Origins of psychology

• What is psychology

  The word “psychology“ comes from the Greek word “psyche” meaning “mind” and the greek word “logos” meaning “study of” .

  • psychology as we know it today involves the scientific study of the mind and behaviour
• What is carrisian dualism ?

  • Rene Descartes (1596-1650)

  • simply means that the mind and body are separate entities, the brain is not the same as the mind
• What is empiricism ?

  • Empiricism: The theory that all knowledge is derived from sensory experience and can be studied using the scientific method

  • idea formed By John Locke
• Who was Charles Darwin ?

  • Charles Darwin (1802-1882)

  • behaviour evolves due to its adaptive value

  • behaviour changes over successive generations which means that those with the stronger more adaptive genes survive and reproduce
• Who was Wilhelm Wundt ?

  • Wundt became known as the “Father of Psychology “

  • in 1873 he published the first book on Psychology and opened the first psychology laboratory in Germany in 1879 where he aimed to examine reaction times and human consciousness

  • The human mind could be studied scientifically and developed the method of introspection to examine consciousness
• What is introspection?

  • comes from Latin and means “looking into”

  • its a way of gaining knowledge about our own mental and emotional stages

  • understanding our “inner” world by examining conscious thoughts and feelings
• How is introspection conducted ?

  1. Participants presented with controlled stimuli (same for all participants) either a visual image or auditory tone
  2. Asked to describe their inner thought processes they were experiencing when seeing the image or hearing the tone
  3. Wundt then compared the responses of each participant to understand how people perceived things
  4. Generate theories about perception and other mental processes based on this evidence
• Who was Wilhelm Wundt?


  Wilhelm Wundt (1873) was a German psychologist and philosopher who is often referred to as the "father of experimental psychology.
• Who was Rogers and Maslow

  In the 1950s the humanistic approach is developed which emphasises the importance of free will
• Who was Sigmund Freud ?

  1900s he created the psychodynamic approach which shows the influence of the unconscious
• Advantages of introspection

  ✔️The 'controlled' nature of introspection causes problems. The situations are controlled in a laboratory environment and the tasks lack external validity

  ✔️Introspection provided the basis for the cognitive approach. Wudnt paved the way for further analysis of cognitive functions

  ✔️ Introspection uses scientific method e.g. systematic methods such as standardised instruction and controlled stimuli that were the same for each participant
• Research support for introspection

  ✔️ Introspection is still useful. Csikszentmihalyi and Hunter used introspection to measure happiness. They gave teenagers beepers that went off randomly throughout the day, surprising them, and requiring them to write down their thoughts and feelings in the moment before the beep. They found that the teens tended to be happy rather than unhappy and when doing a challenging task, they tended to be more upbeat
• Weaknesses of introspection

  ❌ Introspection is limited as it is not possible to study higher mental processes such as learning, language, and emotion through this method

  ❌ Introspection is unreliable. It focuses on 'non-observable' concepts. Wudnts experimental results were not replicated by others because it requires an inference to be made based on information presented. Each psychologist may infer something different this is because it is too subjective
• Advantages of the origins of psychology

  For Wudnt's time, his work was highly scientific, primarily because of his controlled experiments, large sample sizes and transparent methods this systematic approach was a scientific inspiration for subsequent scientific psychologists
• Advantages of the origins of psychology

  Wudnt's use of inferences influenced cognitive psychologists ; these researchers ask participants to complete tasks under experimental conditions and made inferences about the strucrue of internal mental processes like memory and attention
• Disadvantages of the origins of psychology

  Compared to modern psychological techniques, Wudnt's introspective methods are considered subjective and aren't classified as truly scientific as participants cannot be relied upon fully to report their mental states accurately
• Disadvantages of the origins of psychology

  Wudnt's use of inferences to identify internal mental states has been criticised; inferences are assumptions, so they could be mistaken. Behaviourist psychologists rejected the study of internal mental states, seeing the mind as a "black box"