“The richest and fullest lives attempt to achieve an inner balance between three realms: work, love, and play.” Erik Erikson
German-born US psychoanalytic theorist who contributed to the understanding of human mental development. Erikson coined the phrase identity crisis and proposed that the ego is not fixed at birth or during childhood, but continues to be molded throughout life by experience and environment. He established his reputation with the influential work Childhood and Society (1950), his first major book. His research in developmental psychology led to his theory of eight psychosocial stages in the life cycle.
Erikson was born in Frankfurt to Danish parents. After leaving school he spent some time wandering in Italy, sketching children; he would later state that watching children at play is vital to the understanding of their personalities, for ‘whatever is in them rises to the surface in free play’. He emigrated to the USA, where he held academic posts at Harvard; Yale; the Austen Riggs Center, Stockbridge, Massachusetts; and the University of California at Berkeley before becoming a professor at Harvard..
8 Stages of Development - Erikson’s theory outlines 8 stages of psychosocial development from infancy to late adulthood.
image courtesy of SimplyPsychology
Erikson's Stages of Psychosocial Development
Gordon Allport was born in Montezuma, Indiana, in 1897, and received his Ph.D. in Psychology in 1922 from Harvard, following in the footsteps of his brother Floyd, who became an important social psychologist. His career was spent developing his theory, examining such social issues as prejudice, and developing personality tests. He died in Cambridge Massachusetts in 1967.
Appointed as a social science instructor at Harvard University in 1924, he became professor of psychology six years later and, in the last year of his life, professor of social ethics. He consistently related his approach to the study of personality to his social interests and was one of a growing number of psychologists who sought to introduce the leavening influence of humanism into psychology. His important introductory work on the theory of personality was Personality: A Psychological Interpretation (1937).
Allport is best known for the concept that, although adult motives develop from infantile drives, they become independent of them. Allport called this concept functional autonomy. His approach favored emphasis on the problems of the adult personality rather than on those of infantile emotions and experiences. In Becoming (1955) he stressed the importance of self and the uniqueness of adult personality. The self, he contended, is an identifiable organization within each individual and accounts for the unity of personality, higher motives, and continuity of personal memories. He also made important contributions to the analysis of prejudice in The Nature of Prejudice (1954). His last important work was Pattern and Growth in Personality (1961). - Encyclopædia Britannica
Theory
Walter Mischel, born in Vienna, Austria February 22, 1930, is an American psychologist best known for his groundbreaking study on delayed gratification known as "the marshmallow test".
In the late 1960s, Mischel began a study on delayed gratification—the ability to abstain from instant but less desirable outcomes in favor of deferred but more desirable outcomes. The experimenter seated preschool-age children alone at a table with a desired treat such as a marshmallow and, before exiting the room, presented them with a choice: either (1) to ring a bell to call the researcher back and, upon his return, consume the single marshmallow or (2) to wait until the researcher’s voluntary return and be rewarded with not one but two marshmallows.
Remembrance For Walter Mischel, Psychologist Who Devised The Marshmallow Test
Walter Mischel believed that cognitive factors determine behaviors when facing environmental stimuli and that the expectations of events are also determinants. In this, past experiences of different situations, as well as cognitive factors, determine behavior.
The Marshmallow Test for Grownups
John Bowlby is a British developmental psychologist and psychiatrist best known as the originator of attachment theory, which posits an innate need in very young children to develop a close emotional bond with a caregiver. Bowlby explored the behavioral and psychological consequences of both strong and weak emotional bonds between mothers and their young children. In 1946, he joined the staff of the Tavistock Institute in London, where he established a research unit to examine the effects on young children of separation from their primary caregivers. It was at Tavistock that he developed attachment theory, one tenet of which is that very young children who fail to develop close emotional bonds with a caregiver will experience behavioral problems in later life. Courtesy of Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Mary Ainsworth was an American-Canadian developmental psychologist. For most of her career, she studied the relationship between infants and their primary caregivers. Ainsworth is best known for her contributions to Attachment Theory and for developing the Strange Situation test. She is also one of the top 100 most frequently cited psychologists in history. Mary used the lukewarm response as motivation to create an assessment to measure the attachment between mothers and their children. She cataloged specific behaviors infants displayed in different settings and eventually developed the “Strange Situation Test” during her time at Johns Hopkins.
Mary Ainsworth and her colleagues created the "Strange Situation Test" to evaluate the nature of attachment relationships between infants and their caregivers. The experimental procedure consists of eight episodes involving brief separations from, and reunions with the caregiver, as well as exposure to a stranger. All episodes occur within the context of an unfamiliar playroom. See the videos below.
Ainsworth's Attachment Styles
Ainsworth believed attachment styles resulted from the infant’s early interactions with the mother, an idea which she termed the ‘maternal sensitivity hypothesis.’ A sensitive mother was defined as one who accurately perceives the needs of her child and responds to them promptly and appropriately. Ainsworth believed maternal sensitivity was necessary for healthy attachment.
Image courtesy of Practical Psychology
For more information on Mary Ainsworth and the Attachment style see Practical Psychology
Charles Darwin (1809-1882) was a naturalist whose On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection introduced his theory of evolution and natural selection. In this guide, you will find information on researching both Darwin and evolution
Darwin and Natural Selection
Britannica's Charles Darwin Videos & Images
DATABASE: Charles Darwin's Scientific Manuscripts
The Origins of Species by Darwin
Rewriting the Book of Nature: Charles Darwin and Evolutionary Theory -U.S. Library of Medicine's Rewriting the Book of Nature: Charles Darwin and Evolutionary Theory
Darwin Manuscripts from the Cambridge Digital Library
Charles Darwin's Beagle Library
Find other FREE copies of Darwin's works at Darwin Online and Darwin Correspondence Project [New letters from Darwin's best friend, Joseph Dalton Hooker]
Ivan Pavlov was born into an impoverished family in the rural village of Ryazan, Russia. He won a government scholarship to the University of St. Petersburg and studied medicine at the Imperial Medical Academy, receiving his degree in 1883. In the 1890s, Pavlov investigated the workings of the digestive system, focusing on digestive secretions, using special surgically created openings in the digestive tracts of dogs, a project strongly influenced by the work of an earlier physiologist, Ivan Sechenov (1829– 1905). During his investigations in this area, Pavlov observed that normal, healthy dogs salivate upon seeing their keeper, apparently in anticipation of being fed.
This observation led Pavlov, through a systematic series of experiments, to formulate the principles of the conditioned response, which he believed could be applied to humans as well as to animals. According to Pavlov's system, an unconditioned stimulus, such as offering food to a dog, produces a response, or unconditioned reflex, (or an unconditioned response), that requires no training (salivation). In contrast, a normally neutral act, such as ringing a bell, becomes a conditioned stimulus when associated with the offering of food and eventually will produce salivation on its own, but as a conditioned reflex (or conditioned response). According to Pavlov, the conditioned reflex is a physiological phenomenon caused by the creation of new reflexive pathways created in the cortex of the brain by the conditioning process. In further studies of the cortex, Pavlov posited the presence of two important processes that accompany conditioning: excitation, which leads to the acquisition of conditioned responses, and inhibition, which suppresses them. He eventually came to believe that cortical inhibition is an important factor in the sleep process...
Courtesy of Tyonote
Lawrence Kohlberg is an American psychologist and educator known for his theory of moral development. Kohlberg graduated from Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, in 1945. While pursuing his doctoral degree, Kohlberg became interested in Jean Piaget's work on the moral development of children. Kohlberg’s theory was highly influential, especially in psychology and education and his work broke new ground by concentrating on cognitive phenomena.
Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development constitute an adaptation of a psychological theory originally conceived of by the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. Kohlberg began work on this topic while a psychology postgraduate student at the University of Chicago in 1985 and expanded and developed this theory throughout his life.
The theory holds that moral reasoning, the basis for ethical behavior, has six identifiable developmental stages, each more adequate at responding to moral dilemmas than its predecessor. Kohlberg followed the development of moral judgment far beyond the ages studied earlier by Piaget, who also claimed that logic and morality develop through constructive stages. Expanding on Piaget's work, Kohlberg determined that the process of moral development was principally concerned with justice and that it continued throughout the individual's lifetime, a notion that spawned dialogue on the philosophical implications of such research.
Kohlberg relied for his studies on stories such as the Heinz dilemma and was interested in how individuals would justify their actions if placed in similar moral dilemmas. He then analyzed the form of moral reasoning displayed, rather than its conclusion, and classified it as belonging to one of six distinct stages.
Solomon Asch was born in Warsaw but emigrated to the United States in 1920 at the age of 13. He was a Polish American Psychologist responsible for the pioneering social psychologist. He is perhaps best remembered for his research on the psychology of conformity. Asch took a Gestalt approach to the study of social behavior, suggesting that social acts needed to be viewed in terms of their setting. His famous conformity experiment demonstrated that people would change their responses due to social pressure in order to conform to the rest of the group.
The Asch Conformity Experiment, conducted by Solomon Asch in the 1950s, was a series of studies designed to investigate how social pressure from a majority group could influence an individual to conform. In the experiments, groups of participants were asked to match the length of lines on cards, a task with an obvious answer. However, each group only included one real participant, with the rest being confederates instructed to give the incorrect answer.
Image Courtesy of Simply Psychology.
For more information see Solomon Asch's Conformity Line Experiment Study
Abraham Maslow -American Psychologist, best known for his self-actualization theory of psychology.
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, scalable vector illustration by Laplateresca
Encyclopedia, Science News & Research Reviews
The article talks about Abraham's theory and contribution to Psychology.
Brief introduction to Abraham Moslow
Abraham H. Maslow: Books, Articles, Audio/Visual, & His Personal Papers.
Biographical Sketch (adapted from the American Psychologist, 1992, 47, 499-501
Evelyn Hooker, a psychology professor at the University of California at Los Angeles for 30 years, embraced the gay rights movement in the 1940s when she befriended a gay man, Sam From, who convinced her to study the population. In the study, Hooker administered three standard personality tests to two groups of 30 men. In one of the groups, the participants were gay. The two groups were matched in age and IQ and were equal in educational levels. Hooker was also instrumental in establishing homosexuality as a field of study. The University of Chicago honored her for this accomplishment by establishing the Evelyn Hooker Center for the Mental Health of Gays and Lesbians.
Evelyn Hooker Profile and Work
Dr. Evelyn Hooker Advocacy Award
Psychology & Conversion Therapy
Dr. Hooker’s story has been chronicled in a documentary entitled Changing Our Minds: The Story of Dr. Evelyn Hooker. Click here to see a clip from the film.
Bandura was born on December 4, 1925, in a rural hamlet in northern Alberta, Canada. He was the only son in a family of six children of Ukrainian and Polish heritage. His early educational experiences were conducted in an eight-room school with only two high school teachers and few instructional resources. This often led to a reversal of teacher and student roles, and Bandura and his classmates had to develop their own academic skills, which they accomplished with considerable success. Defying conventional expectations, all members of his self-study group attained collegiate degrees. Bandura achieved recognition as an undergraduate at the University of British Columbia by receiving the Bolocan Award in Psychology, the first of many honors in his storied career. These formative educational experiences led to his view of learning and adaptive functioning as a social and self-directed process...For more information on Bandura's see Albert Bandura
Professor Albert Bandura (1925 - 2021) was an innovative scholar whose pioneering work in social cognitive theory has served as a rich resource for academics, practitioners, and policymakers alike across disciplinary lines. His illustrative career includes groundbreaking work across a broad range of areas. His seminal research on social modeling expanded our view of human learning and the growing primacy of this mode of learning in this electronic era.
Albert Bandura (Biography + Experiments)
Image from Flickr Created by Timothy Takomoto
George Herbert Mead (1863–1931), an American philosopher and social theorist, is often classed with William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey as one of the most significant figures in classical American pragmatism. He is considered by many to be the father of the school of Symbolic Interactionism in sociology and social psychology, although he did not use this nomenclature. Mead argued the antipositivistic view that the individual is a product of society, the "self" arising out of social experience as an object of socially symbolic gestures and interactions.
The first person to write about the principles underlying Symbolic Interactionism was George Herbert Mead (1934). Mead, an American philosopher, argued that people develop their self-image through interactions with other people.
Courtesy of Getty Images Creator Taylor Hill | Credit: FilmMagic
Philip G. Zimbardo is a psychologist and a professor emeritus at Stanford University, where he taught for 50 years, starting in 1968. Philip is a prominent Italian-American psychologist, author, and retired professor. He is best known for his 1971 work in the Stanford Prison Experiment, which demonstrated the power of social situations to influence people’s behavior. It is widely considered one of the most impactful and controversial social psychology experiments in history. The experiment has been the subject of conversations, classes, and even movies for years.
Zimbardo and his colleagues (1973) were interested in finding out whether the brutality reported among guards in American prisons was due to the sadistic personalities of the guards (i.e., dispositional) or had more to do with the prison environment (i.e., situational).
Eric. E. Castro - https://www.flickr.com/photos/ecastro/14629567894/in/photolist-ohLmRd-qJ7hPW-BVcQbQ
Simulated Prison Experiment
Philip Zimbardo (Biography + Experiments)
Stanford Prison Experiment: Zimbardo’s Famous Study
Demonstrating the Power of Social Situations via a Simulated Prison Experiment
Carl Rogers (1902-1987) was an American psychologist, researcher, author, and humanistic psychologist best known for his views on the therapeutic relationship and his theories of personality and 'self-actualization" Rogers is widely considered one of the founding fathers of psychotherapy research and was honored for his pioneering research with the Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions by the American Psychological Association(APA) in 1956.
Carl Rogers's Humanistic Theory And Contribution To Psychology
Carl Rogers Biography - Contributions to Psychology
Carl believed self-concept could be broken down into three primary components.
According to Rogers, the three core parts of self-concept are:
Rogers believed how your ideal self and real self-aligned were important to the development of your self-esteem.
If your ideal self did not match the reality of your real self, he suggested your self-concept was “incongruent,” and your self-esteem was likely to be negatively affected.
B. F. (Burrhus Frederic) Skinner was born in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania. He attended Hamilton College as an English major, with the goal of becoming a professional writer. After graduation, Skinner was discouraged about his literary prospects and became interested in behavioristic psychology after reading the works of John Watson and Ivan Pavlov. He entered Harvard University as a graduate student in psychology in 1928 and while at Harvard, Skinner laid the foundation for a new system of behavioral analysis through his research in the field of animal learning, using unique experimental equipment of his own design.
The B. F. Skinner Foundation -Established in 1988, the B. F. Skinner Foundation promotes the science founded by B. F. Skinner and supports the practices derived from that science. The Foundation advances the understanding that a more humane world is achieved by replacing coercive techniques with positive procedures. We connect scholars, students, and the general public through our magazine, Operants. The Foundation is also the prime contact for permissions for reproducing Skinner material or for translations of Skinner’s works.”
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