinners experiements were about how animals learn to affect their environment via reinforcement