Kenneth W. Spence

Kenneth Wartinbee Spence

Kenneth Wartinbee Spence was known for his theoretical and experimental studies of conditioning and learning. His analyses and interpretations of the theories of other psychologists also were very influential.

Spence was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1954 and was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Psychological Association (APA).

The son of Mary E. Wartinbee and William James Spence, an electrical engineer, Spence was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1907, but he grew up in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

Split-brain Technique

Split-brain Technique

Psychologists have demonstrated that even simple human tasks, like thinking of a word when viewing an object, involve separate subtasks within the brain. These smaller tasks involve identifying the object, assessing its use, remembering what other objects are related to it, determining how many syllables are in the word associated with the object, and so on.

People do not realize the complexity of seemingly simple tasks because the brain integrates information smoothly and flawlessly almost all the time. One structure in the brain involved in the exchange and integration of information from one part to the next is the corpus callosum, a bundle of about 200 million nerve fibers that connect the right and left hemispheres of the brain.

Beginning in the 1940s, neurologists questioned whether the corpus callosum was involved in the development of epileptic seizures. Evidence from monkeys suggested that abnormal neural responses in one hemisphere spread to the other via the corpus callosum, resulting in major seizure activity. As such, it might be beneficial to patients suffering from epilepsy to sever the corpus callosum in order to prevent the spread of this abnormal neural activity.

Benjamin Spock

Benjamin McLane Spock

Benjamin McLane Spock was born on May 2, 1903, in New Haven, Connecticut, the oldest child in a large, strict New England family. His family was so strict that in his 82nd year he would still be saying “I love to dance in order to liberate myself from my puritanical upbringing.” Educated at private preparatory schools, he attended Yale from 1921 to 1925, majoring in English literature.

He was a member of the racing crew that represented the United States in the 1924 Olympic Games at Paris, finishing 300 feet ahead of its nearest rival. He began medical school at Yale in 1925, and transferred to Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1927. He had, by this time, married Jane Davenport Cheney, whom he had met after a Yale-Harvard boat race.

Spock had decided well before starting his medical studies that he would “work with children, who have their whole lives ahead of them” and so, upon taking his M.D. degree in 1929 and serving his general internship at the prestigious Presbyterian Hospital, he specialized in pediatrics at a small hospital crowded with children in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen area. Believing that pediatricians at that time were focusing too much on the physical side of child development, he took up a residency in psychiatry as well.

Sports Psychology

Sports Psychology

Sports—which involve emotion, competition, cooperation, achievement, and play—provide a rich area for psychological study. People involved in sports attempt to master very difficult skills, often subjecting themselves to intense physical stress as well as social pressure.

When psychologists began studying sports in the 1930s and 1940s, they focused on motor performance and the acquisition of motor skills. Sports psychology emerged as a distinct discipline in the 1960s, dominated by theories of social psychology.

Since then, research has expanded into numerous areas such as imagery training, hypnosis, relaxation training, motivation, socialization, conflict and competition, counseling, and coaching. Specific sports and recreational specialties studied include baseball, basketball, soccer, volleyball, tennis, golf, fencing, dance, and many others.

Standardized Test

Standardized Test

Standardized tests are used in psychology, as well as in everyday life, to measure intelligence,aptitude, achievement, personality,attitudes and interests. Attempts are made to standardize tests in order to eliminate biases that may result, consciously or unconsciously, from varied administration of the test.

Standardized tests are used to produce norms—or statistical standards— that provide a basis for comparisons among individual members of the group of subjects. Tests must be standardized, reliable (give consistent results), and valid (reproducible) before they can be considered useful psychological tools.

Standardized tests are highly controversial both in psychological circles and particularly in education because true standardization is difficult to attain. Certain requirements must be rigidly enforced. For example, subjects must be given exactly the same amount of time to take the test.

Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales

Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales

Consisting of questions and short tasks arranged from easy to difficult, the Stanford-Binet measures a wide variety of verbal and nonverbal skills. Its fifteen tests are divided into the following four cognitive areas:

1. verbal reasoning (vocabulary, comprehension, absurdities, verbal relations); 
2. quantitative reasoning (math, number series, equation building); 
3. abstract/visual reasoning (pattern analysis, matrices, paper folding and cutting, copying); and 
4. short-term memory (memory for sentences, digits, and objects, and bead memory). 

While the child’s attitude and behavior during the test are noted, they are not used to determine the result, which is arrived at by converting a single raw score for the entire test to a figure indicating “mental age” (the average age of a child achieving that score).

Statistics in Psychology

Statistics in Psychology

Psychologists rely heavily on statistics to help assess the meaning of the measurements they make. Sometimes the measurements involve individuals who complete psychological tests; at other times, the measurements involve statistics that describe general properties of groups of people or animals.

In psychological testing, the psychologist may interpret test results in light of norms, or the typical results, provided from previous testing. In research, psychologists use two kinds of statistics, descriptive and inferential. Descriptive statistics simply give a general picture of the scores in a given group.

They include the measures of central tendency and the measures of variability. Central tendency involves different kinds of averages: the mean, median, and mode. Variability involves the standard deviation, which indicates how far scores in a group are likely to be from the average.