Foundations & the History of Psychology Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

What is the name, in psychoanalysis, for the process by which a patient unconsciously shifts onto the analyst the feelings, expectations and patterns of relating that belong to important people from their past, above all their parents?

Question 2

What is the name for the research design in which neither the participants nor the researchers who deal with them know, while the study runs, who has been given the real treatment and who the dummy, so that neither side's expectations can shape what happens?

Question 3

What is the name, in Freud's model of the mind, for the large region holding wishes, memories and conflicts that are kept out of awareness because admitting them would cause anxiety, but that still leak out in dreams, errors and symptoms?

Question 4

What is the name for the United States Public Health Service study, running from 1932 to 1972, that followed the course of untreated syphilis in a group of poor Black men in Alabama without telling them their diagnosis and without giving them penicillin even after it became the standard cure?

Question 5

What is the name for the perspective in psychology that explains thoughts, feelings and behaviour in terms of the nervous system, brain structures, chemical messengers, hormones and genes, and that relies heavily on animal studies, brain imaging and the effects of drugs and injury?

Question 6

Which German psychologist, working alone and using himself as the only subject, memorised thousands of meaningless three-letter syllables to produce the first experimental laws of memory in 1885, among them a curve showing how fast newly learned material is forgotten?

Question 7

Which Viennese neurologist founded psychoanalysis, argued that much of mental life goes on outside awareness and is driven by sexual and aggressive urges, treated patients by getting them to talk freely, and read hidden meaning into dreams and slips of the tongue?

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About Foundations & the History of Psychology

This quiz is about where psychology came from: the people who founded it, the schools that fought over it, the landmark studies, and the methods and ethics that make it a science. One hundred questions in five packs, each describing a founder, a school of thought, a theorist, a famous experiment, a research method or a key concept and asking you to name it from four choices of the same kind, then explaining it. It is a knowledge quiz.

The first pack is the birth of the discipline and the early schools: Wundt's Leipzig laboratory and introspection, structuralism and functionalism, William James and the stream of consciousness, Ebbinghaus and memory, Galton and individual differences, Gestalt psychology and the phi phenomenon, Pavlov and Thorndike and the law of effect, Watson and Little Albert, behaviourism and Skinner, the cognitive revolution and Chomsky.

The second pack is psychoanalysis and the depth psychologies: Freud, the unconscious, the id-ego-superego division, the pleasure principle, the defence mechanisms of repression, projection and sublimation, the Oedipus complex and the psychosexual stages, free association and transference, Jung and the collective unconscious and the archetypes, introversion and extraversion, Adler and the inferiority complex, Karen Horney and Anna Freud.

The third pack is the humanistic, cognitive and biological approaches and the modern landscape: Maslow's hierarchy and self-actualisation, Rogers and unconditional positive regard, cognitive psychology and Neisser, the biological and evolutionary and sociocultural perspectives, positive psychology and Seligman, learned helplessness, the DSM, and the replication crisis with p-hacking, pre-registration, WEIRD samples and informed consent.

The fourth pack is landmark studies, methods and ethics: Milgram on obedience, Asch on conformity, Zimbardo and the Stanford Prison Experiment, Bandura's Bobo doll, Harlow's wire and cloth mothers, the Hawthorne effect and demand characteristics, the double-blind procedure, random assignment, the independent variable, correlation and causation, debriefing, the Tuskegee study, ethics review, the case study, the placebo and meta-analysis.

The fifth pack is concepts and figures across the field's history: the mind-body problem, dualism and the blank slate, psychophysics and Weber's law, G. Stanley Hall, Lightner Witmer, Mary Whiton Calkins and Margaret Floy Washburn, the Clarks' doll studies, brain imaging and the naming of cognitive neuroscience, behavioural genetics and twin studies, cross-cultural psychology, Wundt's folk psychology, the founders of Indian psychology N. N. Sen Gupta and Girindrasekhar Bose, and psychometrics with reliability and validity.

The wrong answers are always other founders, schools, theorists, studies, methods or concepts of the same kind. About forty of the hundred questions carry a photograph of a neutral object from the history of the field, a model brain, a phrenology head, an electrode cap or a conditioning chamber, chosen because every option is the same sort of thing and the picture cannot point to any of them. Facts have been checked against standard reference works.