Zusammenfassung der Ressource
Biology and
Psychology in the
19th century
- Evolution
- Erasmus Darwin
- Formed a botanical
society
- Lamark
- Created a complete
theory of evolution
before Darwin
- Complexifying and adapting force, that animals strive for
improvement, cited for the inheritance of acquired
characteristics
- Charles Darwin
- There is a perpetual struggle between
individuals for resources
- Mathus, 1798 - essay on
the principle of population
- Natural selection - organisms that are more
adapted to conditions will reproduce
- Speciation
- Over time, adaptive changes in species accumulate and species
become more or less adapted to their environment. After a while,
animals from two separate groups can no longer produce fertile
offspring and a new species arises.
- Darwin, C. R., 1859 - on the origin of species by
means of natural selection
- significant for understanding
human and animal behaviour
today.
- Christianity's great chain of being:
God, Angels, Humans, Animals,
Plants, Rocks
- Ethology
- Deals with instincts, aggression,
learning, sexual selection etc
- Tinbergen
- Studied herring gulls, fish and honey bees.
- With Gulls, baby birds pecked at a red spot
on the parent's bill. With different designs
he found some stimulu that gulls would
peck at more than their actual parents
mouth, aka the supernormal stimulus
- Tinbergen, N., 1953
- Lorenz
- Imprinting
- Von Frisch
- Measured bees smell, taste, and
vision, and found that they
communicated with each other with a
'waggle dance'.
- Von Frisch, K., 1927
- Darwinian psychology
- In his later work such as the
"Descent of man" and "The
expression of emotions" he
mentioned human psychology
- Darwin, C. R., 1871 - the descent of man
- Language
- Is our ability to use language a
specific adaptation or a by-product
of other factors
- Languages evolve culturally, with some
words surviving and others dying out.
Darwin applied the principle of natural
selection to the development and
distinctions between human languages.
- Sexual selection
- He wrote about how females might prefer certain male
traits. These could be biological differences which make
particular animals more likely to reproduce
- Inter-sexual and intra-sexual selection
- Facial expressions
- Facial expressions are innate and universally understood
- Margaret mead believes they are
culturally conditioned, so Ekman went to
different countries to test which was
true
- Ekman found that facial expressions are universal and there are 6 basic ones: happiness,
surprise, sadness, fear, disgust, and anger
- Francis Galton
- Victorian Polymath
- Contributions were mainly
individual differences and
intelligence testing
- Nature versus nurture
- Twin studies
- The father of eugenics
- Eugenics is the study of how to arrange reproduction
within a human population to increase the occurrence of
heritable characteristics regarded as desirable
- Galton found mathematical relationships between
parents and their children, and he concluded bodily and
mental characteristics were largely inherited
- For example, weak and feeble-minded men have feeble-minded sons. He believes
income and status depend on ability
- Twin-studies and trans-racial adoption
studies determine the contribution of nature
and nuture
- Galton, F., 1869 - the comparative worth of different races
- Intelligence testing began in WW2 to
select people for jobs (IQ tests) and it entailed
biological determinism
- Army alpha and Beta tests - Gould 1981 - Sample was 1.75 million US army
recruits who completed 3 types of intelligence tests, the tests are culturally
and historically biased, they don't measure innate intelligence
- William James
- Focussed on the function
rather than the contents of
consciousness (functionalism)
- Free will
- Dual aspectism
- Holistic approach - we should look at the
whole stream of consciousness
- Pragmatic - beliefs and
ideas should be judged on
usefulness
- Roles of instincts and choice, we can
override our instincts
- Physiology of emotions
- Scientific racism
- In the 1800s, anthropologists and naturalist studied
skulls, such as shape and size.
- Morton
- He argued for racial hierarchies in society
- Gould attacked this proposition and pointed out the poor
science behind it, claiming that prejudice was driving
interpretation
- Gould, 1981 - the mismeasure
of man
- Freud and Psychodynamics
- Freud was influenced by
Darwin, Charcot and Breuer.
- In his psychodynamic theory, there are three levels of
consciousness: conscious, preconscious, and
unconscious
- We have repressed memories in our unconscious
- We can have freudian slips -
parapraxes are repressed thoughts
and actions that can arise, which can
be expressed in dreams
- We can make unconscious conflicts conscious
through analysis slips of the tongue, free association
and looking at dreams
- We are driven by two biological drives: eros (life instinct)
and thanatos (death instinct)
- Our personality comprises 3 components: the
superego, the ego, and the Id. The struggle
between these forces is psychodynamics
- We develop in five psychosexual stages
- Oral, Anal, Phallic, Latency, and Genital.
- If our stage-dependent needs arent met this can result in fixations,
which can determine later personality and behaviours
- Oral fixations can lead to compulsive behaviours and eating/drinking disorders, anal
fixations can lead to retentive and expulsive behaviours, and phallic fixations can lead to
extremes of dominant and submissive behaviour.
- Psychosexual conflict can create different problems
- Repression - pushing away from consciousness
- Identification - aligning
with the enemy
- Reaction formation - adopt
exaggerated opposition
- Projection - attributing thoughts onto others
- Rationalisation - excusing or de-valuing actions
- Displacement - shifting onto another
- Regression - reverting to earlier stage
- Denial
- Psychosexual conflicts and disorders include the oedipus complex and the electra complex