1) Pre-scientific

2) Transition to Scientific

3) Scientific 

• Beginning of human history to 5th century C.E.

              -- Ancient Views and Classical Greeks

• 5th-16th Centuries

              --Middle Ages to Renaissance

• 17th-19th Centuries

              --Enlightenment and beyond

Pre-Scientific: Beginning of human history (12,000 B.C.E) to 5th Centruy C.E.

• Views of ancient world 

 --Supernatural forces

 --Demonic or spiritual possession

 --Punishment for transgressions

• Classical World

 --Classical Greeks: rejection of supernatural forces

 --Imbalance of bodily fluids (Hippocrates and Galen)

Hippocrates' Early Medical Concepts

1) Proposed that mental disorders had natural causes

2) Categorized disorders as mania, melancholia, or phrenitis

3) Mental disorders are caused by brain malfunction (role of brain pathology in mental disorders)  

• Middle Ages (Europe)

 -- Supernatural forces invoked again

 -- Visionaroes inspired by God's will, or...

 -- Possessed by the devil

Joan of Arc

• 1429
• French peasant
• Visions of leading army to victory
• Approached French heir to ride in battle
• Many though her "insane"
• Assigned her to Battle of Orleans, which they thought was lost
• She won; French rallied behind her
• Later captured by Burgundians (Germans)
• Burned at the stake -- "witch?"

• Return to rationality, reason (18th-19th Century)
• Beginnings noted in late Renaissance/early Enlightenment (17th Century)
• Descartes

 -- mind and body are distinct intities

 -- mental illnes arises rom abnormalities in the    mind

• John Locke: irrational thinking is what brought on mental disorders

• Asylums

 -- Began as early as 16th Century

 -- Remove the mentally ill from society

• Moral Management

 -- Focis not just on physical needs, but social and individual needs

 -- Mentally ill treated with kindness and respect

 -- Part of humanitarian reform

Transitions to Scientific

Late 19th - Early 20th Centuries 

• Psychoanalysis
• Huamanism

Scientific

20th Century - Today

• Behaviorism
• Cognition
• Social Forces
• Biology
• Synthesis

• Conditioning 
• Instrumental (or Operant) Conditioning

 -- Positive/negative reinforement 

• Observational learning and modeling
• Cognitive-behavioral perspective

Organized around the central theme that the role of learning helps shape human behavior.

• Ivan Pavlov; Dogs
• Paired a neutral stimulus repreatedly with an unconditional stimulus that naturally elicites an unconditional behavior.  

• Pavlov excited American psychologist Watson
• Changed focus of psychology from psychoanalysis and the study of theoretical mentalistic constructions to the study of overt behavior, something observable, so theroies could be tested using the scietific method.
• Emphasized the role of the individuals social enviornment in conditioning personaility development and behavior.

• B.F. Skinner 
• States that new responses are learned and tend to reoccur if they are reinforced either positively or negatively
• The cat must first pull a string on its own and then see that food follows. It then will learn that everytime if pulls the string it will get food.

• Misinformation, due to widespread acceptance of false accounts. People skew, exagerate and distort information about psychological accounts.
• Understandings of events are sometimes open to reinterpretation.
• We have to rely on retrospective accounts not direct observation of past historical events.
• Concepts or terms may change meaning overtime and not mean the same thing as they did a few decades ago.
• Bias can skew interpretation