Prologue

The Story of Psychology

• The brain is the most complex physical object known to us in the entire cosmos
•Questions psychologists ponder:
•To what extent to genetics/environment affect our personalities?
•How are we alike as members of the human family?
•How often/why do we dream?
•What do babies perceive and think?
•Does sheer intelligence affect wealth, creativity, or sensitivity?
•What triggers bad and good moods?

What is Psychology?
Psychology’s Roots

Psychological Science is born

Q 1: When and how did psychological science begin?
• Aristotle theorized about learning and memory, motivation and emotion, perception
and personality
• December 1879 - Wilhelm Wundt conducted first psychological experiment
• They tested how long it took people to hear a bat hit a platform and how long it
took them to be consciously aware that they were perceiving the sound (1/10 and
2/10 of a second)
• He was measuring the “atoms of the mind” - fastest and simplest natural processes
• Over time the science of psychology was organized into different branches:
• early: structuralism and functionalism
• later: Gestalt, behaviorism, and psychoanalysis

Thinking About the Mind’s Structure- Structuralism

• Introduced by Wundt’s student Edward Bradford Titchener
• An early school of psychology that used introspection to explore the structural
elements of the human mind
• Method: engage people in introspection (looking inward) and report their sensations,
feelings, images, etc as they experienced them
• Titchener told Lewis that we know more about ourselves than we could learn from
outside observation
• Introspection, and thus structuralism, sort of failed. It is unreliable (results varied),
humans often don’t know why they feel what they feel, and recollections often err.

Thinking about the Mind’s Functions - Functionalism

• Philosopher-psychologist William James
• a school of psychology that focused on how our mental and behavioral processes
function - how they enable us to adapt, survive, and flourish
• As a functionalist, he explored down-to-earth emotions, memories, willpower habits,
and moment-to-moment streams of consciousness
• Influenced by Darwin; he assumed that thinking was adaptive - it contributed to
survival.
• His legacy came mostly from his Harvard teaching and writing
• In 1878, he began a 12 year textbook project - Principles of Psychology
• In 1890, he admitted Mary Calkins into his graduate seminar. All the males dropped
out, so he tutored her alone.
• She earned a Ph.D. from Harvard but they denied her it and offered her one from
Radcliffe College, which she refused.
• She was APA’s first female president in 1905
• Margaret Floy Washburn
• got title of being first psychology Ph.D. from Harvard
• 2nd woman APA president in 1921
• wrote The Animal Mind
• her thesis was the first foreign study Wundt published in his journal
• there are now way more women in psychology (2/3 of Ph.D.s)

Psychological Science Develops

Q 2: How did psychology continue to develop from the 1920s through today?
• Psychology developed from philosophy and biology
• “Magellans of the mind” came from many different disciplines
• Wundt- phil and physiologist
• James - phil
• Pavlov- physiologist
• Freud- physician
• Piaget- biologist
• Until the 1920s, psychology was defined as “the science of mental life”
• From the 20s to 60s, American psychologists John B. Watson and B.F. Skinner
(behaviorists) dismissed introspection and redefined it as “the scientific study of
observable behavior”
• Behaviorism- the view that psychology 1. should be an objective science that 2.
studies behavior without reference to mental processes. Most researchers today agree
with 1. but not 2.
• Humanistic psychology
• historically significant perspective that emphasized the growth potential of healthy
people and the individual’s potential for personal growth
• reaction to Freudian psychology and behaviorism
• Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow
• emphasized the importance of current environmental influences on growth
potential and the importance of having our needs for love and acceptance satisfied
• Cognitive Revolution
 • 1960s
• support ideas of earlier psychologists, such as how mind processes and retains
info
• has expanded to become more scientific
• cognitive neuroscience- the interdisciplinary study of the brain activity linked with
cognition (including perception, thinking, memory, and language)
• Psychology- the science of behavior and mental processes
• behavior- anything an organism does
• mental processes- the internal, subjective experiences we infer from behavior
(sensations, perceptions, dreams, thoughts, beliefs, etc)

Contemporary Psychology
• Psychology is growing and globalizing
Q 3: What is psychology’s historic big issue?
• nature-nurture issue
• the controversy over the relative contributions that genes and experience make to
the development of psychological traits and behaviors. today’s science sees them
as arising from an interaction of nature and nurture
• Plato said inborn. Locke said blank slate. Descartes said some ideas are innate
• Darwin
• On the Origin of Species
• natural selection- the principle that, among the range of inherited trait variations,
those contributing to reproduction and survival will most likely be passed on to
succeeding generations
• natural selection is used in psychology because it is believed that things like
emotional expressions are a part of it
• look at questions on pg 7
• Nurture works on what nature endows.
• Every psychological event is simultaneously a biological event.

Q 4: What are psychology’s levels of analysis and related perspectives?

• levels of analysis- the differing complementary views, from biological to psychological
to socio-cultural, for analyzing a given phenomenon
• “everything is related to everything else”
• biopsychosocial approach- an integrated approach that incorporates biological,
psychological, and socio-cultural levels of analysis
• see chart pg 8!!
• Analogy 2D views of a 3D object are helpful, but incomplete.
• Psychology’s current subfields (see pg 9 for defs):
• neuroscience
• evolutionary
• behavior genetics
 • psychodynamic
• behavioral
• cognitive
• socio-cultural

Q 5: What are psychology’s main subfields?

1. basic research- pure science that aims to increase the scientific knowledge base
1.1.biological psychologists- link between brain and mind
1.2. developmental- changing abilities from womb to tomb
1.3. cognitive- how we perceive, think, and solve problems
1.4. personality- investigate our persistent traits
1.5. social- exploring how we view and affect one another
2. applied research- scientific study that aims to solve practical problems
2.1.ex: industrial/organization psychologists
3. applied counseling (?)
3.1.counseling psychology- a branch of psychology that assists people with problems
in living and in achieving greater well-being (personal and social functioning)
3.2. clinical psychology- a branch of psychology that studies, assesses, and treats
people with psychological disorders
• 1 and 2 give tests, provide counseling and therapy, and sometimes conduct basic and
applied research
4. psychiatry- a branch of medicine dealing with psychological disorders; practiced by
physicians who sometimes provide medical (for example, drug) treatments as well as
psychological therapy

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