AP Psychology - History and Approaches

Psychological perspectives and historic psychologists

Introspection

The psychological method of studying thought by asking people to record what they are thinking.

Structuralism

The belief that the mind operates by combining subjective emotions and objective sensations.

Functionalism

The belief that actual thought processes cannot be studied, so psychologists should only focus on the behavior of people.

Gestalt Psychology

An early field of psychology that examined people’s total experiences and saw how they impacted their perception of things.

Psychoanalysis

A theory that there is an unconscious mind that impacts behavior without conscious thought of it, and that people repress thoughts that create anxiety in their unconscious mind. This theory claims that you have to examine the unconscious mind to truly understand human thought.

Behaviorism

The belief that psychology can only actually study behavior (specifically responses to stimuli), and that other things (like the unconscious mind) can’t be proven.

Humanist Perspective

The perspective that emphasizes that people have individual choice and free will, and that we choose our behavior and that our behavior is influenced by physiological, emotional, and/or spiritual needs.

Psychoanalytic Perspective

A perspecitve that emphasizes that the unconscious mind controls actions and thought, and that people repress certain thoughts in their unconscious mind, so we have to examine that region of the mind through things like dream analysis and word association to fully understand motives behind behavior.

Bio-psychological Perspective (or Neuroscience)

The perspective that claims our behavior is strictly influenced by our biology. For example a person who follows this might believe a person is introverted because their parents gave them genes that promote introversion.

Evolutionary (or Darwinian) Perspective

A perspective that asserts human behaviors exist because of natural selection, and that overtime psychological traits become more common because they are more advantageous for survival.

Behavioral Perspective

A perspective that explains human thought and behavior through conditioning. Adherents believe that you can only study responses to stimuli, not thought.

Cognitive Perspective

A perspective that focuses on how people interpret, process, and remember environmental events.

Sociocultural Perspective

A perspective of psychology that looks at how thoughts and behaviors vary between cultures, and how cultures influence behavior.

Biopsychosocial Perspective

A modern perspective of psychology that looks at biological, psychological, and social factors together to determine causes of thoughts and behaviors.

Wilhelm Wundt

The first psychologist to open a psychological lab, who studied subjects with introspection.

William James

The author of *The Principles of Psychology*, the first psychological textbook. He also developed functionalism.

Mary Whiton Calkins

Psychologist who studied with William James and became the first female president of the American Psychological Association.

Margaret Floy Washburn

The first woman to earn a PhD in psychology.

G. Stanley Hall

Psychologist who pioneered the study of child development and became the first president of the American Psychological Organization.

Max Wertheimer

The psychologist who pioneered Gestalt Psychology.

Sigmund Freud

The psychologist who created psychoanalysis.

Ivan Pavlov

A psychologist known for conditioning dogs to salivate when they heard a metronome through frequently ringing a metronome when feeding the dogs.

John B. Watson

A psychologist who believed that for psychology to be a science it had to exclusively focus on observable phenomena. This resulted in behaviorism.

B. F. Skinner

Behaviorist known for observing reinforcement when studying a rat and giving it food every time it pulled a bar.

Abraham Maslow

A founder of humanistic psychology, especially known for creating a hierarchy of needs.

Carl Rogers

A founder of humanistic psychology

Charles Darwin

The person who created the theory of natural selection.

Jean Piaget

Cognitive psychologist who is known for creating the cognitive development theory.