Zusammenfassung der Ressource
Historical
Approaches
- the history of psych is a history
of alternative perspectives
- Structuralism
- Wilhelm Wundt is generally acknowledged as
establishing modern psych as a separate,
formal field of study
- he was a structuralist...he was interested in the basic elements
of human experience
- he developed a method of
self-observation called introspection
- Functionalism
- William James is often called
the "father of psychology"
- he wrote the first textbook of
psych, The Principles of
Psychology
- functionalists study how animals and
people adapt to their environments
- Inheritable Traits
- Sir Francis Galton wanted to understand
how heredity influences a person's
abilities, character, and behavior
- he concluded that genius or eminence is a hereditary trait
- he did not consider the possibility that the tendency
of genius to run in socioeconomic advantages that
also tend to surround such families
- Galton's book, Inquiries into Human Faculty,
raised the issue of whether behavior is
determined by heredity or environment
- Gestalt Psychology
- a group of German psychologists argued that
perception is more than a sum of its parts- it
involves a "whole pattern", or in German, a Gestalt
- Gestalt Psychologists studied how sensations are
assembled into perceptual experiences
- This approach became the forerunner for cognitive
approaches to the study of psychology