Undergraduate Conceptual and Historical issues in psych Mapa Mental sobre Biology and Psychology in the 19th century, criado por Lucy Smith em 03-01-2023.
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