The history of psychology is built upon understanding the work of particular individuals throughout history. Your textbook mentions several major and minor contributors to the un
The history of psychology is built upon understanding the work of particular individuals throughout history. Your textbook mentions several major and minor contributors to the understanding of psychology's history. However, the textbook is one interpretation of the writings and thoughts of these historical figures. To have a better understanding of those thoughts, you need to read samples of the original works.
- you will research something that has been written by an individual from the time period(s) being studied (choose a name from the textbook readings-Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt,Edward Bradford Titchener,Franciscus Cornelius Donders)
- The work must be something written by the chosen person, but need only be a sample of the chosen historical work and involve only a few pages of writing. Make sure the writing deals with the topics being covered this week.
- There are several sources to use to obtain the works; the best place to start is to search for the person's name on the Internet using Google but you can only utilize this to find information about the person. Use an original historical work by an author of your choice, but keep in mind that Outside Reading Rubric you should use peer-reviewed, academic sources for the analysis of this work.
- After reading the material, answer these questions:
- What were the main points of the writing?
- What were the differences and similarities between what you read and what was written about the individual in the textbook?
- Based on your own views of psychology, how does the author's viewpoint fit into your current understanding of psychology?
Summary
Wundt was the founder of both experimental psychology as a separate discipline and the school of voluntarism. One of Wundt’s goals was to discover the elements of thought using experimental introspection. A second goal was to discover how these elements combine to form complex mental experiences. Wundt found that there are two types of basic mental experiences: sensations and feelings. Wundt distinguished among sensations, which are basic mental elements; perceptions, which are mental experiences given meaning by past experience; and apperceptions, which are mental experiences that are the focus of atten-tion. Because humans can focus their attention on whatever they wish, Wundt’s theory was referred to as voluntarism.
Wundt believed that reaction time could supplement introspection as a means of studying the mind. Following techniques developed by Donders, Wundt presented tasks of increasing complexity to his subjects and noted that more complex tasks resulted in longer reaction times. Wundt believed that the time required to perform a complex mental operation could be determined by subtracting the times it took to perform the simpler operations of which the complex act consists. Wundt eventually gave up his reaction-time studies because he found reaction time to be an unreliable measure.
In keeping with the major thrust of voluntarism, Wundt claimed that physical events could be explained in terms of antecedent events but psychological events could not be. The techniques used by the physical sciences are therefore inappropriate for psychology. Volitional acts can be studied only after the fact by studying their outcomes. In his 10-volume Völkerpsychologie, Wundt considered such topics as social customs, religion, myths, morals, art, law, and language.
Titchener created the school of structuralism at Cornell University. He set as his goal the learning of the what, how, and why of mental life. The what consisted of determining the basic mental elements, the how was determining how the elements combined, and the why consisted of determining the neurological correlates of mental events. His introspectionists had to be carefully trained so that they would not commit the stimulus error. According to Titchener, sensations and images could vary in terms of quality, intensity, duration, clearness, and extensity. Following in the empirical-associationistic tradition, Titchener said that sensations always stimulate the memories of events that were previously experienced along with those sensations, and these memories give the sensations meaning. There were a number of fundamental differences between Wundt’s voluntarism and Titchener’s structuralism. Many factors led to the downfall of structuralism: examples are the unreliability of introspection and the ignoring of psychological development, abnormal behavior, personality, learning, individual differences, evolutionary theory, and practicality.
Brentano believed that mental acts should be studied rather than mental elements, and therefore, his position is referred to as act psychology. Brentano used the term intentionality to describe the fact that a mental act always encompasses (intends) something external to itself. Like Brentano, Stumpf believed that psychology should be directed at intact, meaningful experience instead of the elements of thought. Stumpf had a major influence on those individuals who later created the school of Gestalt psychology.
Husserl believed that before scientific psychology would be possible, a taxonomy of the mind was required. To create such a taxonomy, pure phenom-enology would be used to explore the essence of subjective experience. According to Husserl, it did not make sense to perform experiments involving such processes as perception, memory, or judgment without first knowing the essences of those processes. The mind itself, he said, must be understood before we can study how the mind responds to objects external to it.
Külpe agreed that the mind possesses processes—not just sensations, images, and feelings—and found that some of these processes are imageless. Examples of imageless thoughts include searching, doubting, and hesitating. Külpe and his colleagues at Würzburg found that a mental set, which could be created either through instructions or through personal experience, provided a determining tendency in problem solving. They also found that once a mental set had been established, humans could solve problems unconsciously.
Ebbinghaus, like members of the Würzburg school, demonstrated that Wundt had been wrong in saying that the higher mental processes could not be studied experimentally. Using “nonsense” material, both Ebbinghaus and Müller systematically studied learning and memory so thoroughly that their works are still cited in psychology texts.
Vaihinger contended that because sensations are all that we can be certain of, all references to so-called physical reality must be fictional. All societal living is based on fictions that can be evaluated only in terms of their usefulness.
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