All the interim summaries of the first half of Historical and conceptual issues in psychology, by Brysbaert, M and Rastle, K (second edition)

Chapter 1

The invention of writing

• Features of the preliterate civilisation:
  • Knowledge confined to know-how without theoretical knowledge of the underlying principles
  • Fluidity of knowledge
  • Collection of myths and stories about the beginning of the universe (animism)
• Written language appeared separately in at least four cultures, in each case it was preceded by proto-writing
• Writing consists of a combination of pictograms and phonograms
• Written records form an external memory, which allows an accumulation of knowledge
• For a long time the number of readers was limited. In addition, they were not encouraged to think critically about what they were reading (scholastic method)

The discovery of numbers

• Knowledge depends on counting and measuring. The first written forms of counting consisted of lines (tallies) in the bones and stones
• Because it is difficult to discern more than four lines in a glance, the tallies were grouped. The grouping usually occurred in fives
• Gradually a separate symbol was used for five and multiples of five
• Later numbers systems were based on multiples of 10
• Number names indicate that the intention of numbers was a slow process; it took quite some time before a useful system was discovered
• The Greek and Roman number systems were suboptimal because their notation did not assign a meaning to the place of digits. Such a place coding system was developed in India. This required the symbol for 0.

The Fertile Crescent

Civilisations in the Fertile crescent:

• Ancient Mesopotamia: mathematics (algebra, astronomy, calendar)
• Ancient Egypt: geometrical knowledge, calendar, hieroglyphs

The Greeks

• Ancient Greece was the birthplace of philosophy and saw major advances in medicine.
• Two great philosophers were Plato and Aristotle.
• Plato and Aristotle founded schools (Academy and Lyceum) which together would educate students for centuries. The two other schools were the Stoa (with an emphasis for self-control) and the Garden of Epicurus (which emphasised the enjoyment of simple pleasures)
• Under Alexander the Great, there was significant expansion and interaction with other cultures, leading to what is called the Hellenistic culture and a shift to Alexandria, where knowledge became more mathematical and specialised.

Developments from the Roman Empire to the end of the Middle Ages

Ancient Romans:

• Assimilated the Greek methods and knowledge
• Were more interested in technological advances than in philosophy

Byzantine empire

• Eastern part of the Roman empire
• Preservation of the legacy of the Ancient Greeks

Arab empire:

• Founded on Islam, contained the Fertile Crescent
• Translation and extension of the Greek works
• Particularly strong on medicine, astronomy, mathematics (algebra) and optics
• Occupied most of Spain

Western Roman empire:

• Largest decline in scientific knowledge
• Catholic church main preserver; not very science-oriented
• In the Renaissance referred to as ‘dark ages’

Turning the tide in the West

Post-medieval developments in Western Europe

• The establishment of (cathedral) schools and universities
• Increased mobility of the scholars
• Discovery of the ancient Greek and Arabic texts
• Growing impact of Aristotle’s work

A cultural movement:

• Increased interest in and imitation of the Ancient Greek and Roman cultures (Renaissance)
• Increasing status of science and scientists

The Protestant reformation

• Rebellion against the dominance of the Catholic church
• More importance given to education, critical thinking, hard work and worldly success

Book printing

• Rapid and Massive availability of reliable information

Colonisation of the world

• Need for technological and scientific innovations
• Discovery of new worlds

The limits of history writing

• History writing always involved simplification and streamlining
• Therefore, biases easily slip in:
  • Centred on persons rather than on zeitgeist
  • Too much credit is given to a small number of people (Matthew effect)
  • Facts are interpreted on the basis of what happened afterwards (hindsight bias)
  • Too much attention is given to the contribution of the author’s own group (ethnocentrism)
  • History writers often rely on summaries and interpretations made by other writers

Chapter 2

From a geocentric to a heliocentric model of the universe

• The need for an improved calendar renewed interest in the motions of the Earth, the Moon and the Sun relative to one another.
• The model of the universe that was used was the geocentric model of Aristotle and Ptolemy. This model has the Earth at the centre of the universe.
• Copernicus became interested in an alternative heliocentric model with the Sun at the centre. He did not publish this model until the year of this death, partly because he thought the evidence was not convincing enough and partly because he did not want to upset the Roman Catholic church.
• Nearly a century later Galileo Galilei used a telescope to look at the night sky and observed several phenomena that were easier to explain on the basis of a heliocentric model than on the basis of a geocentric model. in doing so, he upset the Roman Catholic church.
• Because the evidence was so convincing and could be verified by others, the heliocentric model rapidly came to dominate astronomy despite the Roman Catholic church’s resistance.

Mechanisation of the world view

• The response of the Roman Catholic church to Galilei encouraged René Descartes to build a new philosophy of man
• In this philosophy a clear distinction was made between the soul, which was define and could not be studied with scientific methods, and the rest of the universe (including the human body), which was a complex machine that could be studied scientifically. This became known as (Cartesian) dualism.
• The mechanistic view of the world came to replace Aristotle’s view, which still contained animistic elements

The formulation of the fist laws of physics

• Newton explained why planets orbit the Sun and moons orbit planets
• In doing so, he not only defined the relevant forces, but described them in such detail that they could be calculated precisely
• The resulting mathematical equations were the first laws of physics, published in the Principia mathematica, convincing scholars that science could uncover the mechanisms underlying the universe

What set off the scientific revolution in seventeenth-century Europe?

The following factors are thought to have precipitated the scientific revolution in seventeenth-century Europe

• The growth of the population, urbanisation, and the emergence of a considerable class of merchants
• A crisis in religion
• New inventions that made information more easily available, that led to new questions, and that included the promise of scientific discoveries leading to wealth and power
• The existence of universities and patronage
• Massive enrichment from the Greek and Arab civilisations
• The idea that small issues could be solved without the need of an overall view that explained everything in the universe

The scientific revolution could also have died prematurely if:

• A major disaster or war had happened
• Religion had been able to suppress the new thinking
• Natural philosophers had not been able to organise themselves and create structures that solidified their process

The new method of the natural philosopher

• In particular, the writings of Francis Bacon were important in making the new method of the natural philosopher explicit
• Bacon’s advice comprised the following elements
  • Observation and inductive reasoning are much more important in science than acknowledged by Aristotle
  • Systematic observation is important to have a good understanding of the phenomena and to come to correct axioms; it is also important to spot evidence against the prevailing axioms and convictions
  • Because of the limitations of observations, they must be supplemented by experimental histories to extract the truth from nature (rather than passively observe nature); observation and understanding must constantly interact
• Bacon’s view was able to explain quite well the developments that resulted in the scientific revolution, but the emphasis on observation and experimental histories did not explain the ways in which Galilei and Newton sometimes did came to their conclusions
• Another major change was that natural philosophers started to realise that not all knowledge had been known in ancient times and that much still remained to be discovered

Changes in society as a result of the scientific revolution

Science has induced many changes in society, such as:

• People became more prosperous and knowledgeable
• A scientific career became a new means of upward social mobility
• Life and knowledge became more differentiated and specialised

The reactions to the scientific revolution can roughly be divided into positive and negative ones

• Positive reactions
  • Reason and science should be the basis of social order (age of enlightenment)
  • Science is the motor of progress and true knowledge (positivism)
  • Scientific knowledge is always true and should guide decisions made
• Negative reactions
  • Roman Catholic church: scientific knowledge is second-rank and dangerous if not guided by religious morals
  • Protestant churches: many saw no inherent contradiction between science and religion, but science still had to be guided by religion (led to attacks by positivists around 1870)
  • Humanities: the traditional world order and education have proven their use; it is dangerous to overhaul it all with rationality and science
  • Romanticists: the mechanistic world view relied on by scientists is wrong; the universe is a living, changing organism

The two cultures

• Snow regretted the gulf that existed between scientists and humanists in the 1950s

Chapter 3

Individualisation in Western society

Since the end of the middle ages there has been increasing individualisation in society. Factors hypothesised to play a role include:

• Increased complexity of society
• Increased control by the state
• Individuality promoted by Christianity
• The increased availability of mirrors, books and letters

Empiricism vs rationalism

Rationalism

• Existence of innate knowledge (nativism)
• Reason is the source of knowledge
• Main research method: deductive reasoning
• Main applications: logic, mathematics
• Main proponents: Plato, Descartes, Leibniz

Empiricism

• No innate knowledge (tabula rasa)
• Perception is the source of knowledge
• Main research methods: observation, experimentation, inductive reasoning
• Main applications: natural sciences
• Main proponents: natural philosophers, Locke, Berkeley, Hume

Psychological studies of the mind

Epistemology

• Rise of empiricism (Locke), which questioned the traditional rationalist view
• In its extreme form empiricism leads to idealism, as argued by Berkeley and Hume
• Kant sought to reconcile rationalism and empiricism by arguing that the mind imposes structure on the incoming sensory experiences and that it requires a coherent and constant input to make sense of input
• Idealism was also put aside by Scottish common sense

Rational and empirical psychology

• Psychology was added as the fourth part of metaphysics
• Important impetus: two books by Wolff, who made a distinction between rational psychology (based on axioms and deductions) and empirical psychology (based on introspection)
• Kant argued that psychology could not be a proper natural science, because of the act of introspection changed the state of the mind, inner observations could not be separated and recombined at will, and could not be formulated in mathematical laws
• Comte argued that introspection as a scientific method was flawed and claimed that the human mind could only be studied scientifically by focusing on physiology and the products of the human mind

Textbooks of psychology

The increased importance of psychology has resulted in the production of textbooks since the late 1700s, which illustrate the themes considered important and which also influenced people’s views of psychology. Four books have been discussed:

• Kant: Anthropology as a collection of observed facts about humans
• Herbart: Attempt to make psychology scientific by introducing mathematical laws
• Upham: Claim that intellectual (mental) philosophy is a science worthwhile to be studied
• Bain: Introduction of the nervous system and other physiological information in a textbook of psychology

Scientific studies of 'psychological' functions

Characteristics and limitations of human perception and information processing interested the natural philosophers, who began to run Baconian experimental studies. They discussed two lines of research:

• Studies on human perception. The level of detail humans can discern (Hooke), the influence of illumination on this capacity (Mayer), the detection of just noticeable differences between stimuli (Weber, Fechner) and the formulation of a psychophysical theory based on them (Fechner)
• The time needed to perform tasks and the speed of signal transmission in the nervous system.
• Astronomers varied in their estimates of the timing of events (personal equation) and showed variability in them. Von Helmholtz could measure the transmission speed of nerves in frogs (and humans), Donders could measure the time needed for simple mental operations

Evolutionary theory

Evolutionary theory

• Proposed by Darwin
• Several developments made the theory likely in the nineteenth century: interest in diversity and correspondence between species, discovery of fossils, cultivation of new flower types
• Darwin discovered that random variations at birth, together with limited availability of resources, could explain evolution on the basis of natural selection
• Theory published in The origin of species
• Darwin could not explain how new random generated organisms could come to dominate the existing organisms

Common misunderstandings of evolutionary theory

• The mistaken belief that there is a direction in the genetic changes that cause the initial variation
• The mistaken belief that evolution results in better or stronger organisms

An example of Darwin’s influence: Galton

• Galton tried to find evidence for the heredity of animal and human features
• Was not very successful, but inspired subsequent generations to address the issue of intelligence testing.

The contribution of statistics

• Research on living organisms required other data analysis than research in physics and chemistry, because the data were noisy and simultaneously influenced by many different factors
• Quetelet discovered that, whereas individual data points were impossible to predict, such prediction was possible when the analysis were based on the means of hundreds of observations
• Fisher further showed how researchers could adapt their methodology so that the influence of confounding variables could easily be factored out in statistical analysis

Chapter 4

The foundation of the first laboratory of experimental psychology in Germany

• German universities were reformed in the nineteenth century to make them more dynamic and advance the new sciences
• Wundt was a German physician who became interested in applying the physiological methods to psychological phenomena
• When to obtained a professional chair at the University of Leipzig, he established a new laboratory in 1879. This event became seen as the birth of psychology
• Wundt not only used the experimental methods from physiology, but also thought that introspection was a valid research method and that information about the psychology of individuals could be obtained by looking at cultures (historical method). The impact of the latter two methods increased as he grew older.
• Many psychologists got their initial training in Wundt’s laboratory.

Starting psychology in America: James and Titchener

• James was an Americal physician who became interested in psychology through his teachings. Arguably wrote the most influential textbook of early psychology.
• James was influenced by Darwin’s evolutionary theory. This resulted in interest in the survival functions of the human mind and in comparative research of animals and humans
• Titchener promoted structuralism on the basis of introspection in the USA
• Had limited impact because of criticisms of the method (introspection), the limited usefulness of the knowledge (functionalism), and the objection that humans are more than the sum of the individual sensations (Gestalt psychology)

Psychology in France: Ribot, Charcot, Binet

• In France, psychology was seen as part of the humanities as a result of Comet’s writings. This was questioned by Ribot, who pointed to the developments in the UK and the German lands.
• Another towering figure in France was Charcot, a neurologist best known in psychology for his research on hysteria. Trusted entirely on his clinical expertise, which turned out to be wrong in case of hypnosis.
• Binet and Simon’s development of the first valid test of intelligence is France’s best-known contribution to early psychology

Freud and psychoanalysis

• Freud was one of the first neurologists, a new group of therapists at the end of the nineteenth century. Before, people with mental disorders had been taken care of first on an informal basis and then – increasingly- in institutions, where they were treated as prisoners or patients. Basic treatment in asylums consisted of containment and attempts to re-educate the patients.
• Freud was the first to actually talk to his patients (psychological treatment). On the basis of these talks he constructed the psychoanalytical theory, which argues that the unconscious mind plays a strong role in the control of people’s actions
• Psychoanalysis had a massive impact, both on neurologists and psychologists, because it provided a coherent and attractive theory of psychopathology

Starting psychology in UK

• Psychology had a hard time becoming an academic discipline in the UK. This largely had to do with the fact that the universities did not encourage the new discipline. Although there is no evidence for active opposition, every bit of progress required substantial effort
• In England James Sully from University College London was the driving force, although the University of Cambridge managed to have the first laboratory of experimental psychology under the direction of W.H.R Rivers. Another main source of inspiration was Galton’s work on individual differences.
• In Scotland the most active college was the University of Aberdeen where Alexander Bain was professor and G.F Stout got his first appointment as lecturer
• To fill the void left by universities, intellectuals interested in psychology twice founded a Learned society. The first attempt collapsed with the death of the initiator; the second one, started by Sully at UCL, was more successful and still exists today
• The UK also had some impact because it was home to two early journals of psychology; Mind and the British Journal of Psychology, both of which still exists

What about the five schools of psychology?

• The beginnings of psychology are often depicted by making a distinction between five quarrelling schools.
• A look at the original sources does not warrant this view as a summary of the core developments within psychology. It rather seems to be a re-interpretation of the original meaning of the philosophical term ‘school’, in order to depict the history of psychology in simplifying theses, antithesis and syntheses.

Chapter 5

The perception of psychology in the USA at the beginning of the twentieth century

• Scientific psychology expanded rapidly in the USA: many laboratories were established at universities, the APA was founded, and two important journals were initiated.
• Meanwhile psychology changed to address concerns prevalent tin American society (adaption to the environment, practical usefulness). This led to functionalism
• At the same time, the position of the psychology laboratories were precarious. They were mostly part of philosophical institutes (rather than science faculties), and the public at large did not associate psychology with science but with phrenology, mesmerism and spiritualism. This created pressure to enhance the scientific status of psychology.

Inspiration from animal research

• The evolutionary theory led to an increased interest in animal behaviour
• Initially animal behaviour was studied by focusing on anecdotes of intelligent behaviour. These were explained by assuming the same reasoning processes in animals as in humans
• Thorndike introduced a different approach. Animals were put into a controlled environment and conclusions were drawn on the basis of the animals’ behaviour
• The focus of animal behaviour was further strengthened by Pavlov’s work on classical conditioning
• Together the changes resulted in a research method that much more resembled the methods used in the natural sciences. Watson started to make the claim that the method would also be good for the study of human functioning

The behaviourist manifesto

• In 1913 Watson used his position as editor of Psychological Research to launch the behaviourist manifesto
• Psychology was defined as a purely objective experimental branch of natural science, based on the prediction and control of behaviour
• In the manifesto Watson argued that previous research on introspection into consciousness had failed significantly
• In the manifesto Watson left an opening for later study of more complex behaviour. In his later writings he came to deny the importance of such behaviour

Influence from the philosophy of science

• Behaviourism was part of a wider movement within Western society to make science the cornerstone of human progress
• The philosophers of science tried to define the qualities of a true science. In addition to the ideal of mathematical laws, behaviourists took three ideas from them
  • Operational definitions are necessary
  • There is a distinction between independent variables and dependent variables
  • Science relies on verification

Further developments in behaviourism

• After Watson’s departure from academic life, behaviourism was continued by three heavyweight neo-behaviourists: Hull, Skinner and Tolman
  • Hull: mathematical equations with operationally defined variables that allow detailed predictions of behaviour in specified circumstances
  • Skinner: radical behaviourism
  • Tolman: purposive behaviourism

Mathematical and technological advances questioning the behaviourist tenets

After World War II experimental psychologists came to include mental processing in their models. This was due to the following developments:

• Mathematicians proved that all information could be represented by a Turing machine, working on the basis of binary units and Boolean operations.
• This information is to a large extent independent of the device on which it is implemented
• Neurophysiologists presented evidence that the brain could be considered as a Turing machine
• It was argued that the S-R chains proposed by the behaviourists were not powerful enough to be Turing machines and hence to simulate human behaviour

The liberating metaphor of the computer

The existence of computers provided psychologists with a new metaphor to understand the mind and the nature of their own research

• The computer made it easier to understand how an organism can seem to be goal-directed, without there being a homunculus who sets the goals and checks the progress
• Computers allowed psychologists to simulate human functioning
• Computers needed programmers who dealt with the information processing, independently of the ways in which the processes were carried out in the machine

The emergence of cognitive psychology

Major steps in the emergence of cognitive psychology:

• Miller’s 1956 article on the limits of short-term memory, showing that the human brain could be conceptualised as a computer with a limited capacity.
• Neisser’s 1967 book Cognitive psychology: review of the evidence and important for establishing the name

Specific features of cognitive psychology

Specific features of cognitive psychology are

• The acceptance of a separate level of mental representations, to which transformation algorithms apply
• Information processing on the mental representations captured by boxes-and-arrows diagrams and computational models
• Models designed to lead to predictions that can be verified in experiments making use of performance measures

Focus on

• Behaviourism and cognitive psychology are often depicted as revolutions that radically altered psychological research
• This is only true to some extent, because neither behaviourism nor cognitive psychology has been all-encompassing. This view also hides the fact that various approaches in psychology are not entirely incompatible with each other and represent different ideas of how scientific research should be done.

Chapter 6

Ideas in Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece

• The Edwin Smith papyrus illustrates that practising physicians rapidly made a link between injuries to the brain and mental and behavioural consequences.
• In the Acient Egyptian and Greek societies at large, however, the link between the heart and intelligence was stronger.
• Galen’s experiments clearly established the primacy of the brain and the nerves, rather than the heart and the veins, for the control of movement
• Galen thought that the soul was located in the sold parts of the brain and commanded animal spirits in the ventricles, which travelled through the nerves to the body parts to be influenced.

Further insights into the anatomy and functioning of the nervous system in hte Renaissance and the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

Advances in the understanding of the brain in the Renaissance and the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries:

• In the Renaissance, Vesaluis and peers followed Galen’s belief that the soul was located in the sold parts of the brain and commanded animal spirits that resided in the ventricles and travelled through the nerves to the other body parts
• There was also a renewed interest in the behavioural consequences of brain injury
• In the seventeenth-eighteenth centuries there was a gradually increasing focus on the brain itself. A distinction was made between the grey and the white matter in the cerebral hemispheres.
• There was also growing interest in the reflex, as a type of response that seemed to escape voluntary control.
• The new insights did not (yet) lead to improved treatment

The breakthroughs of the nineteenth century

Five big breakthroughs in the nineteenth century

• Understanding that the spinal cord was an integral part of the central nervous system and was involved in the control of many bodily functions
• Discovery that many processes in the central nervous system were reflexes that did not need voluntary initiation; question to what extent higher cognitive functions could be considered as reflexes as well
• Intense discussions between proponents of brain equiptotentiality and adherents of brain localisation; initially the former were dominant; increasingly, however, evidence for the latter position was found
• Discovery that the brain consisted of a network of individual neurons that communicated with each other; required good microscopes and techniques to stain neurons
• Discovery that the neuron store and transfer information by means of electro-chemical signals; electrical information mainly involved in intra-cell communication, chemical information transfer important for communication between neurons

The emergence of neuropsychology in the twentieth century

Neuropsychology

• Examination of bullet wounds in the World Wars provided physicians with more detailed knowledge about the behavioural consequences of brain injuries. Two famous examples were the partial loss of vision after gun-shot wounds above the neck, and the inability to recognise faces
• Research and treatment of the consequences of brain damage were increasingly taken over by psychologists, who called themselves neuropsychologists
• In the 1970 and 1980s a number of neuropsychologists started to study the implications of brain damage fro the information-processing models proposed by cognitive psychologists; this was the start of cognitive neuropsychology
• One of the first topics addressed by the new approach was deep dyslexia

Brain imaging and the turn to neuroscience

• Single-cell recording allows researchers to find out to which type of information individual neurons respond; it is an invasive technique
• EEG recordings allow researchers to pick up the summed electrical activity of groups of cells non-invasively. They allow researchers to detect cases of epilepsy and to discover different stages of sleep
• ERP studies are based on EEG recordings and allow researchers to find out how the brain response changes as a function of different types of stimuli
• MEG scanning also measures the electrical activity of groups of neurons and allows researchers to add localisation to the ERP studies
• PET scanning allows researchers to see which brain areas require extra blood during the performance of tasks by tracing a radioactive substance injected into the blood
• fMRI scanning allows researchers to localise brain activity on the basis of oxygen use. Produces more detailed images than PET and does not require an injection of substance into participants.
• TMS allows researchers to interfere briefly with the activity of a small region of the grey matter and to examine the effects of this inference on the time needed to complete a particular task. Makes it possible to ascertain that the brain region is crucial for performance
• The above techniques have allowed researchers to measure brain activity while participants are performing mental tasks. This created a new research field, cognitive neuroscience
• Not everyone is convinced that brain imaging techniques allow researchers to examine the detailed cognitive processes involved in correct task performance

Focus on

• Cognitive neuropsychiatry states that symptoms of mental disorders can be understood as the result of errors in the cognitive information-processing model that accounts for normal psychological functioning The
• Capgras delusion refers to a situation in which a person still recognises close relatives, but is convinced that they have been replaced by look-alikes
• The Freudian interpretation of the delusion refers to conflicting feelings towards the relatives, which result in a dissociation between the absent loved persons and the present hated look-alikes
• Cognitive neuropsychiatry argues that the condition results from blocked information transfer in an unconscious, emotion-related processing route that under normal circumstances elicits and emotional response each time we encounter a familiar person. As a result, the relatives feel strange, even though we recognise them.