Phrenology and Aphasia: Controversies and Contributions

Phrenology was controversial for a couple reasons. One reason was the criticism from Pierre Flourens who used the ablation method and his findings were contradictory to phrenologists. Another controversial reason, according to the reading was that the selection of the different “faculties” was totally random. Trying to explain human differences in intelligence and personality by a restricted number of those faculties was not a valid method.
Some positive consequences from Franz Gall’s idea of phrenology were that it kind of opened the door to looking at individual differences and studying personality. Another positive consequence was that phrenology supports that the brain is the organ of the mind and that mental processes originate in the brain and should be studied and to see if parts of the brain perform different functions.

2. Aphasia is the loss of ability to understand speech or produce speech and is caused from brain damage in the left hemisphere. Paul Broca found that loss of speech was due to damage in the left frontal lobe. Broca

examined over twenty-five brains of people who had loss of speech (aphasia) and he found that they all had lesions in the left frontal lobe. Carl Wernicke found that loss of comprehension of speech/language was due to damage in the left temporal lobe.

3. Wundt’s Volkerpsychologie was a study of psychology that he discovered to be able to better explain higher mental processes because he did not think they could be studied experimentally. He felt that higher mental functions should be studied from human culture.

4. Some of the criticisms of Titchner’s Structuralism were his use of introspection to study mental processes and another criticism was how Structuralism totally ignored anything to do with the study of animal behavior.
Some differences between Titchner and Wundt are that Titchner wanted to understand experiences as a complex system of connected parts whereas Wundt had a holism approach to that, meaning he thought you had to understand something as a whole before you can take it apart and look at individual pieces.

The way they constructed their studies was very different. Titchner required much more participation from the person/subject than Wundt did. Titchner would actually have the subjects describe their sensations, not their perceptions. Contrary to that, Wundt just had subjects respond with a response such as “yes” or “no” based on if they perceived the stimulus or if they did not. Another big difference between them was that Titchner thought that experimentation is how we figure out mental functioning and Wundt agreed with that for simple mental functions only but he did not agree with experimentation for higher mental

functions.

5. Three areas of industrial psychology that Münsterberg contributed to are worker selection, worker efficiency and advertising/marketing. In regards to worker selection, Münsterberg came up with self-report measures of job interests paired with some mini tasks related to the job itself. He basically started the idea of putting people in jobs that matched their abilities based on performance and compatibility.
Münsterberg studied workers efficiency in tedious, boring jobs and found that they do not experience them as tedious and boring compared to the judgments of outsiders looking at the same job. He concluded that many factors determine workers morale and satisfaction in the work place. His last contribution to industrial psychology was with advertising and marketing. He studied how to increase consumer demand and increase the effectiveness of advertisements. He looked into the repetition of ads and how that likely affects what consumers purchase at the store because it sticks in their memory.

6. Some other research conducted by Münsterberg was involving clinical psychology. He developed a “directive” approach, which meant that if patients wanted to get better, they had to EXPECT to get better. Munsterberg also looked into eyewitness testimony and explained that it is not always accurate. He described the difference between subjective truth and objective truth and just because someone takes an oath to tell the truth does not mean it is fact or the truth. He was part of the first lie detector test, which involved word association. Another area of research he was involved in was the study of jury decision-making. He concluded that people would make more correct decisions in groups. He did the same experiment involving just women and he concluded that they are not capable of “rational discussion” in groups and should not be part of a jury.

7. The debate about localization of the brain is between a localism approach and a holism approach. The localism side of the debate believes that the different areas of the brain all have specific functions. The holism side believes that the parts of the brain are connected and the small parts cannot exist independently.
Franz Gall was an advocate of localization because of his development of phrenology, which was the idea of being able to tell someone’s mental capabilities by looking at the bumps and depressions on their head. Pierre Flourens was the opposing side to this debate where he thought the whole brain contributed to behavior. When he used his ablation method, he found that in some cases the function that was lost due to damage in the brain, was then regained later which must have meant the brain worked as a whole.
The debate really got started when Broca and Wernicke came into play. They were advocates of the localization side of the debate. The two men were able to find that language and communication functions are controlled in the left hemisphere of the brain and could demonstrate that in several patients that they had.

8. Most psychologists consider 1879 to be a very important year in psychology because it was when the first ever laboratory exclusively for psychology research was created by Wundt. This seemed to open the door to many other kinds of applied psychology in the field. Wundt also had many students that he mentored and a lot of them contributed important thoughts and ideas to the field of psychology.

9. Titchener did not have a problem with the APA other than the fact that he felt that it did not benefit the field of experimental psychology and he felt his area was the most important. He did not like the wide range of membership within the APA and how it grew to include ideas of psychology that were not acceptable according to Titchener’s definition of experimental psychology. He ended up sending a letter to a group of men (who he thought had acceptable research) and invited them to form an organization strictly for the men who are working in the field of experimental psychology. People were hesitant to join and concerned because they did not want any conflict with the APA. His group ended up being called the “Experimentalists.”
Titchener definitely demonstrated some conflicting opinions of women. He was not fully against women being in the field of experimental psychology. He was a mentor and teacher to many women who went on and got their PhD’s in psychology. At his first year at Cornell, his first and only graduate student was a woman named Margaret Floy Washburn. That information right there proves that he knew and understood that women were fully capable. But he did not give women the opportunity to participate in his exclusive group of “Experimentalists” because he did not want women’s emotions to get involved and that women should not be around the smoke.
Not all of his peers agreed with his decision about not including women. In one of the letters from the reading, a man named Edmund Sanford said that several women have a right to be there due to their scientific contributions and he thought that Titchener should at least ask the women if they wanted to be included.

10. William James invited Münsterberg to take charge of a psychology laboratory at Harvard. He proposed Münsterberg with a deal of three years at a salary of three thousand dollars. He was looking for the best person for the job and wanted to be the leader in psychology in all the universities in America. I feel like Münsterberg might have been a little reluctant to come and work at Harvard because it talks about how he went back to Germany after only three years at Harvard because he was hoping to secure a different job at one of the elite universities there, which was where he really wanted to be. He later came back to Harvard after encountering all the anti-Semitism going on there.
He was different from other experimentalists of the time because he was interested in applied science. He thought it was important to come up with ideas and theories that are applicable to every day life. Münsterberg started to begin his work in the law by studying the accuracy of memory and more specifically eyewitness testimony. He wrote a book called “On the Witness Stand” which applied psychology to legal situations. He was also interested in the accuracy of jury’s and their decision-making and false confessions and when that was likely to occur.
I feel that Münsterberg made so many important contributions and I feel like one of his biggest contributions was when he switched his focus to more applied psychology because the topics he studied were relevant and could be actually used. It seems his contributions have been forgotten because for one, he supported Germany because that is where he was from. WWI led to an anti-German epidemic so people responded hatefully towards him. He became more and more defensive of his home country and America just did not like that. Once he disappeared so did all his work and accomplishments.