They also disliked the reductionism, or simplifying nature, of behaviorism. Behaviorism is also deterministic at its core, because it sees human behavior as entirely determined by a combination of genetics and environment. Thus, humanism emerged. Humanism is a perspective within psychology that emphasizes the potential for good that is innate to all humans.
Abraham Maslow — was an American psychologist who is best known for proposing a hierarchy of human needs in motivating behavior. Although this concept will be discussed in more detail in a later chapter, a brief overview will be provided here. Maslow asserted that so long as basic needs necessary for survival were met e.
According to Maslow, the highest-level needs relate to self-actualization, a process by which we achieve our full potential. Beginning with Maslow and Rogers, there was an insistence on a humanistic research program.
This program has been largely qualitative not measurement-based , but there exist a number of quantitative research strains within humanistic psychology, including research on happiness, self-concept, meditation, and the outcomes of humanistic psychotherapy Friedman, Carl Rogers — was also an American psychologist who, like Maslow, emphasized the potential for good that exists within all people.
Rogers used a therapeutic technique known as client-centered therapy in helping his clients deal with problematic issues that resulted in their seeking psychotherapy. Unlike a psychoanalytic approach in which the therapist plays an important role in interpreting what conscious behavior reveals about the unconscious mind, client-centered therapy involves the patient taking a lead role in the therapy session. Rogers believed that a therapist needed to display three features to maximize the effectiveness of this particular approach: unconditional positive regard, genuineness, and empathy.
Unconditional positive regard refers to the fact that the therapist accepts their client for who they are, no matter what he or she might say. Humanism has been influential to psychology as a whole. Both Maslow and Rogers are well-known names among students of psychology you will read more about both men later in this text , and their ideas have influenced many scholars.
The early work of the humanistic psychologists redirected attention to the individual human as a whole, and as a conscious and self-aware being. By the s, new disciplinary perspectives in linguistics, neuroscience, and computer science were emerging, and these areas revived interest in the mind as a focus of scientific inquiry. This particular perspective has come to be known as the cognitive revolution Miller, Although no one person is entirely responsible for starting the cognitive revolution, Noam Chomsky was very influential in the early days of this movement.
Chomsky — , an American linguist, was dissatisfied with the influence that behaviorism had had on psychology. Noam Chomsky was very influential in beginning the cognitive revolution. In , this mural honoring him was put up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
European psychology had never really been as influenced by behaviorism as had American psychology; and thus, the cognitive revolution helped reestablish lines of communication between European psychologists and their American counterparts. Furthermore, psychologists began to cooperate with scientists in other fields, like anthropology, linguistics, computer science, and neuroscience, among others. This interdisciplinary approach often was referred to as the cognitive sciences, and the influence and prominence of this particular perspective resonates in modern-day psychology Miller, Culture has important impacts on individuals and social psychology, yet the effects of culture on psychology are under-studied.
In this sense, it has remained a descriptive science, rather than one seeking to determine cause and effect. For example, a study of characteristics of individuals seeking treatment for a binge eating disorder in Hispanic American, African American, and Caucasian American individuals found significant differences between groups Franko et al.
The study concluded that results from studying any one of the groups could not be extended to the other groups, and yet potential causes of the differences were not measured.
This history of multicultural psychology in the United States is a long one. The role of African American psychologists in researching the cultural differences between African American individual and social psychology is but one example. Sumner established a psychology degree program at Howard University, leading to the education of a new generation of African American psychologists Black, Spence, and Omari, Much of the work of early African American psychologists and a general focus of much work in first half of the 20th century in psychology in the United States was dedicated to testing and intelligence testing in particular Black et al.
That emphasis has continued, particularly because of the importance of testing in determining opportunities for children, but other areas of exploration in African-American psychology research include learning style, sense of community and belonging, and spiritualism Black et al.
The American Psychological Association has several ethnically based organizations for professional psychologists that facilitate interactions among members.
Since psychologists belonging to specific ethnic groups or cultures have the most interest in studying the psychology of their communities, these organizations provide an opportunity for the growth of research on the impact of culture on individual and social psychology.
Before the time of Wundt and James, questions about the mind were considered by philosophers. However, both Wundt and James helped create psychology as a distinct scientific discipline. Wundt was a structuralist, which meant he believed that our cognitive experience was best understood by breaking that experience into its component parts. He thought this was best accomplished by introspection. William James was the first American psychologist, and he was a proponent of functionalism.
Like Wundt, James also relied on introspection; however, his research approach also incorporated more objective measures as well. Sigmund Freud believed that understanding the unconscious mind was absolutely critical to understand conscious behavior.
This was especially true for individuals that he saw who suffered from various hysterias and neuroses. William James, shown here in a self-portrait, was the first American psychologist.
William James — was the first American psychologist who espoused a different perspective on how psychology should operate. Key to that theory is the idea that natural selection leads to organisms that are adapted to their environment, including their behavior. Adaptation means that a trait of an organism has a function for the survival and reproduction of the individual, because it has been naturally selected. Functionalism focused on how mental activities helped an organism fit into its environment.
Functionalism has a second, more subtle meaning in that functionalists were more interested in the operation of the whole mind rather than of its individual parts, which were the focus of structuralism.
Like Wundt, James believed that introspection could serve as one means by which someone might study mental activities, but James also relied on more objective measures, including the use of various recording devices, and examinations of concrete products of mental activities and of anatomy and physiology Gordon, Improve this page Learn More.
Skip to main content. Psychological Foundations. Search for:. Early Psychology—Structuralism and Functionalism Learning Objectives Define structuralism and functionalism and the contributions of Wundt and James to the development of psychology. The school of psychology founded by Wundt is known as voluntarism, the process of organizing the mind.
Wundt's theory was developed and promoted by his one-time student, Edward Titchener , who described his system as Structuralism, or the analysis of the basic elements that constitute the mind.
Introspection is the process by which a person looks inward at their own mental processes to gain insight into how they work. It is the self-observation of one's consciousness. He trained psychology students to make observations that were biased by personal interpretation or previous experience, and used the results to develop a theory of conscious thought. Highly trained assistants would be given a stimulus such as a ticking metronome and would reflect on the experience.
They would report what the stimulus made them think and feel. The same stimulus, physical surroundings and instructions were given to each person. Titchener concluded that there were three kinds of mental components that could be considered to constitute conscious experience:.
These components could be blockquoteated into their particular properties, which he decided were quality, intensity, duration, clearness, and extensity. Pictures and expressions of warmth could be separated further into just bunches of sensations. It can therefore be concluded that by following this train of reasoning all of the thoughts in question were pictures, which being developed from rudimentary sensations implied that all perplexing thinking and thought could in the end be separated into simply the sensations which he could get at through introspection.
The second issue in Titchener's hypothesis of structuralism was the topic of how the psychological components consolidated and interfaced with one another to shape any type of conscious experience. His decisions were generally founded on thoughts of associationism. Specifically, Titchener centers around the law of contiguity, which is the idea the elements combine together.
Titchener dismissed Wundt's ideas of apperception and innovative blend intentional activity , which were the premise of Wundt's voluntarism. Titchener contended that consideration was essentially a sign of the "clearness" property inside sensation.
When Titchener distinguished the elements of the mind and the specific interactions that they make with each other, his theory was concerned with figuring out for what reason the components cooperate in the manner they do. Specifically, Titchener was keen on the connection between the physical process and the conscious experience - he wanted to specifically discover what was it between the two of them that was responsible for most of the interactions between them.
0コメント