Pavlov vs. Watson

Ivan Pavlov, once a sociology and physiology major, is one of the most well know psychologist because of his work on what we know now as classical conditioning. Classical conditioning is when an unconditioned stimulus is paired with a neutral stimulus enough times that the neutral stimulus starts to cause an unconditioned response, which is what a an unconditioned stimulus usually does. For example, Ivan's most known experiment was when he conditioned dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell. He did this by ringing a bell before he gave the dogs food. Soon the dogs salivated at the sound of the bell alone.

Johnson Watson was know for his classical conditioning experiment too. However, his most famous experiment was not with dogs, it was with a baby. He had a "thing" for emotions, believing he could change behaviors based on how people felt about things. John Watson believed that he could mold children by combining stimuli. His famous baby Albert experiment combined stimulus like furry things that initially had no serious effect 0n the baby and paired them with things that caused the baby to cry like a loud gong. This caused the baby to cry every time he say something furry because he associated it with the sound of the gong.

Wilhelm vz. William

Wilhelm Wundt, and William James are both know to be fathers of Psychology so I thought It would interesting to compare and contrast their theories and beliefs, but first, I shall give a brief history of each psychologist. William Wundt, the oldest of the two, was born in 1832 in Germany and William James was born 10 years later in 1842 in America, dieing, in 1910, which happened to be ten years before the death of Wundt. William Wundt was the founder of structualism and founded the first Psychology lab in Germany in 1875. However, it is argued that William James open the first lab in America the same year.

Structualism was Wundt's thoeory. Structualist broke mental processes into basic componets and used a method know as introspection. Some of the weaknesses of structualism were that it was too subjective and could not be accurately measured. However, is was said have influenced experimental psychology.

Wundt, had a student, Tichener, who expanded the structualism theory after Wundt's death, but in the process, he broke aways from many of Wundt's ideas. Anti-structualist, based many of their beliefs about structualism on the ideas of Tichener instead of Wundt himself.

James was an anti-structualist. His theory was functionalism. Functionalist explained the mental processes in a more accurate way then the structualist. They focused more the purpose of conscienceness and behavior and they put emphasis on individual differences as well. Functionalism was also said to have influenced the education system as well as behavior and applied psychology.

"The distinguishing characteristics of the mind are of a subjective sort; we know them only for the contents of our own consciousness." - Wilhem Wundt


"The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook." - William James

Scatter plot correlations.

For the most part, it seems that the bigger the shoe size, the taller the person is. This is infact a correlation. The correlation is strong and positive, because there are only a few exceptions. Although the correlation is strong and positive, it does not mean that one causes the other.

If there is a correlation in this graph, it would be a very weak one. Nothing is consistent. We have tall stusents with long hair and tall students with short hair. There are also short students with long and short hair as well. The data points in this graph, however, do not seem extreme or unsual at all because hair length, unlike shoe sizes is something that we can easily control.

How do I Feel About Blogging?

Hmmmm......... Well, actually, I think this academic blogging thing is AWESOME!
I didn't even know how to make a blog until like five minutes ago, literally. Anyway, I really do feel like this will be a good experience for me and my fellow classmates. I'm actually proofreading right now because I know that anyone can read this if they actually cared to.

I could be a little pessimistic and say that this whole "blogging" thing sucks but, what would be the point of that? I have to do it. Unless I didn't care about..... IDK graduating? lol. So I have decided to be totally optomistic about this new experience and actually make myself like the idea more than I probably would have, and to be honest, I really dont think it's that bad of an idea anyway. Atleast I can give my dad a good reason to keep paying the cable and internet bill because the facebook is getting a littlle old, ( to him of course).

Doing homework assignments like this is pretty cool, beats carrying books. I wonder why you want our opinion on this blog thing. If everyone said they hated this idea, would you stop us from having to do it? Okay now, back to the lecture at hand, I feel that blogging is a really good way for us to stay up to date on our assignments and keep school a little more interesting.