association, in psychology, a connection between different sensations, feelings, or ideas by virtue of their previous occurrence together in experience. The concept of association entered contemporary psychology through the empiricist philosophers John Locke, George Berkeley, David Hume, and David Hartley Hartley, David, 1705–57, English physician and philosopher, founder of associational psychology. In his Observations on Man (2 vol., 1749) he stated that all mental phenomena are due to sensations arising from vibrations of the white medullary substance
..... Click the link for more information. , and the British associationist school of James Mill Mill, James, 1773–1836, British philosopher, economist, and historian, b. Scotland; father of John Stuart Mill. Educated as a clergyman at Edinburgh through the patronage of Sir John Stuart, Mill gave up the ministry and went to London in 1802 to pursue a
..... Click the link for more information. , John Stuart Mill Mill, John Stuart, 1806–73, British philosopher and economist. A precocious child, he was educated privately by his father, James Mill. In 1823, abandoning the study of law, he became a clerk in the East India company, where he rose to become head of the
..... Click the link for more information. , and others (see associationism associationism, theory that all consciousness is the result of the combination, in accordance with the law of association , of certain simple and ultimate elements derived from sense experiences. It was developed by David Hartley and advanced by James Mill .
..... Click the link for more information. ). Translated into the stimulus-response terms of behaviorism behaviorism, school of psychology which seeks to explain animal and human behavior entirely in terms of observable and measurable responses to environmental stimuli. Behaviorism was introduced (1913) by the American psychologist John B.
..... Click the link for more information. , association has been thought of as the basis of learning and conditioning. Paired experience and the principle of reinforcement are often invoked to explain associative learning. However, Gestalt Gestalt (gəshtält`) [Ger.
..... Click the link for more information. psychologists, who believe that association between items is dependent on their relations to each other, interpret association as an aftereffect of perceptual organization. Psychoanalysis psychoanalysis, name given by Sigmund Freud to a system of interpretation and therapeutic treatment of psychological disorders. Psychoanalysis began after Freud studied (1885–86) with the French neurologist J. M.
..... Click the link for more information. uses a technique known as free association, in which the client expresses thoughts exactly as they occur, even though they may seem irrelevant. This procedure is designed to reveal areas of conflict and to bring into consciousness traumatic events that have been repressed, the theory being that earlier thoughts and associations can be derived from current thoughts with similar patterns of association.

Bibliography

See N. J. Mackintosh, Conditioning and Associative Learning (1983).

association

In psychology, the process of forming mental connections or bonds between sensations, ideas, or memories. Though discussed by the ancient Greeks (in terms of similarities, contrasts, and contiguities), the “association of ideas” was first proposed by John Locke and subsequently examined by David Hume, John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, and William James. Ivan Pavlov used objective methods to study the phenomenon, resulting in his identification of the conditioned reflex (see conditioning). Within psychoanalysis, the therapist encourages “free association” in order to help identify latent conflicts. Practitioners of Gestalt psychology and others have criticized associationist theories as too all-embracing, while some theorists of cognitive psychology have made it central to their theory of memory.

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Bibliography

association

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