Module 2.1 - 2.2: History and Perspective

2.1: Definition of Psychology

• $**Psychology**:$ The scientific study of behavior & mental processes
• What is a science?
  • $**Scientific Method**$ (how not what)
• Biological influences on aggression
  • Drugs (alcohol)
  • Testosterone
• Younger vs older → frontal lobes
• $**Basic Research**$: Aims to increase the scientific knowledge base
• $**Applied Research:**$ aims to solve practical problems

Early History

• Stone Age
• Ancient Greeks
  • $**Hippocrates**$: Four “humor “
  • Father of Medicine
  • term for hypocrites
  • $**Four Humors**$
  • Blood: Courage/ happy
  • Yellow Bile: Short Temper
  • Phlem: Calm/ No emotion
  • Black Bile: Mellon colly/ Depressed
• Rene Descartes
  • “I think, therefore I am“
  • Lived during Scientific Revolution
  • Experimented with cadavers
  • Discovered nerves
  • Though they controlled the body

2.2: Modern Psychology Roots

• Wilhelm Wundt
  • 1879, the first psych lab in Germany
  • beginning of psych as a science
• E.B. Titchener
  • $**Structuralism**$: Analyze the basis of conscious experience
  • Introspection
• Gestalt
  • A group. Name meaning “whole“
  • “whole“ is different from the sum of “parts”
• William James
  • $**Functionalism**$: The way consciousness helps people adapt to enviorment