Structuralism:

WILHELM MAXIMILIAN WUNDT

Give a brief about history of Wundt:

• At eight he started studying under a priest(vicar), did medical from University of Heidelberg.

• At the age of 23 studied with Johannes Muller in Berlin who pursued him to pursue experimental physiology instead of medicine.

• Went back to uni of heidelberg and started a course of psychology over there.

• Wrote his first book called “Theory of Sense Perception” (1862)

• Believed that psychology could be used to study immediate consciousness.

• Found the first laboratory of psychology in university of Leipzig in 1879.

What were Psychology’s Goals according to Wundt

• Strongly believed that psychology has become an experimental science

• He believed that experimentation could be used to study the basic processes of the mind but could not be used to study the higher mental events.

• For the latter, only various forms of naturalistic observation could be used.

• He believed that learning about the simpler conscious processes was fundamental for understanding those that are more complex,

• To summarize, according to Wundt, psychology’s goal was to understand both simple and complex conscious phenomena.

Explain Mediate vs Immediate experience

• Most sciences: based on mediate experience (indirect)

• Psychology was based on immediate experience. (direct)

• believed that psychology needed to be studied as it occured.

What were Wundt’s two major goals for his experimental psychology?

• discover basic elements of thought

• the laws by which mental elements were combined into more complex mental experiences.

Explain Wundt’s use of introspection:

• To study basic mental processes involved wundt used introspection along with various other methods.

• Differentiated between pure and experimental introspection

• Pure introspection: the relatively unstructured self-observation used by earlier philosophers.

• Experimental Introspection: (scientifically respectable according to him): made use of laboratory instruments to vary the conditions and hence make the results of internal perception more precise.

• In most cases a simple yes or no was enough without having to describe the inner events.

• Sometimes a telegraph key was used.

• Wundt used introspection more or less as the physiologists and the

  psychophysicists had used it as a technique to determine whether a person is experiencing a specific sensation or not.

Explain Wundt’s elements of thoughts:

• Two basic types of mental experience:

  • sensations

  • feelings

• Sensation: occurs whenever a sense organ is stimulated and the resulting impulse reaches the brain.

  • can be described in terms of modality (visual, auditory, taste, and so on) and intensity (such as how loud an auditory stimulus is).

  • Modality can be further analyzed to determine its qualities. eg a visual sensation can be described in terms of hue.

• Feelings: All sensations are accompanied by feelings.

• developed tridimensional theory of feelings- feelings can be described in terms of

  the degree to which they possess three attributes:

  • pleasantness-unpleasantness,

  • excitement-calm,

  • strain-relaxation.

Give Wundt’s definition of perception

• According to Wundt, perception is a passive process governed by the physical stimulation present, the anatomical makeup of the individual, and the individual’s past experiences.

• These three influences interact and determine an individual’s perceptual field at any given time.

• . The part of the perceptual field the individual attends to is apperceived.

• apperception is active and voluntary. In other words, apperception is under the individual’s control.

What do you mean by the statement that “Wundt is a determinist”:

• he did not believe in free will.

• Behind all volitional acts were mental laws that acted on the contents of consciousness.

• These laws were unconscious, complex, and not knowable through either introspection or other forms of experimentation; but laws they were, and their products were law

• ful.

EDWARD BRADFORD TITCHENER:

Give a brief history of Titchener:

• Born in England and studies in Oxford

• Developed interest in experimental psychology there

• Went to Leipzig to study under Wundt.

• After studies went to Cornell Uni to establish a psychological laboratory.

• In 1892 he accepted the offer from Cornell and soon developed the largest doctoral program in psychology in the United States at the age of 25.

What did Titchener think of behaviourism?

• When the school of behaviorism was introduced by John B. Watson in the early

  1900s, Titchener (1914) claimed that it was a fine technology of behavior but not psychology.

• Also disagreed with pursuing psychology for its applied value as he considered that science seeks pure knowledge and that psychology is a science.

• Was well aware of development of abnormal, clinical, developmental psych etc. but did not consider it pure experimental psychology.

Explain Titchener’s relationship with women:

• Although the APA had admitted women as members almost from its inception, when Titchener created the Experimentalists, women were excluded.

• The ban on women lasted from the organization’s inception until its reorganization two years after Titchener’s death, in 1929.

• It has been suggested that during Titchener’s tenure, Cornell had unusually liberal and advanced ideas about women to which Titchener was obliged to conform.

• it is difficult to imagine him conforming to anything he was not sympathetic toward.

• considered a chauvinist.

What were the goals of structuralism:

• Agreed that psychology should study immediate consciousness.

• defined consciousness as s as the sum total of mental experience at any given moment .

• defined mind as the accumulated experiences of a lifetime.

• Titchener set as goals for psychology the determination of the what, how, and why of mental life.

• the what was to be determined through careful introspection.

• The goal here was a cataloging of the basic mental elements that account for all conscious experience.

• The how was to be an answer to the question of how the elements combine.

• why was to involve a search for the neurological correlates of mental events.

• Unlike Wundt, who sought to explain conscious experience in terms of unobservable cognitive processes, Titchener sought only to describe mental experience.

• Titchener focused on observable (via introspection) conscious events.

• It was the structure of the adult, normally functioning, human mind that Titchener wanted to describe, and thus he named his version of psychology structuralism.

• In 1899 Titchener defined the goal of structuralism as describing the is of mental life; he was willing to leave the is for for others to ponder

How did Titchener use of Introspection?

• more complicated than Wundt’s

• Wundt’s subjects would simply report whether an experience was triggered by an external object or event.

• Titchener’s subjects, however, had to search for the elemental ingredients of their experiences.

• They had to be trained properly to avoid reporting meaning of stimulus.

• If the subjects (more accurately, observers) were shown an apple, for example, the task would be to describe hues and spatial characteristics (red, round, smooth, etc). Calling the object an apple would be committing what Titchener called the stimulus error.

• he wanted the sensation not perception.

Explain mental elements in structuralism or titchener:

• concluded that elemental processes of consciousness consist:

  • Sensations (elements of perception)

  • images (elements of ideas)

  • affections (elements of emotions)

• focused most on sensations> affections> images

• did not accept Wundt’s tridimensional theory of feeling.

• argued that feelings occur along only one dimension, not three, as Wundt had maintained. According to Titchener, feelings (affections) can be described only in terms of Wundt’s pleasantness-unpleasantness dimension