ORIGINS OF PSYCHOLOGY

• WUNDT 


  • father of psychology
  • founder of modern day psych
  • opened up his first psychology lab in Germany in 1875.
• WUNDT - AIM


  study the structure of the human mind.
• WUNDT - PIONEERING WORK

  INTROSPECTION =

  process by which a person gains knowledge about their own mental and emotional states. It allows us to observe our inner world.
• INFLUENCE OF WUNDT 


  Allowed the realms of philosophy, biology and physiology into psychology.

  Helped the emergence of psychology as a science by allowing people to learn about it, soon making it into a possible field to study in university, which allowed for further research and development.
• (+) STRENGTH - WUNDT

  One strength of Wundt’s research comes from the use of laboratory experiments. Investigations were recorded under strictly controlled conditions using standardised instructions, which allowed procedures to be repeated and ensured extraneous variables were not a factor. This suggests that the research has high internal validity and paved the way for modern scientific psychology. 
• (-) WEAKNESS - WUNDT 


  Introspection is not particularly accurate. Wundt found that self reports could not be replicated, therefore unreliable and too subjective. Wundt only used one or two participants (a small sample) therefore hard to generalise. Nisbett and Wilson found that people can not report accurately on the effects of particular stimuli in higher - order inference based responses as they may be unaware that a stimulus influenced a response. 
• (+) STRENTH - WUNDT

  Brain scanning techniques. For example, Baddeley et al were able to see that the prefrontal cortex was activated during short term memory but not during long term memory through a fMRI scan. This suggests that individuals were later on able to further research and study psychology as a science. 
• (-) WEAKNESS - WUNDT 


  A scientific response is not always appropriate for example, behaviour was able to be studied through Maslow’s hierarchy of needs - the humanistic approach. This suggests that behaviour and psychology itself does not need to be studied scientifically.