Brief History of Psychology

The discipline of psychology, as it is known today, began in the 1879 and is credited by many to Wilhelm Wundt (the father of academic psychology)

But speculation about psychological questions is as old as man. Since man has been man he has probably speculated on the hows and whys of human behavior. Most of this early "psychology" took the form of philosophizing. Even the early caveman was probably led by such as experiences as dreams and death to speculate on the existence of a soul, which existed separately from the body. And he was led by the existence of abnormal behavior to speculate upon the existence of evil spirits as a cause of behavior.

The roots of modern western psychology can be traced to the fourth and fifth centuries B.C. The Greek philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle posed fundamental questions about the mind for example like: Do people perceive reality correctly? What is consciousness? Are people inherently rational or irrational? Are people capable of free choice? These type of questions, now often considered as the realm of philosophy, dealt with the nature of the mind are precursors to the cognitive perspective. In the nineteenth century, two theories of the mind competed for support. One known as faculty psychology, was a doctrine of inherited mental powers. According to this theory, the mind has a few distinct and independent "faculties" or mental agencies such as thinking, feeling and willing that account for its activities. These faculties were further broken into subfaculties; we remember through the subfaculty of memory and so on. Faculty psychology tried to localize special faculties in the different parts of the brain. The association psychologist however, held an opposing view. They denied inborn faculties of the mind; instead, they limited the mind’s content to ideas that enter by way of senses and then become associated through such principles as similarity, contrast and contiguity. They explained all mental activity through the association of ideas.

Throughout history the great philosophers and religious thinkers continued to speculate concerning the nature of man. For example, in the 17th century, the famous philosopher Rene' Descartes wrestled with the age-old problem of the relationship between the mind and the body. He espoused the theory which is called dualism. Dualism is the idea that the mind and body are separate entities. The body is physical and exists in the physical world. The mind is not physical. And yet the mind and the body interact and the mind controls the body and knows what the body is sensing. He speculated that the mind and the body interact at one point - the pineal gland. He picked the pineal gland because there is only one pineal gland - it is not duplicated on both sides of the brain.

We may smile at Descartes' lack of sophistication in the light of modern day thought, but the problem he addressed remains unresolved. We all know that our brains are a mass of neurons, filled with chemicals, which produce electrical impulses. But how do we go from neurons to consciousness and the concept of "mind." We still don't have the answer.

Psychology began to break away from philosophy and established itself as an independent discipline during the late 1800's and early 1900's. During the earliest years of modern psychology there was little collaboration between psychologists, many of whom lived in different countries. One group of psychologists might work for years, remaining totally unaware of the work of other psychologists. One psychologist would be studying the contents of his own consciousness through the method of introspection. Another would be studying the processes of memory and forgetting. Another would be studying the processes of perception, with special emphasis on optical illusions. Another would be studying the causes of mental illness.

These various independent movements in psychology were not brought together to form one unified science for many years. And in fact, the process of unifying the science and establishing a harmonious relationship between all the independently developed areas of interest is still not complete. The result is that psychology is still divided into factions, and there are still some basic areas on which various groups of psychologists disagree.

What are the different perspectives in psychology?

In order to understand how psychology got to be the way it is today - and to understand why there is such a diversity of subject matter in the typical psychology textbook - it is important to study the history of psychology and to look at the contributions of some of the leading psychologists, many of whom founded important "schools" of thought which are still influential today.

One of the most important schools of thought in psychology is the school of Behaviorism. Behaviorism was started by a man named J. B. Watson (1878 - 1958). Watson and his followers rejected the idea promoted by earlier psychologists that consciousness could be studied scientifically. The Behaviorists insisted that if psychology was to be a science, it must limit itself to the study of overt (observable) behavior which could be scientifically recorded and measured. In other words, the Behaviorists did not care what people thought - they only cared what they did. They felt that mental processes cannot be studied scientifically because these processes are private. They cannot be seen or touched or measured. The Behaviorists were satisfied to limit themselves to a study of muscular movements and other bodily activities which can be seen or measured or detected with some kind of instrument.

According to a Behaviorist, the act of hitting another person would be classified as behavior, but anger is not behavior. Tossing and turning in your sleep is behavior, but a dream is not behavior. Hunger is not a behavior, but cooking and eating a steak is behavior. The main point is that behavior must be observable or measurable.

What about emotions? Behaviorists insisted that emotions are nothing more than visceral responses - increased heart beat, increased glandular output, increased tension in the abdomen, etc. They were not convinced of the reality of mental states such as emotions. Even if such mental states did exist, the Behaviorists were not interest in studying them because they could not be studied scientifically.

Behaviorists were particularly interested in breaking complex behavior down into its simplest component parts.

Behaviorists were heavily influenced by the work of the Russian physiologist, Ivan Pavlov. Pavlov had conducted a very famous experiment regarding the salivary reflex in dogs (the tendency of dogs to begin to salivate when they saw or smelled food). He decided to ring a bell every day just before he fed the dogs in his laboratory. He discovered that after a few days the dogs began to salivate when the bell rang, even before they saw the food. Pavlov called this behavior a "conditional" or conditioned reflex. According to his interpretation of his observations, the dogs had learned to make a reflex response whenever a stimulus (the bell) was presented. This response occurred because of learning. A stimulus-response connection had been established through learning.

The Behaviorists eventually attempted to explain all behavior as learned responses to stimuli. Therefore behaviorism is sometimes referred to as stimulus-response psychology. Since these learned stimulus-response connections were thought to explain all behavior, the Behaviorists placed a great deal of emphasis on the process of learning. This interest in learning continues to this day. That is the reason you have an entire chapter in your textbook devoted to learning theory.

This emphasis on the importance of learned behaviors led to another Behaviorist point of view. In dealing with the question of nature vs nurture, or heredity vs environment as an explanation for behavior, the Behaviorists came down strongly on the side of environment. They denied the existence of predetermined tendencies in human beings. Instead, they believed that it is the influence of the environment, through the process of learning, that explains human behavior. In fact, Watson once wrote:

Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own special world to bring them up in and I'll

guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select-- doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations and race of his ancestors.

Another point of view which was initiated by the Behaviorists was the use of animals in psychological experiments. If you focus exclusively on observable behavior, there is no reason why you can't study behavior in animals as well as humans. So the Behaviorists tended to spend most of their time studying rats and pigeons.

Why do you think the Behaviorists tended to spend more time studying behavior in animals than in humans? There are three main reasons: (1) We can have total control over the lives of animals. We know everything that they have ever been exposed to, so there is less likelihood of corruption of the experiment by unknown factors, as would be the case in studying humans. (2) We can do things to animals that we could not do to humans because of ethical concerns. For example, we might want to study the impact of near starvation on the learning process. We would be reluctant to starve humans, but we might be more willing to starve animals. Or we might want to know how an electric shock influences behavior. We could not shock humans, but we might be willing to shock animals. (3) Behaviors in animals may be less complex than in humans, so we can discover the principles of learning in a simple organism and then apply these principles to learning in humans.

The study of behavior in animals as a method of discovering principles that also apply to humans makes a somewhat radical assumption - that humans and animals are basically alike in terms of the factors which control behavior. The Behaviorists tended to think of humans simply as more complex animals.

We have mentioned J. B. Watson as the father of behaviorism. The other famous Behaviorist - and the one who has had far more long-term influence that Watson -- is B. F. Skinner. Skinner placed less emphasis on stimulus-response connections and reflex behavior. His primary contribution to behaviorism and to the whole field of psychology is this simple principle: Organisms tend to repeat behaviors that result in pleasant outcomes. They tend not to repeat behaviors that either produce no outcomes or produce unpleasant outcomes. If you ask a question in class and the teacher responds, "That's a great question. I'm really glad you asked that.", then you are more likely to ask questions in the future. On the other hand, if you raise your hand and the teacher ignores you, or if you ask a question and the teacher says, "That is really a stupid question. If you had read your book last night you would have known the answer to that question.", you are less likely to ask a question the next time.

This is a very simple and very obvious principle, but it is a very powerful method of controlling behavior if it is used properly and consistently. Another principle of behaviorism which is the result of Skinner's influence is the belief that all human behavior is determined or controlled by the environment and that free will is just an illusion. Most people would like to believe that their actions are the result of conscious decisions and that they have a choice as to what they do. According to Skinner, however, all behavior is totally predictable if we know everything about the environmental influences the person has been exposed to.

Another school of psychology which came into existence about the same time as Behaviorism and reflects a reaction against behaviorism is Gestalt psychology. (Gestalt is the German word for form, or pattern, or configuration, or shape.) The Gestalt psychologists objected to two aspects of behaviorism: (1) They objected to the Behaviorists' tendency to try to understand behavior by breaking behavior down into several connected stimulus-response bonds. (2) They felt that psychology should continue to study conscious experience and not be limited to the study of overt behavior.

Whereas the Behaviorists (and other earlier psychologists called Structuralists) tended to try to study behavior by breaking it down into smaller, isolated parts, the Gestalt psychologists believed that the whole of conscious experience is not equal to the sum of its isolated parts. Rather, they believed that "the whole is greater than, or sometimes different than, the sum of its parts." The parts may interact with each other and thus produce a different whole. The way the parts are organized is also important. For example, a flashing Christmas tree light, observed alone, is perceived one way. But a string of the same lights strung around a window, which go on and then off in sequence, is perceived as a moving light - when in fact it is a group of stationary lights flashing on and off. (This apparent movement is called the phi phenomenon.) The pattern of lights and the relationship of one to the other creates a perception that is different from each individual light taken in isolation.

Another aspect of Gestalt psychology was its emphasis on insight learning, as opposed to the mechanical stimulus-response learning model promoted by the Behaviorists. Insight learning is that "aha!" learning which takes place when you think about something and suddenly figure it out. Clearly insight learning requires something to be going on in your head, and not just in your muscles.

Although the Gestalt movement is not a dominant movement in contemporary psychology, it continues to have an impact on psychology, particularly in the study of perception. (The chapter on sensation and perception reflects the contribution of the Gestalt psychologists to the field of psychology.)

Another very influential school is the school of Psychoanalysis. The founder of the school of psychoanalysis was Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). Freud was an Austrian physician who became interested in the treatment of mental illness, especially neuroses. We will study Freud's work in detail in the chapter on personality. Briefly, this is what Freud believed:

• In addition to man's conscious mind, there is an unconscious mind which greatly influences behavior. Man is frequently controlled by unconscious conflicts of which he is completely unaware.
• There are two primary instincts which control man's behavior - sex and aggression. Most of Freud's study dealt with man's attempt to deal with his sexual urges in a socially acceptable way.
• Behavior is heavily influenced by what happens to a child during his early years of development
• Sexual urges are not limited to adulthood. Children also have strong sexual urges which take various forms and focus on various parts of the body as children mature.
• Freud developed two techniques for discovering the content of the unconscious mind of his patients - free association, where the patient reveals whatever thoughts enter his mind while he is relaxing, and the analysis of dreams. (Dreams reveal the unconscious mind in a disguised manner.

Another important recent movement in psychology is Humanistic psychology. Humanistic psychology began in the 1950's and represents a reaction against many of the beliefs of the Behaviorists and the Psychoanalysts. The most well-known humanistic psychologists are Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow. The humanistic psychologists share the following beliefs concerning human nature:

• The belief that man is basically good. He is sick only when society is sick. (As opposed to Freud's view of man which sees most people as having a variety of psychological problems and which seeks for underlying negative motivations for apparently positive behaviors.)
• An emphasis on the present and the future, (as compared with Freud, who saw man as permanently trapped in conflicts which originated in early childhood, and the Behaviorists, who place emphasis on early learning experiences.
• An emphasis on open acceptance and expression of feelings. Humanists believe that it is healthy to get things out in the open and to be honest with yourself about your feelings. They offer love and acceptance and not judgement or condemnation or shame as you express feelings which may be negative or hurtful.
• Much less emphasis on animal studies and more emphasis on meaningful human studies. (As opposed to the Behaviorist emphasis on animal studies.)
• Less experimental and more philosophical than the Behaviorists. They have a common sense approach to human behavior.
• They see man as having free will and reject the determinism of both the Freudians and the Behaviorists.
• They see motives other than satisfaction of basic physiological drives as being very important. For example, the need for fulfillment and personal growth is considered to be very important in understanding and motivating people.
• They place more emphasis on subjective experience and reject the Behaviorist belief that only observable, external behaviors are valid subjects for study.
• They feel that science cannot be value free.
• They place more emphasis on the use of naturalistic observation as opposed to controlled experiments. (Naturalistic observation is where you observe behavior as it occurs naturally, such as observing children in a day care center through a one-way mirror.)
• They emphasize conscious thought process rather than unconscious thought processes. What a person believes and thinks on a conscious level is what she really is. The real self is not a dark force lurking in the unconscious.
• The accept the importance of heredity or inborn tendencies, while believing at the same time that people are not trapped by these tendencies.

While not considered schools of psychology, there are two or three other recent emphases in psychology which we should mention briefly.

One of these recent areas of interest is Cognitive Psychology. Cognitive psychologists tend to study language acquisition, cognitive development in children, memory, and problem-solving. In contrast to the Behaviorists, they insist that it is valid to investigate how people manipulate mental images.

Another recent area of interest for psychology is an interest in the physiological bases of behavior. For example, studies involving stimulation of both the surface of the brain as well as the interior structures of the brain show how the brain controls movement, how memories can be revived, and how emotional responses can be evoked. We have also learned about the different functions of the two hemispheres of the brain and about biofeedback.

Finally, during the last 80 years we have seen the rise of applied psychology. Psychologists have been called upon to create and administer intelligence tests and other psychological tests. They have also been called upon to provide psychotherapy for people who are suffering from trauma or many other types of mental disturbance. In addition, they have been called upon to work with educators and students in school settings to improve the effectiveness of teaching and to counsel with students who have problems. Finally, they have applied the principles of psychology to the work setting. They have taught business leaders how to supervise people effectively and how to improve productivity and morale.

What then is psychology?

Based on the young history of psychology, we can surmise, that there could be many definitions of psychology as there are perspectives taken by psychologists in the discipline.

A unifying definition of Psychology may be still be a subject of a heated debate. What we can gather from these different perspectives is an underlying implication that formal psychology be defined as the scientific study of behavior and mental processes.

This social science discipline focus on the person as the subject of its inquiry. It looks into the various known and unknown processes affecting and affected by human beings. As a discipline, it strives to objectively consider factors that influence and are influenced by human interactions. In taking human beings as topics for study, it necessarily connotes the broad range of phenomena for its area of concern. Among the varied topics considered as areas for psychology are the following: human intelligence, learning, expression of aggression, conditioned fear, childhood amnesia, autism, schizophrenia, human sexuality and media violence

Research methods in psychology

What are the various fields of application of psychology?