Benner - Hill - Baker Encyclopedia of Psychology and Counseling

Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1999. - 1276 p.

ISBN: 0-8010-2100-6

 

This book was born out of an awareness of the need for a comprehensive treatment of psychology from a Christian point of view. The rapidly expanding body of knowledge in psychology has led to the publication of a number of encyclopedias in recent years, each written from one viewpoint or more usually from several. None of these, however, has been written from a Christian perspective, identifying the issues and applications of particular importance from that perspective and suggesting ways of evaluating the concepts, theories, and research findings in light of biblical teachings. This volume fills that void.

 

First and foremost this is an encyclopedia, factually presenting the major current findings and theories in the field. Thus it presents psychology in its own terms. Second, many articles also contain an explicit biblical or theological perspective. This is broadly evangelical, though it is much less monolithic and narrowly defined than it would be if all articles had been written by one author. I made no effort to force my viewpoint on the articles, preferring instead to allow contributors the liberty to speak for themselves. This work derives its strength from numerous authors writing on their areas of expertise and from their individual Christian perspectives.

 

Although providing representative coverage of important aspects of the entire field, this volume focuses on the areas of personality, psychopathology (psychological problems), psychotherapy and other treatment approaches, major systems and theories of psychology, and the psychology of religion. These areas interest Christians the most and are often crucial in efforts to relate psychology and Christianity. Approximately 80 percent of the 1,050 articles in this volume fall in these areas, the remaining ones being divided among social psychology, developmental psychology, and general experimental psychology. The goal for all articles has been to be both readily understandable to nonpsychologists and useful to psychologists and other mental health professionals.

 

The encyclopedia was designed around the topics identified in the category index. For example, articles in the category “Psychopathology” include 184 disorders found in the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 99 symptoms and reactions, and 25 general topics. The category “Treatment Approaches and Issues” contains 149 articles on different approaches, and 34 on general issues involved in treating psychological problems.

 

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Learning

 

A branch of psychology with a rich history, learning is principally concerned with the acquisition of knowledge. As such its influences, like those of psychology itself, include both philosophy (i.e., epistemology) and science. A definition of learning often used by psychologists working in this area is that learning is a more or less permanent change in behavior resulting from experience. Behavior (generally defined) is always the dependent variable in psychology, and to demonstrate that learning has taken place it is necessary to show that a change in behavior has occurred. Learning, however, cannot be equated with performance. As any student knows, performance on a task might be poor for several reasons (e.g., motivation, uncertainty regarding instructions, distractions); therefore, inferior performance on a task does not necessarily mean that learning has not occurred. This change in behavior must also be more or less permanent in that the behavioral change cannot be due to a temporary condition such as fatigue or a drug-induced state. Finally, the change in behavior must be due to experience. Some behavioral changes occur because of native response tendencies or physiological maturation (e.g., flying, walking), but these phenomena are not typically classified as learning.

 

Philosophical Foundations

The major philosophical influences on learning come from the epistemologies of empiricism and rationalism. Empiricism is the view that all knowledge comes from experience, with special emphasis placed on sensory experience. Ideas are either direct copies of sensory impressions (simple ideas) or are combinations of several simple ideas (complex ideas). John Locke, James Mill and John Stuart Mill, David Hume, and George Berkeley are a few philosophers who made significant contributions to empiricism. The epistemology of empiricism also includes other features such as reductionism, the position that all complex ideas or behaviors can be reduced to simple ideas or behaviors; associationism, the thesis that ideas or behaviors that are contiguous in time become connected; and mechanism, the belief that the mind is like or is a machine.

 

Rationalism, a position held by René Descartes, Leibnitz, and Kant, among others, is the epistemological position that knowledge is derived through reason rather than sensory experience. For the rationalists sense data provide the raw material that the rational mind interprets according to certain innate principles.

 

Both empiricism and rationalism provide the philosophical groundwork for theories of learning. Empiricism is the foundation of most learning theories, including those of Edward Lee Thorndike, Ivan Pavlov, Clark Leonard Hull, and B. F. Skinner. Gestalt theory and the cognitive theories (e.g., information processing and the learning theory of Edward Chace Tolman), while certainly not without influences from empiricism, are more in keeping with rationalistic assumptions.

 

Historical Theories

A brief review of a few major learning theories in psychology’s history is warranted. The first theory to have a significant impact on the psychology of learning in the United States was that of Thorndike. Thorndike proposed that learning is incremental due to trial and error, not insightful (as was supposed at the time), and that an association or connection between a stimulus (S) and a response (R) is strengthened when the response is followed by a “satisfying state of affairs.” This principle, known as the law of effect, was the basis for later behaviorist notions of reinforcement.

 

A second theorist to make a major contribution to the psychology of learning was Pavlov, a Russian physiologist. Known for his discovery of classical conditioning, Pavlov’s work was the harbinger of years of research investigating the phenomenon of conditioned reflexes. By making an unconditioned stimulus (a stimulus that reflexively elicits an unlearned or unconditioned response) contingent upon the presentation of a neutral stimulus (the conditioned stimulus), Pavlov found that a new response (the conditioned response) could be acquired by the subject. Classical conditioning remains a central paradigm for investigating learning processes as well as an approach to the treatment of certain types of psychopathological disorders.

 

From the 1930s to the early 1960s Hull’s learning theory was the most ambitious and influential in psychology. Hull sought to develop a theory of learning that consisted of a systematic and logical structure of postulates and theorems. In his effort to develop such a theory, Hull made use of intervening variables, or theoretical constructs, such as habit strength, drive, and inhibition. Hull believed that by knowing the value of each of these variables (as well as other variables that are included in his system) the likelihood of a learned response being made at a given moment, known as reaction potential, could be calculated. Reinforcement, according to Hull, is accomplished through drive reduction. A response that reduces the drive state will be strengthened, more likely to occur in future similar situations. The importance of Hull’s theory of learning is the basic approach it takes; that is, the assumption that behavior is determined and mechanistic and that it is thoroughly knowable in a systematic and scientific manner. Although Hull’s theory did not reach its lofty goal, the contributions of Hull, both through his own work and that of his followers such as Kenneth Spence, Neal Miller, and Orval Hobart Mowrer, are numerous and significant.

 

Tolman represents a blending of behavioral and cognitive approaches in his introduction of the concept of expectancy to learning theory. Hull and Tolman were contemporaries, but their theories were vastly different. While Hull was thoroughly mechanistic in his theory, Tolman denied that behavior is automatic. Behavior to Tolman was purposeful; his brand of learning was known as purposive behaviorism because it attempted to explain behavior in terms of goals. Tolman, however, remained a behaviorist in that he studied what every other behaviorist studied: observable stimuli and observable responses.

 

One of Tolman’s important theoretical concepts is latent learning, learning that is not demonstrated through the performance of the subject. According to Tolman, we know much more about our environment than our behavior indicates; in other words, we act upon only a small part of the information we have available. We act upon information only when we need to do so. This distinction between learning and performance remains an important consideration in learning.

 

Another concept of Tolman’s was the cognitive map. According to Tolman, an organism does not simply learn S-R relationships; an organism essentially learns that certain events lead to other events, or that one sign leads to another sign. For example, an animal running through a maze develops a picture or cognitive map of the environment and accesses that map in order to navigate through the maze. Thus the behavior of an animal is more advanced and cognitive than other behaviorists believed. Tolman, therefore, adumbrated the movement toward cognitivism that took place in the 1960s and 1970s.

 

No other individual in psychology had greater impact within the discipline or without than Skinner. Upon Skinner’s death, psychology lost perhaps its last larger-than-life personality, its last celebrated figure that commanded the attention of both psychologists and the general public alike. One of the ironies of psychology is that for most nonpsychologists, and perhaps for most psychologists as well, Skinner is the quintessence of behaviorism; the model from which all other behaviorists follow. While Skinner was a behaviorist, his brand of behaviorism was unlike that of Tolman’s or even Hull’s. The kind of learning theory that Skinner proposed was so different from what most behaviorists were discussing during the 1930s to the 1950s that it was known as radical behaviorism.

 

Skinner differed from other theorists mentioned in that he believed that any discussion of theoretical constructs (e.g., drive, habit, cognitive maps) hampers a scientific understanding of the controls of behavior. Skinner was interested in a functional, or experimental, analysis of behavior; by this he meant an analysis of behavior only in terms of specific environmental determinants of specific behaviors. A behavior is explained in Skinner’s behaviorism when all of the antecedent factors, or independent variables, acting on that behavior are identified. Only then can a psychologist predict the occurrence of the response and also influence its occurrence by manipulating the independent variables.

 

Skinner was consistent in insisting that a true functional analysis of behavior had never been tried in psychology. All other behaviorisms were, according to Skinner, too mentalistic in their use of intervening variables, variables not located within the peripheral environment.

 

While Skinner’s behaviorism was a minority view in psychology, his popular writings such as Walden Two and Beyond Freedom and Dignity made him a center of controversy for the public. In his novel Walden Two, Skinner tried to apply his learning principles to the shaping of a model society, and in Beyond Freedom and Dignity Skinner discusses cultural engineering. Both books brought Skinner’s ideas of psychology’s role in society to the public’s awareness and fostered in many a distrust and even fear of psychology, a distrust that remains to this day.

 

Beginning in the 1950s, different views, known as mathematical (or statistical) models of learning, were proposed by various theorists. An example of such a theorist is William Estes (b. 1919). According to these statistical approaches, the learning process is not entirely predictable; it is random in certain ways that can be described statistically. Rather than attempt to predict the behavior of a single individual on a single learning trial (as Hull, for example, sought to do), statistical learning theorists attempt to predict the average behavior of a single individual over many trials or the average behavior of many individuals on a single learning trial. The development of these types of mathematical theories further prepared the psychology of learning for its current state.

 

Contemporary Learning Theory

While learning theories during the first 70 years of the twentieth century attempted to provide comprehensive global theories of the learning process, contemporary learning theory is more limited in scope, often proposing different mechanisms for different behaviors. Some of the reasons for this change in perspective are data that do not fit neatly into the traditional view of learning; that is, learning due to classical conditioning, operant conditioning, or some combination of the two.

 

For example, contrary to the theory of Thorndike, animals do seem to have a certain degree of insight. Not all animal learning is by trial and error. Contrary to the traditional view of classical conditioning, not all stimuli can be presented contiguously to produce a conditioned response. There are biological constraints that allow only certain kinds of associations to be made. Research in conditioned toxicosis (or learned flavor aversions) clearly shows that organisms are biologically prepared to learn associations between internal CSs (e.g., taste) and internal USs (e.g., a substance that makes an animal temporarily ill), but not between external CSs (e.g., lights) and internal USs. Finally, the phenomenon of instinctive drift (an organism’s drift toward instinctive behaviors to the detriment or even preclusion of conditioning) challenges the traditionally accepted views of instrumental conditioning.

 

The contemporary state of learning can be illustrated through a brief description of two developments, the current view of classical conditioning and recent advancements in the neurophysiology of learning. The traditional view of classical conditioning is that it is a simple process based on the contiguous pairing of two stimuli (the CS and the US). However, it is now known that contiguity is not sufficient to produce learning. In addition to the problem of preparedness, the current view of classical conditioning is that it is a much more complex and cognitive learning process. The subject in classical conditioning is now seen as an active information seeker using logical relations among events to create a representation of the world. Conditioning is based on a contingency (or predictiveness) between the CS and the US, and it is this information that the subject acquires during learning.

 

Neuroscience has brought tremendous changes to our understanding of learning. The brain changes both physiologically and structurally as a result of experience. Learning, therefore, can be thought of as represented by these physical changes in the neural network. When learning occurs, the connections between brain cells are modified, a process known as synaptic plasticity. New connections are made and old connections can be lost or changed in strength. This synaptic plasticity is the subject of the new connectionism, or network theory. Using techniques from biology and other natural sciences, psychologists investigating learning from a neuroscience perspective can literally see changes in the brain following a learning trail. A putative mechanism for synaptic plasticity is long-term potentiation (LTP), an artificial way of inducing changes in brain that are similar to the changes naturally seen during learning. By studying LTP, psychologists have gained valuable insight into the biochemistry and physiology of learning.

 

A specific example of neuroscience’s contribution to learning is in classical conditioning. It is now known that classical conditioning is accomplished in the cerebellum. Destruction of certain cells in the cerebellum precludes classical conditioning or abolishes the performance of the conditioned response if the cerebellar damage occurs after conditioning has taken place. Evidence such as this suggests that the traditional attempt to find the engram might have found success in the case of classical conditioning and opens up other opportunities to study where in the brain learning takes place in other learning situations.

 

Contemporary learning is very physiological in nature. While many learning experiments take place that are not directly physiological in scope, the generally accepted view is that learning is intimately linked to the brain. At the end of the twentieth century researchers are attempting to elucidate what these more or less permanent changes in the neural network that result from experience are, what the mechanisms behind the changes might be, and if those mechanisms can be modified to facilitate the learning process.

 

Additional Readings

K. S. Seybold

 

See Cognitive Development; Behavioral Psychology; Conditioning, Classical; Conditioning, Operant.