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Plato suggested that the brain is the mechanism of mental processes.
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Aristotle suggested that the heart is the mechanism of mental processes.
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Phineas Gage suffered brain damage when an iron pole pierces his brain. His personality was changed but his intellect remained intact suggesting that an area of the brain plays a role in personality.
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Charles Darwin published the On the Origin of Species, detailing his view of evolution and expanding on the theory of ‘Survival of the fittest.’
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Carl Wernicke published his work on the frontal lobe, detailing that damage to a specific area damages the ability to understand or produce language
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Wilhelm Wundt founds the first experimental psychology lab in Leipzig, Germany. The event is considered the starting point of psychology as a separate science.
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James McKeen Cattell becomes the first professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.
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Sir Francis Galton developed the technique known as the correlation to better understand the interrelationships in his intelligence studies.
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William James published ‘Principles of Psychology,’ that later became the foundation for functionalism.
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The term “Mental Tests” was coined by James Cattell, beginning the specialization in psychology now known as psychological assessment.
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G. Stanley Hall forms the American Psychological Association (APA), which initially has just 42 members.
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The first psychological clinic was developed at the University of Pennsylvania marking the birth of clinical psychology.
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Edward Thorndike developed the ‘Law of Effect,’ arguing that “a stimulus-response chain is strengthened if the outcome of that chain is positive.”
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Sigmund Freud publishes Interpretation of Dreams.
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Alfred Binet’s Intelligence Test was published in France.
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John B. Watson publishes Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It. The work helped establish behaviorism, which viewed human behavior arising from conditioned responses.
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Carl Jung begins to depart from Freudian views and develops his own theories, which are eventually known as analytical psychology.
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John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner published the Little Albert experiments, demonstrating that fear could be classically conditioned.
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Harry Harlow publishes The Nature of Love, which describe his experiments with rhesus monkey's on the importance of attachment and love.
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Albert Bandura first describes the concept of observational learning to explain personality development.