1.

0 Introduction

Psychology is the scientific study of the mind and behavior. Psychology is a many-sided
study and comprises many subfields of education such areas as human progress, sports, health,
medicine-based, social behavior and thinking-related processes. The first effort to define
psychology was made on the basis of its technological origin. The word "psychology" comes
from the Greek words "psyche" which means the soul and "logos" which means to study or know
about (Baldwin, 1913). Therefore, psychology was well-defined as the study of the soul.
Psychology can also be defined as the scientific study of behavior and mental processes. It
embraces three key terms such as science, behavior and mental developments. The term
"behavior" denotes to activities and responses that monitored directly. Since behavior is so
multifaceted, the technical study causes many special encounters. The term mental processes
refer to internal states and processes such as thoughts and feelings that cannot be seen directly
and inferred from observable, measurable responses (Ballantyne, 2008). Although thoughts,
feelings, motives, memory and private experiences are not visible and observed directly, they are
very real. All of these build part of mental processes and the mind.

In mental studies, the method used to comprehend behaviors and mental processes are the
same scientific technique. Therefore, psychology is a science. The rules of psychology are
widespread. The scope of modern psychology springs from the borders of medicine and the
biological sciences to those of the social sciences. Psychology has a long past but a short history.
It has a long past since the root of psychology is to comprehend ourselves and understand fellow-
men. Nevertheless, psychology has a short history because it emerged as a systematized body of
scientific inquiry only in the last hundred odd years. History can be separated into the pre-
scientific phase and the scientific phase, (in which/during which/in what way/in what) the pre-
scientific time in history refers to very old Greek (people who think a lot about how people
think) and to the period of Islam. The purpose of this assignment is to enhance the knowledge
about Edward B. Titcheners and Wilhelm Wundts contributions to psychology.
2.0 Edward B. Titcheners contributions to psychology.

Edward Bradford Titchener was a British educated person and student of Wilhelm
Wundt in Leipzig, Germany, before becoming a professor of psychology and founding the first
psychology laboratory in the United States at Cornell University. Titchener designed the terms
"structural psychology" and "functional psychology". Structural psychologists reviewed human
experiences through self-examination, breaking mental activity down into "basic elements" or
"building blocks." Although his hypothetical models were not accepted by others, his defending
of psychology as a science, using the scientific method of laboratory experiments to gather data,
made a strong separation between experimental psychology and other trends such as
psychoanalysis. However, the understanding of human nature cannot be accomplished only
through science, although the honors or statements of differences drawn by Titchener were
valuable in its early development.

Edward Bradford Titchener was born in southern England to a family of old ancestry. He
entered Oxford University in 1885 on a studentship to study philosophy, and he became
interested in Wilhelm Wundt's writings, interpreting the third edition of the Principles of
Physiological Psychology. However, the way of thinking of Wundt was not received at Oxford,
so Titchener decided to go to Leipzig and work with Wundt. There, Titchener took his (college
degree of doctor) finishing a long speech or story on effects of monocular stimulation. After
unsuccessfully probing for a place in England, Titchener accepted a professorship at Cornell
University, which had opened up when Frank Angell, another American student of Wundt, went
to the newly found Stanford University. For thirty-five years, Titchener lined over psychology at
Cornell, where he was an institution unto himself, in a bold, obnoxious way lecturing in his robes
and tolerating no dissent. Titchener often quarreled with his American colleagues and found his
own association to rival the fledgling American Psychological Association because of the
argument with members of the latter group. Titchener became the American editor of Mind in
1894 and associate editor of the American Journal of Psychology in 1895. Later, he is
acknowledged with honorary degrees from Harvard, Clark, and Wisconsin. Although Titchener
supervised a large number of students in early twentieth-century American psychology, his
system died with him in 1927. Figure 1 below shows the detail about Edward Bradford
Titchener.
 Figure 1: Details about Edward Bradford Titchener, Cherry (2014)

In the end of the nineteenth century, Edward B. Titchener carried the simple thoughts of
Wilhelm Wundt to the United States. Titchener called Wundt's ideas structuralism and tried to
unserdtand the structure of mental life or consciousness.

His structural psychology has a threefold aim. Those are as listed below:

To describe the components of consciousness in terms of basic elements,

To describe the combinations of basic elements,
To explain the connections of the elements of connections of the elements of
consciousness to the nervous system.

Consciousness is well-defined as "immediate experience," experience as it is being

experienced. Mediate experience is categorized by contents already in the mind, such as previous
associations and the emotional and motivational levels of an individual. Structural psychology, in
general, attempted to defend the integrity of psychology by contrasting it with physics (Henle,
1971).
 Edward Titchener put his own spin on Wundt's psychology of consciousness. He
endeavored to categorize the structures of the mind, not unlike the way a chemist breaks down
chemicals into their constituent parts water into hydrogen and oxygen, for instance. Thus, for
Titchener, just as hydrogen and oxygen were structures, so were feelings and thoughts. He
considered of hydrogen and oxygen as structures of a chemical compound, and feelings and
thoughts as structures of the mind. This tactic is known as "structuralism. The experimental
method employed by structuralists was self-examination. This method of self-report is the
ageless approach which best outlines self-experience. Introspection depended on the nature of
consciousness observed, the purpose of the test, and the commands given by the experimenters.
Introspection was considered usable only if done by exceptionally well-trained scientists, not
naive observers. The most common mistake made by inexperienced introspectionists was labeled
the "stimulus error" describing the object observed rather than the conscious content. Stimulus
error, conferring to Titchener, resulted not in psychological data but in physical explanations.
Under this natural science approach, psychology was defined as the experimental study of the
data of immediate experience through the method of introspection. The goal of psychology was
to lessen the contents of consciousness to constituent elements of sensory origin.

In the 1890s, Wilhelm Wundt developed a three-dimensional theory of feeling.

Essentially, Wundt thought that feelings differ along three dimensions: Pleasant-unpleasant,
strain-relaxation, excitement-calm. Titchener agreed with and accepted only the pleasant-
unpleasant dimension. This approach led him to downgrade sentiments to organic instinctual
reactions. In additional, Edward Titchener planned a theory of meaning signifying that the
context in which a feeling occurs in consciousness determines to mean. Accordingly, simple
feeling has no meaning by itself, but it obtains meaning by association with other feelings or
images. In that way, Titchener labeled the mind in terms of formal elements with "attributes" of
their own, linked and combined by the mechanism of associations.

As a structural psychologist, Titchener, in his effort to adhere strictly to a natural science

model, sacrificed psychological processes and actions that did not fit into his methodological
framework (Evans, 1972). In addition, the over-reliance on the questionable, strict methodology
of introspection led Titchener and other structural psychologists into a sterile dead end. In a
sense, structuralism was caught between the "empiricism of the British tradition" and "nativism
of the German tradition." Titchener and other structuralists expressed a view of the mind as
determined by the elements of sensation; at the same time they documented mental activity and
tried to deal with activity through such concepts as "apperception." Coupled with the
inadequacies of introspection, structuralism botched to lodge contradictory philosophical
expectations about the nature of the mind.

Structural psychology holds a exclusive place in the progress of the natural science model
for psychology in Germany. Specifically, the texts of Edward B. Titchener, as well as those of
Wilhelm Wundt establish an organized attempt to start a intelligible science, encompassing all
that they considered being psychological. As such, structural psychology was a scheme of
psychology.

However, other scientists in Germany, contemporary with Wundt and Titchener, replied
to the same powers of Zeitgeist and wrote on psychology (Pillsbury, 1928). They wrote as
individuals, though, not as system manufacturers. Within the restrictions of natural science
approach to psychology, the extremism of Wundt (Germany) and Titchener (the United States)
was disallowed, both in the terms of the substance and the methodology of structuralism. These
scientists were experimentalists in the sense that they were guided in their progress not by the
outline of a fixed system, as were Wundt and Titchener, but somewhat by the results and
inferences of their laboratory studies.

Titchener did not prosper in splitting the applied from the scientific in psychology, even
though he spoke with passion and conviction on this topic. He was adequately active in such
performances that Sigmund Freud considered Titchener "the adversary" following his speech at
Clark University in 1909 when psychoanalysts were first presented into America. Equally,
Titchener's theoretical model of mental processes botched to account for the rich variety of the
activities and products of the human mind (Woodworth, 1906). Nevertheless, Titchener's work
resolutely set the stage for psychology to be preserved as a scientific enterprise, using the
scientific technique of laboratory experiments to acquire data.

Although best known for his structuralism, Titchener's contributions to experimental

psychology can still be found in psychology training today. Many of his psychological
philosophies varied from his mentor, Wilhelm Wundt, but one area they totally agreed on
was experimental psychology, the scientific study of psychological processes. Prior to the
introduction of experimental psychology, most of the world reflected psychology to be pure
philosophy, or in other words, unverified theories. To be accepted as a science, Titchener knew it
was vital that psychology theories be testable and the results measurable. He trusted heavily
on introspection, the process of examining one's own thoughts, as his main tool for determining
outcomes. He trained his subjects to report the elements or sensations of thoughts, rather than
name the object itself. For Titchener, simply calling the object an 'apple' was a grievous mistake
and he referred to this as stimulus error. Table 1 outlines three of Edward B. Titcheners
contributions.

No Contributions

1. He experimented on sensations, images, and feelings. It led to important findings like

attention. It was interpreted as an increase in the vividness of a sensation (or image).
He gave the core-context theory of meaning.
2. Titchener personally directed 56 students into getting doctoral degrees in
3. experimental psychology.

Table 1: Titcheners Contribution to Psychology

Publications by Titchener:

Books:

Titchener, E.B. 2005 (original 1896). An Outline of Psychology. Adamant Media

Corporation. ISBN 1402177461
Titchener, E.B. 1903 (original 1898). A Primer of Psychology. Macmillan & Co.
Titchener, E.B. 1901. Experimental Psychology.
Titchener, E.B. 1973 (original 1908). Elementary Psychology of Feeling and Attention.
Ayer Co Pub. ISBN 0405051662
Articles:

Titchener, E.B. 1898. "The postulate of structural psychology" in Philosophical Review.

No.7, 449-465.
Titchener, E.B. 1899. "Structural and functional psychology" in Philosophical Review.
No.8, 290-299.
Titchener, E.B. 1925. "Experimental psychology: A Retrospect" in American Journal of
Psychology. No.36, 313-323.

3.0 Wilhelm Wundts contributions to psychology.

Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt (August 16, 1832 August 31, 1920) was a German
physiologist, philosopher, and psychologist. Wundt was born on August 16, 1832, in Neckarau,
in Baden, Germany. He was the fourth child in the family. His father was Maximilian Wundt,
who was a Lutheran pastor, and his mother was Marie Frederike. Many ancestors on both sides
of Wilhelm Wundts family were philosophers, scientists, professors, physicians, and
government officials. Wundts scientific psychology and its fortune deliver a valued lesson for
both history and psychology. Creatively uniting philosophy and physiology, Wundt formed a
new division of science, psychology, which was a research field of physiology lecturing
questions of philosophy. Wundt is typically credited as the founder of experimental psychology
and of structuralism in psychology. His system is considered to be dualistic, atomistic,
associationistic, and thoughtful. Figure 2 below shows details about Wilhelm Maximilian
Wundt.
 Figure 2: Details about Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt. (Patel & Mehta, 2014)

During his childhood and adolescence, Wundt was permitted only a firm routine of
learning, with little time for play or idleness. This kind of background made a rather determined
person, totally committed to intellectual activities of a systematic and creative nature. At the age
of thirteen, Wundt began his formal education at a Catholic Gymnasium. The German
gymnasium of the nineteenth century was a college preparatory high school, and the entrance
was limited to the sons of middle-class intellectuals. The German university system also was
highly distinctive. One had to get the typical doctorate and then a second, higher level doctorate
before one could teach.

For Wundt, psychology was the technical study of instant experience, and thus the study
of human consciousness, or the mind, as long as the mind is understood as the entirety of
conscious experience at a given moment. Wundt joint philosophical introspection with
techniques and laboratory apparatus brought over from his physiological studies with Helmholtz,
as well as many of his own projects. This experimental introspection was in dissimilarity to what
had been called psychology until then, a division of philosophy where people introspected
themselves.

Wundts comments on myth and custom are unexceptional. He observed history as going
over a series of phases from primeval communities to an age of heroes, and then to the
development of nation-states, concluding in a world state based on the concept of humanity as a
whole. In fact, Wundt proposed an introspective psychology (Anderson, 1975). According to
Wundt, it is needless to assume a special inner sense to observe ones consciousness. One simply
has experiences and can define them; one does not have to witness the involvements happening.
Wilhelm Wundt considered the development of mind a significant topic, which could be lectured
moderately by child and psychology, but above all by the study of the historical growth of the
human species. Life is short, so our own experience is limited, but we can draw on the historical
experience of humanity as written and preserved in existing cultures at different levels of
development (McLeod, 2008). This collective experience allows studying the inner retreats of
consciousness, those well detached from sensory-motor responses and hence not agreeable, in
Wundts view, to experimental study. He called this his Vlkerpsychologie (ethnic or folk
psychology), embracing especially the study of language, myth, and custom.

Wundt separated language into two aspects: outer phenomena, consisting of actually
produced or perceived utterances, and inner phenomena, the cognitive processes that motivate
the outer string of words. Sentence production, according to Wundt, begins with a united idea
which one wishes to express, the Gesamtvorstellung (whole mental configuration). The analytic
purpose of apperception prepares the united idea for speech, as far as it must be examined into
component parts and a structure that holds the relationship between the parts and the whole.

Publications by Wundt:

Die Lehre von der Muskelbewegung (1858)

Beitrge zur Theorie der Sinneswahrnehmung (1862)
Vorlesungen ber die Menschen- und Tierseele (1863), English translation, Lectures on
Human and Animal Psychology
Lehrbuch der Physiologie des Menschen (1865)
 Die physikalischen Aiome und ihre Beziehung zum Kausalprincip (1866)
System der Philosophie (1889)
Hypnotismus und Suggestion (1892)
Vorlesungen ber die Menschen und Thierseele, Leipzig, (1893)
Vlkerpsychologie, eine Untersuchung der Entwicklungsgesetze *von Sprache, Mythus,
und Sitte 10 volumues, (1900-1920)
Einleitung in die Philosophie (1901)
CONCLUSION

The structural psychology of Wundt and Titchener had threefold aims which are to describe the
components of consciousness in terms of basic elements; to describe the combinations of basic
elements, and to explain the connections of the elements of consciousness to the nervous system.
The experimental method proposed to secure appropriate analysis of the mental contents via
introspection. Wundt is known for founding the first laboratory and establishing experimental
psychology as a discipline while Titchener experiments on sensations, images and feelings led to
important findings. Being one of the few founding fathers in the field of Psychology of
Consciousness, Wilhelm Wundt has contributed significantly to the development of psychology.
Similar to Wundt, Titchener has also significantly contributed to the development of modern
psychology.
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