Intro to Psychology History & Approaches

Psychology….A short history and a long past. Stand Alone discipline for 120 years. What is psychology? Science of behavior and mental processes Sickness is as old as humankind and methods of attempting to cure it are as old as human culture. Supernatural and natural healing methods have been used by all peoples, ancient and recent, but surgery in general is a product of Western culture. An exception to this is the operation called trephination, the oldest known surgery. Trephined human skull fossils date as far back as 10,000 years to the people of the European Neolithic era and in a limited way in the Canary Islands, North Africa, Russia, and in the New World before the discovery of the Americas. The most extensive and expert practice of the operation by American Indians was in Peru and Bolivia, where numerous trephined skulls have been found in ancient burial sites. Some show no signs of healing, indicating the death of the patient during or shortly after the operation, but many show extensive healing of the bone.

Prescientific Psychology How are ideas formed? Some ideas are inborn, innate The mind is a blank slate, ideas grow from experience Socrates (469-399 B.C.) Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) Plato (428-348 B.C.) Locke (1632-1704) Most historians of Psych trace the roots of the discipline back to the ancient Greek philosophers. Plato/Socrates described human knowledge as being innate. Humans born with the ability to perform certain tasks. Others disagreed- Aristotle- In order to understand something, you must directly observe the phenomenon. His ideas are an early example of what scientists call empiricism. Most psychologists believe this is an essential component of psych.

Psychological Science is Born Wilhelm Wundt Late 1800’s 1st Psychology Lab Father of Modern Psychology Seeking to measure reflexes vs. conscious awareness. (direct way to observe causes of behaviors) Late 1800’s Wundt had been interested in understanding the biological causes of behavior. He realized however, that it would be difficult to study the brain of a human directly while the human was using it! He devised a technique that would allow him to indirectly observe causes of behavior. Wundt called his approach introspection. Wundt trained his subjects to record accurately their cognitive reactions to simple stimuli.

Early Schools of Thought Wave One: Structuralism/Functionalism What is consciousness? Edward Titchener Introspection Functionalism Why do we have consciousness? How does it help us adapt/function? William James- 1st Psych Textbook Wilhelm Wundt (late 1800’s) 1st Psychology Lab Father of Modern Psychology Structuralism (what is consciousness) Titchener/ William James (Harvard) 1st Psychology Text Functionalism (Why do we have consciousness? How does it help us live? Structuralism was introduced by Edward Titchener and furthered the study of measuring the “atoms of the mind”, the discrete elements of consciousness. Through introspection , Wundt believed, a psychologist would be able to distill the structure of consciousness. This theory became known as structuralism. Titchener (student of Wundt) was convinced that unless we teach students HOW to do psychology, psychology as a scientific discipline would never develop the way biology, physics, and chemistry had. Set up a lab at Cornell to teach students how psychology works. Structuralism was the study of the most basic elements, primarily sensations and perceptions, that make up our conscious mental experience. An early school of psychology that used introspection to explore the elemental structure of the human mind. While Wundt was developing his theory in Germany, James was developing his own at Harvard College. James believed that understand the structure of consciousness was useful, but it wasn’t enough. He felt that we needed to understand the purpose for consciousness. Functionalism which was the study of the function of consciousness (rather than the structure). James was interested in how our minds adapt to our changing environment. Explores the “why” not the “what” What are your immediate sensations?

What the heck do you see?

Wave Two: Gestalt Gestalt Psychology Max Wertheimer (1880-1943) Examine a person’s whole experience. The whole is more than the sum of its individual parts. Gestalt Therapy While Wundt and James were experimenting with introspection, another group of early psychologists were explaining human thought and behavior in a very different way. Gestalt psychologists tried to examine a person’s total experience because the way we experience the world is more than just an accumulation of various perceptual experiences. Gestalt theorists demonstrated that the whole experience is often more than just the some of its parts of the experience. A painting can be represented as rows and columns of points of color, but the experience of the painting is much more than that. Therapists later incorporated gestalt thinking by examining not just a client’s difficulty but the context in which the difficulty occurs. Like the introspective theories, other than the contribution to specific forms of therapy and the study of perception, Gestalt psychology has relatively little influence on current psychology

Wave Three: Psychoanalysis Freud (1856-1939) Psychoanalytic Theory Critics Unscientific Unverifiable theories If you ask a random person to name a psychologist they will most likely say Freud (Dr. Phil) Freud revolutionized the field of psychology when he claimed that he discovered the unconscious mind, a part of our mind over which we do not have control that determines, in part, how we think and behave While many therapists still use some of Freud’s basic ideas in helping clients, Freud has been criticized for being unscientific and creating unverifiable theories. Many of Freud’s terms moved from being exclusively used by psychologists to being used in day-to-day speech.

Wave Four: Behaviorism John Watson (1878-1958) (founder) B.F. Skinner (reinforcement) Limit studies to what can be observed Watson studied the pioneering conditioning experiments of Ivan Pavlov. Watson declared that if psychology is to be a science than if must limit itself to only observable behaviors. Watson and colleagues wanted to establish behaviorism as the dominant paradigm of psychology B.F. Skinner expanded the ideas of behaviorism with ideas on reinforcement.

Modern Approaches/Perspectives Evolutionary Biological Cognitive Behavioral Psychoanalytical Humanistic Approach Cross-Cultural