Unit 1 | Psychology’s History and Approaches
Module 1 Psychology’s History
❖ Modern psychology developed from several conflicting traditions, including
structuralism, functionalism, Gestalt psychology, behaviorism, and psychoanalysis
❖ The four goals of psychology - describe, explain, predict, and change/control behavior
❖ Prescientific Psychology
➢ Ancient Greeks - Socrates, Plato, Aristotle
■ Socrates: mind and body are separate. knowledge is innate. (Dualism)
■ Aristotle: Mind and body are the same; knowledge is not pre-existing.
(Monism)
■ Hippocrates: Saw the brain as the home of mental processes – the intellect,
consciousness, thinking
➢ Rene Descartes - research into nerve paths and reflexes
➢ Francis Bacon - a founder of modern science, mind perceives patterns in random
events.
➢ John Lock - the mind at birth is a Tabula Rasa (blank slate)
➢ Empiricism - the idea that knowledge comes from experiences
❖ Body and Soul
➢ Monism - the belief that the mind (soul) and body are different aspects of the
same thing
➢ Dualism - the belief that the mind (soul) can exist separately from the body
(Socrates, Plato, St. Thomas Aquinas, Rene Descartes)
❖ Voluntarism – the willful, voluntary actions of the mind – studied through experimental
self-observation and interpretation of conscious experience
❖ Völkerpsychologie (sociological psychology) – a forerunner of modern social or cultural
psychology
❖ Structuralism - Based on Introspection – people reported elements of their experiences
as they did things like view a rose, and watch a metronome (Edward Titchener)
➢ Wilhelm Wundt - First Psych Lab - Leipzig
■ Founded a lab @ University of Leipzig
■ Reaction time experiment
■ Measure atoms of the mind or the fastest and simplest mental processes
■ What are the fundamental structures of our thinking?
■ Critized for being too subjective
➢ G Stanley Hall - John Hopkins
➢ Edward Titchener - Cornell
■ US student devlops first psych lab in the US @ John Hopkins
❖ Functionalism - Thinking developed because it served a way to help us survive
➢ William James @ Harvard
❖ Experimental psychology – using experiments to study behavior /thinking
Module 2 Psychology’s Big Issues and Approaches
❖ Nature vs Nurture - long standing controversy over the relative contributions that genes
and experience make to the development of psychological traits and behaviors (both)
Module 3 Careers in Psychology
❖ Basic Research subfields
➢ Educational psychologists
➢ Experimental psychologists
➢ Social psychologists
➢ Developmental psychologists
■ Kubler-Ross, Bowlby (attachment and grief), Ainsworth, Piaget
➢ Educational psychologists
➢ Experimental psychologists
➢ Social psychologists
➢ Cognitive psychologists - the scientific study of all the mental activities
associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating.
➢ Psychometric and Quantitative Psychologists - the scientific study of the
measurement of human abilities, attitudes, and traits.
❖ Applied Reseach subfields
➢ Forensic psychologists
➢ Health psychologists
➢ Neuropsychologists
➢ Rehabilitation psychologists
➢ School psychologists
➢ Sport psychologists
➢ Industrial/organizational (I/O) psychologists - study factors that promote
motivation, teamwork and productivity, as well as management practices that
improve employee’s performance.
❖ Helping Professions
➢ Clinical psychologists
➢ Community psychologists
➢ Counseling psychologists