VIEW POINTS IN PSYCHOLOGY AND THEIR ORIGIN | WHAT IS PSYCHOLOGY

Discuss the various viewpoints in psychology and their origin.

Ans:

Structuralist and the Nature of Conscious Experience

a.    Wundt and Titchner studied the elements of consciousness by using a method of looking inward at one’s own experience. This method is called Introspection. They try to isolate the basic elements of the mind because Wundt and Titchner were interested in the basic elements of conscious experience and how these elements are organized. Their viewpoints ware known as structuralism. E.g., the apple in the person’s mouth.

b.    Henry Alston is known for his studies of the sensation of heat and cold. Alston discovered that we feel cold when one kind of nerve ending in the skin is stimulated, but we feel intense heat when both the cold and warm receptors in the skin are stimulated at the same time.

c.    Max Wertheimer and Gestalt Psychologists felt that human consciousness could not be broken down into elements as structuralists do as they believe that the whole is different from the sum of its part e.g., (A = 11, B = 13, C = 12)

Gestalt psychologists also used the phi-phenomenon. It is the perception of the apparent movement between two stationary stimuli. When two lights are presented in rapid sequence, the viewers see one light moving from one position to another and not as two stationary lights.

 

Functions of the conscious mind

a.    William James and the Functionalists – William James felt that thinking, feeling, learning, remembering, and other processes of human consciousness exists only because they help us to survive as a species. Because we can think, we are better able to find food or avoid danger all which helps us to survive. They emphasize on the function of consciousness; the school of thought came to be known as functionalism. According to them, studying the elements of the mind does not tell us how it functions or how it helps us to adopt to the demands of life therefore the function of the mind and not its elements re the subject matter of study.

b.    Studies of Memory – Herman Ebbinghaus – He memorized lists of information and measured the memory for them after different intervals of time. He invented an entirely new set of meaningless items for his experiments called nonsense syllables. They consisted of combination of constants C-V-C e.g., KEB, MUZ, LAT. He did this to be sure that the material he studied was not affected by the previous experience with it. He sat listening to a metronome that clicked every few seconds and learnt a list of nonsense syllables. He later tested his ability to recall and found that forgetting is very rapid at first but proceeds slowly then after.

Mary Calkins also studied memory but presented her objects with a sense of numbers, each paired with a different color. Later she would show the subjects only the color to see how many numbers they could recall. This method was called the Paired Association Method.

c.    Intelligence – Alfred Binet developed a way to measure intelligence, by experimenting a large number of test items. Binet and his colleagues were able to find a set of test questions that could be answered by most children of a given age, but not by those who were younger or who had lower intelligence.

 

Behaviorism and Social Learning Theory

a.    Ivan Pavlov – Russian psychologists in the 1890s noticed that after several feedings, the dog in his experiment started salivating when he heard the sound of the bell indicating that food was being brought to him, rather than when the food was being presented. Pavlov recognized that the dog had learnt to associate the sound with the food itself. Thus, he identified a simple form of learning called Classical Conditioning. Later other psychologists such as skinner also studied over behavior, which came to be called as ‘Operant Conditioning’. It refers to learning by consequences of our act.

b.    Watson ad Margaret Washburn – Watson agreed with Pavlov that most human behavior was learned through Classical Conditioning, but he did not believe in the study of mental process and felt that psychology should study only overt behavior.

Margaret Washburn was the first woman to attain a PhD in Psychology.

c.    Contemporary Behaviorism and Social Learning Theory – According to this theory the most important aspects of our behavior are learnt from other persons of the society (family, friends, culture, etc.)

 

Nature of Unconscious Mind

a.    Sigmund Freud and Psychoanalysis – He believed that most psychological problems were due to unconscious motives and conflict, which surround these behaviors. Very often we are not aware that these exists, most of these conflicts refer to aggressive and sexual drives.

b.    Humanistic psychology and the Unconscious mind – Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers believed that human beings determine their own fetus through the conscious decision they make. The most important aspect of people is the self-concept. As a result we became anxious later this school of thought came to be known as Humanistic Psychology.