SYSTEMS AND SCHOOLS

IN PSYCHOLOGY
UNIT I - Development Of Psychology as A Discipline
Historical Roots

Jennifer Nila Vijayakumar, M.A., MPhil (Clin Psy)

Assistant Professor
Department of Clinical Psychology
Psychology has a long past,
but only a short history.
Hermann Ebbinghaus (1908)
 INTRODUCTION
History of Psychology

The roots of psychology can be traced to the great philosophers of

ancient Greece.

The most famous of them, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.

They posed fundamental questions about mental life:

❑ What is consciousness?

❑ Are people inherently rational or irrational?

❑ Is there really such a thing as free choice?

They deal with the nature of the mind and mental processes, which are the
key elements of the cognitive perspective in psychology.
 Nature of Body HIPPOCRATES (460 BC)
&
Human Behaviours
• Hippocrates – Father of Human Behaviour

• Interested in physiology - the study of the functions of

the living organism and its parts.

• He made many important observations about how the

brain controls various organs of the body.

• These observations set the stage for what became

the biological perspective in psychology.
 OBSERVATIONS BY HIPPOCRATES
• The right side of the brain controls the left side of the body and vice versa.

• In “The Nature of Man” he described a theory of four humors (corresponding to the

4 elements of air, earth, fire and water): blood, two biles, phlegm.
 OBSERVATIONS BY HIPPOCRATES
▪ In “The Art of Healing” he described symptoms of melancholia (depression), mania,
postpartum depression, phobias, paranoia and hysteria.

▪ He described epilepsy in “De morbu sacro” (Concerning the Sacred Disease). -

Seizures were considered a result of divine meddling.

• He rejected such views and predicted that a physiological cause would be

discovered (it has been).

• His “dry mouth” theory of thirst says that as air passes over throat membranes it
dries them out, creating a sensation of thirst that motivates drinking.
 HIPPOCRATES – FATHER OF PSYCHOLOGY?
Hippocrates is considered the father of medicine but he also contributed
to psychology by:
• Describing the natural causes of psychological conditions
• Recommending holistic treatments
• Describing behavioral problems
• Formulating long-lasting theories of temperament and motivation
(based on imbalances of humors)
• Criticizing laws prohibiting women from studying medicine
 GREEK PHILOSOPHERS
SOCRATES PLATO ARISTOTLE
(469-399 BC) (427-347 BC) (385-322 BC)

Posed fundamental Plato acknowledged the unreliability of He complemented deductive

the senses but said knowledge derives
questions about mental life. reasoning with an inductive,
from the processes of reasoning about
sensations. observational approach.
 CONTRIBUTIONS OF GALEN
• He wrote a 17-book treatise “De Usu Partium” (On the
Usefulness of the Parts) describing the body.

• In “On the Passions and Errors of the Soul” he described

a method for curing diseases of the soul.

• Diseases arise from passions (anger, fear) which can be

controlled via understanding and self-knowledge.

• Self-love blinds us to our own faults without a therapist.

• Galen first described the therapeutic relationship.

Galen (130 to 200 AD)
 NATURE VS NURTURE DEBATE
This nature–nurture debate centers on the question of whether
human capabilities are inborn or acquired through experience.

• The nature view holds that human beings enter the world with
an inborn store of knowledge and understanding of reality.

• Early philosophers believed that this knowledge and

understanding could be accessed through careful reasoning
and introspection.

• The nurture view holds that knowledge is acquired through

experiences and interactions with the world.
 THOMAS HOBBES
• Asserted in his primary principle of psychology that
all knowledge is derived through sensations.

• Hobbes grounded his psychology firmly in the

philosophical positions called "materialism" and
"mechanism" (cf., Brennan, 1991).

• The materialistic approach stresses that the only

means through which reality is known is through an
understanding of physical matter.

• The mechanistic approach holds that all events,

phenomena, or behavior may be explained in
mechanical terms.
 RENE DESCARTES
• In the seventeenth century, Descartes supported the
nature view by arguing that some ideas (such as God,
the self, geometric axioms, perfection, and infinity) are
innate.

• Descartes is also notable for his conception of the

body as a machine that can be studied much as other
machines are studied.

• Originated the concept of Dualism, viewed mind and

body as interactive machines.

• Stated that the mind could follow body and vice versa.
Proposed the idea of both voluntary and involuntary
behavior.
 JOHN LOCKE
• The nuture view is most strongly associated with the
seventeenth-century English philosopher John Locke.

• According to Locke, at birth the human mind is a

“tabula rasa”, a blank slate on which experience
‘writes’ knowledge and understanding as the
individual matures.

• Knowledge should be acquired by careful observation.

• No innate ideas: all knowledge comes from experience

or reflection.
 ASSOCIATIONISM

Perspective by John Locke gave birth to associationist psychology.

Associationists denied that there were inborn ideas or capabilities.

Instead, they argued that the mind is filled with ideas that enter by way of
the senses and then become associated through principles such as
similarity and contrast.

Current research on memory and learning is related to early association

theory.
 JEAN – JACQUES ROUSSEAU
• Rousseau did not believe individuals specifically children
were blank slates, but instead developed according to a
natural plan which unfolded in different stages (Crain, 2005).

• He did not believe in teaching them the correct way to think,

but believed children should be allowed to think by
themselves according to their own ways and an inner,
biological timetable.

• This focus on biological maturation resulted in Rousseau

being considered the father of developmental psychology.
 GUSTAV THEODOR FECHNER
• German experimental psychologist who founded psychophysics and
formulated Fechner's law, a landmark in the emergence of
psychology as an experimental science

• The ultimate philosophic problem which concerned Fechner, and to

which his psychophysics was a solution, was the perennial mind-
body problem.

• His solution has been called the identity hypothesis: mind and body
are not regarded as a real dualism, but are different sides of one
reality.

• They are separated in the form of sensation and stimulus; that is,
what appears from a subjective viewpoint as the mind, appears from
an external or objective viewpoint as the body.
 PHRENOLOGY
• Phrenology was a popular approach to psychology from

approximately 1810 -1840.

• By measuring the contour of the skull, phrenologists

made assumptions about a person’s personality and

intellect.

• It was believed that because the skull forms around the

brain, bumps and curves on the skull were indicative of

different abilities.

• This approach was later abandoned due to lack of

scientific merit
 Rationalism Vs Empiricim
RATIONALISM

Regards reason, logic, and introspection as the best methodology to

acquire knowledge.

Sensory experiences are not the source of truth, but rather deduction and
reasoning.

EMPIRICISM

Knowledge comes from sensory experience – witnessing and measuring

an event.

The foundation for modern scientific methodology

 Free Will versus Determinism.
This question concerns the extent to which people have control over their own
actions.

Are we the products of our environment, guided by forces out of our control, or
are we able to choose the behaviors we engage in?

Most of us like to believe in free will, that we are able to do what we want—for
instance, that we could get up right now and go fishing.

And our legal system is premised on the concept of free will; we punish
criminals because we believe that they have choice over their behaviors and
freely choose to disobey the law.

Recent research has suggested that we may have less control over our own
behavior than we think we do (Wegner, 2002).
 Accuracy Vs Inaccuracy

To what extent are humans good information processors?

Although it appears that people are “good enough” to make sense of the
world around them and to make decent decisions (Fiske, 2003),they are far
from perfect.

Human judgment is sometimes compromised by inaccuracies in our

thinking styles and by our motivations and emotions.

For instance, our judgment may be affected by our desires to full our own
needs
 Conscious versus unconscious
processing

To what extent are we conscious of our own actions and the causes of
them, and to what extent are our behaviors caused by influences that we
are not aware of?

Many of the major theories of psychology, ranging from the Freudian

psychodynamic theories to contemporary work in cognitive psychology,
argue that much of our behavior is determined by variables that we are not
aware of.
 Differences versus similarities.

To what extent are we all similar, and to what extent are we different?

For instance, are there basic psychological and personality differences

between men and women, or are men and women by and large similar?
And what about people from different ethnicities and cultures?

Are people around the world generally the same, or are they influenced by
their backgrounds and environments in different ways?

Personality, social, and cross-cultural psychologists attempt to answer

these classic questions.
STRUCTURALISM
 INTRODUCTION
Structuralism can be defined in psychology as the study of the elements of

consciousness.

The idea is that conscious experience can be broken down into basic

conscious elements, much as a physical phenomenon can be viewed as

consisting of chemical structures that can in turn be broken down into

basic elements.

Structuralism sought to analyze the adult mind (defined as the sum total of

experience from birth to the present) in terms of the simplest definable

components and then to find the way in which these components fit

together in complex forms.

 INTRODUCTION
In a nutshell, Structuralism is a school of thought that sought to identify the
components (structure) of the mind (the mind was the key element to
psychology at this point).

Structuralism is when you explain something by ‘focusing-in’ and analyzing

its separate, physical parts (its structure)

So, in structuralism, a bicycle would not be regarded as ‘a vehicle’ or ‘type

of transportation’, but rather as the parts — a metal frame with wheels and
handles and a seat that supports a person. It is considered a very ‘sterile’
and ‘reductionist’ way to interpret reality and phenomena.
 INTROSPECTION
Introspection as a self-observation was to
break down perception into sensations,
resolve ideas into images and analyse
emotions as affections.

Or

Restated to actualize actual mental

experience into its simplest components, to
discover how these elements combine, to find
out the laws which govern their combination
(synthesis), and to bring them into
connection with their physiological
conditions.
 HISTORICAL ROOTS
OF
STRUCTURALISM
The structural definition of psychology was the analytic study of the
generalized adult normal human mind through introspection. This approach
was dominant in America from 1890 – 1920.

This school was fundamentally the continuation of the psychological system

of Wilhelm Wundt.

Wilhelm Wundt, was evidently a very systematic organizer, is considered a

forerunner of great magnitude of the structuralist movement.

His influence brings about the mention of him throughout the history and
systems of psychology.
 WILHELM WUNDT
• Wilhelm Wundt was born on August 16th 1832

in Germany. He was a psychologist, physician,

physiologist, professor, and philosopher.

• Many historians recognize him as the founding

father of psychology, for he was the first to ever

to titled as a psychologist.

• Wilhelm set psychology apart from philosophy

and biology.
 CONTRIBUTIONS
OF WUNDT
• Wilhelm Wundt founded the first psychological
laboratory at Leipzig, Germany in the year 1879.

• Wundt’s conception of psychology emerged during

many decades of research and teaching, which led
him from neurophysiology to psychology and
philosophy.

• His famous book entitled Principles of Physiological

Psychology was published in 1873.
CONTRIBUTIONS OF WILHELM WUNDT
Wilhelm Wundt held on two important principles:

• The first stringent requirement was the use of “trained” or practiced

observers, who could immediately observe and report a reaction.

• The second requirement was the use of repeatable stimuli that

always produced the same experience in the subject and allowed
the subject to expect and thus be fully attentive to the inner
reaction.

• This attempt to understand the structure or characteristics of the

mind was known as structuralism .
 STUDY OF CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE

• Wundt viewed psychology as a scientific study of conscious

experience, and he believed that the goal of psychology was to
identify components of consciousness and how those components
combined to result in our conscious experience.

• In Wundt’s view, consciousness included many different parts and

could be studied by the method of analysis or reduction.

• Wundt wrote, “The first step in the investigation of a fact must

therefore be a description of the individual elements … of which it
consists”.
 STUDY OF CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE
• Wundt used introspection (he called it “internal perception”), a
process by which someone examines their own conscious
experience as objectively as possible, making the human mind
like any other aspect of nature that a scientist observed.

• Wundt’s version of introspection used only very specific

experimental conditions in which an external stimulus was
designed to produce a scientifically observable (repeatable)
experience of the mind (Danziger, 1980).
 STUDY OF CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE
• Wundt believed that consciousness was active in organizing its
own content. Hence, the study of the elements, content, or
structure of consciousness alone would provide only a beginning
to understanding psychological processes.
Voluntarism
• Because Wundt focused on the mind’s self-organizing capacity,
he labeled his system voluntarism, a term he derived from the
word volition, defined as the act or power of willing.
• Voluntarism refers to the power of the will to organize the mind’s
contents into higher-level thought processes.
 METHOD OF INTROSPECTION
Wundt described his psychology as the science of conscious experience, and

therefore the method of a scientific psychology must involve observations of

conscious experience. Wundt decided that the method of observation must necessarily

involve introspection—the examination of one’s own mental state.

Introspection, or internal perception, as practiced in Wundt’s laboratory at the

University of Leipzig, was conducted under Wundt’s explicit rules and conditions:

• Observers must be able to determine when the process is to be introduced.

• Observers must be in a state of readiness or strained attention.

• It must be possible to repeat the observation several times.

• It must be possible to vary the experimental conditions in terms of the controlled

manipulation of the stimuli.

 GOALS OF PSYCHOLOGY

Having defined the subject matter and methodology for his new

science of psychology, Wundt outlined his goals as follows:

• Analyze conscious processes into their basic elements.

• Discover how these elements are synthesized or organized.

• Determine the laws of connection governing the organization

of the elements.
 STUDY OF CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE
Mediate Experience
• According to Wundt, psychologists should be concerned with
the study of immediate experience rather than mediate
experience.
• Mediate experience provides us with information or knowledge
about something other than the elements of an experience.
This is the usual form in which we use experience to acquire
knowledge about our world.
• When we look at a rose and say, “The rose is red,” for example,
this statement implies that our primary interest is in the flower
and not in the fact that we are perceiving something called
“redness.”
 STUDY OF CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE
Immediate Experience

• The immediate experience of looking at the flower is not in the object

itself but is instead in the experience of something that is red.

• For Wundt, immediate experience is unbiased or untainted by any

personal interpretations, such as describing the experience of the

rose’s red color in terms of the object—the flower—itself.

• In Wundt’s view, basic human experiences—such as the experiences

of redness or of discomfort—form the states of consciousness (the

mental elements) that the mind actively organizes.

 ELEMENTS OF CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE
Sensations
• Wundt suggested that sensations were one of two elementary forms of

experience.

• Sensations are aroused whenever a sense organ is stimulated and the

resulting impulses reach the brain.

• Sensations can be classified by intensity, duration, and sense modality.

• Wundt recognized no fundamental difference between sensations and

images because images are also associated with excitation of the

cerebral cortex.
ELEMENTS OF CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE
Feelings
• Feelings are the other elementary form of experience.

• Sensations and feelings are simultaneous aspects of immediate

experience.

• Feelings are the subjective complements of sensations but do not

arise directly from a sense organ.

• Sensations are accompanied by certain feeling qualities; when

sensations combine to form a more complex state, a feeling

quality will result.

 ELEMENTS OF CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE
• Wundt proposed a tridimensional theory of feelings, based on his

personal introspective observations.

• Working with a metronome (a device that can be programmed to

produce

• audible clicks at regular intervals), he reported that after

experiencing a series of clicks, he felt that some rhythmic patterns

were more pleasant or agreeable than others.

• He concluded that part of the experience of any pattern of sound is

a subjective feeling of pleasure or displeasure.

Organizing the Elements of Conscious Experience

• Wundt explained the phenomenon through his doctrine of apperception.

• The process of organizing mental elements into a whole is a creative
synthesis (also known as the law of psychic resultants), which creates
new properties from the building up or combining of the elements.
• Wundt wrote, “Every psychic compound has characteristics which are
by no means the mere sum of the characteristics of the elements”
(Wundt, 1896, p. 375).
• To Wundt, apperception is an active process. Our consciousness is not
merely acted
• on by the elemental sensations and feelings we experience.
• Instead, the mind acts on these elements in a creative way to make up
the whole.
 CRITICISMS OF WUNDTIAN PSYCHOLOGY

• Experiments using the introspection technique cannot always yield

agreement because introspective observation is self-observation—
decidedly a private experience. As such, disagreements cannot be
settled by repeating the observations.
• Wundt’s personal opinions on political matters also offered a target for
criticism and his political stance may also have cost him a Nobel Prize.
• Wundt’s system also faced increasing competition in the German-
speaking world following World War I.
• During Wundt’s later years, two other schools of thought arose in
Europe to overshadow his views: Gestalt psychology in Germany and
psychoanalysis in Austria.
EDWARD TITCHENER (1867-1927)
• Edward Titchener a disciple of the German
psychologist Wilhelm Wundt.
• Titchener gave Wundt’s theory on the scope and method
of psychology a precise, systematic expression.
• He migrated to the USA and conducted psychology
labs at Cornell University in NY.
• Titchener is not as similar to Wundt as he has been
portrayed in some histories of psychology.
 CONTRIBUTIONS OF TITCHENER
• Titchener refined Wundt’s technique of introspection and to study sensation and
it Structuralism. He defined this as the study of the structure of the conscious
mind.
• Titchener translated Wundt’s major work “Principles of Physiological
Psychology” into English.
• He considered himself a “true Wundtian” all his career.
• For Titchener, psychology was the study of the mind. He rejected the idea
of a homunculus (mental mannikin) –a mind within the mind that doing the
thinking.
 CONTRIBUTIONS OF TITCHENER
Titchener focused on mental elements or contents, and their mechanical linking

through the process of association, but he discarded Wundt’s doctrine of

apperception.

Titchener’s work concentrated on the elements themselves.

In Titchener’s view, psychology’s fundamental task was to discover the nature of the

elementary conscious experiences—to analyze consciousness into its component

parts and thus determine its structure.

 CONTRIBUTIONS OF TITCHENER
Psychology has a three-fold task:

• Analyze the sum total of mental processes, their elements and how they go

together.

• Discover the laws determining the connections between these elements.

• Work out in detail the correlations of mind and nervous system.

 CONTRIBUTIONS OF TITCHENER
• To accomplish psychology’s tasks, experiments must be conducted.
• For Titchener, experiments consisted entirely of introspections made under
standard conditions.
• Mental processes must be observed, interrogated and described in terms of
observed facts.
• He used Wundt’s techniques to carry out introspection.
• Observers needed extensive training (10,000+ controlled observations) to perform
correct introspection.
 CONTENT OF CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE
• According to Titchener, the subject matter of psychology is conscious experience as that
experience is dependent on the person who is actually experiencing it.

• This kind of experience differs from that studied by scientists in other fields. For example,
light and sound can be studied by physicists and by psychologists.

• Physicists examine the phenomena from the standpoint of the physical processes involved,
whereas psychologists consider the light and sound in terms of how humans observe and
experience these phenomena.
 CONTENT OF CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE
• Other sciences are independent of experiencing persons.

• Titchener offered, from physics, the example of temperature. The temperature in a

room may be measured at 85 degrees Fahrenheit, for example, whether or not
anyone is in the room to experience it.
• When observers are present in that room and report that they feel uncomfortably
warm, however, that feeling—that experience of warmth—is dependent on the
experiencing individuals, the people in the room.

• To Titchener, this type of conscious experience was the only proper focus for
psychological research.
 CONTENT OF CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE
STIMULUS ERROR
In studying conscious experience, Titchener warned against committing what he called
the stimulus error, which confuses the mental process with the object we are
observing.

For example, observers who see an apple and then describe that object as an apple—
instead of reporting the elements of color, brightness, and shape they are
experiencing—are guilty of committing the stimulus error.

The object of our observation is not to be described in everyday language but rather in
terms of the elementary conscious content of the experience.
 CONTENT OF CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE
When observers focus on the stimulus object instead of on the conscious content, they
fail to distinguish what they have learned in the past about the object (for example, that
it is called an apple) from their own direct and immediate experience.

All that observers can really know about the apple is that it is red, shiny, and round.
When they describe anything other than color, brightness, and spatial characteristics,
they are interpreting the object, not observing it.

Thus, they would be dealing with mediate, not immediate, experience.

 CONTENT OF CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE
Titchener defined consciousness as the sum of our experiences as they exist at a
given time. The mind is the sum of an individual’s experiences accumulated over a
lifetime.

Consciousness and mind are similar, except that consciousness involves mental
processes occurring at the moment whereas mind involves the total of these
processes.

Structural psychology as Titchener envisioned it was a pure science. He was not

concerned with applying psychological knowledge. Psychology, he said, was not in the
business of curing sick minds or reforming society.
 INTROSPECTION
Titchener’s form of introspection, or self-observation, relied on observers who were
rigorously trained to describe the elements of their conscious state rather than
reporting the observed or experienced stimulus by a familiar name.

Titchener adopted Külpe’s label, systematic experimental introspection, to describe his

method. Like Külpe, Titchener used detailed, qualitative, subjective reports of his
subjects’ mental activities during the act of introspecting.

He opposed Wundt’s approach, with its focus on objective, quantitative measurements,

because he believed it was not useful for uncovering the elementary sensations and
images of consciousness that were the core of his psychology.
 INTROSPECTION
In other words, Titchener differed from Wundt in that Titchener was interested in
the analysis of complex conscious experience into its component parts, not in the
synthesis of the elements through apperception.

Titchener emphasized the parts, whereas Wundt emphasized the whole.

Titchener also was influenced by philosophy’s mechanistic spirit, as is evident in

his image of the observers who supplied the data in his laboratory.
 INTROSPECTION
In Titchener’s published research reports, subjects are called reagents, who are
usually passive, an agent used to elicit or prompt responses from some other
substance.

Applying this concept to the human observers in Titchener’s laboratory, we see that
he considered his subjects to be like mechanical recording instruments, objectively
reacting and responding by noting the characteristics of the stimulus they are
observing.

The subjects were to be nothing more than impartial, detached machines.

 INTROSPECTION
Titchener proposed taking an experimental approach to introspective observation
in psychology. He diligently followed the rules of scientific experimentation, noting
that :
“an experiment is an observation that can be repeated, isolated, and varied. The
more frequently you can repeat an observation, the more likely are you to see
clearly what is there and to describe accurately what you have seen. The more
strictly you can isolate an observation, the easier does your task of observation
become, and the less danger is there of your being led astray by irrelevant
circumstances, or of placing emphasis on the wrong point. The more widely you
can vary an observation, the more clearly will the uniformity of experience stand
out, and the better is your chance of discovering laws.” (Titchener, 1909, p. 20)
 INTROSPECTION
The reagents or subjects in Titchener’s laboratory introspected on a variety of stimuli and
provided lengthy, detailed observations of the elements of their experiences.

• In an experiment a chord would be struck on a piano;

the chord consisted of three individual notes
• Another experiment involved a given
sounded together. word spoken aloud.

• As Titchener described it, the reagent

• The subjects would report on how many separate
was asked to “observe the effect which
tones they could distinguish, the mental this stimulus produces upon
characteristics of the sounds, and whatever other consciousness: how the word affects
you, what ideas it calls up, and so forth”
basic atoms or elements of consciousness they
could detect.
 ELEMENTS OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Titchener posed three essential problems for psychology:
1. Reduce conscious processes to their simplest components.

2. Determine laws by which these elements of consciousness were associated.

3. Connect the elements with their physiological conditions.

Thus, the aims of Titchener’s structural psychology coincide with those of the natural
sciences. After scientists decide which part of the natural world they wish to study, they
proceed to discover its elements, to demonstrate how those elements are compounded
into complex phenomena, and to formulate laws governing those phenomena.

The bulk of Titchener’s research was devoted to the first problem, to discovering the
elements of consciousness.
 ELEMENTS OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Titchener defined three elementary states of consciousness: sensations, images, and

affective states.

Sensations are the basic elements of perception and occur in the sounds,

sights, smells, and other experiences evoked by physical objects in our environment.

Images are the elements of ideas, and they are found in the process that reflects experiences

that are not actually present at the moment, such as a memory of a past experience.

Affective states, or affections, are the elements of emotion and are found in

experiences such as love, hate, and sadness.

 ELEMENTS OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Mental elements have attributes that allow us to distinguish among them.
Titchener added duration and clearness to the Wundtian attributes of quality and
intensity.
He considered these four to be fundamental to all sensations in that they are
present, to some degree, in all experiences.
• Quality is the characteristic—such as “cold” or “red”—that clearly distinguishes
each element from every other element.
• Intensity refers to a sensation’s strength, weakness, loudness, or brightness.
• Duration is the course of a sensation over time.
• Clearness refers to the role of attention in conscious experience; experience that is
the focus of our attention is clearer than experience toward which our attention is
not directed.
 ELEMENTS OF CONSCIOUSNESS
• Sensations and images possess all four of these attributes, but affective states have

only three: quality, intensity, and duration.

• Affective states lack clearness. Why? Titchener believed it was impossible to focus

attention directly on an element of feeling or emotion.

• When we try to do so, the affective quality—such as the sadness or the

pleasantness— disappears.

• Some sensory processes, particularly those involving vision and touch, possess

another attribute, extensity, in that they take up space.

 CRITICISMS OF TITCHENER’S
STRUCTURALISM
• By the second decade of the twentieth century, the intellectual climate of thought in American and
European psychology had changed.
• Many psychologists came to regard Titchener’s structural psychology as a futile attempt to cling to
antiquated principles and methods.
• Titchener believed he was establishing a foundation for psychology, but his efforts proved
• to be only one phase in its history. The era of structuralism collapsed when Titchener died, and that
it was sustained for so long is an effective tribute to his commanding personality.
• Critics charged that the whole of an experience cannot be recaptured by any later association or
combination of elementary parts. They argued that experience does not come to us in individual
sensations, images, or affective states but in unified wholes.
• Something of the conscious experience is inevitably lost in any artificial effort to analyze it.
FUNCTIONALISM
 INTRODUCTION
• Functionalism was the first major non-German school of
psychology

• Functionalism was introduced due the main weakness of

Voluntarism and Structuralism was addressed

• Functionalist moved from mental functions to the application of

psychology.

• Central interest: how the animal uses its mind to adapt to

environment.

• Hence, the emergence of Applied Psychology can be credited to

Functionalists, in the US.
 DEFINITION
• Functionalism focused on studying how the mind works to enable

an organism to adapt to its environment.

• Focus of psychology shifted to the cause and consequence of

mental behaviors, not what it is made up of.

• Emphasized on studying the functions of the mind and the adaptive

value of consciousness

• The aim for it was to see how the mind functions and the

processes that lead to practical consequences

 Goals of Psychology
• The goal of psychology is not the discovery of the elements of
experience but rather the study of living people as they adapt to their
environment.

• The function of consciousness is to guide us to those ends required for

survival.

• Consciousness is vital to the needs of complex beings in a complex

environment; without it, human evolution could not have occurred.

• Moved from the structure of consciousness to the role the mind plays
in helping people adapt to their environment

• Functionalism was influenced by Darwin’s work which focused on how

behaviors help people adapt.
 Influence of Charles Darwin
Today we can see that Darwin’s work influenced contemporary
psychology in the following ways:
• A focus on animal psychology, which formed the basis of
comparative psychology.
• An emphasis on the functions rather than the structure of
consciousness.
• The acceptance of methodology and data from many fields.
• A focus on the description and measurement of individual
differences.

Psychologists realized that the study of animal behavior was vital to

their understanding of human behavior, and they focused their
research on the mental functioning of animals.
 Influence of Francis Galton
Francis Galton’s work on mental inheritance and the individual differences in

human capacities effectively brought the spirit of evolution to bear on the new

psychology.

Galton was interested in measuring things: “Whenever you can, count.” In 1884

he established an anthropometric laboratory to collect data on individual

differences.

Psychometrics – measurement of mental powers.

Visual & auditory reaction times, highest audible tone.

 Evolution Comes to America

Evolution Comes to America

• Herbert Spencer (1820-- 1903) was a pioneering influencer who brought

the concept of evolution to American.

• He emphasized on social darwinism - Evolution and natural selection

apply to the social realm

 Evolution Comes to America
• Spencer argued that the development of all aspects of the universe follows
evolutionary principles

• Including human character and social institution “survival of the fittest”

• Those who are best adapted will be those most likely to survive and pass
traits on to future generations Only the best will survive

• This way, society could eventually achieve perfection.

 American Functionalism
Key tenets:
• consciousness cannot be meaningfully analyzed in
elements

• structure and function cannot be meaningfully

separated

• behavior should be treated in terms of significance to

the organism

Functionalism fit with American temperament:

individualism, independence, pragmatism

 Core Themes of American
Functionalism
Diverse and diffuse “school” of thought united by a few core themes:

1. Believed psychology should focus on the adaptive purposefulness of mental

processes, rather than a static search for the elements of mental processes:
‘what is thought for’ rather than ‘what is thought made of’

2. Emphasized the practical nature of psychology rather than “pure” science or

theory

3. Eclectic and inclusive of both subject matter (developmental, comparative,

perception, memory, pathology) and methods (introspection,
experimentation, naturalistic observation, etc.)

4. Especially concerned with motivation, thought to reflect adaptive concerns:

survival, reproduction, competition, etc.

5. Idiographic rather than nomothetic

 Life of William James
William James - “father of American Psychology”

not the founder of functional psychology per se, but ideas had huge

influence on American movement.

In early 20th century, America’s foremost psychologist.

 As a young man, James floated directionless, rejecting chemistry,

natural science, dabbling in medicine, until finally discovering
psychology.

 He visited Fechner and Wundt.

 He finally graduated in medicine.

 He was offered a job at Harvard teaching physiology & anatomy.

 He contemplated suicide at age 28.

 Life of William James
James as a Psychologist

 He opposed the Wundt-Titchener approach.

 He proposed an analytical approach that studies the functions of

consciousness & its characteristics.

 Consciousness is adaptive – lets us adjust to environment

 Also, personal, ever-changing (a stream), selective

 Principles of Psychology (1890)
It focused on:

• study of people as they adapt to their environment

• consciousness has a function (enables survival)

• espoused a radical empiricism

• anything that can be observed is important for James

• use of introspective and comparative methods

• both mental processes and behavior are important

 Pragmatism
• In 1907 James published Pragmatism, overview of his

Pragmatic philosophy.

• Any belief, thought, or behavior that increases life’s value is

worth holding. Truth is what works.

• Good life steers course between tough-minded skepticism,

empiricism, and tender-minded idealism, optimism.

• Pragmatism - The belief that if an idea works, it is valid

 STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Consciousness is a continuous flow, always changing, never the same

twice.

Consciousness is:

• personal: makes no sense to look for general principles (individual

differences)

• irreducible: cannot be divided up for analysis makes no sense to look

for elements

• selective: certain events entering are attended to and others are not

• functional: serves to aid in survival of organism

 Study of Self

Three components of self (empirical self)

Material self : Body, family, and all things owned

Social self: Self known by others; many social selves

Spiritual self : State of consciousness,one’s own subjective reality

The self as a knower is the awareness of one’s empirical self.

He was among the first to examine self-esteem.

 Central Concepts
Habits & Emotions
• Habits (instincts) are formed as an activity is repeated.He had a

neurophysiological explanation of habit formation.

• Behavior is evolutionarily honed to be adaptive.

• In most animals this results in a relatively invariant set of behaviors

(instincts) designed to increased fitness (hens sitting on eggs, dogs

chasing critters, beavers building dams, etc.).

• Humans as well, except that our behaviors are more modifiable with

experience (habits).
 Central Concepts
Habits & Emotions
• With repetition, a habitual behavior pattern establishes an increasingly

easily accessed and executed neural pathway that underlies the behavioral

act.

• While much of this is emotionally, unconsciously driven (adaptive acts feel

good and are automatically encoded) not all is.

• James believed we could consciously learn desired habits and eliminate

undesirable ones achieving self-improvement

 James-Lange Theory of Emotions
Theory of emotion

Event (stimulus) causes a bodily reaction/behavior, which is then experienced as

an emotion.

• James stated that the action preceded the emotion and hence Carl Lange

supported his idea and the correspondence between the two theories led to

the James-Lange Theory of Emotions- one experiences an emotion because of

the way that their physiology changes.

• Eg: You feel scared of a lizard because your heart beats faster and that makes

you feel scared

 James – Lange Theory

• An emotional event occur a response in the autonomic nervous

system. This response is detected by central nervous system to
produce an emotional experience.

• The James-Lange theory of emotion argues that an event causes

physiological arousal first and then we interpret this arousal.

• Only after our interpretation of the arousal can we experience

emotion.

• If the arousal is not noticed or is not given any thought, then we

will not experience any emotion based on this event.