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KEY TERM GLOSSARYReductionism: the argument that complex behaviour can be reduced to its basic parts.
Holism: to study the human as a whole/entire person.
Determinism: your choices are caused by factors outside of your control.
Free will: you have full control over the choices you make.
Idiographic: focus on the individual and recognition of uniqueness.
Nomothetic: attempts to establish laws and generalisations about people.
Introspection: observation of one's mental state. (looking inward)
Behaviourist approach: views people (and animals) are controlled by their
environment; we are the result of what we have learnt from the environment.
Social learning theory (SLT): learn through copying our role models.
Cognitive approach: psychology institutionalised as a science. People process
information like a computer. You are made up of an input, processor and output.
Biological approach: behaviour is caused by hormones, brain, nervous system and
neurotransmitters.
Psychodynamic approach: Freud believed that events in our childhood can have a
significant impact on our behaviour as adults. He also believed that people had little
free will to make choices in life as behaviour is determined by the unconscious mind.
Humanistic approach: emphasize on the study of the whole person. Looks at human
behaviour, not only through the eyes of the observer, but through the eyes of the
person doing the behaving. (subjective)
Nature: is what we think of as pre-wiring and is influenced by genetic inheritance and
other biological factors.
Nurture: is generally taken as the influence of external factors after conception, e.g.,
the product of exposure, life experiences and learning on an individual.
, PSYCHOLOGY TIMELINE
17th-18th century: psychology is a branch of philosophy.
1879: Wundt opens the first experimental lab in Germany and psychology emerges as a
distinct discipline in its own right.
1900s: the psychodynamic approach is established, where Freud emphasized the
influence of the unconscious mind.
1913: the behaviourist approach is established. (Watson and Skinner)
1950s: Rogers and Maslow develop the humanistic approach, rejecting the views
preferred by the behaviourist and psychodynamic approach. They emphasized the
importance of self-determination and free will.
1960s: the cognitive approach was introduced (at the same time as the digital
computer), which compared the human mind and mental processes to a computer.
1960s: around the same time as the cognitive approach introduced, Bandura proposed
the social learning theory, which draws attention to the cognitive factors involved in
learning.
1980s onwards: the biological approach begins to establish itself as the dominant
scientific perspective in psychology (due to advances in technology).
THE ORIGINS OF PSYCHOLOGY
- The origins of psychology date back to the father of psychology, Wundt, who set
up the first psychology laboratory in Germany in the 1870s.
- Wundt believed that all aspects of the mind could be studied scientifically by
breaking down human experience into its basic elements. (reductionism)
- He developed a technique to scientifically test mental processes called
introspection. Introspection involves the systematic analysis of your own
conscious experience of a stimulus; it involves training participants to report
their own mental processes including memory, perception and emotion.
1. Focus on a stimulus. (e.g; an object, image or auditory tone)
, 2. Reflect on different mental processes experienced while focusing on the
stimulus.
3. Provide a systematic description of the inner processes experienced.
4. Observers will then compare different participants’ reports in response
to the same stimuli and purpose general theories about mental
processes.
- Wundt’s research paved the way for the acceptance of psychology as a distinct
science and introspection is still used today in areas such as therapy and
studying emotional states demonstrating its value as one way mental processes
can be investigated.
THE ORIGINS OF PSYCHOLOGY AS A SCIENCE
- Wundt’s work followed an empirical approach to studying the mind and this was
highly influential in psychology’s emerge as a science.
- Empirical methods involve acquiring knowledge through direct experience (such
as introspection) rather than a reasoned argument. His focus was on trying to
understand psychological processes of perception rather than looking at
biological processes.
- Wundt later recognised that higher mental processes were difficult to study
using his procedures. This encouraged others to look for more appropriate
methods and techniques, paving the way for approaches such as scanning (MRI,
EEG).
- Watson was critical of Wundt’s focus on private mental processes and argued a
true science should focus on behaviours observable to all.
- Watson (1913) and Skinner (1953) developed the behaviourist approach, which
focused on observable learned behaviour in controlled laboratory experiments.
This took the scientific assumption that all behaviour is caused (determinism)
and therefore can be predicted.
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