Adler added that, at the center of each of our lifestyles, there sits one of these fictions, an important one about who we are and where we are going.

Unit 4

Unit 4

History of Psychology: Behaviorism

Behaviorism is the philosophical position that says that psychology, to be a science, must focus its attentions on what is observable — the environment and behavior — rather than what is only available to the individual — perceptions, thoughts, images, feelings.... The latter are subjective and immune to measurement, and therefore can never lead to an objective science.

The first behaviorists were Russian. The very first was Ivan M. Sechenov (1829 to 1905). He was a physiologist who had studied at the University of Berlin with famous people like Midler, DuBois-Reymond, and Helm-holtz. Devoted to a rigorous blend of associationism and materialism, he concluded that all behavior is caused by stimulation.

In 1863, he wrote Reflexes of the Brain. In this landmark book, he introduced the idea that there are not only excitatory processes in the central nervous system, but inhibitory ones as well.

Vladimir M. Bekhterev (1857 to 1927) is another early Russian behaviorist. He graduated in 1878 from the Military Medical Academy in St. Petersburg, one year before Pavlov arrived there. He received his MD in 1881 at the tender age of 24, then went to study with the likes of DuBois-Reymond and Wundt in Berlin, and Charcot in France.

He established the first psychology lab in Russia at the university of Kazan in 1885, then returned to the

Military Medical Academy in 1893. In 1904, he published a paper entitled «Objective Psychology*, which he later expanded into three volumes.

He called his field reflexology, and defined it as the objective study of stimulus-response connections. Only the environment and behavior were to be discussed. And he discovered what he called the association reflex — what Pavlov would call the conditioned reflex.

Ivan Pavlov

Which brings us to the most famous of the Russian researchers, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1849-1936). After studying for the priesthood, as had his father, he switched to medicine in 1870 at the Military Medical Academy in St. Petersburg. It should be noted that he walked from his home in Ryazan near Moscow hundreds of miles to St. Petersburg.

In 1879, he received his degree in natural science, and in 1883, his MD. He then went to study at the university of Leipzig in Germany. In 1890, he was offered a position as professor of physiology at his alma mater, the Military Medical Academy, which is where he spent the rest of his life. It was in 1900 that he began studying reflexes, especially the salivary response.

I n 1904, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology for his work on digestion, and in 1921, he received I lie 11 его of the Revolution Award from Lenin himself.

Pnvlovian (or classical) conditioning builds on re-ii' til W, begin with an unconditioned stimulus and an Unconditioned response — a reflex. We then associate a neutral Stimulus with the reflex by presenting it with the unconditioned stimulus. Over a number of repetitions, the neutral stimulus by itself will elicit the response. At this point, the neutral stimulus is renamed the conditioned stimulus, and the response is called the conditioned response.

Or, to put it in the form that Pavlov observed in his dogs, some meat powder on the tongue makes a dog salivate. Ring a bell at the same time, and after a few repetitions, the dog will salivate upon hearing the bell alone — without being given the meat powder.

Pavlov agreed with Sekhenov that there was inhibition as well as excitation. When the bell is rung many times with no meat forthcoming, the dog eventually stops salivating at the sound of the bell. That's extinction. But, just give him a little meat powder once, and it is as if he had never had the behavior extinguished: He is right back to salivating to the bell. This spontaneous recovery strongly suggests that the habit has been there all alone. The dog had simply learned to inhibit his response.

Pavlov, of course, could therefore condition not only excitation but inhibition. You can teach a dog that he is NOT getting meat just as easily as you can teach him that he IS. For example, one bell could mean dinner, and another could mean dinner is over. If the bells, however, were too similar, or were rung simultaneously, many dogs would have something akin to a nervous breakdown, which Pavlov called an experimental neurosis.

In fact, Pavlov classified his dogs into four different personalities, ala the ancient Greeks: Dogs that got angry were choleric, ones that fell asleep were phlegmatic, ones that whined were melancholy, and the few that kept their spirits up were sanguine. The relative strengths of the dogs' abilities to activate their nervous system and calm it back down (excitation and inhibition) were the explanations. These explanation would be used later by