Pre- and perinatal psychology

Biography of Ivan Pavlov

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was born on September 14, 1849 in Ryazan, where his father, Peter Dmitrievich Pavlov, was a village priest. He was educated first at the church school in Ryazan and then at the theologi­cal seminary there. In 1870 he enrolled in the physics and mathematics faculty to take the course in natural science.Pavlov became passion­ately absorbed with physiology, which in fact was to remain of such fundamental importance to him throughout his life. In 1875 Pavlov completed his course with an outstanding record and received the de­gree of Candidate of Natural Sciences. However, impelled by his over­whelming interest in physiology, he decided to continue his studies and proceeded to the Academy of Medical Surgery to take the third course there. He completed this in 1879 and was again awarded a gold medal. After a competitive examination, Pavlov won a fellowship at the Acad­emy, and this together with his position as Director of the Physiologi­cal Laboratory at the clinic of.the famous Russian clinician, S. P. Botkin, enabled him to continue his research work. In 1883 he pre­sented his doctor's thesis on the subject of "The centrifugal nerves of the heart". In this work he developed his idea of nervism, using as ex­ample the intensifying nerve of the heart which he had discovered, and furthermore laid down the basic principles on the trophic function of the nervous system. In this as well as in other works, resulting mainly from his research in the laboratory at the Botkin clinic, Pavlov showed that there existed a basic pattern in the reflex regulation of the activity of the circulatory organs.

In 1890 Pavlov was invited to organize and direct the Department of Physiology at the Institute of Experimental Medicine. Under his direc­tion, which continued over a period of 45 years to the end of his life, this Institute became one of the most important centres of physiological re­search.

In 1890 Pavlov was appointed Professor of Pharmacology at the Mil­itary Medical Academy and five years later he was appointed to the then vacant Chair of Physiology, which he held till 1925. It was at the Insti­tute of Experimental Medicine in the years 1891—1900 that Pavlov did the bulk of his research on the physiology of digestion.

Pavlov's research into the physiology of digestion led him logically to create a science of conditioned reflexes. In his study of the reflex reg­ulation of the activity of the digestive glands, Pavlov paid special atten­tion to the phenomenon of "psychic secretion", which is caused by food stimuli at a distance from the animal. By employing the method — de­veloped by his colleague D. D. Glinskiy in 1895 — of establishing fistu­las in the ducts of the salivary glands, Pavlov was able to carry out ex­periments on the nature of these glands. A series of these experiments caused Pavlov to reject the subjective interpretation of "psychic" sali­vary secretion and, on the basis of Sechenov's hypothesis that psychic activity was of a reflex nature, to conclude that even here a reflex — though not a permanent but a temporary or conditioned one — was in­volved.

This discovery of the function of conditioned reflexes made it possi­ble to study all psychic activity objectively, instead of resorting to sub­jective methods. It was now possible to investigate by experimental means the most complex interrelations between an organism and its ex­ternal environment.

Even in the early stages of his research Pavlov received world ac­claim and recognition. In 1901 he was elected a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, in 1904 he was awarded a Nobel Prize, and in 1907 he was elected Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In 1912 he was given an honorary doctorate at Cambridge University and in the following years honorary membership of various scientific societies abroad. Finally, upon the recommendation of the Medical Academy of Paris, he was awarded the Order of the Legion of Honour (1915).

After the October Revolution, a special government decree, signed by Lenin on January 24, 1921, noted "the outstanding scientific services of Academician I. P. Pavlov, which are of enormous significance to the working class of the whole world".The Communist Party and the Soviet Government saw to it that Pavlov and his collaborators were given un­limited scope for scientific research. The Soviet Union became a promi­nent centre for the study of physiology, and the fact that the 15th Inter­national Physiological Congress of August 9—17, 1935, was held in Le­ningrad and Moscow clearly shows that it was acknowledged as such.

Pavlov directed all his energy towards scientific reforms. He devoted much effort to transforming the physiological institutions headed by him into world centres of scientific knowledge, and it is generally ac­knowledged that he succeeded in this endeavour.

Pavlov nurtured a great school of physiologists, which produced many distinguished pupils. He left the richest scientific legacy and a host of followers all over the world.

Dr. Pavlov died in Leningrad on February 27, 1936.

 

Biography of B. F. Skinner

Burrhus Frederic Skinner conducted pioneering work on experimen­tal psychology and advocated behaviourism, which seeks to understand behavior entirely in terms of physiological responses to external stimuli. He also wrote a number of controversial works in which he proposed the widespread use of psychological behavior modification in order to im­prove society and increase human happiness.

Skinner was born in rural Pennsilvania. He attended Hamilton Col­lege in New York with the intention of becoming a writer and received a B. A. in English literature. After graduation, he spent a year in Green­wich Village attempting to become a writer of fiction, but he soon be­came disillusioned with his literary skills and concluded that he had lit­tle world experience and no strong personal perspective from which to write. During this time, which Skinner later called The Dark Year, he had read Russel's Philosophy in which Russell discusses the behaviourist philosophy of psychologist John Watson. At the time, Skinner had be­gun to take more interest in the actions and behaviors of those around him, and some of his short stories had taken a "psychological" angle. He decided to abandon literature and seek admission as a graduate student in psychology at Harvard University, which at the time was not re­garded as a leading institution in that field.

Skinner received a Ph.D from Harvard in 1931 and remained at that institution as a researcher until 1936. He then taught at the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis and later at Indiana University at Bloomington before returning to Harvard as a tenured professor in 1948. He remained there for the rest of his career.

Biography of Abraham Maslow

Abraham Harold Maslow was born April 1, 1908 in Brooklyn, New York. He was the first of seven children born to his parents, who them­selves were uneducated Jewish immigrants from Russia. His parents, hoping for the best for their children in the new world, pushed him hard for academic success. Not surprisingly, he became very lonely as a boy, and found his refuge in books.

To satisfy his parents, he first studied law at the City College of New York (CCNY). After three semesters, he transferred to Cornell, and then back to CCNY. He married Bertha Goodman, his first cousin, against his parents wishes. Abe and Bertha went on to have two daugh­ters. He and Bertha moved to Wisconsin so that he could attend the University of Wisconsin. Here, he became interested in psychology, and his school work began to improve dramatically. He spent time there working with Harry Harlow, who is famous for his experiments with baby rhesus monkeys and attachment behavior.

He received his BA in 1930, his MA in 1931, and his PhD in 1934, all in psychology, all from the University of Wisconsin. A year after gradu­ation, he returned to New York to work with E. L. Thorndike at Colum­bia, where Maslow became interested in research on human sexuality.

He began teaching full time at Brooklyn College. During this period of his life, he came into contact with the many European intellectuals that were immigrating to the US, and Brooklyn in particular, at that time - people like Adler, Fromm, as well as several Gestalt and Freud­ian psychologists.

In 1951, Maslow served as the chair of the psychology department at Brandeis for 10 years, where he met Kurt Goldstein (who introduced him to the idea of self-actualization) and began his own theoretical work. It was also here that he began his research in humanistic psychol­ogy - something much more important to him than his own theorizing. He spent his final years in semi-retirement in California, until, on June 8, 1970, he died of a heart attack after years of ill health.

Biography of Carl Rogers

Carl Ransom Rogers was a psychologist who was instrumental in the development of non-directive psychotherapy (Rogerian psychotherapy).

Carl Rogers was Born in Oak Part, Illinois. His father was an engi­neer, his mother was a housewife and devoted Christian. Following an education in a strict, religious and ethical environment, he became a rather isolated, independent and disciplined person, and acquired a knowledge and an appreciation for the scientific method in a practical world. His first career choice was agriculture, followed by religion. At age 20, following his 1922 trip to Beijing for an international Christian conference, he started to doubt his religious convictions; to help him clarify his career choice, he attended a seminar entitled 'Why am I en­tering the ministry?', after which he decided to change career.

He signed up to the psychology program in Chicago, and obtained his Ph.D. He taught and practiced at Ohio University, the University of Chicago and the University of Wisconsin). However, following several internal conflicts at the department of psychology of Wisconsin, Rogers became disillusioned with academia. He received an offer at La Jolla for research, where he remained, doing therapy, speeches and writing until his sudden death.

Rogers also made a significant impact upon Education Psychology. He developed a theory of experiential learning, which he contrasted to what he called "cognitive learning". Rogers' idea of the 'fully function­ing person' involved the following qualities, which show marked similar­ities to Buddhist thinking.

Computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum's famous computer pro­gram, Eliza tried to simulate a therapy session with a human Rogerian therapist. It works by applying simple transformation rules to the users input in order to construct questions and reflect the content of the statements that the user makes. Some people are impressed by Eliza's performance in such situations, especially when this performance is compared to the simplicity of the program. Others have noted that Eliza's responses become noncoherent when users make nonstandard statements, and that Eliza does not understand anything of what the user says. Weizenbaum described Eliza as providing a "parody" of "the responses of a nondirective Rogerian psychotherapist in an initial psy­chiatric interview.

 

ARTICLES

Folk psychology

Folk theories are theories that are based on common, everyday expe­riences, but not subjected to rigorous experimental techniques, underlie many of our actions. For instance, a fairly sophisticated folk physics (the theory of the behavior of middle-sized, common objects, such as tables, chairs and bowling balls) is essential to our everyday interactions with the surrounding environment. Just think of all the assumptions you make about the clothing you are currently wearing, for example, that it is not going to melt, that it stays at a certain temperature range in stan­dard conditions, that it will not protect you from missiles and so on. Similarly, folk psychology is considered the basis for many of our social actions and judgements about the psychology of others. It has all of the beliefs we make about the relations between people's behavior, mental states, and surrounding conditions.

Folk physics has been, to a large extent, discredited and shown to be thoroughly inadequate in providing robust explanations of various physical phenomena. This, of course, raises the question of how folk psy­chology would fare in this respect and this matter is a subject of lively debate in the philosophy of mind.

Philosophers take various attitudes toward the possibility of extend­ing folk psychology by allowing its theoretical terms (e.g. 'belief 'desire' etc.) to play a role in serious scientific theorizing.

Educational psychology

Educational psychology or school psychology is the psychological science studying how children and adults learn, the effectiveness of vari­ous educational strategies and tactics, and how schools function as orga­nizations. Educational psychologists work together with teachers and parents, to enhance children's learning and development, especially in cases of behavioural and learning difficulties. Educational psychologists also advise on the needs of individual children in the school environ­ment.

Educational psychology focuses on the needs of children in the school environment, as well as how school experiences impact other areas of children's lives. School psychologists conduct evaluations of chil­dren to determine eligibility for special services and to identify children with problems such as learning disabilties, emotion or mood disorders, and many other childhood psychological problems, especially as they re­late to educational needs. In addition to conducting assessments, pro­vide services such as counseling, teacher consultation, and crisis inter­vention.

In Great Britain, training involves an initial degree in psychology, a teaching qualification and at least 2 years experience of teaching in schools, before starting postgraduate training in educational psychology (there is no requirement to be a qualified teacher in Scotland).

Unconscious mind

The unconscious mind (or subconscious) is the aspect of the mind of which we are not directly conscious or aware. The unconscious mind should not be confused with "being unconscious" and unconsciousness which is loss of consciousness.

Certain philosophers preceding Sigmund Freud, such as Leibniz and Schopenhauer, developed ideas foreshadowing the subconscious. The new medical science of psychoanalysis established by Freud and his dis­ciples popularized this and similar notions such as the role of the libido (sex drive) and the self-destructive urge of thanatos (death wish), and the famous Oedipus complex wherein a son seeks to "kill" his father to make love to his own mother. Freud developed the idea that there were layers in human consciousness: the conscious, preconscious, and uncon­scious. He thought that certain psychic events take place "below the surface", or in the unconscious mind. A good example is dreaming, which Freud called the "royal road to the unconscious".

Many modern philosophers and social scientists either dispute the concept of an unconscious, or argue that it'is not an entity that can be scientifically investigated or discussed rationally. In the social sciences, this view was first brought forward by John Watson, considered to be the first American behaviourist. Among philosophers, Karl Popper was one of Freud's most notable contemporary opponents. Popper claimed that Freud's theory of the unconscious was not falsifiable.

However, there is an agreement among many, perhaps most, psychol­ogists and cognitive scientists that much mental functioning takes place in a part of the mind inaccessible to consciousness.

Carl Jung developed the concept of unconsciousness further. He di­vided the unconscious into two parts: the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. The first of these corresponds to Freud's idea of the subconscious, though unlike his mentor, Jung believed that the per­sonal unconscious contained a valuable counter-balance to the con­scious mind, as well as childish urges. As for the collective unconscious, which consists of archetypes, this is the common store of mental build­ing blocks that makes up the psyche of all humans. Evidence for its exis­tence is the universality of certain symbols that appear in the mytholo­gies of nearly all peoples.

There are other views. Jane Roberts presents a rich portrait of con­sciousness in which the unconscious mind is described as being clairvoy­ant and in communication with all other minds. The self that each of us experiences day-to-day is described as being but one facet of a richer and very complex multi-dimensional entity.

The subconscious is not directly accessible to ordinary introspection, but it is capable of being "tapped" and "interpreted" by special methods and techniques such as random association, dream analysis and verbal slips (commonly known as a Freudian slip), examined and conducted during psychotherapy. Thoughts, feelings and urges that are repressed are all present in the subconscious mind and "issues" need to be "worked out" with professionals skilled in the field of mental health and mental illness. Is the unconscious altogether inaccessible, or is it just hard to ac­cess?

As some of the above examples indicate, material is constantly mov­ing from the conscious mind to the unconscious and vice versa. The con­scious mind only holds a small amount of information at any given time.

In many cases information — especially easily accessible memories — can be called into awareness at will. Some psychics also believe that the un­conscious mind possesses a kind of "hidden energy" or "potential" that can realize dreams and thoughts, with minimal conscious effort or action from the individual. Some also believe that the subconscious has an "in­fluencing power" in shaping one's destiny. All such claims, however have so far failed to stand scientific scrutiny.

Knowledge of the unconscious has been exploited by marketing strategists employed by corporations to either play on hidden fears and secret desires buried in the common subconscious. Teams of psycholo­gists are hired to do market research and understand the psychology of buying in order to use subliminal messages in advertising campaigns.

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence, also known as machine intelligence, is defined as intelligence exhibited by anything manufactured (artificial) by hu­mans or other beings or systems (should such things ever exist on Earth or elsewhere). It is usually hypothetically applied to general-purpose computers. The term is also used to refer to the field of scientific inves­tigation into the plausibility of and approaches to creating such sys­tems.

One popular and early definition of artificial intelligence research, put forth by John McCarthy at the Dartmouth Conference in 1956, is "making a machine behave in ways that would be called intelligent if a human were so behaving.", repeating the claim put forth by Alan Turing in "Computing machinery and intelligence". However this definition seems to ignore the possibility of strong AI. Another definition of artifi­cial intelligence is intelligence arising from an artificial device. Most definitions could be categorized as concerning either systems that think like humans, systems that act like humans, systems that think rationally or systems that act rationally.

The term "Strong AI" was originally coined by John Searle and was applied to digital computers and other information processing machines. Searle defined strong AI:"according to strong AI, the computer is not merely a tool in the study of the mind; rather, the appropriately pro­grammed computer really is a mind". Strong artificial intelligence re­search deals with the creation of some form of computer-based artificial intelligence that can truly reason and solve problems. In theory, there are two types of strong AI:

• Human-like AI, in which the computer program thinks and reasons much like a human mind.

• Non-human-like AI, in which the computer program develops a totally non-human sentence, and a non-human way of thinking and reasoning.

Weak artificial intelligence research deals with the creation of some form of computer-based artificial intelligence that can reason and solve problems only in a limited domain. Such a machine would, in some ways, act as if it were intelligent, but it would not possess true in­telligence.

Much of the (original) focus of artificial intelligence research draws from an experimental approach to psychology, and emphasizes what may be called linguistic intelligence.

Artificial intelligence began as an experimental field in the 1950s with such pioneers as Allen Newell and Herbert Simon, who founded the first artificial intelligence laboratory at Carnegie-Mellon Univer­sity, and McCarthy and Marvin Minsky, who founded the MIT AI Lab in 1959. Artificial intelligence research was very heavily funded in the 1980s by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in the United States and by the fifth generation computer systems project in Japan. The failure of the work funded at the time to produce immediate results, despite the grandiose promises of some AI practitioners, led to correspondingly large cutbacks in funding by government agencies in the late 1980s, leading to a general downturn in activity in the field known as "AI winter". Over the following decade, many AI researchers moved into related areas with more modest goals such as machine learn­ing, robotics, and computer vision, though research in pure AI contin­ued at reduced levels.

Whilst progress towards the ultimate goal of human-like intelligence has been slow, many spinoffs have come in the process. Notable exam­ples include the languages LISP and Prolog, which were invented for AI research but are now used for non-AI tasks. Hacker culture first sprang from AI laboratories, in particular the MIT AI Lab. Many other useful systems have been built using technologies that at least once were active areas of AI research. Some examples include:

• Chinook was declared the Man-Machine World Champion in checkers (draughts) in 1994.

• Deep Blue, a chess-playing computer, beat Garry Kasparov in a famous match in 1997.

• InfoTame, a text analysis search engine developed by the KGB for automatically sorting millions of pages of communications intercepts.

• Handwriting recognition is used in millions of personal digital assistants.

• Speech recognition is commercially available and is widely deployed.

Some observers foresee the development of systems that are far more intelligent and complex than anything currently known. To some com­puter scientists, the phrase artificial intelligence has acquired somewhat of a bad name due to the large discrepancy between what has been achieved so far in the field and some more usual notions of intelligence. This problem has been aggravated by various popular science writers and media personalities such as Kevin Warwick whose work has raised the expectations of AI research far beyond its current capabilities. For this reason, some researchers working on topics related to artificial in­telligence say they work in cognitive science, informatics, statistical in­ference or information engineering. However, progress has in fact been made, and AI is today routinely employed in thousands of industrial sys­tems around the world.

Groupthink

Groupthink is a term coined by psychologist Irving Janis in 1972 to describe one process by which a group can make bad or irrational deci­sions. In a groupthink situation, each member of the group attempts to conform his or her opinions to what they believe to be the consensus of the group. This results in a situation in which the group ultimately agrees on an action which each member might normally consider to be unwise.

Janis' original definition of the term was "a mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members' strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action." The word groupthink was intended to be reminiscent of George Orwell's coinages (such as doublethink and duckspeak) from the fictional language Newspeak, which he portrayed in his ideological novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Groupthink tends to occur on committees and in large organizations. Janis originally studied the Pearl Harbor bombing, the Vietnam War and the Bay of Pigs Invasion. Others have cited groupthink as a contrib­uting factor in the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster as well as the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, the bankruptcy of Enron, and more re­cently, the decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003.

Janis cited a number of antecedent conditions that would be likely to encourage groupthink. These include high group cohesiveness, directive leadership, lack of norms requiring methodical procedures, high stress from external threats with low hope of a better solution than the one of­fered by the leader(s). Janis listed eight symptoms that he said were in­dicative of groupthink:

1. Illusion of invulnerability.

2. Unquestioned belief in the inherent morality of the group.

3. Collective rationalization of group's decisions.

4. Shared stereotypes of outgroup, particularly opponents.

5. Self-censorship; members withhold criticisms.

6. Illusion of unanimity.

7. Direct pressure on dissenters to conform.

8. Self-appointed "mindguards" protect the group from negative information.

Finally, the seven symptoms of decision affected by groupthink are:

1. Incomplete survey of alternatives.

2. Incomplete survey of objectives.

3. Failure to examine risks of preferred choice.

4. Failure to re-appraise initially rejected alternatives.

5. Poor information search.

6. Selective bias in processing information at hand.

7. Failure to work out contingency plans.

One mechanism which management consultants recommend to avoid groupthink is to place responsibility and authority for a decision in the hands of a single person who can turn to others for advice. Others advise that a pre-selected individual take the role of disagreeing with any suggestion presented, thereby making other individuals more likely to present their own ideas and point out flaws in others' — and reducing the stigma associated with being the first to take negative stances.

An alternative to groupthink is a formal consensus decision-making process, which works best in a group whose aims are cooperative rather than competitive, where trust is able to build up, and where participants are willing to learn and apply facilitation skills.

Milgram experiment

The Milgram experiment was a famous scientific experiment of social psychology. The experiment was first described by Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, in an article titled Behavioral Study of Obedience published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology in 1963 and later summarized in his book Obedience to Authority: An Ex­perimental View. It was intended to measure the willingness of a partici­pant to obey an authority who instructs the participant to do something that may conflict with the participant's personal conscience.

Details on the exact procedure tend to vary greatly, perhaps because of the prolificity of the test, perhaps because of its status as a near-ur­ban-legend.

Participants were recruited using various experiments. For instance, one study at Yale used a "study for memory" as its excuse. It is common in psychological experiments to mislead the participant as to the nature of the experiment, because when participants figure out what the experiment is testing for, they will sometimes provide that outcome of their own free will — for which they deserve a compliment, but which can skew the experiment's results. Consequently, the experiment is de­ll scribed as studying a very different thing than it actually is. The Yale experiment was advertised as taking one hour, for which those responding would be paid $4.50. Participants were men between the ages of 20 and 50, excluding college and high school students. Later recreations of the experiment tested demographics of all ages, races, occupations and genders.

In the waiting room, the participant meets the experimenter (with clipboard and white lab coat) and someone who claims to be a fellowparticipant but is actually another experimenter. In psychological jargon, this person is called a "confederate." The experimenter explains to participant and confederate that the experiment will test the effectiveness of punishment on learning behavior. The participant will be the 'teacher': he will pose various questions to the confederate (hereby called the 'learner'). This testing will be facilitated by a communicationsdevice, which the Teacher and Learner are then shown.

The device, on the Teacher's side, consists of a large computerized control panel. It has a row of buttons, most with a numerical value associated with them. However, near the end of the row is a button labeled, "Do not go beyond this point" — though the presence of further buttons suggests that one can go beyond this point. The control panel also has a microphone and a speaker. The Learner's apparatus, on the other side of a wall from the Teacher's side, consists solely of a speaker, a microphone and a chair. A chair which can and will deliver an electric shock, in volt­age equal to the numbers on the Teacher's control panel. This shocking ability is sometimes demonstrated to both Teacher and Learner.

The experimenter straps the Learner into the chair and then takes the Teacher to the control panel. If the Learner answers a question incor­rectly, he will receive an electric shock as punishment, with each incor­rect answer resulting in a shock of increased magnitude, hence the row of buttons with its ever-growing voltage labels. Also, the experimenter tells the Teacher, that the experiment must not be disrupted. No matter what happens, the Teacher and Learner must continue. The experimenter will stay in the room with the Teacher to help facilitate this. The Teacher turns on his microphone, and the questions and answers begin.

The Learner gets questions wrong, and the Teacher delivers the ap­propriate shocks. As the voltage builds up, however, the Learner begins to protest. He yells out in pain every time the shocks are delivered. Be­tween questions, he complains: the shocks are painful, he's starting to be hysterical, he wants the experiment to end right now. Even worse, he has a heart problem: too much voltage might kill him.

In reality, there are no shocks being given to the confederate; he is merely acting. He might have been replaced by the control panel itself, if technology allowed it: each button would trigger an appropriate sound bite. Milgram did not need an injured confederate, only the illusion of it. The experiment up until now seems simple: if the Learner is begging to be released, why not release him? The answer lies with the experimenter in the white lab coat, a symbol of faceless scientific authority; the exper­imenter, present in the room with the Teacher, would refuse to let the Teacher (the participant) end the experiment prematurely. The test Milgram was running was not a "test for memory". Instead, he was at­tempting to answer a question: "How many people will continue up to and past the button that says Do not go beyond this point... If that guy in the white lab coat is constantly hovering over his shoulder, urging him to go on, refusing to let him stop?"

At "Do Not Go Beyond This Point" (generally taking the place of the 300-volt button), the Learner gave a horrible scream; thereafter he would not answer any questions (which the experimenter would insist on interpreting as incorrect answers, necessitating the delivery of fur­ther shocks). His silence, combined with the knowledge of his heart condition and "Do Not Go Beyond This Point" label, led to an obvious con­clusion. Once the participant had run out of buttons, the experiment ended.

Before the experiment was conducted Milgram polled fellow psychologists as to what the results would be. They unanimously believed that only a few sadists would be prepared to give the maximum voltage.

In Milgram's first set of experiments, 65 percent of experimental participants administered the experiment's final 450-volt shock, though many were quite uncomfortable in doing so. No participant stopped before the 300-volt level. The experiment has been repeated by other psychologists around the world and with different participant demographics, but always with similar results. Variations have been performed to test for variables in the experimental setup. For example, participants are much more likely to be obedient when the experimenter is physically present, as opposed to when the instructions are given over telephone.

Thomas Blass of the University of Maryland writes in Psychology to­day (March/April 2002) that he has collected results from repeats of the experiment done at various times since, in the US and elsewhere, and found that the percentage of participants who are prepared to inflict fa­tal voltages remains remarkably constant, between 61% and 66%, re­gardless of time or location.

The experiment raised questions about the ethics of scientific experi­mentation itself because of the extreme emotional stress suffered by the participants (even though it could be said that this stress was brought on by their own free actions). Most modern scientists would consider the experiment unethical today, though it resulted in valuable insights into human psychology.

In Milgram's defense, given the choice between "positive," "neutral," and "negative," 84 percent of former participants contacted later rated their role in the experiments as a positive experience and 15 percent chose neutral. Many later wrote expressing thanks. Milgram repeatedly received offers of assistance and requests to join his staff from former participants.

Milgram created a documentary film showing the experiment and its results, titled "Obedience". It is now very hard to find copies of it, but it can be very informative viewing. He also produced a series of five other films on social psychology with Harry From, some of which touched on his experiments

Phobia

The term phobia, which comes from the Ancient Greek word for fear (fobos), denotes a number of psychological and physiological conditions that can range from serious disabilities to common fears. Phobias are the most common form of anxiety disorder. An American study by the Na­tional Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) found that between 5.1 and 21.5 percent of Americans suffer from phobias. Broken down by age and gender, the study found that phobias were the most common mental ill­ness among women in all age groups and the second most common ill­ness among men older than 25.

Most psychologists and psychiatrists divide phobias into three cate­gories. Social phobias - fears to do with other people and social rela­tionships such as performance anxiety, fears of eating in public, etc. Spe­cific phobias — fear of a single specific panic trigger, like dogs, flying, running water and so on. Agoraphobia - a generalised fear of leaving your home or your small familiar 'safe' area, and of the inevitable panic attacks that will follow. Agoraphobia is the only phobia regularly treated as a medical condition.

Many specific phobias, such as fears of dogs, heights, spider bites, and so forth, are extensions of fears that everyone has. People with these phobias treat them by avoiding the thing they fear. Many specific pho­bias can be traced back to a specific triggering event, usually a traumatic experience at an early age. Social phobias and agoraphobia have more complex causes that are not entirely known at this time. It is believed that heredity, genetics and brain-chemistry combine with life-experi­ences to play a major role in the development of anxiety disorders and phobias.

Phobias vary in severity among individuals, with some phobics sim­ply disliking or avoiding the subject of their fear and suffering mild anxi­ety. Others suffer fully-fledged panic attacks with all the associated dis­abling symptoms. It is possible for a sufferer to become phobic about vir­tually anything.

The name of a phobia generally contains a Greek word for what the patient fears plus the suffix-phobia. Creating these terms is something of a word game. Few of these terms are found in medical literature, e.g. cancerophobia is a fear of cancer, necrophobia is a fear of death or dead things or cardiophobia is a fear of heart disease.

Some therapists use virtual reality to desensitize patients to the feared thing. Other forms of therapy that may be of benefit to phobics are graduated exposure therapy and cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). Anti-anxiety medication can also be of assistance in some cases. Most phobics understand that they are suffering from an irrational fear, but are powerless to override their initial panic reaction.

Graduated Exposure and CBT both work towards the goal of desen­sitizing the sufferer, and changing the thought patterns that are contrib­uting to their panic. Gradual desensitization treatment and CBT are of­ten extremely successful, provided the phobic is willing to enduresome discomfort and to make a continuous effort over a long period of time. Practitioners of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) claim to have a procedure that can be used to alleviate most specific phobias in a single therapeutic session, though this has not yet been verified scientifically.

In some cases, a fear or hatred is not considered a phobia in the clini­cal sense because it is believed to be only a symptom of other psycholog­ical problems, or the result of ignorance, or of political or social beliefs. These are phobias in a more general, popular sense of the word:

• Xenophobia, fear or dislike of strangers or the unknown, often used to describe nationalistic political beliefs and movements.

• Homophobia, fear or dislike of homosexual people.

• Islamophobia, fear or dislike of Muslims or Islamic culture.

Furthermore, the term hydrophobia, or fear of water, is usually not a psychological condition at all, but another term for the disease rabies, referring to a common symptom. Likewise photophobia, is a physical complaint, aversion to light due to an inflamed or painful eye or exces­sively dilated pupils.

Motivation

Motivation is the driving force behind all actions of an organism. Motivation is based on emotions, specifically, on the search for positive emotional experiences and the avoidance of negative ones, where posi­tive and negative are defined by the individual brain state, not by social norms: a person may be driven to self-injury or violance because their brain is conditioned to create a positive response to these actions.

The easiest kinds of motivation to analyse, at least superficially, are those based upon obvious physiological needs. These include hunger, thirst and escape from pain.

At the next level are motivations that have an obvious biological ba­sis but are not required for the immediate survival of the organism. These include the powerful motivations for sex, parental care and ag­gression. Again, the physiological bases of these are similar in humans and other animals, but the social complexities ате greater in humans (or perhaps we just understand them better in our own species). In these ar­eas insights from behavioral ecology and sociobiology have offered new analyses of both animal and human behaviour in the last decades of the 20^th century, though the extension of sociobiological analyses to humans remains highly controversial. Perhaps similar, but perhaps at a rather different level, is the motivation for new stimulation — variously called exploration, curiosity, or arousal-seeking. A crucial issue in the analysis of such motivations is whether they have a homeostatic component, so that they build up over time if not discharged. This idea was a key com­ponent of early twentieth century analyses of sex and aggression by, for example, Freud and Konrad Lorenz, and is a feature of much popular psychology of motivation. The more informed biological analyses of re­cent decades, however, imply that such motivations are situational, aris­ing when they are (or seem to be) needed to ensure an animal's fitness and subsiding without consequences when the occasion for them passes.

These important biological needs tend to generate more powerful emotions and thus more powerful motivation than secondary goals. This is described in models like Abraham Maslow's hierachy of needs. A dis­tinction can also be made between direct and indirect motivation: In di­rect motivation, the action satisfies the need, in indirect motivation, the action satisfies an intermediate goal, which can in turn lead to the satis­faction of a need. In work environments, money is typically viewed as a powerful indirect motivation, whereas job satisfaction and a pleasant so­cial environment are more direct motivations. However, this example highlights well that an indirect motivational factor (money) towards an important goal (having food, clothes, etc.) may well be more powerful than the direct motivation provided by an enjoyable workplace.

The self-control of motivation is increasingly understood as a subset of emotional intelligence; a person may be highly intelligent according to a more conservative definition (as measured by many intelligence tests), yet unmotivated to dedicate this intelligence to certain tasks. Victor Vroom's "expectancy theory" provides an account of when peo­ple will decide whether to exert self control to pursue a particular goal.

The control of motivation is only understood to a limited extent. There are many different approaches of motivation training, but many of these are considered pseudoscientific by critics. To understand how to control motivation it is first necessary to understand why many people lack motivation.

In recent years non-work related activities like Internet surfing have become an increasing concern for employers in industrialized nations. Some companies have used prohibitive tactics to counter this perceived threat, others try to define certain limits, and many merely take action in extreme cases. Even for home users, Internet addiction is increasingly perceived as a risk. Similar concerns accompany the use of video games and television. It is true that for many people, these activities have reached the point of psychological addiction.

This can be explained with a positive feedback loop. The aforemen­tioned activities can generate quick, positive emotional responses of dif­ferent types — the endomorphine release from action movies and video games, or the curiosity satisfied by visiting news sites. It is known that connections in the human brain's neural network are intensified by re­peated activity, which means that it is often easier to continue to do what one is doing than to do something else. This is how a daily habit can, over time, turn into a psychological addiction that is hard to break.

The key question for motivation is then: Which activities generate a positive emotional response, and which ones do not? The answers to this question are increasingly explored by neuropsychology. It is known that, for most people, activities that involve powerful audiovisual input have a stronger emotional effect. Purely text-based information, on the other hand, is usually not very motivating. This seems intuitive given the fact that reading is a trained higher cortical skill, whereas large brain areas are congenitally devoted to processing audiovisual input. For this class of information, there are simply more connections from the pro­cessing areas of the brain's cortex to the lower emotional centers of the limbic system. It therefore seems logical to assume that motivation can be created easier through multimedia input.

Since humans are social animals, it also appears natural that social connections play a crucial role in motivation. Not much is known about the way the human brain deals with social relationships, but for the sake of the argument, it can be assumed that social connections are merely very powerful, emotionally encoded memories connected to others. An idea which is connected to these memories thus triggers the emotions. It follows logically, then, that negative social relationships are likely to de­crease motivation, and that intrinsic desire to act has to be substituted within these relationships with coercion. For teachers and managers alike, it then seems desirable to maintain such positive relationships in order to provide a motivating atmosphere — however, personal reasons may stand in the way of this goal. This is why many motivation control programs try to teach managers to find outlets for their personal feelings other than their employees.

 

Hypnosis

Hypnosis, as defined by the American Psychological Association Di­vision of Psychological Hypnosis, is "a procedure during which a health professional or researcher suggests that a client, patient, or experimental participant experience changes in sensations, perceptions, thoughts, or behavior." However, any definition will be vague, as the underlying mechanism is little understood. Some theories view hypnosis as an al­tered state of consciousness, others as a type of focused attention. Psy­chologists have recently researched hypnosis and found a strong corre­lation between the ease of putting someone in a state of 'hypnosis' and their level of suggestibility. Generally, under hypnosis people become more susceptible to suggestion, causing changes in the way they feel, think, and behave, although contrary to popular belief they do still re­main theoretically in control of their actions.

Hypnosis also generally stimulates a feeling of relaxation, and this has helped its development into a therapy — hypnotherapy. One of the treatments in hypnotherapy is regression. Often it is viewed by some psychologists with skepticism. It is claimed that when participants are put through the process of regression, they may invent false memories due to the social expectation placed on them. These memories cannot therefore be reliable.

Hypnosis has further been described as "the suspension of the critical factor" which expands on the idea of "increased suggestibility". A person who claims to be hypnotized sometimes appears to accept statements as true that they would normally reject. For example, statments such as "you have forgotten your name" would not normally be accepted, but under hypnosis people do claim that they do not know their own name. It appears as if the hypnotized participant accepts the authority of the hypnotist over their own experience. When asked afterwards some par­ticipants appear to be genuinely unable to recall the incident, while oth­ers would say that they had known the hypnotist was wrong but at the time it had seemed easier just to go along with his instructions. Some hypnotists would claim that this showed the difference between a deep and a shallow hypnotic trance while skeptics would question the valid­ity of the demonstration.

Experienced hypnotists claim that they can hypnotize almost anyone with the exception of the very young, the very elderly and people with a very low IQ, particularly those with an inability to concentrate. Intoxi­cated people would also prove very difficult. They also claim it is a myth that people with strong will power cannot be hypnotized, as they claim these generally make the best participants. Hypnotism depends upon the cooperation of the hypnotist and the participant; when a person with strong will power decides to cooperate with a hypnotist, hypnosis can occur. Alternatively, since hypnosis does depend on cooperation, no one can really be hypnotized against their will. Being a hypnotist is not a source of power over other people.

Many religious and cultural rituals contain many similarities with techniques used for hypnotic induction and induce similar states in their participants.

Self-hypnosis - hypnosis in which a person hypnotizes themselves without the assistance of another person to serve as the hypnotist - is a staple of hypnotherapy-related self-help programs. It is most often used to help the self-hypnotist stay on a diet, overcome smoking or some other addiction, or to generally boost the hypnotized person's self-es­teem. It is rarely used for the more complex or controversial uses of hyp­notism, which require the hypnotist to monitor the hypnotized person's reactions and responses and respond accordingly. Most people who practise self-hypnosis require a focus for their attention in order to be­come fully hypnotized.

What does NLP mean?

The name Neuro-Linguistic Programming comes from the disciplines which influenced the early development of the field. It began as an ex­ploration of the relationship between neurology, linguistics, and observ­able patterns ("programs") of behavior.

NLP was developed in the early 1970's by Richard Bandler, Ph.D., an information scientist, and John Grinder, Ph.D., a linguist. Bandler and Grinder were interested in how people influence one another, and in the possibility of being able to duplicate the behavior, and therefore effective­ness of highly influential people. Their early research was conducted at the University of California at Santa Cruz. What made their search spe­cial was their use of technology from linguistics and information science, combined with insights from behavioral psychology and general systems theory, to unlock the secrets of highly effective communication.

NLP, as most people use the term today, is a set of models of how communication impacts and is impacted by subjective experience. It's more a collection of tools than any general theory. NLP is very prag­matic: if a tool works, it's included in the model, even if there's no theory to back it up. None of the current NLP developers have done research to "prove" their models correct. The party line is "pretend it works, try it, and notice the results you get. If you don't get the result you want, try something else."

Much of early NLP was based on the work of Virginia Satir, a family therapist; Fritz Perls, founder of Gestalt therapy; Gregory Bateson, an­thropologist; and Milton Erickson, hypnotist. It was Erickson's work that formed the foundation for a lot of NLP, thus the tight connection with hypnosis. Bandler and Grinder's book "Patterns of the Hypnotic Techniques of Milton H. Erickson, Volume I" is one of the best books ever written on how language influences mental states.

The actual technology, or methodology, that Bandler and Grinder used is known as human modeling; actually the building of models of how people perform or accomplish something. This modeling process ac­tually means finding and describing the important elements and pro­cesses that people go through, beginning with finding and studying a human model. This is a person, who does something in a particular, usu­ally highly skillful, way. For example, if you want to know how to teach some particular skill or concept, you'd first find someone who does it ex­tremely well. Then ask him or her lots of questions about what they do, why they do it, what works and doesn't work, and so on.

At the same time, observing this person in action will often lead to new and better questions to ask in the process. Most of us do this al­ready, though perhaps not systematically.

The addition of specific NLP technology makes it possible to dis­cover much of what this human model does that he or she is not aware of. To do this well means to actually study the structure of people's thought processes and internal experience, as well as their observable behavior.

During their early studies Bandler and Grinder developed a unique system of asking questions and gathering information that was based on the fields of transformational grammar and general semantics. Later they and their colleagues discovered certain minimal cues people give that in­dicate very specific kinds of thought processes. These include eye move­ments, certain gestures, breathing patterns, voice tone changes and even very subtle cues such as pupil dilation and skin color changes (training of Practitioners of NLP includes the skills and knowledge to use these infor­mation gathering techniques and to notice and interpret the subtle cues).

NLP is this gathering of information to make models, based on the internal experience and information processing of the people being stud­ied and modeled, including the part that is outside of their conscious awareness. The word 'neuro' refers to an understanding of the brain and its functioning. Linguistic relates to the communication aspects (both verbal and non-verbal) of our information processing. Programming is the behavioral and thinking patterns we all go through. There is a rela­tionship between perceptions, thinking and behavior that is neuro-lin-guistic in nature. The relationship is operating all the time, no matter what we are doing, and it can be studied by exploring our internal or subjective experience. The formal definition of Neuro-Linguistic Pro­gramming is: The study of the structure of subjective experience.

NLP is not based on theory. It is based on the process of making models. There is a big difference. A model doesn't have to be "true" or "correct" or even perfectly formed. It only has to be useful when applied to what it's designed for. If it isn't, it can be discarded in any situation where it fails. NLP is really an epistemology (the study of the origin and structure of knowledge itself). Everything in NLP is based on specific evidence procedures for effectiveness and is thoroughly tested.

Adapted from: "Neuro-Linguistic Programming." INFO-LINE, American Society For Training & Development, April, 1994.

WRITINGS

The Stream of Consciousness

By William James

Me and Not-me

...One great splitting of the whole universe into two halves is made by each of us; and for each of us almost all of the interest attaches to one of the halves; but we all draw the line of division between them in a dif­ferent place. When I say that we all call the two halves by the same names, and that those names are "me" and "not-me" respectively, it will at once be seen what I mean. The altogether unique kind of interest which each human mind feels in those parts of creation which it can call me or mine may be a moral riddle, but it is a fundamental psychological fact. No mind can take the same interest in his neighbor's me as in his own. The neighbor's me falls together with all the rest of things in one foreign mass against which his own me stands cut in startling relief. Even the trodden worm, as Lotze somewhere says, contrasts his own suf­fering self with the whole remaining universe, though he has no clear conception either of himself or of what the universe may be. He is for me a mere part of the world; for him it is I who am the mere part. Each of us dichotomizes the cosmos in a different place.

What is an Emotion?

The physiologists who, during the past few years, have been so indus­triously exploring the functions of the brain, have limited their attempts at explanation to its cognitive and volitional performances. Dividing the brain into sensorial and motor centres, they have found their division to be exactly paralleled by the analysis made by empirical psychology, of the perceptive and volitional parts of the mind into their simplest ele­ments. But the aesthetic sphere of the mind, its longings, its pleasures and pains, and its emotions, have been so ignored in all these researches that one is tempted to suppose that if either Dr. Ferrier or Dr. Munk were asked for a theory in brain-terms of the latter mental facts, they might both reply, either that they had as yet bestowed no thought upon the subject, or that they had found it so difficult to make distinct hy­potheses, that the matter lay for them among the problems of the future, only to be taken up after the simpler ones of the present should have been definitively solved.

And yet it is even now certain that of two things concerning the emo­tions, one must be true. Either separate and special centres, affected to them alone, are their brain-seat, or else they correspond to processes oc­curring in the motor and sensory centres, already assigned, or in others like them, not yet mapped out. If the former be the case we must deny the current view, and hold the cortex to be something more than the surface of "projection" for every sensitive spot and every muscle in the body. If the latter be the case, we must ask whether the emotional "pro­cess" in the sensory or motor centre be an altogether peculiar one, or whether it resembles the ordinary perceptive processes of which those centres are already recognized to be the seat. The purpose of the follow­ing pages is to show that the last alternative comes nearest to the truth, and that the emotional brain-processes not only resemble the ordinary sensorial brain-processes, but in very truth are nothing but such pro­cesses variously combined. The main result of this will be to simplify our notions of the possible complications of brain-physiology, and to make us see that we have already a brain-scheme in our hands whose applica­tions are much wider than its authors dreamed. But although this seems to be the chief result of the arguments I am to urge, I should say that they were not originally framed for the sake of any such result. They grew out of fragmentary introspective observations, and it was only when these had already combined into a theory that the thought of the simplification the theory might bring to cerebral physiology occurred to me, and made it seem more important than before.

I should say first of all that the only emotions I propose expressly to consider here are those that have a distinct bodily expression. That there are feelings of pleasure and displeasure, of interest and excitement, bound up with mental operations, but having no obvious bodily expres­sion for their consequence, would, I suppose, be held true by most read­ers. Certain arrangements of sounds, of lines, of colours, are agreeable, and others the reverse, without the degree of the feeling being sufficient to quicken the pulse or breathing, or to prompt to movements of either the body or the face. Certain sequences of ideas charm us as much as others tire us. It is a real intellectual delight to get a problem solved, and a real intellectual torment to have to leave it unfinished. The first set of examples, the sounds, lines, and colours, are either bodily sensations, or the images of such. The second set seem to depend on processes in the ideational centres exclusively. Taken together, they appear to prove that there are pleasures and pains inherent in certain forms of nerve-ac­tion as such, wherever that action occur. The case of these feelings we will at present leave entirely aside, and confine our attention to the more complicated cases in which a wave of bodily disturbance of some kind accompanies the perception of the interesting sights or sounds, or the passage of the exciting train of ideas. Surprise, curiosity, rapture, fear, anger, lust, greed, and the like, become then the names of the men­tal states with which the person is possessed. The bodily disturbances are said to be the "manifestation" of these several emotions, their "ex­pression" or "natural language"; and these emotions themselves, being so strongly characterized both from within and without, may be called the standard emotions.

Our natural way of thinking about these standard emotions is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called the emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily ex­pression. My thesis on the contrary is that the bodily changes follow di­rectly the PERCEPTION of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur IS the emotion. Common sense says, we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike. The hypothesis here to be defended says that this order of sequence is incorrect, that the one mental state is not immediately induced by the other, that the bodily manifestations must first be interposed between, and that the more ra­tional statement is that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble, because we are sorry, angry, or fearful, as the case may be. Without the bodily states following on the perception, the latter would be purely cognitive in form, pale, colourless, destitute of emotional warmth. We might then see the bear, and judge it best to run, receive the insult and deem it right to strike, but we could not actually feel afraid or angry.

 

By Sigmund Freud

Id. Ego, Super-ego

[The id is]...a chaos, a cauldron of seething excitement. We suppose that it is somewhere in direct contact with somatic processes, and takes over from them instinctual needs and gives them mental expression, but we cannot say in what substratum this contact is made. These instincts fill it with energy, but it has no organisation and no unified will, only an impulsion to obtain satisfaction for the instinctual needs, in accordance With the pleasure-principle. The laws of logic — above all, the law of contradiction — do not hold for processes in the id. Contradictory im­pulses exist side by side without neutralising each other or drawing apart; at most they combine in compromise formations under the over­powering economic pressure towards discharging their energy. There is nothing in the id which can be compared to negation, and we are aston­ished to find in it an exception to the philosophers' assertion that space and time are necessary forms of our mental acts. In the id there is noth­ing corresponding to the idea of time, no recognition of the passage of time, and (a thing which is very remarkable and awaits adequate atten­tion in philosophic thought) no alteration of mental processes by the passage of time. Conative impulses which have never got beyond the id, and even impressions which have been pushed do