Binet 

New legislation. Just as psychological research responds to social changes, so it also responds to new legislation. Examples include changes to legislation on health and safety, on discrimination in training and selection, and on treatment of, and facilities for, people with mental health problems. This relationship is not one-way – psychologists have influenced public policy in a number of areas in recent years, for instance, in censorship and the child maltreatment. Two pieces of legislation can be linked to early developments in psychology: 1890: The Lunacy Act was passed in the UK (the Act has been linked to the formation of the British Psychological Society). At around the same time similar legislation was enacted across Europe and the USA to regulate the treatment of the insane. 1876-1900: Education Acts: Compulsory education was introduced first in England, then at the turn of the century in France. Along with compulsory education came a perceived need for mental tests of children (first developed by Alfred Binet and his collaborator Théodor Simon in France), and a market for psychological data on education. Later laws regulating, for instance, re-training and industrial law, influenced the development of occupational psychology. More recently, debates and legislation on stem cell research illustrate the direct impact laws can have on research. Written by: Course Team 

Hypnosis. Based on inducing a condition of strong SUGGESTIBILITY, through an initial period of developing a deepening relaxation. From this suggestible state, the individual being hypnotised concentrates on the voice of the hypnotist, allowing the suggestions (if it is working) to enter and affect their own mind. For example, if the aim is to help in giving up smoking, the suggestion may be 'you no longer have any desire for cigarettes'. Trance can also be self-induced, and the suggestions chosen by, and given to oneself, in self-hypnosis. 

Psychometric (assessment and techniques). Psychometric methods involve measuring psychological characteristics, such as personality, intelligence or aptitudes. Statistical techniques are particularly important, to establish reliability (does the test produce consistent results?) and validity (is the test measuring what it is supposed to be measuring?). Another important concept is 'norms'. For example, on intelligence tests, the norm for children of a particular age is the average score gained by the children of that age on whom the test was standardised. It therefore reflects typical development for that age group. 

Developmental psychology focuses on how our psychological characteristics change and develop throughout life, from birth (or, indeed, conception) to old age. Developmental characteristics studied include personality, development of relationships with others, cognitive capacities, and biological changes. All these characteristics are seen as interacting: for example the level of biological development influences our cognitive capacity; this will in turn have consequences for social interaction and so on. Two of the research designs used in developmental psychology are: • longitudinal studies, Where the same people are followed over time, and their changes in behaviour plotted. • Cross-sectional studies – which look at different people in different age groups, examing their different capacities in terms of cognition, capacity for social relationships etc. One of the first major influences on developmental psychology was Darwin, whose theory of evolution prompted a radical re-examination of the way people thought about human development. The first idea that developmental psychology inherited from Darwin's theory was a functionalist perspective, arguing that if a behaviour is functional it increases the organism's chances for survival. Darwin examined the high degree of similarity between adults and children within any one species, as well as degrees of difference, suggesting that some actions must be innate reflexes rather than learned behaviours. An individual is the result of a gradual sequence of prior changes, both in a broad evolutionary sense and within that individual's own lifetime. Throughout, an individual's life further development and change lies ahead. This emphasis on gradual and continual change forms the basis of modern lifespan psychology. At the beginning of the 20th Century developmental psychologists were particularly concerned with charting the ages at which certain changes in behaviour 'normally' occur (e.g. when does a child talk for the first time). This developed into an approach to studying human development that is known as the organismic approach. That is, the individual (or 'organism') is its main focus. Changes in behaviour throughout life are typically presented as a natural sequence of changes that occur sequentially, in a fixed order, so that an individual has to pass through an earlier stage before reaching a later one. This is referred to as a stage theory. It should also be noted that there are distinct 'developmental lines' which tend to develop in parallel, for example cognitive development (cf Piaget) and psychosexual development (cf Freud). One of the assumptions of an organismic stage theory is that environmental influences, while important, can only affect the speed of development. They may slow development down, or accelerate it, or even stop it, but they cannot alter the nature of the stages themselves or the sequence in which they occur.\nAn early influential example of such an approach to human development was Freud's theory of psychosexual stages, which a child had to pass through, seen as central to the emotional development of that child. If a crisis occurred during any developmental stage, then it would be reflected in that person's personality. Like many earlier developmental theories, it tended to conceive of adulthood as a relatively static 'product' of childhood development, rather than seeing it as having its own unique developmental stages. Another developmental approach in the organismic tradition was produced by Piaget, who focused on cognitive development rather than emotional development. Although Freud and Piaget both took an organismic approach, their research methods and psychological traditions are very different. Freud's ideas were based on the clinical data of psychoanalysis, whereas Piaget's theorizing was based, initially, on observation of his own children - informed by biological, evolutionary and psychometric perspectives.\nIn contrast to the organismic approach, the mechanistic approach to representing human development focuses not on the individual, but on his or her behaviour. Development is primarily seen as the product of environmental influences (external factors), with genetic inheritance and cognitive processes (internal factors) seen as less significant. This approach draws on behaviourism and its principles, where development is characterised as a sequence of behavioural responses to environmental stimuli. However, behaviour analysis attempts to address the full context and complexity of human responses to his or her environment, and differs from behaviourism is in its greater acknowledgement of biological influences and constraints on development. \nInitially, developmental psychology focussed primarily on changes during childhood; however, 'lifespan' theories (such as Erik Erikson's) attempt to look at possible developmental challenges occurring throughout adult life also. This represents the beginnings of attempts to overcome the rather pessimistic view implied by traditional approaches, which viewed adulthood as a relatively static 'end-point' of childhood development, with the only change perceived as the physical and psychological decline of old age.\nErik Erikson's lifespan psychology was pioneering in several ways: firstly, in explicitly recognising that psychological development continues during later life, and trying to map some of the key transitions. Secondly, because of its emphasis on the relationship between the individual and society in affecting personal development. Erikson's model of later life is essentially person-centred. Another approach is function-centred: looking at just one type of behaviour (e.g. memory) and measuring variation in it across the lifespan. This approach focuses on changes in ability with age. These changes can include both losses and gains (e.g. loss of processing speed compared to a young adult, but potentially balanced by increase in experience and knowledge). Modern developmental psychologists increasingly conceive development is as a transaction between the individual and their environment, with each influencing the other and in turn affecting the developmental path followed. This acknowledgement of the role a person plays in determining their own environment (and vice-versa) means that the 'nature-nurture' distinction is seen as overly simplistic in developmental psychology. Modern theories also conceive development as the outcome of interactions between age-related factors (e.g. biological maturation, social events such as attending school), historically-related factors (e.g. evolution, the occurrence of war), and 'random' biological and environmental occurrences that only relate to one individual. This approach to lifespan development is known as 'contextualism', drawing on a wide range of perspectives in addition to psychology, such as neuroscience, sociology, history and anthropology. The basic idea behind developmental contextualism is that development does not occur in isolation, it is affected by the context of a person's life. It is suggested that internal influences on development like an individual's biology and psychology interact with external factors such as their cultural influences, interpersonal relationships etc. It is this interaction between influences that results in human development. With this approach, development is seen as clearly embedded within society, its cultures and history. 

Intelligence is a shorthand term covering a complex range of human capacities. There are no universally accepted definitions, but intelligence is generally taken to relate to factors such as the capacity to make sense of abstract ideas and to perceive patterns of complex relationships. There are many factors which relate to 'intelligence', such as capacity for insight into human relationships, verbal and numerical ability, non-verbal insights, 'motor intelligence' (such as ability to quickly master complex motor tasks like driving or tennis); 'emotional intelligence'; 'spiritual intelligence', and so on. A key assumption of many early workers in the field was that all such abilities factors simply reflected an underlying 'general intelligence'. Such a viewpoint would probably be seen as oversimplified these days. It is more likely that intelligence involves a constellation of partly interdependent factors, such as verbal and numerical ability, visuo-spatial ability, or visual pattern-recognition. 

Psychometrics involves the measurement and representation of psychological variables (such as intelligence, aptitude or personality type). It is heavily based on statistics and mathematical analysis. Measurement of individual differences is done using tests designed to be highly reliable (i.e. giving consistent results) and valid (i.e. measuring what they are supposed to measure). With respect to the study of personality, the psychometric perspective measures personality, describes personality structure, and often tries to explain the origins of personality in terms of biology, asking whether it is individual differences in biology that cause individual differences in personality. Although approaches such as humanistic psychology are also particularly interested in individual differences, the underlying philosophy of the two approaches is totally different, and form an interesting contrast. Humanistic psychologists attempt to take an 'idiographic' approach, that is try to understand a person in terms of their own, unique, worldview; this tradition also usually focuses on qualitative data, and takes a holistic view of people. Psychometrics, in contrast, will focus on quantitative data, using categories applicable to everyone, devised by the psychologist, into which the 'individual differences' of the person examined must fit. The focus is on aspects of people – particular dimensions of their behaviour and feelings; the concern is not with 'whole people' and their inner experience; the aim is to make statements about people in general. These are often based on 'personality traits': adjectives that describe enduring characterisics of people, used as the basic 'building blocks' of theories about personality. In attempting to measure personality, psychometrics focuses on the ways in which humans are like each other, in terms of their positions on broad dimensions, rather than with the ways in which each person is unique. The psychometric tradition has also typically seen human beings as having relatively fixed personality traits, in contrast to the humanistic emphasis on possibilities for self-directed change and transformation. Psychometrics has a long tradition in psychology, going back to Galton (around 1884) and is usually associated with biologically-based theories of evolution and heritability. This association led to (in modern terms) some rather ethically dubious connections between psychometrics at that time and movements such as eugenics, the desire to improve humanity through 'selective breeding'. In judging the viewpoints of earlier generations we perhaps do need to take into account the changing moral climate produced by changing socio-political contexts – e.g. eugenics, post-Hitler, probably has quite different connotations to those it would have had in the nineteenth century. As a tradition, psychometrics and individual differences psychology – whether in relation to personality, intelligence or other aspects of psychological measurement – has tended to develop and use its methods for practical applications as well as pure research. Psychometric instruments play an important role in occupational psychology, i.e. psychology applied to a work setting. The use of psychometrics to examine individual differences has been a crucial part of the growth of psychology as an empirical and scientific discipline. Over the last century, at first driven by education policies, and then recruitment into the military in the Second World War, increasingly sophisticated psychometric techniques have helped to develop a wide variety of psychological tests and led to a highly profitable industry. There are now many established tests of aptitude, intelligence and personality which are used both for research and in applied settings such as education, occupational testing for job selection, career counselling and in forensic psychology and clinical practice.