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Chapter 1 Introduction to Personality Psychology 26

At this point it is interesting to note that Pavlov was rather dismissive of psychology and saw his own contribution in the more rigorous discipline of ‘physiology of higher nervous activity’ (Pavlov, 1927; see Gray, 1979). Namely, Pavlov was a physiologist who became a psychologist when he discovered the famous conditioned reflex (explained in detail in Chapter 3) in dogs serving as subjects for his exper iments examining digestion. Actually, his greatest discovery was something that interfered with his experiments. As he was interested in measuring the amount of saliva in response to food intake, Pavlov was frustrated because the dogs produced saliva in response to signs/signals that indicated food intake, rather than in response to the food itself. He initially referred to these reactions as ‘psychic secretion’— or ‘appetite juice’ (Pavlov, 1897/1982) and began to study them scientifically. The shift of his research in terest from physiology to psychology made him truly famous and overshadowed his Nobel Prize-winning work on digestion (Gray, 1979). The importance of Pavlov’s work is felt through out the whole of psychology and psychiatry. In per sonality psychology, it is seen in the work of Hans Eysenck and Jeffrey Gray, whose work is discussed in Chapters 5 and 6—indeed, Gray’s PhD in 1964 led to a book called Pavlov’s Typology . As we will see in Chapter 5, Eysenck’s (1957) first biological theory of personality was based on Pavlovian notions as well as newer learning-based theory current at the time. As we see in Chapter 13, we now have a neuroscience of personality that is not too far removed from Pavlov’s notion of higher nervous system activity (Corr & Perkins, 2006). One account of the individual differences observed in Pavlov’s dogs refers to a flood in his basement lab oratory in St. Petersburg, Russia. The morning after the flood, some dogs appeared to be frightened, while others were far less so. This led Pavlov to suggest that their different behavioural responses reflected differ ences in the sensitivity of their nervous systems to this potentially unpleasant event.While some were slightly agitated, others took the event more ‘calmly’. Following this event, Pavlov began to study systematic differences in dogs in conditioning experiments, which led him to the insight that temperament can play an important

role in determining responses in conditioning experi ments.At that time, it was rather bold of Pavlov to seri ously consider individual differences in the behaviour of his dogs as valuable empirical data rather than as experimental ‘error’ and annoying nuisances in his experimental studies. Interestingly, Pavlov challenged his own theories when an individual dog’s behaviour did not match his theory-based expectations, rather than dismissing that particular observation as an out lier or statistical noise. In a sense, this research strat egy reflects a focus on the whole animal rather than an abstraction of factors and processes in different ani mals that are summarized in statistical terms (Corr & Perkins, 2006). Pavlov did not rest content with mere description of his behavioural observations, but he wanted to ex plain them in biological terms. This was made easier by the study of dogs who are easily amenable to con ditioning by food—they are also generally agreeable creatures with which to work. What is remarkable about Pavlov’s research was the attempt to build a mechanistic model of the mind based upon physiol ogy of the ‘higher nervous activity’, replacing ‘men talistic’ models, especially those requiring recourse to notions of the ‘soul’ or ‘mind’—this is something we see in the behaviourist tradition of psychology, which he greatly enabled (see Chapter 3). It is less known that Pavlov was also interested in psychiatry. In ‘Real-World Implications’ we explore how Pavlov inspired psychiatry. Later in his career, he founded the field of experimental psychopathology, which is now an active field of psychiatric science, and was interested in the application of his concepts to neu roses in humans. For example, he exposed his dogs to increasingly similar discriminative stimuli that elicited contradictory responses, which he considered a form of experimental neurosis. Again, we can posit a biological theory of personality that is related to learning theory (i.e. the acquisition and extinction of learned responses) and that can then be extended to the understanding and treatment of human clinical disorders: the continuum of personality and psychopathology. Pavlov was, indeed, a very reluctant psychologist, but ironically for him, one of the most important ones ever to live. This self-avowed physiologist did much to establish a new science of behaviour and one

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© Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press