THE EVOLUTION OF PSYCHOLOGY

A NEW SCIENCE IS BORN
1. Psychology's intellectual parents were the disciples of philosophy and physiology.
2. By the 1870's, a small number of scholars in both fields were actively exploring questions about the mind.
  1. "How are bodily sensations turned into mental awareness of the outside world?"
  2. "Are peoples perceptions of the world accurate reflections of reality?"
  3. "How do mind and body interact?"
  4. It was a german professor, Wilhelm Wundt, who eventually changed this view.
3. Wundt campaigned to make psychology an independent discipline rather than a stepchild of philosophy and physiology.
  1. Wundt's campaign was so successful that today he is widely characterized as the founder of psychology.
4. Wundt declared that the new psychology should be a science modelled after fields such as chemistry and physics.
PHILOSOPHY, PHYSIOLOGY, AND PSYCHOLOGY
1. Psychology: Study of the human mind and its functions, especially those effecting behaviour in a given context.
2. Philosophy: the development of ideas about mind, behaviour, and human nature; which developed itself through the periods of Renaissance.
3. Physiology: Branch of biology dealing with the normal functions of living organisms and their parts.
STRUCTUALISM VS FUNCTIONALISM
1. The first two major schools of thought. Both were entangled in the fields first great intellectual battle.
2. Wilhelm Wundt, founder of the first psychology lab, is often associated with this school of thought. Despite the fact that it was his student, Edward, P Tichener, who first coined the term to describe this school of thought.
3. Structualism was based on the notion that the task of psychology is to analyze consciousness into its basic elements and investigate how these elements are related.
4. Functionalism was based on the belief that psychology should investigate the function or purpose of consciousness, rather than its structure.
  1. Functionalists sought to explain the mental process in a more systematic and more accurate manner.
5. Functionalism was heavily influenced by the work of William James and the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin.
6. Functionalism also emphasized individual differences, which had a profound effect on education.
BEHAVIOURISM MAKES ITS DEBUT
1. In the early 1900's, another major school of thought appeared that dramatically altered the course of psychology.
2. Behaviourism is a theoretical orientation based on the premise that scientific psychology should study only observable behaviour.
3. Founded by John, B Watson
4. Watson thought if psychology were a science, it would have to give up consciousness as its subject matter and become instead the science of behaviour.
5. Although Watsons views shaped the evolution of psychology for many decades, but his ideas did not go unchallenged.Gestalts and Sigmund Frued (both psychologists) had different views on how psychology should develop.
FREUD BRINGS THE UNCONSCIOUS INTO THE PICTURE
1. During frauds medical practice, he treated people troubled by psychological problems. Such as irrational fears, obsessions, and anxieties, with an innovative procedure he called psychoanalysis.
2. According to freud, the unconscious contains, thoughts, memories, and desires that are well below the surface of conscious awareness; which exerts great influence on behaviour.
3. Frueds psychoanalytic theory attempts to explain personality, motivation, and mental disorders by focusing on unconscious determinants of behaviour.
4. HIs theory gained influence only very slowly, but where it did get noticed, it had considerable impact. By 1920 The Psychoanalytic theory was widely known around the world, but it continued to meet with considerable resistance in psychology.
5. According to Horstein, by the 1940's, "Psychoanalysis was becoming so popular it threatened to eclipse psychology entirely."
BEHAVIOURISM FLOURISHES
1. B.F Skinner's impact on society was significant; in fact he became arguably the most famous scientist of his time.
2. Although Skinner was influenced by Watson's methodological behaviourism and by Pavlov's work on conditioned reflexes, he eventually developed a system based on his own philosophy of a radical behaviourism.
3. "Organisms tend to repeat responses that lead to positive outcomes, and they tend not to repeat responses that tread to neutral or negative outcomes" Despite its simplicity this principle turns out to be quite powerful.
4. Skinner showed that he could exert remarkable control over the behaviour of animals by manipulating the outcomes of their responses
5. According to Skinner people are controlled by their environment, not by themselves. In Short, Skinner arrived at the conclusion that free will is an illusion.
6. There is no doubt that Skinner significantly impacted the developing field of psychology. His influence went beyond academia, for some time he was the face of psychology.
THE HUMANISTS REVOLT
1. Beginning in the 1950's, the diverse opposition to behaviourism and psychoanalytic theory blended into a loose alliance that eventually became a new school of thought called "humanism"
2. Humanism is a theoretical orientation that emphasizes the unique qualities of humans, especially their freedom and their potential for personal growth.
3. The most prominent architects of the humanistic movement have been Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow. Both he and Maslow maintain that to fully understand peoples behaviour, psychologists must take into account the fundamental human drive toward personal growth.
4. More generally, the humanists have argued eloquently for a different picture of human nature than those implied by psychoanalysis and behaviourism.
PSYCHOLOGY COMES OF AGE AS A PROFESSION
1. The 1950's saw psychology come into a profession. Their work falls within the domain of applied psychology, the branch of psychology concerned with everyday, practical problems.
2. Today, the broad umbrella of applied psychology covers a variety of professional specalties, including school psychology, industrial and organizational psychology, and counselling psychology.
COGNITION AND NEUROSCIENCE
1. Cognition refers to the mental processes involved in acquiring knowledge. In other words, Cognition involves thinking to conscious experience.
2. Congnition theorits have argued that psychology must study internal mental events to fully understand behaviour.
3. The 1950's and the 1960's also saw many discoveries that highlighted the interrelations among mind, body, and behaviour.
4. Advocates of the biological or neuroscience perspective maintain that much of our behaviour can be explained in terms of structures of and process in the brain.
5. Interest in the neuroscience approach to psychology has increased dramatically in the past few years and is pervasive across all areas, of psychology, including development, clinical, personality, and social psychology.
THE EMERGENCE OF EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY
1. This renewed focus on evolutionary principles in psychology has its roots earlier human and comparative research.
2. Evolutionary psychology examines behavioural processes in terms of their adaptive value for members of a species over the course of many generations.
3. The 1960's and 1970's brought major breakthroughs in the field of evolutionary biology .
4. By the mid 1990's, it became clear that psychology was witnessing the birth of its first major, new theoretical perspective since the cognitive revolution in the 1950's and 1960's.
THE POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY MOVEMENT
1. Seligman was inspired to launch a new initiative within psychology that came to be known as the "Positive Psychology Movement" from his daughter.
2. Seligman went on to argue convincingly that the field of psychology had historically devoted too much attention to pathology, weakness, damage, and ways to heal suffering. He acknowledged that this approach had yielded valuable insights and progress, but he argued that it also resulted in an unfortunate neglect of the forces that make life worth living.
3. Positive psychology uses theory and research to better understand the positive, adaptive, creative, and fulfilling aspects of human existence.
4. The PPM has also led to the development of interventions and exercise designed to promote well being.

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