Psychology Paper 2 - Approaches

• Wilhelm Wundt opened the first psychology lab in Leipzig, Germany (1879)
• Wundt wanted to document and describe the nature of human consciousness.
• Introspection is described as the first systematic experimental attempt to study the mind by breaking up conscious awareness into basic structures of thoughts, images and sensations.
• Controlled methods for introspection

  • all introspections recorded under strictly controlled conditions with the same stimulus each time
  • standardised instructions allowed procedures to be replicated.

  Wundt's work was significant because it marked the separation of modern SCIENTIFIC psychology from its philosophical roots.
• Watson and the early behaviourists

  • Watson (1913) questioned introspection - believed it produced subjective data as introspections varied from person to person.
  • Also critical of introspection's focus on "private" mental processes - proposed a truly scientific psychology should restrict itself only to studying phenomena that could be observed and measured.
• Strengths and weaknesses of introspection

  Weakness - ppts unable to comment on unconscious factors relating to their behaviour

  • produces subjective results.

  Strength - Griffiths (1994) used introspection to investigate mental processes of gambling addicts (IRL application)
• Wundt's new "scientific" approach to psychology was based on two major assumptions:

  1. Determinism - all behaviour has a cause
  2. Predictability - possible to predict how human beings are likely to behave in different conditions.
• Watson and Skinner brought the language, rigour and methods of natural sciences into psychology.

  • Behaviourists focused on scientific processes involved in learning AS WELL AS carefully controlled lab experiments.
• Emergence of cognitive and biological psychology

  • cognitive approach reintroduced study of mental process but in a more scientific way.
  • biological approach also uses experimental data; seen as highly scientific. Physiological processes investigated with scanning techniques (e.g., EEG and MRI)
  • cognitive neuroscience merges these together - studies how biological structures affect mental states; uses more sophisticated scanning techniques (e.g., fMRI)