origins of psychology

• Wundts beliefs

  - father of psychology

  -He defined psychology as the science of consciousness emphasised a technique called INTROSPECTION which is the break down of one's own mental and emotional processes into thoughts, images and sensations which he then analysed.

  - His work helped the study of mental processes.
• The emergence of psychology as a science

  Psychology is seen as a scientific discipline which in part can be credited to the work of Wundt.

  He emphasise key concepts which are consistently applied to modern psychology e.g. intensity, duration and sense modality.

  His approach in psychology stress the importance upon precise definitions of stimulus and response been studied.

  Psychology at the discipline is reliant upon the philosophical viewpoint called empiricism which states that knowledge comes from experiment.
• Psychology then focused on two viewpoints:

  1)all behaviour is caused

  2) as all behaviour is caused it is possible to predict how humans will behave
• scientific

  P: strength - wundts methods were systematic and controlled

  E: All introspections were recorded in a lab so extraneous variables would not alter the results

  E: procedures and instructions were standardised so all pts received the same information and were tested in the same way

  L: therefore wundts research paved the way for other approaches such as the behaviorist approach
• subjective data

  P: limitation - other aspects of research would be considered unscientific

  E: wundt relied on ppts self reporting their mental processes which is subjective

  E: Some ppts may have hidden their thoughts so is difficult to establish meaningful 'laws of behavior'

  L: therefore some of wundts early efforts to study the mind flawed
• modern psychology

  P: strength - research in modern psychology can claim to be scientific

  E: psychology has the same aims as natural sciences - to describe, predict, understand and control behaviour

  E: the different approaches all rely on the use of scientific methods to study theories in an unbiased and controlled way

  L: therefore psychology has established itself as a science
• subjective data

  P: limitation - not all approaches use objective methods

  E: the humanistic approach focuses on individual and subjective experiences

  E: the psychodynamic approach makes use of case studies which do not use representative samples

  L: therefore a scientific approach to study human behaviour may not always be desirable