Psychology Chapter 1: Evolution of Psychology

Chapter 1: The Evolution of Psychological Science

• Psychology is the scientific study of the mind and behavior.
• Mind refers to internal mental events (thoughts, feelings, perceptions) not directly observable.
• Behavior refers to observable actions and reactions.
• Psychology's roots are in philosophy, specifically questions about the mind-body relationship.
• Key figures in early psychology include:
  • René Descartes (dualism: mind and body are separate but interact).
  • Thomas Hobbes (materialism: mind is what the brain does).
  • John Locke (realism: perceptions accurately reflect the external world).
  • Immanuel Kant (idealism: perceptions are interpretation of sensory data).
• Philosophical empiricism states all knowledge is gained through experience.
• Philosophical nativism postulates some knowledge is innate.
• Modern psychology mostly embraces nativism with research supporting innate knowledge structures.
• Psychology's early history was centered around White men, with limited opportunities for other demographic groups.
• Hermann Helmholtz (late 1800s) studied reaction time and nerve impulse speed, establishing psychology as a scientific field.
• Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) established the first psychology lab—at the University of Leipzig in Germany, marking the beginning of experimental psychology. He believed psychology's goal was to understand the facts of consciousness.
• Structuralism is an approach attempting to analyze the mind into basic sensory elements.
• Edward Titchener (1867-1927), a student of Wundt, pioneered introspection (systematic self-observation) to study basic dimensions of sensations and the mind's elements.
• William James (1842-1910) and other psychologists developed functionalism (emphasizing mental processes' adaptive significance) and challenged structuralism.
• Functionalism drew inspiration from Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, which explored how specific attributes contribute to survival and reproduction.
• Early 1900s:
  • Psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud)—emphasized the importance of the unconscious mind.
  • Behaviorism (Ivan Pavlov, John B. Watson)—focused on observable behavior, dismissing the mind as an explanatory factor.
    • Emphasized stimulus-response relationships rather than internal mental processes.
• Early 1900s resistance to behaviorism included:
  • Gestalt psychology (Max Wertheimer)—emphasized the importance of perceptual organization and how the whole is more than the sum of its parts, challenging the reductionist approach of structuralism and behaviorism. Focus on subjective experience through perception, memory and judgment.
• Late 1900s Cognitive Revolution:
  • Noam Chomsky questioned behaviorist explanations for language learning arguing that children generate sentences they haven't heard before, contradicting the reinforcement principle.
  • Early cognitive psychology drew parallels to computers to study information processing.
• Early 2000s: Neuroscience explored biological correlates of cognitive function, and the brain-mind connection. Techniques like fMRI were being used to study cognition.
• Major figures in this period were Donald Hebb and Brenda Milner.
• Emergence of cultural psychology—studied how culture influences mental life.
• Social psychology emerged emphasizing the importance of subjective interpretations and how people react to their perception of the world (Kurt Lewin, Solomon Asch, Gordon Allport).

Historical Figures, The Mind, Philosophers

• Key figures in the conceptualization of the mind and body relationship. Early conceptualizations of the mind in psychology are heavily influenced by introspection .

Early Psychologists and Their Focuses

• Early psychologists such as Wilhelm Wundt and Edward Titchener tried to understand the structure of the mind. Structuralism and Functionalism.

Becoming a Psychologist

• Psychologists require advanced degrees.
• Multiple specializations in psychology, the most popular include clinical psychology, counseling psychology, social psychology, biological psychology.