Lawrence Kohlberg was born in Bronxville, New York, and received his B.A. (1948) and Ph.D. (1958) from the University of Chicago. He served as an assistant professor at Yale University from 1959 to 1961 and was a fellow of the Center of Advanced Study of Behavioral Science in 1962. Kohlberg began teaching at the University of Chicago in 1963, where he remained until his 1967 appointment to the fac…
The Kohs block test, or Kohs block design test, is a cognitive test for children or adults with a mental age between 3 and 19. It is mainly used to test persons with language or hearing handicaps but also given to disadvantaged and non-English-speaking children. The child is shown 17 cards with a variety of colored designs and asked to reproduce them using a set of colored blocks. Performance is b…
Wolfgang Köhler was born in Revel, Estonia, and grew up in Wolfenbüttel, Germany. He studied at the universities of Bonn and Tübingen, and at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin, where he received his Ph.D. in 1909, writing a dissertation on psychoacoustics under the direction of Carl Stumpf (1848-1936). In 1910, Köhler began a long professional association with …
Emil Kraepelin was a pioneer in the development of psychiatry as a scientific discipline. He was convinced that all mental illness had an organic cause, and he was one of the first scientists to emphasize brain pathology in mental illness. A renowned clinical and experimental psychiatrist, Kraepelin developed our modern classification system for mental disease. After analyzing thousands of case st…
Born in Windsor, Connecticut, Christine Ladd-Franklin spent her early childhood in New York City. Her father was a prominent merchant and her mother was a feminist. Following her mother's death when Ladd-Franklin was 13, she moved to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to live with her paternal grandmother. Ladd-Franklin attended the Wesleyan Academy in Wilbraham, Massachusetts for two years, taking…
Ronald David Laing, or R.D., as he was invariably known, developed the theory that mental illness was an escape mechanism that allowed individuals to free themselves from intolerable circumstances. As a revolutionary thinker, he questioned the controls that were imposed on the individual by family, state, and society. Rejecting a physiological basis for diseases such as schizophrenia, Laing argued…
The milestones of child language development— the onset of babbling, first words, first sentences—are quite variable across individuals in a culture, despite the universal similarity in the general ages of their development. In one study of 32 normally developing children at 13 months, the average number of words reported by parents was 12, but the range was 0 to 45. The two-word-sen…
Human infants are acutely attuned to the human voice, and prefer it above all other sounds. In fact, they prefer the higher pitch ranges characteristic of female voices. They are also attentive to the human face, particularly the eyes, which they stare at even more if the face is talking. These preferences are present at birth, and some research indicates that babies even listen to their mother&#x…
In adults, much of what is known about the organization of language functions in the brain has come from the study of patients with focal brain lesions. It has been known for hundreds of years that a left-hemisphere injury to the brain is more likely to cause language disturbance—aphasia—than a right hemisphere injury, especially but not exclusively in right-handed persons. For about…
Karl Spencer Lashley was born at Davis, West Virginia, on June 7, 1890. Even as a child he was interested in animals, an interest which continued throughout his adult life. His mother, Maggie Lashley, encouraged him in intellectual pursuits. After studying at the University of West Virginia and then taking a master's degree in bacteriology at the University of Pittsburgh, Lashley did doctor…
Psychologists have been interested in the factors that are important in behavior change and control since psychology emerged as a discipline. One of the first principles associated with learning and behavior was the Law of Effect, which states that behaviors that lead to satisfying outcomes are likely to be repeated, whereas behaviors that lead to undesired outcomes are less likely to recur. This …
As a graduate student in psychology, Arnold Lazarus first developed a therapy based on behavioral psychology. He expanded this into cognitive behavior therapy, and later into a multi-faceted psychotherapy known as multimodal therapy. In recent years, Lazarus has written popular psychology books. Lazarus has held numerous professional positions and won many honors, including the Distinguished Servi…
In any group of people, there are those who step forward to organize people and events to achieve a specific result. In organized activities, leaders can be designated and, in informal contexts, such as a party, they may emerge naturally. What makes certain people into leaders is open to debate. Luella Cole and Irma Nelson Hall have written that leadership "seems to consist of a cluster …
The concept of learned helplessness was developed in the 1960s and 1970s by Martin Seligman (1942-) at the University of Pennsylvania. He found that animals receiving electric shocks, which they had no ability to prevent or avoid, were unable to act in subsequent situations where avoidance or escape was possible. Extending the ramifications of these findings to humans, Seligman and his colleagues …
When a person is introduced to new information or a new skill, it may take several learning sessions to acquire that knowledge or skill. Psychologists refer to this acquisition process as the learning curve. In general, this term refers to the time it takes an individual to develop knowledge or a new skill. Behavioral psychologists have noted that the degree, or strength, of learning reflects thre…
A learning disability, or specific developmental disorder, is a disorder that inhibits or interferes with the skills of learning, including speaking, listening, reading, writing, or mathematical ability. Legally, a learning disabled child is one whose level of academic achievement is two or more years below the standard for his age and IQ level. It is estimated that 5-20% of school-age children in…
Psychologists have suggested a variety of theories to explain the process of learning. During the first half of the 20th century, American psychologists approached the concept of learning primarily in terms of behaviorist principles that focused on the automatic formation of associations between stimuli and responses. One form of associative learning— classical conditioning—is based …
When people try to learn a new behavior, the first attempts are often not very successful. After a time, however, they seem to get the idea of the behavior and the pace of learning increases. This phenomenon of greater improvement in speed of learning is called learning-to-learn (LTL). There are two general reasons for the existence of LTL. First, negative transfer diminishes. When people have lea…
The left-brain hemisphere neurologically controls the right side of the body and is connected to the right-brain hemisphere by an extensive bundle of over a million nerve fibers called the corpus callosum. Scientific study of the brain hemispheres dates back to the 1800s. In the 1860s, French physician Paul Broca (1824-1880) observed speech dysfunction in patients with lesions on the left frontal …
Kurt Lewin was born in Mogilno, Prussia, on September 9, 1899. He studied at the universities of Freiburg and Munich and completed his doctorate at the University of Berlin in 1914. He taught in Berlin from 1921 until the advent of Hitler to power in 1933, when he emigrated to the United States. He was visiting professor at Stanford and at Cornell before receiving an appointment as professor of ch…
The term libido, which Sigmund Freud used as early as 1894 and as late as the 1930s, underwent changes as he expanded, developed, and revised his theories of sexuality, personality development, and motivation. In Freud's early works, it is associated specifically with sexuality. Libido is central to the theory of psychosexual development outlined in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (…
Because emotional states are often accompanied by physiological arousal, researchers have often wondered if physiological measurements could be used to detect what a person is thinking or feeling. If you feel guilty for telling a lie, are there physiological cues that will betray you? The assumption that there are such cues forms the basic rationale behind the polygraph test. It is assumed that a …
Theories of localization first gained scientific credence in the 1860s with Paul Broca's discovery that damage to a specific part of the brain—the left frontal lobe—was associated with speech impairment. Other discoveries followed: in 1874, Carl Wernicke identified the part of the brain responsible for receptive speech (the upper rear part of the left temporal lobe, known as W…
One of the highly developed abilities that humans and other animals possess is the ability to determine where a sensory input originates. The capacity to localize a sound, for example, depends on two general mechanisms. The first is relevant for low frequency (i.e., low pitch) sounds and involves the fact that sound coming from a given source arrives at our ears at slightly different times. The se…
John Locke was born on August 29, 1632, in Wrington, in Somerset, where his mother's family resided. She died during his infancy, and Locke was raised by his father, who was an attorney in the small town of Pensford near Bristol. John was tutored at home because of his always-delicate health and the outbreak of civil war in 1642. When he was 14, he entered Westminster School, where he remai…
If a person with an internal locus of control does badly on a test, she is likely to blame either her own lack of ability or preparation for the test. By comparison, a person with an external locus of control will tend to explain a low grade by saying that the test was too hard or that the teacher graded unfairly. The concept of locus of control was developed by psychologist Julian Rotter, who dev…
Regarded as a universal human trait, the ability to think logically, following the rules of logical inference, has traditionally been defined as a higher cognitive skill. The field of cognitive child psychology was dominated for more than half a century by the Swiss philosopher and psychologist Jean Piaget, whose studies are considered fundamental. Piaget identified four stages of cognitive develo…
Researchers in such fields as developmental psychology use longitudinal studies to study changes in individual or group behavior over an extended period of time by repeatedly monitoring the same subjects. In longitudinal research, results are recorded for the same group of subjects, referred to as a cohort, throughout the course of the study. An example of a longitudinal study might be an examinat…
Konrad Lorenz played a lead role in forging the field of ethology, the comparative study of animal behavior, and helped regain the stature of observation as a recognized and respected scientific method. Along the way, his observations—particularly of greylag geese —led to important discoveries in animal behavior. Perhaps his most influential determination was that behavior, like phys…
There are many kinds of loss and each has its own kind of grief. People lose loved ones like spouses, partners, children, family members, and friends. Even pet losses can cause grief. Job or property loss can be painful. Mourning is the conventional cultural behavior for those experiencing a loss. Grief reactions are those personal reactions to a loss, independent of expected cultural standards. E…