origins of psych

• Psychology: The Scientific study of human mind and its functions, especially those functions affecting behavior in a given context
• Science: A means of acquiring knowledge through systematic and objective investigation. The aim is to discover general laws
• Introspection: The first systematic experimental attempt to study the mind by breaking up conscious awareness into basic structures of thoughts, images and sensations.
• Wundt: Emergence ofPsychology as a Science

  • Wundt opened the first ever lab dedicated to Psychological enquiry in Germany in 1879.
  • considered the “Father of Psychology”.
  • He aimed to describe the nature of human consciousness in an objective way through his method of INTROSPECTION
  • Wundt and colleagues recorded their own conscious thoughts with the aim of breaking them down into constituent parts (e.g. sensation, perception) – STRUCTURALISM
• Introspection – a systematic analysis of your own conscious experience of a stimulus.

  Introspection process:

  • Focus on an everyday object (occasionally a metronome is used as the object to focus on)
  • Think about your own present experience (sensations, feelings, images)
  • After a set amount of time, report what you experienced –

  how did you feel? what did you think about?
• ev of introspection

  • Wundt later recognised that higher mental processes were difficult to study using his procedures. Though it was supposed to be scientific + objective, other psychologists realised that it was actually subjective (influenced by opinion).
  • HOWEVER, this encouraged others to look for more appropriate methods paving the way for other approaches such as the cognitive approach
  • Introspection is still used today in areas such as therapy + studying emotional states (e.g. mindfulness) demonstrating its value as one way mental processes can be investigated.
• The emergence of Psychology as a science

  Early philosophical routes-

  • Rene Descartes (1596-1650): Suggested that the mind and body are separate from each other (Cartesian Dualism)
  • John Locke (1632-1704): Empiricism – The idea that all experience can be obtained though the senses, and that human beings inherit neither knowledge nor instincts
  • Charles Darwin (1809-1882) – Theory of evolution. The assumption that human behaviors have evolved due to their adaptive value
•  In 1979, Wundt opened the first psychology lab in Germany, and this is considered to be the starting point of psychology.

  Wundt separated psychology from philosophy as he attempted to study the mind in a more controlled and objective way.
• He studied the topics of science and psychology and attempted to break them down into their basic components – a process known as structuralism.
• However, later psychologists such as behaviourists have since criticised Wundt’s work. Whilst Wundt created introspection to be a scientific method for understanding thought processes, behaviourists would argue that studying thought processes at all can never be considered scientific as thought processes cannot be directly observed. Furthermore, he often found unreliable and subjective results using this procedure.
• Nonetheless, later approaches of psychology which did attempt to measure the mind and thought processes scientifically were much more successful than Wundt. The cognitive approach, for example, now uses laboratory experiments in order to try to objectively measure the processes of memory and thinking. It could be argued that without Wundt’s initial contributions, the cognitive approach may not be what it is today.
• although the fact that participants needed to be trained to introspect gave them a sense of authority, it also meant that their observations were biased by their training and tended to support the theories of the researchers who trained them.

  Introspection was not a reliable method for finding out about mental states - we can only report a fragment of what we are actually thinking and often have little awareness of the processes that actually influence our decisions.