Alright. Back to the past, not back to the future. We're back to the past. talking more about history. History of psychology. and specifically looking at the ripples, I guess, from that big stone that Freud threw into this discipline that was developing. It was developing with a very scientific focus. and then Freud suddenly brought in this medical curveball, as it were, and stopped it being about sort of the study of the conscious mind. And instead kind of shaped it toward the study of pathology, of mental disorders. in fact along the way developed all these theories that extended well beyond mental disorders. And became in a sense theories about human behavior but theories that the scientific community felt just couldn't be tested. They were not scientific theories. They were just pulled out of thin air very fascinating, very interesting. But how do you know if it's real and if can never test whether it's real, then it's not science. Okay? So how did they then react to this. Let's find out. Lecture five, psychology after Freud. Alright. Well, perhaps not surprisingly the reaction was to suddenly retreat and, and in fact, become more scientific than ever before. And, and what I'm referring to of course now is the scientific group within psychology. Though the, the clinical psychology that Freud started continued on and flourished, okay. And I'll come back to that in a point, but it's certainly not the case that people went flocking away from clinical psychology. Once Freud had kind of set that stake in the ground, it was there, and it continued on. But the more scientific-minded psychologists they did react to Freud's ideas. And they reacted by saying, oh my goodness, we want to be a science of, a science of the mind, a science of psychology. We really have to be scientific. we cannot just come up with things like id and ego, and throw it out there, and, and suggest maybe its true if we can't prove that's true. we have to be much more discipline. now specifically they really went to a far end of the discipline scale. the suggestion was by most behaviorism and that's why this new school of psychology is called behaviorism. Behaviorists said, here's the best way to go. Let's restrict our experiments and our theories to things we can manipulate and things we can measure precisely. Some people call this SR psychology , Stimuli, which are things you can manipulate and responses which are things you can measure. And, you know, what happens in between? Let's not talk about that because we don't know. Those are theoretical things. We can't see what happens between when we present a stimulus and a person responds and so let's just not go there. Let's keep that separate. Okay, let me give you an example and I'm gon, I'm going to use this example for a couple of reasons. First to show that you can still get out some very interesting issues. despite these constraints but, also I hope to give you a sense that these are constraints. Boundaries and therefore it's not surprising that future psychologists are going to try to break out of them. But here's a good example to give you a start. So this is the little Albert experiment. It's one of the famous psychology experiments partly because of it's dubious ethics. It's a little worrisome. If this was your child I don't think you would be happy about it. But this is how the experiment worked. We start with Albert here, little Albert, and before anything happens we have little Albert in a room and we expose him to nice, little, furry creatures like this. And we look at his response. So the creatures would be the stimulus. So here's a stimulus here, a little furry rabbit. And the response would be literally how does Albert respond. And as kind of suggested in this picture, if you ignore the ominous hammer for a second. Albert's okay with the rabbit, oklay? And early on, before anything happened in this experiement, Albert was fine with furry critters. No fear response, no negativity at all. Now he did show negativity to other stimuli. So let's forget about the critters for a second and say, okay, we have Albert in a room. And somebody bangs on something metal with a hammer, makes that clanging sound. That scares Albert. So Albert gets scared and he cries and he reacts in fear. So rabbit doesn't produce any reaction. Hammer produces fear, and so now the experiment is, well what if we now associate the critter with the noise? 'Kay, what if we reliably do the following, we have Albert in a room right now, there's nothing else in the room, but then we introduce a furry critter. And if Albert approaches the critter or if the critter approaches Albert then we clang. We hit our hammer on that thing and clang which of course makes Albert cry because he's scared of that noise. We give him trial after trial of this. We introduce another critter, another clang, another critter, another clang. Let's say we do that 20 times. Then we, then we're not going to claim it anymore. We're not going to hit anything anymore. But now we just bring the critter in. What's Albert do? well what Albert does is he acts scared. Okay he's learned to associate this critter that used to be perfectly fine for him with something that scared him. And now he reacts in fear, not only to rabbits, by the way, but to stuffed rabbits, to shoals that are furry, to anything sort of like that. He's suddenly scared of all these things. So to the behaviorists they say, okay, now this is a cool experiment. because we've just manipulated the stimuli in ways we can measure. You know, the rabbit was there without the clang and then we had a rabbit with the clang. so this is all very clear and scientific what we did. And the behaviors that Albert shows are clearly measurable and categorizable in a way we all agree. And what we've shown in this experiment is that something like fear can be conditioned. Okay. You can learn to become scared of something, and that's what we've demonstrated. So, you know. Absolutely true. it's, it's a bit of a creepy experiment so I've got a link here. And what I'd like you to do is take a moment and follow that link. And it'll show you, you know, real footage of this experiment and I think you'll find it a little uncomfortable. but you know it, it really does show this notion of Behaviorism and the importance of the environment in terms of effecting how we grow. So it has some profound implications. so let's start there. 'Kay, check that out and come on back. Alright, welcome back. Well, so behaviorism was really important for psychology. it, it was that retreat to a much more scientific place and so now we really had a pretty big split. We had clinical psychology going strong but clinical psychology was really about the treatment. Pre-, predominantly a mental disorders. Then we had this experimental psychology that was more just generally inquisitive about, you know, human nature and what can we learn. But the problem was that this behaviorist approach, restricting yourself to stimuli and responses, there's only so much you can do within that space. And it was kind of like psychologists needed a way out and they got a way out. The, in the 1960s, computers started to become more common. And that's important because computers formed a very important analogy for psychologists. Here were devices that kind of did things humans did. They took input and they produced output. So kind of like a behavioral stimulus response. But, there were also very clear concrete things that happened in between. So that input, it was plotted into the computer but then if you're a, a technician or an engineer. You can really specify how that information was past from component to component. How it was changed and how it ultimately, for example, produced something on the computer screen. So this notion was called Information processing. That's what a computer did was processed information. And when a lot of psychologist looked at this they said, it's kind of like what we do, isn't it? as a memory system, it's getting inputs from the world. It's producing outputs on the world. Maybe we can think of this as[UNKNOWN] to a human. Maybe we can think of the hardware as the brain, and then the program, the software, is thoughts. As cognitive experiences. and so suddenly this was an analogy. And suddenly things like memory, which seemed really squishy before. There was this concrete notion of memory in a computer, and so it didn't seem quite as theoretical. It seemed much more reasonable to talk about various components of an information processing system. And a lot of that way of thinking was now imported into psychology and with it came the notion that, okay we agree with the behaviors. We have to be scientific, but what we don't agree with is that you have to be able to directly measure everything you're[UNKNOWN] Interested in. If what you're interested in leaves some sort of trace, so if learning leaves a trace of some sort. And we can look at that trace, we can make inferences about learning. We can go ahead and talk about that theoretical construct. And infer what the data tells us, about that. So that really opened the door. And it was kind of a middle ground. We're going to be a little theoretical. We're going to deal with some of these abstract concepts, but we're going to do it scientifically. Now cognitive psychology was primarily interested in the individual. Thinking about sort of the average individual. And how does the average memory system work, and the average attention system work. this was also a time of course of civil unrest in, in the 60s, and 70s, and think of things like Vietnam, political unrest. You know, communism versus fascism, although fascism was large, was largely kind of deteriorating by that point in time. But there was political instability and so people kind of, some psychologists said well, I want to know more than that. I want to actually study things like how humans influence each other, and how groups work together. how things like prejudice are formed. This was also times in America, things like segregation. And so this new kind of psychology opened up, social psychology. That's really about how humans interact with one another. At the same time, both of these, you can kind of say, are still focused on the average human being. The way an average human being's system works, the way that average human being is influenced by others. Some psychologists thought, well, that's interesting, but I actually want to know how a given individual is different from another. So they study things like, for example, intelligence. What makes one person more intelligent than another person. And is there anything we can do about that. So it's often educational systems really drove studies of individual differences and trying to learn about that. Things like personality would fall under this too. How is my personality different from your personality? Can we measure that? how, how stable are our personalities? so these are things that make one individual different from another. That's now a thriving area of psychology. I'm just kind of throwing out some of the things that are big now. Cross-cultural psychology is newer but really critical and really interesting in the context of something like this mook. the idea behind this is, hey, the way we think and the way we behave is partly determined by the culture in which we live. That there isn't a human behavior. There, there's a culturally bound human behavior on what might be considered perfectly reasonable behavior within one culture may not be considered reasonable behavior within a different culture. or even you know more suddenly than that perhaps there are ways in which culture determines the way humans think. and so this is an area called, called cross-cultural psychology. And it's becoming quite big now because of, of, of how much our cultures are intermixing in this globalized world. It's really important that we understand each other and how we're different. As I mentioned, clinical psychology, of course, has been, has been marching on. I highlight it here because I, I just want to be clear that it's, it's not just Freud. since Freud other schools of clinical psychology have also opened up. I'll give you one taste of that. There's one kind of clinical psychology that's called Positive psychology. And the pause of psychology is also a reaction of Freud in a way. Because it was kind of like these people looking at Freud's theory and saying, gee he's focusing on aggression, sexuality. Kind of like the darkest aspects of human nature. But there's some good things about humans. There's things like empathy and creativity. And altruism, shouldn't we study those? Shouldn't we try to understand those? What about a clinical approach that isn't focused on disorders, but is focused on helping individuals reach their maximum potential. And so a positive psychologist doesn't even talk about the people they see as patients, they call them clients. And they think of themselves kind of like a financial planner would think, you know I'm helping you get a healthy bank account. Well positive psychologist is trying to lie to lead a mentally healthy life, so they're not focused on the problems. They're focused on positive side of things, that gives you a taste of clinical psychology. But the last one I really want to highlight and it's party because of it's recency, but also because of its dominance. Is what I'm calling the Biological Revolution. With scanning devices, brain scanning devices, becoming so powerful and so within reach to researchers over the last, oh I'd say, you know, 20 years, but especially the last 10, let's say. we can now watch the brain in action. And so while a cognitive psychologist is, would say they're primarily interested in the software, the mind. How information is processed, we can now ask our participants to do some information processing task. But we can watch their brain as they do it. So we can actually, in addition to seeing how they do on the task, we can learn the relationship between that and the underline hardware, the brain. So over the last little while while we've learned a lot about the brain from these devices. And, it's become so omnipotent that any of these areas that we taked about now you could remove the word psychology. And throw in the word neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, social neuroscience, well this doesn't really happen in psychology but, cross cultural neuroscience, clinical neuroscience As areas where, yeah, maybe someone's interested in prejudice let's say, but maybe they're interested in seeing how prejudicial behavior is related to the brain. And so they're considering the brain at the same time. So that's a very important part of psychology, in fact it's so important now, that's where we're going to begin. We're going to move now in week 2 to a careful analysis of the brain so that we have a good understanding of what it's about. And then once we have that in our pocket, we can now talk about some of these other areas. And some of their coolest experiments and kind of play that same game of learning what we learned. And also thinking about how it relates to the brain. That's the journey ahead. I look forward to taking it with you. Let the adventure continue.
