Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Psychology
Lecture 2
Intro to Psychology-101
Instructor: Sadia Mumtaz
School of Thoughts
■ The formal history of Psychology
can be described by school of
thoughts which guided
Psychologists in their actions.
■ Each school determined a subject
matter and the methods to be used
in investigating that particular
subject matter.
Cont..
■ Group of people who share common
ideas/opinion related to any discipline, social
issue or subject belongs to a single specific
school of thought.
School of Thoughts
■ There are five historical school of thoughts of
Psychology:
1.Structuralism (study of conscious experience)
2.Functionalism (study of functions of
consciousness)
3.Behaviorism (study of observable behavior)
4.Psychoanalysis (study of unconscious
experiences)
5.Gestalt Psychology (study of whole)
1: Structuralism:
■ The science of psychology had its formal
beginning in 1879 when Wilhelm Wundt
(1832-1920), a German psychologist set up a
laboratory at the University of Leipzig to study
mind/mental activities. He studied the
conscious experience of mind through
introspection.
■ Introspection: “looking inward”
■ observation or examination of one's own
mental and emotional state, mental
processes, etc.
■ Wilhelm Wundt also known as father of
psychology
■ Wundt was the first person to believe that
consciousness could be studied through
experimentation.
■ Earlier he devoted attention on studying
the building blocks of the mind. Later he
defined psychology as the study of
conscious experiences, he found the
system of psychology known as “
Structuralism”.
■ Edward B. Titchener who first coined
the term to describe this school of
thought.
Cont.
■ Structuralism: An early
approach to psychology which
focused on the fundamental
elements that form the foundation
of thinking , consciousness,
emotions , and other kinds of
mental states and activities.
■ Its emphasize on studying the
most basic components or
structures of conscious
experiences / mental activities.
Introspection:
■ Structuralism held that even our most
complex conscious experiences could
be broken down into components or
elemental structures, to identify these
structures of conscious thoughts a
procedure used that is called
“introspection”
■ Structuralists held the belief that
■ “ Whole is equal to the sum of the parts”
■ Structuralists concluded that all conscious
experiences consisted of three elements:
Sensations, images and feelings
e.g. a person having a slice of cake, would not
simply define the type of food, this conscious
experience comprised of basic elements:
taste, smell, texture, color, shape etc.
Cont..
■ Using introspection , Wundt presented his
trained subjects with a stimulus such as
bright green object and asked them to
describe it in their own words.
■ He thought that we can understand the
structure of mind through the reports of
subjects. The subject might first report on the
colors they saw, then the smells and so on, to
create a total description of their conscious
experiences.
Cont..
■ Wundt did not have the technologies at his
time. Therefore he had to rely on combination
of external stimuli and reports of internal
observations by the participants
■ He believed that there were two sides of any
explanation of phenomenon
■ External side: Measured in laboratory which
involve sensory processes (Physiological
response to an external stimuli e.g eye
registering a small, round, green object)
Cont..
■ Psychological side: Measured by self report
of internal observations known as perception
(psychological interpretation of sensation)
■ Strengths of Structuralism:
■ Structuralism influenced experimental
psychology
Criticism on Structuralism