Although he considered himself to be a physiologist, few men of the 20th century had more of an impact on the field of psychology than did Ivan Petrovich Pavlov. His work illustrates one of those great ironies of history. He considered psychology to be something of a pseudo-science and something that would soon go away. Little did he know that his experiments would end up giving a great deal of scientific credibility to the field that until that time, was much more closely related to things like philosophy than to science (Frovlov, 1938).
Ivan Pavlov was born on September 14, 1849 in Ryazan, Russia. He was the son of a minister and he therefore attended a theological seminary after his primary education was complete. After reading some scientific books, however, he dropped out and instead enrolled at the University of St. Petersburg in 1870. After graduating in 1875, he enrolled in the Military Medical Academy where he earned a doctorate of medicine in 1883 (Pavlov, 1928).
During his studies and especially after he had earned his degrees, Pavlov was a prominent researcher in the field of physiology. He was particularly interested in the physiology of digestion. By 1890, he was invited to organize the Department of Physiology at the Institute of Experimental Medicine. He was appointed as the Professor of Pharmacology, and in 1895, he was appointed to the Chair of Physiology. He held this position until 1925 (Pavlov, 1928).
Through-out his career, Pavlov was widely recognized and acclaimed for his contributions to the fields of physiology and later psychology. He won a gold medal for work on the pancreatic nerves during his studies at the University of St. Petersburg and another for work conducted while in medical school. In 1904, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology for his work on digestion, and in 1915, he was awarded the Order of the Legion of Honor (Safra, 2002).
Even the Soviet government recognized the importance of Pavlov’s work. Lenin himself signed a decree on January 14, 1921, that talked about “The outstanding scientific services of Academician I.P. Pavlov, which are of enormous significance to the working class of the whole world.” Unlike many other pre-revolution scientists, Pavlov was largely left alone by the Communist Party of which he never became a member. He was given much more freedom to conduct his studies than most Russians of his day and was not even persecuted after openly denouncing Communism after visiting the United States (Safra 2002).
Pavlov was a tireless researcher. He was working until the very day of his death. One thing he was known for was his extreme punctuality. He never missed an appointment and he was so regimented that he even went on vacation to the same place on the same day ever year. (Safra, 2002) There is an anecdote that illustrates his amazing punctuality quite well. During the Russian Revolution, one of Pavlov’s colleagues arrived ten minutes late to the lab as a result of the shooting that was taking place in the streets. Rather than acknowledging this as a sufficient excuse, Pavlov merely stated that violence in the streets was no reason to put aside their work (Pavlov, 1928)!
Pavlov’s death came in 1936. By that time, he had established an entire school of thought and pupils who continued his work long after he had died (Frovlov, 1938). In fact, there are still people carrying on the work of Ivan Pavlov though he has been dead for almost seventy years. As he looked over his life in his last days, he must have had a great deal of pride in his work. He was universally acclaimed for his work and had made huge contributions to both the fields of physiology and psychology.
What he would have thought of his personal life, however, is a different matter. He married Seraphima Karchevskaya in 1881, but they had to live apart for a time due to finances. Eventually, however, she was able to devote herself to taking care of him and he later attributed this to his success. That did not prevent tragedy, however. Their first child died in miscarriage and their second child died suddenly at a very young age. Of their three sons who survived to adulthood, one of them died while serving in the White Army. This affected Pavlov so greatly that he developed insomnia and became less punctual and predictable than he once had been. Perhaps he could have found solace in religion as his wife did, but he rejected it his whole life. He is on record as saying, however, that the only person he envied anything of was his wife for her deep religious beliefs. How that affected the way he felt about life and tragedy, only he can know (Safra, 2002).
Although Pavlov has come to be known by many as “the guy with the dogs”, he made many other contributions to the field of physiology. He studied such topics as the nerves of the heart and pancreas, the circulation of the blood, the effects of different stimuli on blood pressure, and the physiology of digestion. He also developed a surgical technique that allowed him to implant a small stomach into an animal so he could study its digestion secretions over time. This was revolutionary in that until this point, physiologists had been unable to study the organs of the body while functioning normally. Thus, he not only added much to the knowledge base of physiology, but he also provided a method whereby others could make further discoveries (Pavlov, 1928).
There can be no denying, however, that Pavlov’s most important scientific advancement was in the field of psychology and in particular the idea of conditioned reflexes. Why? The answer is two-fold. In the first place, it was some of the first work to treat psychology as an observable, objective science (Frovlov, 1938). Secondly, it provided a basis for a whole school of thought and an explanation to both the natural function of the human psyche and its disorders (Pavlov, 1967). This provided a base that men such as Watson and Skinner could later augment.
Pavlov’s discovery of conditioned reflexes came almost by accident as he was studying the digestion system of dogs. He had long used animals in his studies, and in this particular case, one of the observations that he was taking was the amount of saliva that dogs produced when they were being fed. He noticed, however, that the mere presence of a lab coat was enough to cause the dogs to salivate. He later discovered that the reason for this was that the dogs recognized that every time they were fed, people in lab coats brought them their food. Thus, they linked food with white lab coats. When they saw someone wearing one, they believed that they were about to be fed and thus produced saliva even if there was no food in front of them (Pavlov, 1928).
Intrigued by this phenomenon, Pavlov experimented. He began sounding a tone whenever he would feed the dogs to see if he could produce a response similar to what had already occurred naturally. What he found was that if he sounded the tone whenever he fed the dogs, before long the dogs would learn to connect the two and would expect one to accompany the other. Soon, the dogs would salivate even if no food was presented in front of them. This he called a conditioned response because it needs to be taught to an organism as opposed to an unconditioned response which is instinctive. In this case, the normal salivation of a dog when it is presented food is an unconditioned response, while the learned behavior of salivating at the sound of a tone is a conditioned response. Appropriately, the food would be called an unconditioned stimulus and the tone would be called a conditioned stimulus (Myers, 2005).
As Pavlov continued to experiment, he found that if he continued to sound the tone without presenting food to the dogs, before long, they would disassociate the two and they would no longer salivate at the sound. This is a process known as extinction. The interesting thing about this process is it is almost impossible for it to be made permanent. Unless one repeats the process of unlearning time after time, the learned response will still be there. At random, one may even exhibit the learned response in reaction to the proper stimulus. With enough repetition of the stimulus and the appropriate item, that behavior can be learned again. Since the behavior had previously been learned and must now be simply re-learned, the process does not take nearly so long the second time (Myers, 2005).
Pavlov also discovered that the timing of the stimulation was important if one hoped to produce the desired effect. The best time to produce the conditioned stimulus is directly before the unconditioned stimulus is presented. If Pavlov were to sound the tone a long time before presenting the food to the dogs or after the food had already been presented, it was possible to produce a conditioned response, but it was not likely to work. If it did, it would require much repetition and the level of response, in this case the amount of saliva produced, would probably be low (Nordby & Hall, 1974).
At first glance, Pavlov’s findings seem a little obvious and one may wonder why he has received so much attention for discovering that dogs drool when they think they are going to be fed. If one considers the implications of the principle of conditioned responses, however, one may see its practical application in diagnosing and treating people with certain kinds of mental disorders. For example, let us consider the common phobia. According to Pavlov, the reason that a particular person has a fear of wide open spaces or an aversion to a particular kind of food has its root in some event of the past that whether that person realizes it or not, associates with that situation. Thus, if we know how a phobia is produced, we can begin the process of conditioning a different, more “normal” response to that given stimulus.
Pavlov would not limit his ideas about the uses for the conditioned response to the study of phobias alone, however. He, like Skinner and Watson, was a behaviorist. This means that he believed that scientists should concentrate only on observable behavior and basically ignore the mental processes involved in cognition. Why should we ignore such a seemingly important part of our existence? Pavlov believed that it was not scientifically sound to attempt to study that which cannot be observed and measured. In this respect, he totally abandoned the ideas of the early psychologists who believed that introspection was the primary means whereby the individual could study his own mind (Myers, 2005).
Is it scientifically sound to simply ignore such an important part of our existence even if it cannot be scientifically observed? Pavlov would have said yes, but most of today’s psychologists are of a different opinion. Modern psychology has come to the understanding that something that affects us as heavily as cognition cannot be simply ignored (Myers, 2005). True, science should focus primarily on what can be observed, and documented, and measured, and experimented on, but there is more to life than just that. True, our behaviors are a good indication of who we are, but there is no way to ascertain things like motives and morals by merely examining behavior.
While some of Pavlov’s ideas have been critiqued over the years, his reputation as one of the leading scientific figures of the 20th century remains unblemished. Some go so far as to say that no other 20th century psychologist did as much for the field as Pavlov other than Freud himself (Nordby & Hall, 1968). This is high praise for someone who not only refused to think of himself as a psychologist, but had nothing but contempt for the field (Pavlov, 1967).
References
Fravlov, Y. (1938). Pavlov and His School. London: Johnson Reprint Company.
Mountcastle, V. (1968). Medical Physiology. Saint Louis: The C. V. Mosby Company.
Myers, D. (2005). Exploring Psychology. New York, New York: Worth Publishers.
Nordby, V & Hall, C. (1974). A Guide to Psychologists and Their Concepts. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company.
Pavlov, I. (1928). Lectures on Conditioned Reflexes. New York, New York: International Publishers.
Pavlov, I. (1941). Conditioned Reflexes & Psychiatry. New York, New York: International Publishers.
Safra, J. (2002). Pavlov, Ivan. The New Encyclopedia Britannica (Vol. 9, pp. 215-216). Chicago, IL: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.
