Chap 1: History and Approaches

Source: Barron’s AP Psychology

Waves of Psychology

• Each wave is a way of thinking about human thought and behaviour that dominated the field for a certain period of time until a new wave started to dominate the field.

Wave 1 - Introspection

Wilhelm Wundt (1832 - 1920)

• First psychological laboratory in an apartment near the university at Leipzig, Germany
• Introspection
  • The process of examining one's own thoughts, feelings, and emotions
  • Subjects were asked to record accurate their cognitive reactions to simple stimuli.
  • Wundt hoped to examine basic cognitive structures
• Structuralism
  • Idea that the mind operates by combining subjective emotions and objective sensations.

William James (1842 - 1910)

• In 1890, he published The Principles of Psychology, the science’s first textbook.
  • Examined how these structures Wundt identified functioned in our lives
  • Functionalism
  • Emphasizes the role of mental processes in determining behaviour
  • Based on the idea that the mind and behaviour can be understood in terms of the functions they serve, rather than their underlying structures or processes.

Mary Whiton Calkins (1863 - 1930)

• Studied with William James and went on to become president of the APA (American Psychological Association)

Margaret Floy Washburn (1871 - 1939)

• First woman to earn a PhD in psychology

G. Stanley Hall (1844 - 1924)

• Student of William James; pioneered study of child development; first president of the APA (American Psychological Association)

Wave 2 - Gestalt Psychology

Examining a person’s total experience because the way we experience the world is more than just an accumulation of various perceptual experiences.

Main Idea: Context

• Not just looking at a client’s difficulty, but the context in which the difficulty occurs

Max Wertheimer (1880 - 1943)

• Argued against dividing human thought and behaviour into discrete structures

Wave 3 - Psychoanalysis

Sigmund Freud (1856 - 1939)

• Psychoanalytic theory
• Unconscious mind
  • a part of our mind over which we do not have conscious control that determines, in part, how we think and behave
• Believed that hidden part of ourselves builds up over years through repression
  • The pushing down into the unconscious events and feelings that cause so much anxiety/tension that our conscious mind cannot deal with them.
• Examine unconscious mind through: dream analysis, word association, other psychoanalytic therapy techniques
• Freud has been criticized for being unscientific and creating unverifiable theories

Wave 4 - Behaviourism

John B. Watson (1878 - 1958)

• Studied pioneering conditioning experiments of Ivan Pavlov (1849 - 1936)
• Limit psychology to an observable phenomena, not unobservable concepts.

Behaviourism

• Psychologists should look at only behaviour and causes of behaviour
  • Stimuli (environmental events) and Responses (physical reactions)

B. F. Skinner

• Reinforcement
  • Environmental stimuli that encourage or discourse certain responses.

Wave 5 - Multiple Perspectives

• Current perspective

Eclectic - Drawing from multiple perspectives

Psychological Perspectives

Humanist

Abraham Maslow (1908 - 1970) and Carl Rogers (1902 - 1987)

• Individual choice and free will
• Most of our choice is guided by physiological, emotional, or spiritual needs.
  • We choose how to act
• Contrasts with deterministic behaviour (caused by past conditioning)

Psychoanalytic

• The unconscious mind controls much of our thought and action
• Repression
  • Impulses and memories pushed into the unconscious mind
• Examine unconscious mind through dream analysis, word association, and other psychoanalytic therapy techniques.

Example: Introversion may be caused by past trauma

Biopsychology (Neuroscience)

• Explain human thought and behaviour in terms of biological processes
• Cognition may be caused by genes, hormones, neurotransmitters, etc

Example: Extroversion is an inherited trait

Evolutionary (Darwinian)

• Examine human thought and action in terms of natural selection
  • Some psychological traits might be advantageous for survival, and these traits would be passed down from parents to the next generation.
  • Charles Darwin (1809 - 1882)

Example: a person may be extroverted as a survival advantage (e.g. more friends and allies)

Behavioural

• Explain human thought and behaviour in terms of conditioning
• Observable behaviours + response to stimuli

Example: Extroversion in terms of reward and punishment

Cognitive

• Explain human thought and behaviour in terms of how we interpret, process, and remember environmental events.
• Jean Piaget’s cognitive development theory

Example: Extroversion in terms of how he/she interprets social situations

Social-Cultural (Sociocultural)

• How thoughts and behaviours vary between cultures

Example: Extroversion in terms of his or her culture’s rules about social interaction.

Biopsychosocial

• Human thought and behaviour is a combination of biological + physiological + social factors

\