origins of psychology

• what was psychology known as pre 19th century?

  experimental philosophy
• when was the first psychology lab opened and by who?

  1879

  Wilhelm Wundt
• what is introspection?

  the first systematic experimental attempt to study the mind by breaking up conscious awareness into basic structures of thoughts, images and sensations
• what is structuralism?

  an approach to psychology based on the idea that conscious experience can be broken down into its basic underlying components
• what was Wundt's procedure to investigate introspection?

  lab study: how different stimuli (eg. metronome, light, a ball dropping) in a room made people feel --> they were asked to report their feelings and sensations
• what was the aim of Wundt's study?

  to analyse feelings of participants to determine the underlying structure of their mind as it can't be seen
• what are the strengths of Wundt's work?

  systematic and well-controlled methods (controlled environment/standardization meant Wundt had degree of replicability within studies and extraneous variables were reduced)

  
  

  real life application, no other way to access conscious processes
• what are the limitations of Wundt's work?

  research considered unscientific by today's standards (subjective self-reporting, difficult to predict future behaviours: can now use inference to draw conclusions about mental processes)

  
  

  No way to objectively verify the results of introspection

  
  

  Subjective to each person (can't generalise results)
• name the 6 approaches and briefly describe them

  behaviourist: all behaviour is learnt from our environment through either classical or operant conditioning

  
  

  social learning theory: all behaviour is learnt from our environment through observation and imitation of models

  
  

  cognitive approach: focuses on how our mental processes (thoughts, perceptions, etc) affect behaviour

  
  

  biological approach: focuses on how internal biological structures affect behaviour

  
  

  psychodynamic approach: unconscious mental forces drive human behaviour

  
  

  humanistic approach: humans are self determining and have free will