Remembering Sir Frederic Bartlett by Benjamin Saad

Sir Cyril Lodowic Burt: The Decaying Persuasion by Christopher Sanchez

Conwy Lloyd Morgan: The Birth of Comparative Psychology by Nicholas Martin

Charlotte Wolff: Leaving her Handprint on the World by Hannah Grigorian

Pioneer of Child Psychology: Margaret Lowenfeld by Rebecca Carlone

The Man Behind the Math: The Life and Works of Karl Pearson by Christian Panier

James Sully: Philosopher and Psychologist by Samantha Beckwith

Samantha Beckwith

Charles S. Myers: Physician, Anthropologist, and Psychologist by Olivia Foley

John Watson

When you think of behaviorism, one of the first people you think of is probably John Watson. Born in 1878, he is considered to be the founder of this sector of psychology. Though he was born into poverty in South Carolina, he was able to educated himself fully and attend Furman University, a college not too far away from his hometown. Because his father was an alcoholic and was not really there to see Watson grow up, his mother because his biggest support system and hoped that after college he would become a Baptist Minister. When he finally graduated with his master’s degree, he was as school principal for a short time. However, his mother fell ill and died, which of course was devastating to Watson.

Her death, though tragic, released him from his obligation of becoming a Baptist Minister and he was free to explore other opportunities outside of his home state. He applied to the University of Chicago and enrolled in 1900. Originally, he believed he would study and pursue a career in philosophy, but he was deterred from that path when he studied under John Dewey. Then, under the direction of James Rowland Angell, he pursued a career in psychology and forged a path that hadn’t been explored before; behaviorism. 

John Watson became well known for his publication of what he called “The Behaviorist Manifesto”. This manifesto was a letter that basically denounced all of psychology up until that point. He motioned to move away from the study of consciousness, and study the effects and cause of everyday human behavior. Using the ideas discovered by Pavlov and his dogs just years prior he decided to study the effects of behavior on children. This work translated into the famous study known as “Little Albert”. In this study, a young infant was conditioned to associate fear with objects not normally known to induce fear (i.e. fluffy objects).  In the study, Watson paired a white rat object with a loud noise to induce such fear.

Little Albert was removed from the study before he could before he could be de-condition of his fear of furry objects. The whereabouts of Little Albert today remain a mystery. Several people have attempted to locate to boy or even his mother. Some claim that he has been identified, but died at the age of six. Others claim that he is still alive today. The fact is that we will probably never truly know what ever happened to him, and if he kept the fear of white fluffy objects with him his whole life.

By Ben and Rebecca

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTrmSyJ0jzI - Clip of the Little Albert Experiment

King’s Chambers at the Tower of London

Ivan Pavlov

For our last week of class in London, we discussed behaviorism and all of the important people who were involved in the behaviorist school of psychology.  One of the most well-known behaviorist was Ivan Petrovich Pavlov.  Pavlov was born in 1849 in Ryazan, Russia, where he lived with his parents and ten other siblings.  Pavlov was originally interested in studying theology, attending the Ryazan Church School, but shortly after became fascinated by Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, therefore changing his study of interest to science, but more specifically physics and math.

 In 1870 he attended the University of Saint Petersberg, where he focused on physiology and in his fourth year there he completed his research project on the nerves of the pancreas.  He also helped found the Department of Physiology at the Institute of Experimental Medicine where he worked for 45 more years.  After receiving many awards for his accomplishments at the university and finally graduating, he decided to continue his education at the Academy of Medical Surgery.  Eventually Pavlov became an assistant at the Veterinary Institute were he did some research on the circulatory system for his dissertation.

Toward the end of the 19^th Century, Ivan Pavlov began conducting experiments on digestive systems of dogs. He noticed that the dogs would salivate in response to cues of food instead of the actual food. Pavlov knew that dogs don’t learn to salivate for food; it’s a natural reflex response, so he decided to test if he could tech reflex responses in reaction to a new learned stimulus. He set up an experiment where he would pair a specific bell tone every time the food was presented. The two variables were presented simultaneously, the food and the bell, and this process continued until the dogs learned to associate the sound of the bell with the presentation of food, casing the dog to salivate simply to the sound of a bell with the expectation that food was on the way. When the bell is paired with the food before the animal makes the association, it is called the unconditioned stimuli, while the unconditioned response is the dog’s salivation for the food. After the association is made, the simple sound of the bell would be the conditioned stimulus while the conditioned response would be the dog salivating to a simple sound of a bell. Pavlov’s discovery was completely accidental but the results of his experimentation changed the world of behaviorism and opened the gate to understanding learning behavior.

It is important to note that although Pavlov never called himself a psychologist nor did he particularly like the field of psychology, he had major impact on it.

http://www.simplypsychology.org/pavlov.html

Nick Martin

Olivia Foley

James Mark Baldwin

James Mark Baldwin

By, Hannah Grigorian and Christopher Sanchez

James Mark Baldwin was born on January 12, 1861 to an abolitionist father and mother. During the Civil War, his father moved to the North but Baldwin himself stayed with his family within Southern Carolina until he went to New Jersey to attend Princeton University. While beginning in theology he switched to philosophy quickly and used the Green Fellowship of Mental Science as a result to study at Leipzig with Wilhelm Wundt. In 1887 he married Helen Hayes Green who was the daughter of the president of the seminary he had begun to teach at but shortly after that in 1889, Baldwin moved to Toronto to attend school as the chair of logic as well as metaphysics. Here, his focus shifted to the study of infants and published the book, Mental Development in the Child and the Race. Methods and Processes in 1894. A man who was famous for scandal, Baldwin taught at Princeton for a short time before leaving as a result of a disagreement with the president as well as being a professor at John Hopkins before he was caught in the raid of a brothel. After the last scandal at John Hopkins, Baldwin was forced to leave an American career in psychology and live out the rest of his days in countries such as Mexico and France.

Even with the associated scandal, Baldwin had gained respect as an experimental psychologist. His two most prominent ideas fall under the construct of developmental psychology: Organic selection and the Baldwin Effect. Organic selection, later renamed as functional selection, is the idea that infants select the most useful movements from an excess of movements created by way of imitation. He extended this to later stages of development as well in an attempt to explain the learning process when it comes to things like drawing or writing. This is generally referred to as “niche building” within humans.  

The Baldwin Effect is another idea pertaining directly to developmental psychology for which Baldwin was so renowned for. The Baldwin Effect, also referred to as Baldwinian Evolution, deals with the effects of human behavior on the human genome. Baldwin believed that the behavioral decisions humans make are shaped into culture and sustained over generations have the ability to affect the human genome. For instance, the taboo on incest, which is a culturally enforced taboo, allows for the diversification of genes and increases the overall success of the species. Baldwin proposed that a similar idea could be extended to include many culturally enforced behaviors and that, in fact, breed the human species selectively in order to overcome cultural or physical obstacles that would be insurmountable to previous generations of humans.

Below you will find a Picture of James Mark Baldwin the ingenious and scandalous focus of this blog post.

Also, while studying the dead schools and behaviorism these last few days we have also been carving out time to spend exploring London! Click the Link below to check out some facts about the London Eye which we took advantage of this past weekend.

http://primaryfacts.com/665/10-london-eye-facts/

University College London

In our final week in London, we are busy completing the final touches on our papers and presentations. We are also able to make time for the fun parts too. For example, we live right around the corner from one of the most historic universities in London, University College London!  UCL was opened in 1826 to students of any race, class, or religion. It was also the first university to accept female students as equals to men. Today, it is ranked fourth in the world’s top ten universities. Through our research we have found that many historic figures have attended or had some sort of association with UCL in the past. From Alexander Graham Bell, the man who invented the telephone, to Chris Martin, the lead singer of the popular band Coldplay, UCL has a long list of successful alumni. James Sully was also a part of UCL’s history for a large part of his life. Sully was an early British psychologist that contributed many articles and textbooks about topics such as philosophy, psychology, and music. He was elected Grote Chair of the Philosophy of the Mind and Logic in 1892. He kept this position until 1903 when he retired. Another famous face seen at University College London was Karl Pearson.

Karl Pearson, the world famous statistician, was a lecturer at UCL during his career in academia.   He became an engineering lecturer with a heavy focus on mathematics.  Student accounts show that he was a very intelligent and confident man, yet he rarely backed down from an intellectual argument.  After extensive study in multiple different fields at several different institutions, Pearson came to UCL at the beginning of his career as a professor.  In 1890, at the beginning of his teaching career, he married his first wife Maria Sharpe at the age of 33.  Soon after, W.F.R. Weldon, a zoologist who became a great friend of Pearson’s, was offered a position at UCL as well.  The two continued to motivate and push each other’s intellectual boundaries until Weldon’s death in 1906.  Weldon also introduced Pearson to his most influential colleague, Sir Francis Galton.  A cousin of Charles Darwin, Galton theorized that the physical world could be analyzed using correlation rather than causation.  This idea peaked Pearson’s interest and eventually awarded him with the title, “the father of modern statistics”.  This is a great example of the quality of educators that UCL has produced over the past century.  Along with Pearson, several Nobel Prize winners and other important figures have been a part of the UCL faculty, making it one of the most prestigious institutions in the world. 

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/about-ucl/history

Here is a link to more UCL history!

Christian Panier & Samantha Beckwith

Sigmund Freud and Archaeology

Sigmund Freud and Archaeology

By Hannah Grigorian and Nick Martin

            Sigmund Freud was an avid collector of archeological artifacts. This is obvious from a mere glance around his home. Upon first inspection during our visit to Sigmund Freud’s final home his interest in archaeology was clear from the artifacts in every corner of his office and connections to Egyptology in his dream analyses. He was always trying to connect humans across cultures in order to delve into the human psyche. In fact, he even gained inspiration from them and used his artifacts as reference tools while psychoanalyzing his patients. Within his talk therapy he would use them as visual distractors for the patients he treated. While they could not see him they could focus on the other figures. Freud used the artifacts as a metaphor for his work. He compared psychoanalysis to anthropology is the sense that he was always digging through minds, searching for the little pieces he could salvage to try and put together a puzzle of subconscious information. For Freud, gathering the pieces of one’s mind takes a long time, much like gathering a collection of artifacts. Overall Freud appreciated the anthropological methods and compared them to his work in sense that he would work with elements of surface and depth, past and present, manifest and latent, adult and infantile, and hidden and revealed.  Freud once claimed that he had read wore anthropological works than psychological ones.

He also used archeological terms in his writings; he was heavily influenced by the science in that he understood the mind in a way that he was aiming to discover something hidden deep beneath the surface. Freud commonly used the anthropology metaphor, in his work, to his patients in order to explain the techniques he used, and to his family and friends. Notably, Freud was a literary critic when it came to archaeology. He published “Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva” in 1907. In it, he psychoanalyzed Wilhelm Jensen’s novel in which an archaeologist falls in love with a walking woman portrayed in bas-relief that he later name Gradiva and in a dreamlike state realizes it is his childhood sweetheart Zoe. Freud used the book to outline the neurotic symptoms present and how these could be helped with the aid of psychoanalysis. In his work he outlines the delusions within Gradiva and how these can be mimicked in everyday life. Archaeology, in this case, allowed Freud to bring psychoanalysis more toward the public with this connection to a popular, fictitious work and this was, as we said, just one of the many outlets archaeology provided for him. It maintained a dominant force in his written work and within his psychoanalyses.

Below you can see one of our own artifacts, a small Sigmund Freud replica, sitting on the sign of Sigmund Freud’s final home which was the inspiration for this blog post as well as a link to the Sigmund Freud Museum in Austria which came highly recommended by our guide. Despite Freud’s final home being in London with most of his home relics, he lived in Vienna, before fleeing the Nazis, in the apartment where the museum lies.

http://www.freud-museum.at/

Anna Freud

Anna Freud        

           Anna Freud was Sigmund Freud’s youngest child out of six.  She was born on December 3, 1895 in Vienna, Austria.  Anna was very close to and greatly influenced by her father, but was by no means hidden in his shadow.  She started her early career as an elementary school teacher, but started translating her father’s work into German, and that is when she became very interested in psychoanalysis and child psychology.  She created the field of child psychoanalysis, which became her main area of expertise.  In 1923 she began her children’s psychoanalytic practice in Vienna, and became the chair of the Vienna Psycho-Analytic Society.  Two years later in 1925 she began teaching child analysis at the Psychoanalytical Training Institute.

            In 1938 Anna was arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo, which led to her father’s decision to leave Austria for good and head for London.  She took care of her father until 1939, when he passed from cancer of the mouth.  In 1941 she opened the Hampstead War Nursery with Dorothy Tiffany-Burlingham as a home and psychoanalytic program to homeless children who were victims of the war.  The goal was for the kids to keep social interaction and have relationships in order to form attachments.

After the passing of her father, Anna Freud travelled to the United States on several occasions. She traveled to America to visit friends and give lectures. She even spent some time teaching at Yale Law School. Anna Freud is also responsible for setting up what is today referred to as the Freud Museum in London.  The museum is the house that the family moved to after leaving Vienna. It is in this house that Sigmund Freud died, along with all of his collectables and belongings.  These collectables were shipped from his home in Austria and recreated in the new house. It was Anna who stayed in the house after his death, and ultimately decided to turn the house into a museum when she was to pass away. After her death in 1982 the house was turned into a museum to commemorate the life and success of her father. The house was set up as not only a dedication to her father, but to society of Psychoanalysis. This is perhaps a tribute to the both the work that Anna and Sigmund Freud accomplished in their lifetimes. The Museum is openly available for the public to go and visit, and it still maintains its original setup.

http://www.freud.org.uk

This is a link to the Freud Museum in London. The site is complete with several images and explanations behind many of the important objects and antiquities in the home.

Picture: Inside Sagrada Família in Barcelona, Spain, where four students traveled this past weekend!

Post by: Olivia Foley and Ben Saad