User:Sallieg37/functionalism figures/dumping ground

Functionalism Figures

Hugo Munsterberg (June 1, 1863-December 19, 1916) was born in what is now Gdansk, Poland. He entered the University of Leipzig in 1883 and received a Ph.D. in physiological psychology under Wilhelm Wundt in 1885.

Wundt criticized Munsterberg’s experimental studies in psychophysics because they dealt with cognition rather than feelings. In 1891 he met William James, who offered him a three-year term as psychology lab chair at Harvard. While there, Munsterberg became very interested in applying psychological concepts to applied clinical psychology although he initially disapproved of applied psychology. While at Harvard, he oversaw many important dissertation students, including Mary Whiton Calkins.

Munsterberg had an important role in trying to improve relations between Germany and the United States, to little avail. Munsterberg also had a strong interest in forensic psychology, or how psychological concepts could affect trial outcomes and even applied this research to court cases. He also suggested that psychology could improve the market by improving work performance and influencing advertising. Although initially schooled as an experimental psychologist, Munsterberg’s work and contrubutions to the field of psychology are distinctly applied in nature.

Mary Whiton Calkins (1863-1930) was born in Hartford, Connecticut. She graduated from Smith College in 1884 with a degree in classics and philosophy. She began tutoring classics at Wellesley College and took an interest in psychology. A professor at Wellesley offered her a teaching position in psychology as long as she completed a year’s more of studies in the field, which she accepted. As a woman, her career options were quite limited. The president of Harvard at the time did not want to let Calkins take classes at Harvard, but William James and Josaih Royce protested and Calkins was finally allowed to take classes as long as she was not registered as a student. Calkins worked alongside Edmund Sandford to create the first psychology lab at Wellesley College. Calkins was distinct in the field of psychology in part because of her struggles with prejudice and discrimination as a pioneering woman in a male-dominated field. She became the first woman president of the American Psychological Association. Her research focused on memory, dream research, and self-psychology. She invented the paired-association technique of memory study in which numbers are paired with colors, and later recall of these pairings is tested.

G. Stanley Hall (1844-1924) was born in Ashfield, Massachusetts. He graduated from Williams College in 1867 and enrolled in the Union Theological Seminary. Hall studied philosophy and theology at the University of Bonn, in Germany. While in Germany, he felt very liberated from his pious upbringing. When he returned home he began tutoring languages and took interest in reading Wundt’s Physiological Psychology. After taking an interest in psychology, he settled in Massachusetts and began studying at Harvard. He was the first to receive a doctorate in psychology in America under the direction of William James at Harvard. He then moved back to Germany in hopes of working with Wundt, but ultimately Wundt had very little influence on Hall. Hall returned to the United States and began giving lectures on the importance of studying children to improve education. He was offered a professorship at Johns Hopkins. He founded the American Journal of Psychology and later became the first president of Clark University. His most important work focused on the growth of the mind in relation to evolutionary theory. His recapitulation theory is the idea that child development repeats the history of humans, in that children begin as savages and develop a rational, intellectual nature as they mature.

Francis Cecil Sumner (1895-1954) was born in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. He completed elementary school but was unable to attend high school because he was black. He loved reading, however, and read every textbook he could get his hands on. He completed an entrance exam and was accepted into Lincoln University at age fifteen. He graduated from Lincoln and later attended Clark University, where he began working with the president, G. Stanley Hall. He went back to Lincoln University and became increasingly interested in the field of psychology. He was approved to begin working on his Ph.D. at Clark University but was drafted and fought in World War I. Finally, after the war, he was able to become the first African American to receive a Ph.D. in psychology. Sumner is noted for implementing a psychology program at a historically black college, Howard University. In addition, he translated thousands of articles from German, Spanish, and French into English so that they would be available to American psychologists. He also investigated bias in research focused on suggesting the inferiority of blacks. John Dewey (1859-1952) was born in Burlington, Vermont. He attended the University of Vermont and earned a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. He then accepted a teaching position at the University of Michigan and later the University of Chicago. Dewey’s mentors included G. Stanley Hall and Herbert Baxter Adams. At Chicago, he established a laboratory school that inspired educators to implement more interactive learning across the nation. He went on to teach at Columbia University, where many of his students recalled that he was brilliant but an unskilled teacher. Dewey’s criticism of the reflex arc was very important for functional psychology. He suggested that reflexes form circles rather than arcs because we receive feedback after actions occur. His ideas were strongly rooted in evolutionary psychology. Consciousness and behavior are essential elements of human survival. The framework that Dewey provided for the functionalist school of thought was essential to the progression of psychology. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Huffmanb14 (talk • contribs) 11:44, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

JAMES ROWLAND ANGELL (1869-1949)→ Burlington, Vermont; graduated from Michigan with Bachelor’s Degree in 1890, then received Masters in Psychology from Harvard in 1892. He published the textbook Psychology; An Introductory Study of the Structure and Functions of Human Consciousness in 1904, which became the major statement of the functionalist approach to psychology. In it, the book notes that the function of the conscious is to improve organism’s adaptive abilities and that psychology’s goal is to study how mind assists organism in adjusting to it’s environment. Angell describes three major themes of the functionalist movement, which can be found in book on p. 152. He was greatly influenced by John Dewey. Angell believed: “Functional psychology is interested in mental operations by way of mental activity and its relation to the larger biological forces" and that "functional psychologists must consider the evolution of the mental operations in humans as one particular way to deal with the conditions of our environment. Mental operations by themselves are of little interest. Functional psychology is not conscious elements” In 1905, he became the head of a newly created psychology department at University of Chicago. During the last year of World War I Angell worked for the military under the supervision of Northwestern University psychologist Walter Dill Scott. In 1921, he became the president of Yale University until he retired in 1937. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1932. Angell is especially credited with modeling the functionalist movement into a working school of thought and making the psychology department at the University of Chicago the most influential of its day, with it becoming the major training ground for functionalist psychologists.

HARVEY CARR Along with John Dewey and James Rowland Angell, Carr is credited with the development of functionalism as a school of thought. He attended the University of Colorado as a student of psychology. He studied experimental psychology with Dewey and Watson at University of Chicago, then later studied under Angell. He also worked with Watson as a laboratory assistant, who introduced him to animal psychology. Carr served as the head of Chicago’s psychology department later on, following Angell heading it. Under Carr, functionalism at Chicago reached its height and popularity as a formal system. In 1925, he published Psychology: A Study of Mental Activity which would organize the functionalist ideas. This worked contained two major themes pertaining to functionalist psychology: 1. Subject matter of psychology is described as a mental activity i.e. memory, perception, will, judgment, etc. 2. Mental activity functions in acquiring, fixating, retaining, organizing, and evaluating experiences, then using these experiences to determine future actions. By Carr’s time of publishing in 1925, functionalism was considered to be mainstream psychology. Carr’s ideas on functional psychology puts more emphasis on mental processes rather than consciousness.

HELEN BRADFORD THOMPSON WOOLEY (1874-1947)

Wooley was a pioneer in study of gender differences, and she was known for her study of childhood education and welfare. Woolley is said to have walked the line between scientific research and social activism. In 1903, Woolley published her controversial doctoral dissertation, The Mental Traits of Sex at the University of Chicago on gender differences and similarities, but these conclusions were not well received by male academic psychologists. She received her Bachelor’s Degree and PhD from University of Chicago, and her major professors were Angell and Dewey. She became the director of the psychological lab at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts after her post grad fellowship in Paris and Berlin. She later began working at the Vocation Bureau in Cincinnati, Ohio. She was the first woman and first psychologist to head this organization, which was one of the earliest psychological clinics in public schools Unlike popular beliefs at the time, Woolley found that there were negative consequences for a child to drop out of school to begin working. Her research on the effects of child labor let to changes in Ohio’s labor laws. She performed the first experimental test on the Darwinian notion that women were biologically inferior to men. Results showed no sex differences in emotional functioning and only small, insignificant differences in intellectual abilities. Also showed women to be slightly superior to men in memory and sensory perception. As part of the functionalist tradition, Woolley helped to expose the strengths as well as the limitations of psychology as a way of investigating practical social issues.

JAMES MCKEEN CATTELL (1860-1944)

Cattell was born in Easton, Pennsylvania and attended Lafayette College, where he became interested in psychology through his own experiments with drugs and their effects on his cognitive functioning. He was the first professor of psychology in the US at the University of Pennsylvania, and he was an editor and publisher of the scientific journal Science. Cattell helped establish psychology as a legitimate science. He worked with Wilhem Wundt, whom he completed his PhD under. Wundt and Cattell helped to establish the formal study of intelligence, and under Wundt, Cattell become the first American to publish a dissertation in the field of psychology. Cattell also worked with Francis Galton, who influenced Cattell’s use of statistical techniques, and through Cattell, these techniques came to characterize the new American psychology Cattell believed in Eugenics, and this belief was heavily influence by Darwin’s theory of evolution. Cattell was also interested in the study of individual differences, which is the way humans differ in their behavior. His work on mental tests embodied the American functional spirit, in which he promoted a practical, test-oriented approach to the study of mental processes. His strongest influence on American psychology was through his work as an organizer, executive, and administrator of physiological science and practice, as well as being an articulate link between psychology and the greater scientific community

(Msgreskovich (talk) 17:03, 9 October 2012 (UTC))

Leta Stetter Hollingworth (1886-1939) Leta Stetter Hollingworth was born in 1886 in dawes county Nebraska. Her mother died having third child, Leta then lived with her alcoholic father and stepmother until she graduated high school in 1902. When she was 16 years old, she enrolled at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and received her Bachelor of Arts degree and a State Teacher’s Certificate in 1906. After teaching at two highschools in Nebraska, she moved to New York and married Harry Hollingworth. She received her Masters in Education at Columbia in 1913, and then went on the work at the Clearing House for Mental Defectives where she administered Binet Intelligence tests. She later received the first position as psychologist under Civil Service in New York, and then moved on to work at the Bellevue Hospital where she was offered the position of chief at the psychological lab. While maintaining this position, she received her doctoral degree under Edward L. Thorndike in 1916, and then was immediately offered a teaching position at Columbia’s Teacher’s College. Hollingworth was active in developing educational strategies concerning the development of gifted students, and worked with mentally defective children as well. She learned that many of the mentally defective children had normal intelligence, but experienced adjustment problems in adolescence. She also challenged the widely accepted belief that women were intellectually inferior to men, and that women hold less prominent positions than men because of social roles instead of an intellectual inferiority. Harry Hollingworth (1880-1956) Harry Hollingworth was born in 1880 in Dewitt, Nebraska. He enrolled at the University of Nebraska at the age of 23. After studying psychology and philosophy at graduate school, he received an offer for an assistantship from James McKeen Cattell at Columbia University. In 1909 he received his doctorate from Columbia after completing his dissertation on the accuracy of reaching. Shortly after graduating, he took a position at Barnard College teaching psychology and logic. Hollingworth was hired by Coca-Company to investigate the psychological effects of caffeine on humans, and he found no deleterious effects on motor or mental performance. During World World I, he created a theory of functional neurosis based on obvservations of shell-shocked soldiers who returned from the war, and this theory was published in 1920 in his book The Psychology of Functional Neurosis. In 1927, he was elected president of the American Psychological Association.

Robert Sessions Woodworth (1869-1962) Robert Sessions Woodworth was born in 1869 in Belchertown, Massachusetts. He received his A.B. degree from Amherst College in 1891, and it wasn’t until his senior year that he changed his plan to become a minister, and instead decided to teach mathematics for four years. Highly influenced by the works of Stanley Hall and William James, he then decided to follow a career in psychology. In 1895, he returned to college as an undergraduate at Harvard University, where he studied psychology with William James. He earned his bachelor’s degree in 1896 and then became an assistant at the Harvard Medical School in the psychology department. James Cattell offered Woodworth a graduate fellowship at Columbia University, where he earned his PhD. His disseration was titled, “Accuracy of voluntary movement.” In 1906, the American Psychological Association appointed Woodworth to a committee to study psychometrics, where he attempted to precent “shell shock” for soldiers in World War I. He created the Woodworth Personal Data Sheet, which is considered the first personality test. In 1932 he published Contemporary Schools of Psychology, which described the history of psychology according to a view that differing schools of psychology are complementary. Woodworth argued Kulpe’s idea that imageless thought existed, disagreeing with Titchener’s belief that imageless thought was not possible. He also introduced the expression Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) to described the functionalist approach to psychology and to stress its difference from the strictly Stimulus-Response approach of the behaviorists. He noted that the stimulus elicits a different effect or response depending on the state of the organism. Robert Yerkes (1876-1956) Robert Yerkes was born in 1876 in Breadysville, Pennsylvania, and grew up on a farm. With the intention of getting away from the rural farmer lifestyle, he attended Ursinus College from 1892 to 1897. After graduating he accepted an offer from Harvard University to do graduate work in Biology. There he became interested in animal behavior and received his Ph.D. in the Psychology Department in 1902. In 1917 he served as the President of the APA, where he developed the Army’s Alpha and Beta Intelligence Tests, which concluded that recent immigrants scored considerably lower than older waves of immigration, and was used as one of the eugenic motivations for harsh immigration restriction. The tests were later criticized as only measuring acculturation. Yerkes has a strong fascination with the study of chimpanzees, and in the 1920’s, he raised and observed chips on his own. In 1924, Yerkes was hired as a professor of psychobiology at Yale University, where he founded the Laboratories of Primate Biology in New Haven. Lillian Moller Gilbreth (1878-1972) Lillian Moller Gilbreth was born in 1878 in Oakland, California. She graduated from the University of California, Berkely in 1900 with a bachelor’s degree in English Literature. She originally pursued a master’s at Columbia University, where she was exposed to psychology by Edward Thorndike, but she became ill and returned home to finish her master’s degree in literature at University of California in 1902. She attended Brown University and received her Ph.D. in 1915, which was the first degree granted in industrial psychology. Gilbreth was the first American engineer to ever creat a synthesis of psychology and scientific management. She helped formulate a constructive critique of Taylorism, which she thought fell short when it came to managing the human element of the workplace. Sallieg37 (talk) 17:23, 9 October 2012 (UTC)