Origins of Psychology

• 18th Century: The acceptance that conscious mental life was linked to biological processes in the body - a consequence of Darwin’s theory of evolution.
• 19th Century:

  • psychology gained a new definition - the science of mental life, both of its phenomena and their conditions (James)
  • Introspection was developed to expose the mind to scientific research
  • The first experimental psychology laboratories began to appear in universities
• Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) is generally considered the father of experimental psychology
• Wundt delivered the first university course on psychology and went to develop the first text book. Futhermore 1900, he founded the first psychology lab at Leipzig University.
• Wundt separated psychology from philosophy and biology and became the first person to be called a psychologist
• Wundt’s approach became known as structuralism because he used experimental methods to find the basic building blocks (structures) of thought and investigate how they interacted. To do this, he studied sensation and perception, breaking participants’ observations of objects, images and events down into constituent parts in the same way that an anatomist would study a body trying to find its constituent parts and how they interact.