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Playing video games doesn't lead to violent behaviour, study shows | Games | The Guardian

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Playing video games doesn’t lead to violent behaviour, study shows

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Analysis of 28 global studies dating back to 2008 found a minuscule positive correlation

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Peggy Andover: The difference between classical and operant conditioning

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Why is it that humans react to stimuli with certain behaviors? Can behaviors change in response to consequences? Peggy Andover explains how the brain can associate unrelated stimuli and responses proved by Ivan Pavlov's famous 1890 experiments and how reinforcement and punishment can result in changed behavior.

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The new approaches to praise, learning and encouragement to help children achieve more.

Claudia Hammond talks to Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck who has identified that individuals tend towards a fixed or growth mindset, regarding what they can learn and achieve. Her research has also shown that a fixed mindset can be changed, and that once a child or adult adopts a growth mindset, they can achieve more. Professor Dweck's ideas have spread around the world and increasing numbers of schools are adopting her approaches to praise, learning and encouragement.

(Photo: A woman reads a book with a young girl)

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BBC World Service - Health Check, The Psychology of Praise

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The new approaches to praise, learning and encouragement to help children achieve more. Claudia Hammond talks to Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck who has identified that individuals tend towards a fixed or growth mindset, regarding what they can learn and achieve.

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A report on the advent of clinical psychology and the influence of Sigmund Freud. How psychology started to be used in medicine and how mental illness became a recognised disease that could be treated.

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BBC World Service - Health Matters, The Birth Of Clinical Psychology

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A report on the advent of clinical psychology and the influence of Sigmund Freud. How psychology started to be used in medicine and how mental illness became a recognised disease that could be treated.

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Why your brain is not a computer | Science | The Guardian

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We are living through one of the greatest of scientific endeavours - the attempt to understand the most complex object in the universe, the brain. Scientists are accumulating vast amounts of data about structure and function in a huge array of brains, from the tiniest to our own. Tens of thousands of researchers are devoting massive amounts of time and energy to thinking about what brains do, and astonishing new technology is enabling us to both describe and manipulate that activity.

We can now make a mouse remember something about a smell it has never encountered, turn a bad mouse memory into a good one, and even use a surge of electricity to change how people perceive faces. We are drawing up increasingly detailed and complex functional maps of the brain, human and otherwise. In some species, we can change the brain's very structure at will, altering the animal's behaviour as a result. Some of the most profound consequences of our growing mastery can be seen in our ability to enable a paralysed person to control a robotic arm with the power of their mind.

Every day, we hear about new discoveries that shed light on how brains work, along with the promise - or threat - of new technology that will enable us to do such far-fetched things as read minds, or detect criminals, or even be uploaded into a computer. Books are repeatedly produced that each claim to explain the brain in different ways.

And yet there is a growing conviction among some neuroscientists that our future path is not clear. It is hard to see where we should be going, apart from simply collecting more data or counting on the latest exciting experimental approach. As the German neuroscientist Olaf Sporns has put it: "Neuroscience still largely lacks organising principles or a theoretical framework for converting brain data into fundamental knowledge and understanding." Despite the vast number of facts being accumulated, our understanding of the brain appears to be approaching an impasse.

In 2017, the French neuroscientist Yves Frégnac focused on the current fashion of collecting massive amounts of data in expensive, large-scale projects and argued that the tsunami of data they are producing is leading to major bottlenecks in progress, partly because, as he put it pithily, "big data is not knowledge".

"Only 20 to 30 years ago, neuroanatomical and neurophysiological information was relatively scarce, while understanding mind-related processes seemed within reach," Frégnac wrote. "Nowadays, we are drowning in a flood of information. Paradoxically, all sense of global understanding is in acute danger of getting washed away. Each overcoming of technological barriers opens a Pandora's box by revealing hidden variables, mechanisms and nonlinearities, adding new levels of complexity."

The neuroscientists Anne Churchland and Larry Abbott have also emphasised our difficulties in interpreting the massive amount of data that is being produced by laboratories all over the world: "Obtaining deep understanding from this onslaught will require, in addition to the skilful and creative application of experimental technologies, substantial advances in data analysis methods and intense application of theoretic concepts and models."

There are indeed theoretical approaches to brain function, including to the most mysterious thing the human brain can do - produce consciousness. But none of these frameworks are widely accepted, for none has yet passed the decisive test of experimental investigation. It is possible that repeated calls for more theory may be a pious hope. It can be argued that there is no possible single theory of brain function, not even in a worm, because a brain is not a single thing. (Scientists even find it difficult to come up with a precise definition of what a brain is.)

As observed by Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the DNA double helix, the brain is an integrated, evolved structure with different bits of it appearing at different moments in evolution and adapted to solve different problems. Our current comprehension of how it all works is extremely partial - for example, most neuroscience sensory research has been focused on sight, not smell; smell is conceptually and technically more challenging. But the way that olfaction and vision work are different, both computationally and structurally. By focusing on vision, we have developed a very limited understanding of what the brain does and how it does it.

The nature of the brain - simultaneously integrated and composite - may mean that our future understanding will inevitably be fragmented and composed of different explanations for different parts. Churchland and Abbott spelled out the implication: "Global understanding, when it comes, will likely take the form of highly diverse panels loosely stitched together into a patchwork quilt."

or more than half a century, all those highly diverse panels of patchwork we have been working on have been framed by thinking that brain processes involve something like those carried out in a computer. But that does not mean this metaphor will continue to be useful in the future. At the very beginning of the digital age, in 1951, the pioneer neuroscientist Karl Lashley argued against the use of any machine-based metaphor.

"Descartes was impressed by the hydraulic figures in the royal gardens, and developed a hydraulic theory of the action of the brain," Lashley wrote. "We have since had telephone theories, electrical field theories and now theories based on computing machines and automatic rudders. I suggest we are more likely to find out about how the brain works by studying the brain itself, and the phenomena of behaviour, than by indulging in far-fetched physical analogies."

This dismissal of metaphor has recently been taken even further by the French neuroscientist Romain Brette, who has challenged the most fundamental metaphor of brain function: coding. Since its inception in the 1920s, the idea of a neural code has come to dominate neuroscientific thinking - more than 11,000 papers on the topic have been published in the past 10 years. Brette's fundamental criticism was that, in thinking about "code", researchers inadvertently drift from a technical sense, in which there is a link between a stimulus and the activity of the neuron, to a representational sense, according to which neuronal codes represent that stimulus.

The unstated implication in most descriptions of neural coding is that the activity of neural networks is presented to an ideal observer or reader within the brain, often described as "downstream structures" that have access to the optimal way to decode the signals. But the ways in which such structures actually process those signals is unknown, and is rarely explicitly hypothesised, even in simple models of neural network function.

The processing of neural codes is generally seen as a series of linear steps - like a line of dominoes falling one after another. The brain, however, consists of highly complex neural networks that are interconnected, and which are linked to the outside world to effect action. Focusing on sets of sensory and processing neurons without linking these networks to the behaviour of the animal misses the point of all that processing.

By viewing the brain as a computer that passively responds to inputs and processes data, we forget that it is an active organ, part of a body that is intervening in the world, and which has an evolutionary past that has shaped its structure and function. This view of the brain has been outlined by the Hungarian neuroscientist György Buzsáki in his recent book The Brain from Inside Out. According to Buzsáki, the brain is not simply passively absorbing stimuli and representing them through a neural code, but rather is actively searching through alternative possibilities to test various options. His conclusion - following scientists going back to the 19th century - is that the brain does not represent information: it constructs it.

The metaphors of neuroscience - computers, coding, wiring diagrams and so on - are inevitably partial. That is the nature of metaphors, which have been intensely studied by philosophers of science and by scientists, as they seem to be so central to the way scientists think. But metaphors are also rich and allow insight and discovery. There will come a point when the understanding they allow will be outweighed by the limits they impose, but in the case of computational and representational metaphors of the brain, there is no agreement that such a moment has arrived. From a historical point of view, the very fact that this debate is taking place suggests that we may indeed be approaching the end of the computational metaphor. What is not clear, however, is what would replace it.

Scientists often get excited when they realise how their views have been shaped by the use of metaphor, and grasp that new analogies could alter how they understand their work, or even enable them to devise new experiments. Coming up with those new metaphors is challenging - most of those used in the past with regard to the brain have been related to new kinds of technology. This could imply that the appearance of new and insightful metaphors for the brain and how it functions hinges on future technological breakthroughs, on a par with hydraulic power, the telephone exchange or the computer. There is no sign of such a development; despite the latest buzzwords that zip about - blockchain, quantum supremacy (or quantum anything), nanotech and so on - it is unlikely that these fields will transform either technology or our view of what brains do.

ne sign that our metaphors may be losing their explanatory power is the widespread assumption that much of what nervous systems do, from simple systems right up to the appearance of consciousness in humans, can only be explained as emergent properties - things that you cannot predict from an analysis of the components, but which emerge as the system functions.

In 1981, the British psychologist Richard Gregory argued that the reliance on emergence as a way of explaining brain function indicated a problem with the theoretical framework: "The appearance of 'emergence' may well be a sign that a more general (or at least different) conceptual scheme is needed ... It is the role of good theories to remove the appearance of emergence. (So explanations in terms of emergence are bogus.)"

This overlooks the fact that there are different kinds of emergence: weak and strong. Weak emergent features, such as the movement of a shoal of tiny fish in response to a shark, can be understood in terms of the rules that govern the behaviour of their component parts. In such cases, apparently mysterious group behaviours are based on the behaviour of individuals, each of which is responding to factors such as the movement of a neighbour, or external stimuli such as the approach of a predator.

This kind of weak emergence cannot explain the activity of even the simplest nervous systems, never mind the working of your brain, so we fall back on strong emergence, where the phenomenon that emerges cannot be explained by the activity of the individual components. You and the page you are reading this on are both made of atoms, but your ability to read and understand comes from features that emerge through atoms in your body forming higher-level structures, such as neurons and their patterns of firing - not simply from atoms interacting.

Strong emergence has recently been criticised by some neuroscientists as risking "metaphysical implausibility", because there is no evident causal mechanism, nor any single explanation, of how emergence occurs. Like Gregory, these critics claim that the reliance on emergence to explain complex phenomena suggests that neuroscience is at a key historical juncture, similar to that which saw the slow transformation of alchemy into chemistry. But faced with the mysteries of neuroscience, emergence is often our only resort. And it is not so daft - the amazing properties of deep-learning programmes, which at root cannot be explained by the people who design them, are essentially emergent properties.

Interestingly, while some neuroscientists are discombobulated by the metaphysics of emergence, researchers in artificial intelligence revel in the idea, believing that the sheer complexity of modern computers, or of their interconnectedness through the internet, will lead to what is dramatically known as the singularity. Machines will become conscious.

There are plenty of fictional explorations of this possibility (in which things often end badly for all concerned), and the subject certainly excites the public's imagination, but there is no reason, beyond our ignorance of how consciousness works, to suppose that it will happen in the near future. In principle, it must be possible, because the working hypothesis is that mind is a product of matter, which we should therefore be able to mimic in a device. But the scale of complexity of even the simplest brains dwarfs any machine we can currently envisage. For decades - centuries - to come, the singularity will be the stuff of science fiction, not science.

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A related view of the nature of consciousness turns the brain-as-computer metaphor into a strict analogy. Some researchers view the mind as a kind of operating system that is implemented on neural hardware, with the implication that our minds, seen as a particular computational state, could be uploaded on to some device or into another brain. In the way this is generally presented, this is wrong, or at best hopelessly naive.

The materialist working hypothesis is that brains and minds, in humans and maggots and everything else, are identical. Neurons and the processes they support - including consciousness - are the same thing. In a computer, software and hardware are separate; however, our brains and our minds consist of what can best be described as wetware, in which what is happening and where it is happening are completely intertwined.

Imagining that we can repurpose our nervous system to run different programmes, or upload our mind to a server, might sound scientific, but lurking behind this idea is a non-materialist view going back to Descartes and beyond. It implies that our minds are somehow floating about in our brains, and could be transferred into a different head or replaced by another mind. It would be possible to give this idea a veneer of scientific respectability by posing it in terms of reading the state of a set of neurons and writing that to a new substrate, organic or artificial.

But to even begin to imagine how that might work in practice, we would need both an understanding of neuronal function that is far beyond anything we can currently envisage, and would require unimaginably vast computational power and a simulation that precisely mimicked the structure of the brain in question. For this to be possible even in principle, we would first need to be able to fully model the activity of a nervous system capable of holding a single state, never mind a thought. We are so far away from taking this first step that the possibility of uploading your mind can be dismissed as a fantasy, at least until the far future.

or the moment, the brain-as-computer metaphor retains its dominance, although there is disagreement about how strong a metaphor it is. In 2015, the roboticist Rodney Brooks chose the computational metaphor of the brain as his pet hate in his contribution to a collection of essays entitled This Idea Must Die. Less dramatically, but drawing similar conclusions, two decades earlier the historian S Ryan Johansson argued that "endlessly debating the truth or falsity of a metaphor like 'the brain is a computer' is a waste of time. The relationship proposed is metaphorical, and it is ordering us to do something, not trying to tell us the truth."

On the other hand, the US expert in artificial intelligence, Gary Marcus, has made a robust defence of the computer metaphor: "Computers are, in a nutshell, systematic architectures that take inputs, encode and manipulate information, and transform their inputs into outputs. Brains are, so far as we can tell, exactly that. The real question isn't whether the brain is an information processor, per se, but rather how do brains store and encode information, and what operations do they perform over that information, once it is encoded."

Marcus went on to argue that the task of neuroscience is to "reverse engineer" the brain, much as one might study a computer, examining its components and their interconnections to decipher how it works. This suggestion has been around for some time. In 1989, Crick recognised its attractiveness, but felt it would fail, because of the brain's complex and messy evolutionary history - he dramatically claimed it would be like trying to reverse engineer a piece of "alien technology". Attempts to find an overall explanation of how the brain works that flow logically from its structure would be doomed to failure, he argued, because the starting point is almost certainly wrong - there is no overall logic.

Reverse engineering a computer is often used as a thought experiment to show how, in principle, we might understand the brain. Inevitably, these thought experiments are successful, encouraging us to pursue this way of understanding the squishy organs in our heads. But in 2017, a pair of neuroscientists decided to actually do the experiment on a real computer chip, which had a real logic and real components with clearly designed functions. Things did not go as expected.

The duo - Eric Jonas and Konrad Paul Kording - employed the very techniques they normally used to analyse the brain and applied them to the MOS 6507 processor found in computers from the late 70s and early 80s that enabled those machines to run video games such as Donkey Kong and Space Invaders.

First, they obtained the connectome of the chip by scanning the 3510 enhancement-mode transistors it contained and simulating the device on a modern computer (including running the games programmes for 10 seconds). They then used the full range of neuroscientific techniques, such as "lesions" (removing transistors from the simulation), analysing the "spiking" activity of the virtual transistors and studying their connectivity, observing the effect of various manipulations on the behaviour of the system, as measured by its ability to launch each of the games.

Despite deploying this powerful analytical armoury, and despite the fact that there is a clear explanation for how the chip works (it has "ground truth", in technospeak), the study failed to detect the hierarchy of information processing that occurs inside the chip. As Jonas and Kording put it, the techniques fell short of producing "a meaningful understanding". Their conclusion was bleak: "Ultimately, the problem is not that neuroscientists could not understand a microprocessor, the problem is that they would not understand it given the approaches they are currently taking."

This sobering outcome suggests that, despite the attractiveness of the computer metaphor and the fact that brains do indeed process information and somehow represent the external world, we still need to make significant theoretical breakthroughs in order to make progress. Even if our brains were designed along logical lines, which they are not, our present conceptual and analytical tools would be completely inadequate for the task of explaining them. This does not mean that simulation projects are pointless - by modelling (or simulating) we can test hypotheses and, by linking the model with well-established systems that can be precisely manipulated, we can gain insight into how real brains function. This is an extremely powerful tool, but a degree of modesty is required when it comes to the claims that are made for such studies, and realism is needed with regard to the difficulties of drawing parallels between brains and artificial systems.

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Current 'reverse engineering' techniques cannot deliver a proper understanding of an Atari console chip, let alone of a human brain. Photograph: Radharc Images/Alamy

Even something as apparently straightforward as working out the storage capacity of a brain falls apart when it is attempted. Such calculations are fraught with conceptual and practical difficulties. Brains are natural, evolved phenomena, not digital devices. Although it is often argued that particular functions are tightly localised in the brain, as they are in a machine, this certainty has been repeatedly challenged by new neuroanatomical discoveries of unsuspected connections between brain regions, or amazing examples of plasticity, in which people can function normally without bits of the brain that are supposedly devoted to particular behaviours.

In reality, the very structures of a brain and a computer are completely different. In 2006, Larry Abbott wrote an essay titled "Where are the switches on this thing?", in which he explored the potential biophysical bases of that most elementary component of an electronic device - a switch. Although inhibitory synapses can change the flow of activity by rendering a downstream neuron unresponsive, such interactions are relatively rare in the brain.

A neuron is not like a binary switch that can be turned on or off, forming a wiring diagram. Instead, neurons respond in an analogue way, changing their activity in response to changes in stimulation. The nervous system alters its working by changes in the patterns of activation in networks of cells composed of large numbers of units; it is these networks that channel, shift and shunt activity. Unlike any device we have yet envisaged, the nodes of these networks are not stable points like transistors or valves, but sets of neurons - hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands strong - that can respond consistently as a network over time, even if the component cells show inconsistent behaviour.

Understanding even the simplest of such networks is currently beyond our grasp. Eve Marder, a neuroscientist at Brandeis University, has spent much of her career trying to understand how a few dozen neurons in the lobster's stomach produce a rhythmic grinding. Despite vast amounts of effort and ingenuity, we still cannot predict the effect of changing one component in this tiny network that is not even a simple brain.

This is the great problem we have to solve. On the one hand, brains are made of neurons and other cells, which interact together in networks, the activity of which is influenced not only by synaptic activity, but also by various factors such as neuromodulators. On the other hand, it is clear that brain function involves complex dynamic patterns of neuronal activity at a population level. Finding the link between these two levels of analysis will be a challenge for much of the rest of the century, I suspect. And the prospect of properly understanding what is happening in cases of mental illness is even further away.

Not all neuroscientists are pessimistic - some confidently claim that the application of new mathematical methods will enable us to understand the myriad interconnections in the human brain. Others - like myself - favour studying animals at the other end of the scale, focusing our attention on the tiny brains of worms or maggots and employing the well-established approach of seeking to understand how a simple system works and then applying those lessons to more complex cases. Many neuroscientists, if they think about the problem at all, simply consider that progress will inevitably be piecemeal and slow, because there is no grand unified theory of the brain lurking around the corner.

Why can't the world's greatest minds solve the mystery of consciousness? | Oliver Burkeman

There are many alternative scenarios about how the future of our understanding of the brain could play out: perhaps the various computational projects will come good and theoreticians will crack the functioning of all brains, or the connectomes will reveal principles of brain function that are currently hidden from us. Or a theory will somehow pop out of the vast amounts of imaging data we are generating. Or we will slowly piece together a theory (or theories) out of a series of separate but satisfactory explanations. Or by focusing on simple neural network principles we will understand higher-level organisation. Or some radical new approach integrating physiology and biochemistry and anatomy will shed decisive light on what is going on. Or new comparative evolutionary studies will show how other animals are conscious and provide insight into the functioning of our own brains. Or unimagined new technology will change all our views by providing a radical new metaphor for the brain. Or our computer systems will provide us with alarming new insight by becoming conscious. Or a new framework will emerge from cybernetics, control theory, complexity and dynamical systems theory, semantics and semiotics. Or we will accept that there is no theory to be found because brains have no overall logic, just adequate explanations of each tiny part, and we will have to be satisfied with that. Or -
This is an edited extract from The Idea of the Brain by Matthew Cobb, which will be published in the UK by Profile on 12 March, and in the US by Basic Books on 21 April, and is available at guardianbookshop.com
* Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, and sign up to the long read weekly email here.
Topics

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We are living through one of the greatest of scientific endeavours - the attempt to understand the most complex object in the universe, the brain. Scientists are accumulating vast amounts of data about structure and function in a huge array of brains, from the tiniest to our own.

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Dogs Detect Cancer With Nearly 100% Accuracy

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On and off the football pitch, I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here star Ian Wright has long been famous for his fiery temper.

The former West Ham striker was fined £1,500 for spitting at Oldham Athletic fans in 1992 and once had to be restrained after after trashing a referee's dressing room in a fit of rage.

"I ended up kind of like blacking out and I smashed the referee's room to smithereens," he previously told The Players Tribune.

"[I] threw all their clothes in the bath; threw the television up against the wall. It's like I blacked out with pure rage."

Admitting he felt constantly angry, fighting was his passion and his thirst for violence began when he was just nine years old and living in the shadow of a bullying step-father in Brockley, South London.

Recalling how he was subjected to "massive beatings", he said: "In the house I couldn't do anything. I didn't have any power.

"When I started playing football I got respect and power and when someone tackled me, I didn't know how to deal with it. So the first thing I done was fought them. Everything was confrontation."

Talking to The Mirror earlier this year, he told how his then heavy drinking mother, Nesta, offered him no affection.

And according to Ian, one torment that left an indelible mark was her insistence that she wished she'd aborted him.

"I can't remember ever being hugged. I just felt really, really alone," he said.

"All I thought about was much I hated being in my house, how much I hated my sister and aunt, I hated my step-dad, and how my mum never showed anything."

"I learned the word 'termination' because she used to say she wanted one instead of me," he added.

The hate fuelled his passion for football and followed him onto the pitch, where he became known for his anger as much as his skill.

But after landing himself in front of the FA's disciplinary panel on at least six occasions, Ian, 56, realised he needed help.

Determined not to let his demons destroy his career, he started seeing a counsellor who implored him to heal the rift with his family, but that was easier said than done.

He said: "The counsellors used to talk to me about seeing if I could make peace with them.

"I tried on many many occasions, but my mum never opened up in any way.

"When you tried to sit down and speak to her about anything, she wouldn't have it.

With help from therapists, Ian was finally able to channel his aggression and now uses his own dark childhood experiences to influence how he parents his own eight kids.

"I wouldn't say I'm the greatest dad but I know what it means to love somebody, and what it means to give people love, and how it can affect them growing up," he said.

"My love for them is unconditional and my upbringing means I have a lot of love to give now."

As for the hatred, it's all but gone - unless he's hungry of course.

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Ian Wright's violent anger 'blackouts' and scars left by mum's cruel remark

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On and off the football pitch, I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here star Ian Wright has long been famous for his fiery temper. The former West Ham striker was fined £1,500 for spitting at Oldham Athletic fans in 1992 and once had to be restrained after after trashing a referee's dressing room in a fit of rage.

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The Modern World Genius Episode 3 - Sigmund Freud

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Sigmund Freud (German: ˈziːkmʊnt ˈfʁɔʏt; born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; 6 May 1856 - 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for treating psychopathology through dialogue between a patient and a psychoanalyst. Freud was born to Galician Jewish parents in the Moravian town of Freiberg, in the Austrian Empire.

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Swapped at birth, then adopted by mistake: 'For 41 years I lived someone else's life'

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Alex Carter had created his own romantic story of how he came into the world. But then he met the twin he never knew he had...

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Id ego and superego

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What is Psychoanalysis? Part 4: The Ego, the Id and the Superego

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Oedipus complex

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What is Psychoanalysis? Part 3: The Oedipus Complex

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Sexuality

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What is Psychoanalysis? Part 2: Sexuality

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psychoanalysis

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The Freud Museum ~ Education ~ What is Psychoanalysis? (Is it Weird?)

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School and university visits. Learning resources on Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud and psychoanalysis.

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Genotype and phenotype

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Genes and twins

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Keeping history alive is crucial to the ongoing development of psychology. Preserving and documenting past discoveries and research allows rising stars to learn from past successes while continuing to develop the profession.

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History of Psychology Centre - The British Psychological Society

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Keeping history alive is crucial to the ongoing development of psychology. Preserving and documenting past discoveries and research allows rising stars to learn from past successes while continuing to develop the profession.

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Undergraduate debate

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Cognitive approach basic assumptions handout 

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We're going to talk about Freud's stages of psychosexual development. Psychosexual is kind of a big word, but all it really means is that Freud thinks that personality develops through stages that have to do with one's sexuality. Basically, this is a way of explaining personality and it rests on the idea that you go through phases - as an infant through to childhood and then the final stage is adulthood - in which you're basically fixated on certain body parts.

Each of these stages also helps with the development of another one of Freud's concepts, which is the id, the ego and the super-ego. Briefly, these are other ideas of divisions of personality that fight with each other. The id is impulsive, the super-ego is your conscience, your ego is your sense of yourself. These fight with each other, and Freud thought that the psychosexual development stages can help you to develop healthy senses of all of these three parts.

Instinctual Libido

What Freud thought, which is a little funky, is that humans basically have what he called an instinctual libido. Libido is probably a familiar word that basically means sex drive. But the weird thing about Freud's theory is that he basically thought that infants, from birth, have a sex drive; we have an instinctual libido. In the beginning, there's some form of sexual drive that is present and it's key to developing personality. And he thought that this libido developed in stages - these are the psychosexual stages - and they develop through you focusing on different body parts. What he thought was that if anxiety or trauma occurred during one of the stages, then what you're going to have when you're an adult later on in life is a characteristic set of problems, neuroses, anxieties, that have to do with development being interrupted at that stage at that particular body part. So yes, it's weird. I hope you're with me. Now we're just going to go through these stages and talk them through.

Stage 1 - Oral Stage

The first one is the oral stage. This is from when you're born to when you're two years old. If you think about it, it makes a little sense that oral would be the first one; babies like to chew on things, they like to suck on things, so it makes a certain amount of sense that Freud would go there. The life is really dominated by breast feeding, initially, for babies. An important part about this stage is that the baby is pretty much entirely id driven at this point. It's not thinking, it's doing things instinctually. It has certain wants and desires that are pretty simplistic. It goes about and it does them.

And what Freud thought this had to do with personality is that when babies are weaned - when they're not allowed to breast feed anymore - the baby learns the principle of delayed gratification . This is super important because you can't just go over to the bathroom whenever you want in life, you can't just eat whenever you want; this is a pretty key concept to being a functioning adult and not just doing what you want all the time. What Freud thought was that if the parents were too indulgent in this stage or didn't enforce this well enough, the kid might resist growing up. He wouldn't develop this sense in a proper way. If parents were basically too delayed with their gratification, the kid would basically grow up being manipulative of others. That was the way that Freud thought the whole breast feeding id development in the oral stage went.

This is when this entered our language: people who are stuck at the oral stage, Freud called having an . The basic theory about the oral stage that Freud has is that if people are interrupted at this stage, they'll actually do things like smoke and eat too much. That's sort of having an oral fixation. This has actually entered our vocabulary. It's actually the title of a Shakira album. So that's the oral stage.

Stage 2 - Anal Stage

The next stage is what Freud called the anal stage. About 15 months to three years is considered general anal stage range. And as one might expect from the title the key experience here (remember the key experience from the oral stage was breast feeding) is toilet training. What this does is, as you can imagine, it continues the development of delayed gratification because, like I said, you can't just go running off to the bathroom whenever you want. That's not cool.

In this stage, basically, the ego starts to develop. It starts to reign in the id. The ego is always dealing with having you interact with reality, so the ego starts to reign the id a little bit; not as much as the super-ego will later, but it works on it a little bit.

And what's basically going on during toilet training is that parents are trying to teach the kid to be clean, but they need to do this in a way that the ego can grow up properly. So if they are way too demanding, if they are not understanding that toilet training is hard (I can't quite remember that, but I'm sure it was), if they're not understanding of that, the kid is going to grow up really obsessed with order. This is what Freud thought.

These are actually people that we describe - this is another one that of those ones that has gotten into our language - as 'anal compulsive'. If you've ever described someone as anal because they have their action figures all in a row and they're color coordinated, that's what you're basically saying, is that they are too obsessed with order, and what Freud would think is that their parents didn't toilet train them properly. They were too demanding.

But if the parents aren't demanding enough, predictably, the kid is going to grow up to be a total mess. This is one that hasn't really gotten into our language so much - Freud's term for this was 'anal expulsive'. You don't really go around calling people that, but what it basically means is you've probably had a roommate like this that is just a mess, they leave their stuff everywhere, and Freud thought that kind of personality type was related to parents who weren't demanding enough of their kids during toilet training.

Stage 3 - Phallic Stage

Where we go next is known as the phallic stage. These names just keep getting better and better, don't they? This is from when kids are about three years old to six years old, and this is the stage where kids really start to become aware of their bodies. They start to learn - again, these names make a certain amount of sense - the difference between being a boy and being a girl and that it all kind of rests on the existence of a phallus or not.

At least that's what Freud thought. That's sort of a controversial aspect of his theory - he was saying that absence of penis or not absence of penis was the defining thing. He's gotten a lot of flack for that and we won't go into that right now. But basically what's going on here is kids are learning that boys are different from girls.

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freud's stages of psychosexual development - video & lesson transcript | study.com

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Freud's Stages of Psychosexual Development - Video & Lesson Transcript | Study.com

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We're going to talk about Freud's stages of psychosexual development. Psychosexual is kind of a big word, but all it really means is that Freud thinks that personality develops through stages that have to do with one's sexuality.

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Davao Institute for Educational Research Development & Consultancy

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Discussion about Sigmund Freud's psycho-sexual theory

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Humanistic theory | Behavior | MCAT | Khan Academy

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Humanistic psychology is a perspective that emphasizes looking at the the whole person, and the uniqueness of each individual. Humanistic psychology begins with the existential assumptions that people have free will and are motivated to acheive their potential and self-actualize.

1) It offered a new set of values for approaching an understanding of human nature and the human condition.

2) It offered an expanded horizon of methods of inquiry in the study of human behavior.

3) It offered a broader range of more effective methods in the professional practice of psychotherapy.

Basic Assumptions

Humanistic psychology begins with the existential assumption that people have free will:

Personal agency is the humanistic term for the exercise of free will. Free will is the idea that people can make choices in how they act and are self-determining.

Behavior is not constrained by either past experience of the individual or current circumstances (determinism).

Personal agency refers to the choices we make in life, the paths we go down, and their consequences. Individuals are free to choose when they are congruent (Rogers) or self-actualized (Maslow).

Although Rogers believes much more in free will, he acknowledges that determinism is present in the case of conditional love because that may affect a person's self-esteem. In this way free will and determinism are integral to some extent in the humanistic perspective.

People are basically good, and have an innate need to make themselves and the world better:

Humanistic psychology: a more recent development in the history of psychology, humanistic psychology grew out of the need for a more positive view of human beings than was offered by psychoanalysis or behaviorism.

Humans are innately good, which means there is nothing inherently negative or evil about them (humans).

In this way the humanistic perspective takes an optimistic view of human nature that humans are born good but during their process of growth they might turn evil.

The humanistic approach emphasizes the individual's personal worth, the centrality of human values, and the creative, active nature of human beings.

The approach is optimistic and focuses on the noble human capacity to overcome hardship, pain and despair.

People are motivated to self-actualize:

Major humanistic psychologists such as Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow believed that human beings were born with the desire to grow, create and to love, and had the power to direct their own lives.

Self-actualization concerns psychological growth, fulfillment, and satisfaction in life.

Both Rogers and Maslow regarded personal growth and fulfillment in life as basic human motives. This means that each person, in different ways, seeks to grow psychologically and continuously enhance themselves.

However, Rogers and Maslow both describe different ways which self-actualization can be achieved.

According to Maslow, people also have needs which must be met for self-actualization to be possible. The basic needs e.g. food and water have to be satisfied before the higher psychological and emotional needs. This is shown in Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

According to Rogers, people could only self-actualize if they had a positive view of themselves (positive self-regard). This can only happen if they have unconditional positive regard from others - if they feel that they are valued and respected without reservation by those around them (especially their parents when they were children).

Self-actualization is only possible if there is congruence between the way an individual sees themselves and their ideal self (the way they want to be or think they should be). If there is a large gap between these two concepts, negative feelings of self-worth will arise that will make it impossible for self-actualization to take place.

The environment a person is exposed to and interacts with can either frustrate or assist this natural destiny. If it is oppressive, it will frustrate; if it is favorable, it will assist.

Behavior must be understood in terms of the subjective conscious experience of the individual (phenomenology):

Humanistic psychologists also believe that the most fundamental aspect of being human is a subjective experience. This may not be an accurate reflection of the real world, but a person can only act in terms of their own private experience subjective perception of reality.

Humanistic psychologists argue that physical objective reality is less important than a person's subjective (phenomenological) perception and understanding of the world. Thus, how people interpret things internally is (for them), the only reality.

Sometimes the humanistic approach is called phenomenological. This means that personality is studied from the point of view of the individual's subjective experience. Meaning is the purpose or value that a person attaches to their actions or experiences

According to Rogers, we each live in a world of our own creation, formed by our processes of perception. He referred to an individual's unique perception of reality as his or her phenomenal field.

As Rogers once said, "The only reality I can possibly know is the world as I perceive and experience it at this particular moment. The only reality you can possibly know is the world as you perceive and experience at this moment. And the only certainty is that those perceived realities are different. There are as many 'real worlds' as there are people! (Rogers, 1980, p. 102).

For Rogers, the focus of psychology is not behavior (Skinner), the unconscious ( Freud), thinking (Piaget), or the human brain but how individuals perceive and interpret events. Rogers is therefore important because he redirected psychology toward the study of the self.

Humanistic theorists say these individual subjective realities must be looked at under three simultaneous conditions.

First, they must be looked at as a whole and meaningful and not broken down into small components of information that are disjointed or fragmented like with psychodynamic theorists. Rogers said that if these individual perceptions of reality are not kept intact and are divided into elements of thought, they will lose their meaning.

Second, they must be conscious experiences of the here and now. No efforts should be made to retrieve unconscious experiences from the past.

Phenomenenological means 'that which appears' and in this case, it means that which naturally appears in consciousness. Without attempting to reduce it to its component parts - without further analysis.

Finally, these whole experiences should be looked at through introspection. Introspection is the careful searching of one's inner subjective experiences.

Humanism rejects scientific methodology:

Rogers and Maslow placed little value on scientific psychology, especially the use of the psychology laboratory to investigate both human and animal behavior.

Rogers said that objective scientific inquiry based on deterministic assumptions about humans has a place in the study of humans (science) but is limited in the sense that it leaves out inner human experiences (phenomenology).

Studying a person's subjective experience is the biggest problem for scientific psychology, which stresses the need for its subject matter to be publicly observable and verifiable. Subjective experience, by definition, resists such processes.

Humanism rejects scientific methodology like experiments and typically uses qualitative research methods. For example, diary accounts, open-ended questionnaires, unstructured interviews, and observations.

Qualitative research is useful for studies at the individual level, and to find out, in-depth, the ways in which people think or feel (e.g. case studies).

The way to really understand other people is to sit down and talk with them, share their experiences, and be open to their feelings.

Humanism rejected comparative psychology (the study of animals) because it does not tell us anything about the unique properties of human beings:

Humanism views humans as fundamentally different from other animals, mainly because humans are conscious beings capable of thought, reason, and language.

For humanistic psychologists' research on animals, such as rats, pigeons, or monkeys held little value.

Research on such animals can tell us, so they argued, very little about human thought, behavior, and experience.

Humanistic Theory of Personality

Central to Rogers" personality theory is the notion of self or self-concept. This is defined as "the organized, consistent set of perceptions and beliefs about oneself."

The self is the humanistic term for who we really are as a person. The self is our inner personality, and can be likened to the soul, or Freud's psyche. The self is influenced by the experiences a person has in their life, and out interpretations of those experiences. Two primary sources that influence our self-concept are childhood experiences and evaluation by others.

According to Rogers (1959), we want to feel, experience and behave in ways which are consistent with our self-image and which reflect what we would like to be like, our ideal-self. The closer our self-image and ideal-self are to each other, the more consistent or congruent we are and the higher our sense of self-worth.

A person is said to be in a state of incongruence if some of the totality of their experience is unacceptable to them and is denied or distorted in the self-image.

The humanistic approach states that the self is composed of concepts unique to ourselves. The self-concept includes three components:

Self-worth

Self-worth (or self-esteem) comprises what we think about ourselves. Rogers believed feelings of self-worth developed in early childhood and were formed from the interaction of the child with the mother and father.

Self-image

How we see ourselves, which is important to good psychological health. Self-image includes the influence of our body image on inner personality.

At a simple level, we might perceive ourselves as a good or bad person, beautiful or ugly. Self-image affects how a person thinks, feels and behaves in the world.

Ideal-self

This is the person who we would like to be. It consists of our goals and ambitions in life, and is dynamic - i.e., forever changing.

The ideal self in childhood is not the ideal self in our teens or late twenties etc.

Historical Timeline

Maslow (1943) developed a hierarchical theory of human motivation.

Carl Rogers (1946) publishes Significant aspects of client-centered therapy (also called person-centered therapy).

In 1957 and 1958, at the invitation of Abraham Maslow and Clark Moustakas, two meetings were held in Detroit among psychologists who were interested in founding a professional association dedicated to a more meaningful, more humanistic vision.

In 1962, with the sponsorship of Brandeis University, this movement was formally launched as the Association for Humanistic Psychology.

The first issue of the Journal of Humanistic Psychology appeared in the Spring of 1961.

Clark Hull's (1943) Principles of behavior was published.

B.F. Skinner (1948) published Walden Two, in which he described a utopian society founded upon behaviorist principles.

Issues and Debates

Free will vs. Determinism

It is the only approach that explicitly states that people have free will, but its position on this topic is somewhat incoherent as on one hand, it argues that people have free will.

However, on the other hand, it argues that our behavior is determined by the way other people treat us (whether we feel that we are valued and respected without reservation by those around us).

Nature vs. Nurture

The approach recognizes both the influence of nature and nurture, nurture- the influence of experiences on a person's ways of perceiving and understanding the world, nature- influence of biological drives and needs (Maslow's hierarchy of needs).

Holism vs. Reductionism

The approach is holistic as it does not try to break down behaviors in simpler components.

Idiographic vs. Nomothetic

As this approach views the individual as unique, it does not attempt to establish universal laws about the causes of behavior; it is an idiographic approach.

Are the research methods used scientific?

As the approach views the individual as unique, it does not believe that scientific measurements of their behavior are appropriate.

Critical Evaluation

Strengths

Humanistic psychologists rejected a rigorous scientific approach to psychology because they saw it as dehumanizing and unable to capture the richness of conscious experience.

As would be expected of an approach that is 'anti-scientific', humanistic psychology is short on empirical evidence. The approach includes untestable concepts, such as 'self-actualization' and 'congruence'.

However, Rogers did attempt to introduce more rigor into his work by developing Q-sort - an objective measure of progress in therapy. Q-sort is a method used to collect data on outcome of therapy based on changes in clients self-concepts before, during, and after therapy in that it is used to measure actual changes based on differences between self and ideal self.

In many ways, the rejection of scientific psychology in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s was a backlash to the dominance of the behaviorist approach in North American psychology. For example, their belief in free-will is in direct opposition to the deterministic laws of science.

However, the flip side to this is that humanism can gain a better insight into an individual's behavior through the use of qualitative methods, such as unstructured interviews.

The approach also helped to provide a more holistic view of human behavior, in contrast to the reductionist position of science.

Examples

The humanistic approach has been applied to relatively few areas of psychology compared to the other approaches. Therefore, its contributions are limited to areas such as therapy, abnormality, motivation, education, and personality.

Client-centered therapy is widely used in health, social work and industry. This therapy has helped many people overcome difficulties they face in life, which is a significant contribution to improving people's quality of life.

Humanistic therapies are based on the idea that psychological disorders are a product of self-deceit. Humanistic therapists help clients view themselves and their situations with greater insight, accuracy and acceptance.

The fundamental belief of this type of therapy is that clients can fulfill their full potential as human beings if they can achieve these goals. Examples of humanistic therapies include client-centered therapy and Gestalt therapy.

Client-centered therapy aims to increase clients' self-worth and decrease the incongruence between the self-concept and the ideal self.

It is a non-directive therapy in which the client is encouraged to discover their own solutions to their difficulties in an atmosphere that is supportive and non-judgemental and that provides unconditional positive regard.

It focuses on the present rather than dwell on the past unlike psychoanalysis. This therapy is widely used e.g. health, education and industry.

Rogers' view of education saw schools as generally rigid, bureaucratic institutions which are resistant to change. Applied to education, his approach becomes 'student-centered learning' in which children are trusted to participate in developing and to take charge of their own learning agendas. His attitude to examinations, in particular, would no doubt, find a most receptive audience in many students:

'I believe that the testing of the student's achievements in order to see if he meets some criterion held by the teacher, is directly contrary to the implications of therapy for significant learning'.

Humanistic ideas have been applied in education with open classrooms. In the open classrooms, students are the ones who decide how learning should take place (student-centered), they should be self-directed, they're free to choose what to study and the teacher merely acts as a facilitator who provides an atmosphere of freedom and support for individual pursuits.

Summerhill School in UK, founded by A.S. Neill is one of the schools that have applied humanistic ideas fully with some success to enhance motivation in students.

The school has a clear structure and rules and that students from Summerhill are very creative, self-directed (free to choose subjects, learning materials, etc.), responsible and tolerant.

Limitations

Psychoanalytic criticisms claim that individuals cannot explain their own behavior because the causes are largely unconscious. Consequently, conscious explanations will be distorted by rationalization or other defenses.

The behaviourists have been the severest critics of humanistic psychology because of the phenomenological approach, which they feel, is purely subjective and dualistic.

Thus, according to behaviourists, the theories lack any empirical validity and scientific method is abandoned in favour of introspection.

A possible reason for the limited impact on academic psychology perhaps lies with the fact that humanism deliberately adopts a non-scientific approach to studying humans.

The areas investigated by humanism, such as consciousness and emotion, are very difficult to scientifically study. The outcome of such scientific limitations means that there is a lack of empirical evidence to support the key theories of the approach.

Another limitation is the humanistic approach is that it is ethnocentric. Many ideas central to humanistic psychology, such as individual freedom, autonomy and personal growth, would be more readily associated with individualistic cultures in the Western world, such as the United States.

Collectivist cultures such as India, which emphasize the needs of the group and interdependence, may not identify so easily with the ideals and values of humanistic psychology.

Therefore, it is possible that the approach would not travel well and is a product of the cultural context within which it was developed, and an emic approach is more appropriate.

Humanism proposes a positive view of human nature, however, it could be argued that this might not be very realistic when considering everyday reality, such as domestic violence and genocides.

Furthermore, the approach's focus on meeting our needs and fulfilling our growth potential reflects an individualistic, self-obsessed outlook that is part of the problem faced by our society rather than a solution.

References

Maslow, A. H. (1943). A Theory of Human Motivation. Psychological Review, 50, 370-96.

Rogers, C. R. (1946). Significant aspects of client-centered therapy. American Psychologist, 1, 415-422.

Maslow, A. H. (1968). Toward a psychology of being (2nd ed.). New York: D. Van Nostrand.

Rogers, C. R. (1946). Significant aspects of client-centered therapy. American Psychologist 1, 415-422.

Rogers, C. R. (1959). A theory of therapy, personality and interpersonal relationships as developed in the client-centered framework. In (ed.) S. Koch, Psychology: A study of a science. Vol. 3: Formulations of the person and the social context. New York: McGraw Hill.

Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc
BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education

Associate Editor for Simply Psychology

Olivia Guy-Evans is a writer and associate editor for Simply Psychology. She has previously worked in healthcare and educational sectors.

Saul Mcleod, PhD
Educator, Researcher

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul Mcleod, Ph.D., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years experience of working in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

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Humanistic Approach in Psychology (humanism): Definition & Examples

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Humanistic, humanism, and humanist are terms in psychology relating to an approach that studies the whole person and the uniqueness of each individual.

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One of psychology's greatest mysteries appears to have been solved. "Little Albert," the baby behind John Watson's famous 1920 emotional conditioning experiment at Johns Hopkins University, has been identified as Douglas Merritte, the son of a wetnurse named Arvilla Merritte who lived and worked at a campus hospital at the time of the experiment - receiving $1 for her baby's participation.

In the study, Watson and graduate student Rosalie Rayner exposed the 9-month-old tot, whom they dubbed "Albert B," to a white rat and other furry objects, which the baby enjoyed playing with. Later, as Albert played with the white rat, Watson would make a loud sound behind the baby's head. After a number of conditioning trials, Watson and Rayner reintroduced the animals and furry items without the scary noise. Through the conditioning, the animals and objects that were once a source of joy and curiosity had become a trigger of fear.

Watson had no reason to reveal Albert's true identity, and he never de-conditioned the child. (Watson was also dismissed from the university around the same time because of an affair with Rayner.) Since then, Little Albert's fate and identity have been a recurring question among psychology scholars, including Appalachian State University psychologist Hall P. Beck, PhD, who with a team of colleagues and students, sought answers. For seven years, Beck and his associates scoured historical materials, conferred with facial recognition experts, met with relatives of the boy they theorized was Albert.

Eventually, the pieces of the puzzle came together. The attributes of Douglas and his mother matched virtually everything that was known about Albert and his mother. Like Albert's mother, Douglas's mother worked at a pediatric hospital on campus called the Harriet Lane Home. Like Albert, Douglas was a white male who left the home in the early 1920s and was born at the same time of year as Albert. What's more, a comparison of a picture of Albert with Douglas' portrait revealed facial similarities.

Sadly, the team also discovered that Douglas died at age 6 of acquired hydrocephalus, and was unable to determine if Douglas' fear of furry objects persisted after he left Hopkins.

The team, which also included Sharman Levinson, PhD, of The American University in Paris, and Gary Irons, the grandson of Arvilla Merritte, published their findings in the October American Psychologist (Vol. 64, No. 7). The article not only satisfies a long-held curiosity, but also reflects a growing interest in the fate of research participants, says Cathy Faye, of the Archives of the History of American Psychology at the University of Akron. Participants in such famous, controversial studies "have become unwitting protagonists whose stories are told over and over again in psychology textbooks," she says. "So people become very curious: Who were they, and how did they feel about the experiment?"

Beck is pleased his students have answered some of those questions, but the real bonus, he believes, is what they gained in the research process.

"The search took them beyond the memorization of their lectures and textbooks, and for the first time, into the creative world of psychological research," he says. "In the end, that was even more important to them than finding Albert."
-T. DeAngelis

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baby behind john watson's famous 1920 emotional conditioning experiment

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Mystery solved: We now know what happened to Little Albert

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One of psychology's greatest mysteries appears to have been solved. "Little Albert," the baby behind John Watson's famous 1920 emotional conditioning experiment at Johns Hopkins University, has been identified as Douglas Merritte, the son of a wetnurse named Arvilla Merritte who lived and worked at a campus hospital at the time of the experiment - receiving $1 for her baby's participation.

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Skinners research used to train pigeons 

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Skinners research used to train pigeons 

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Created as part of Psych 380, History of Psychology, at the University of Waterloo.

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How to Train a Brain: Crash Course Psychology #11

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The Bobo Beatdown: Crash Course Psychology #12

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BF Skinner

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Claudia Hammond explores the legacy of BF Skinner and behaviourism. One of the most famous psychologists of the 20th century, he remains one of the most controversial.

Claudia Hammond presents the history of psychology series which examines the work of the people who have changed our understanding of the human mind. This week she explores the legacy of BF Skinner and Behaviourism. One of the most famous psychologists of the 20th century, by applying to human learning the theory he developed through animal studies, he became one of the most controversial.

Claudia is shown round his study by his daughter, Julie Vargas; remaining much as it was when he died in 1990, it is full of quirky, Heath-Robinson-type, home-made gadgets, evidence of Skinner's practicality and ingenuity. They reveal another side to the man famous for his operant conditioning experiments with rats and pigeons, and infamous for his template for what some have described as a totalitarian state, in his book 'Beyond Freedom and Dignity'.

Claudia also meets his younger daughter, Deborah Buzan, and explodes the myth that she was raised in one of Skinner's experimental 'boxes'.

She hears more about the man and his work from Richard McNally at Harvard, and Gordon Bower and Lee Ross of Stanford University.

Producer: Marya Burgess.

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BBC Radio 4 - Mind Changers, BF Skinner and Superstition in the Pigeon

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A classic experiment in operant conditioning conducted by the famous behaviourist.

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Little Albert - John Watson

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Claudia Hammond profiles JB Watson, the psychologist considered the father of behaviourism, who famously conducted behavioral experiments on an 11 month boy called 'Little Albert'.

Claudia Hammond profiles JB Watson, the psychologist considered the father of behaviourism, who famously conducted behavioral experiments on an 11 month boy called 'Little Albert', before his career ended with an affair.

JB Watson, together with bell-ringing Ivan Pavlov of salivating dogs fame, spearheaded the movement which dominated American psychology for most of the 20th century: behaviourism. This proclaimed that all physical behaviour is learned or conditioned. But Watson went further: he claimed that emotional responses could also be conditioned: a view disputed by the general belief that emotions came from within.

He went on to prove his theory in a series of experiments involving a subject named Little Albert B, which would send today's ethics committees into the stratosphere! Albert B, an orphan left in a hospital since birth, was recruited for this study at the age of nine months. First, Watson established whether he had any innate fears by exposing him to different stimuli including a white rat, a rabbit, a monkey, a dog, masks, cotton wool. Albert showed interest in all of these, reaching to touch them; he displayed no fear, so they were deemed neutral stimuli. Watson's aim was to generalise fear in the young child, so that neutral stimuli could engender a response of fear.

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BBC Radio 4 - Mind Changers, John Watson and Little Emotional Albert

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Claudia Hammond profiles JB Watson, the psychologist considered the father of behaviourism

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Intro to Psychology: Crash Course Psychology #1

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Psychology Crash Course #2: Early Approaches to Psychology

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This "Psychology Crash Course" series will take you through a typical introduction to psychology course from start to finish. In this episode, we look at early approaches to psychology, starting with Wilhelm Wundt establishment of the first psychology research lab, and following on with Titchener's structuralism, James' functionalism, Wertheimer's Gestalt approach and Freud's psychoanalysis.