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