Psychology today

Psychology today

1. Psychometric testing

   • Assessments of people to measure psychological attributed such as personality or intelligence
     • Galton first measured intelligence (brain size etc)
     • Binet developed a different approach to Galton and proposed Binet's intelligence test
       • Used psychophysical and verbal tasks to measure mental abilities such as attention and memory
       • Rationalist approach
       • Terman
         • Revised the intelligence test and it became Stanford-Binet. He saw it as a tool for eugenics (nurturing the bright and institutionalising the feeble minded)
   • Used for officer selection
     • Mass intelligence testing of military personnel
   • Yerkes (1920)
     • Suggested many of white males were morons (47.3%, IQ 51-70). He noted down worse percentages for other races (1923), noted 79-89% in black people
       • Led to more eugenics and it restricted immigration from certain countries
         • It is still a problem today, for example testing still happens in personnel selection, college admissions and courts

2. Witmer

   • He was interested in clinical psychology and instituted the first psychology clinic. He applied the principles of clinical psychology to treating cases related to learning difficulties

3. Mayo

   • Looked at the Hawthorne effect. He looked at the effect of lighting on workers productivity, and found that any changes in environment caused an increase in productivity

4. Neuroscience

   • Looking at the computational model of the mind, the brain is the hardware, and the cognition is the software. McCullough applied this to neurons and Hebb developed a physiological basis for learning.
   • Studies involving frontal lobe regions, split brain studied, plasticity etc, entrenched the study of the brain in psychology
   • There has been developments in measurements of brain activity, such as EEG, MRI and fMRI

5. Personality

   • Stern influenced personality psychology
   • Heymans developed quantitative typology of personality
   • Ribot coined the term 'personality' in a clinical setting
   • Allport distinguished between idiographic and nomothetic approaches

6. Social psychology

   • Allport studied group behaviour and worked on the study of attitudes
   • Festinger studied cognitive dissonance
   • Milgram and Zimbardo

7. Evolutionary psychology

   • The brain has evolved for certain purposes.
   • The sociobiological approach looks for evolutionary causes of behaviour. (natural and sexual selection behaviour, instinctive behaviour, phylogenetic continuity)