Psychology

Lesson 2 Historical&Contemporary Approaches to Psychology

By firedragon5004

  • Inheritable Traits

    Inheritable Traits
    From 1822-1911 Sir Francis Galton traced ancestry of various eminent people and found that greatness runs in families. He concluded that genius or eminences is a heredity trait. He thought "good" marriages gave talented offspring.

  • Behavioral Psychology

    Behavioral Psychology
    Ivan Pavlov ran an experiment on a dog for everything he rang a fork the dog would come and salivate when he started to eat the food. Over time the dog started to salivate as soon as he rang the fork. By this experiment they began to account for behavior as the product of prior experience. B.F. Skinner introduced the concept of reinforcement. 1849-1936 is how long the experiment lasted.

  • Psychoanalytic Psychology

    Psychoanalytic Psychology
    Sigmund Freud a physician who practiced in Vienna until 1938 was more interested in the unconscious mind. The thoughts beneath the surface are primitive biological urges that are in conflict with the requirements of society and morality. He thought that these unconscious motivations and conflicts are responsible for most human behavior.

  • Functionalism

    Functionalism
    William James taught the first class in psychology at Harvard University. He is often known as the "father of psychology". IT took him 12 years to write the first text book of psychology, "The Principles of Psychology" (1890).

  • Structuralism

    Structuralism
    In Germany Wilhelm Wundt started his laboratory of psychology. Wundt was interested in basic elements of human experience. He modeled his research on the mind after research in other natural sciences. He developed a method of self-observation. His trained participants reported their thoughts as he tried to map out the basic structure of thought processes.

  • Gestalt Psychology

    Gestalt Psychology
    Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler, and Kurt Koffka disagreed with the principle of structuralism and behaviorism. They argued that perception is more than the sum of its parts, it involves a whole pattern (Gestalt). This is from 1880-1967.

  • Cognitive Psychology

    Cognitive Psychology
    Since 1950 cognitive psychology benefited from the contributions of people such as Jean Piagot, Noam Chomsky, and Leon Fistinger. Cognitivists focus on how we process, store, and use information and how this information influences our thinking, language, problem solving, and creativity. Behavior is influenced by a variety of mental processes including Perceptions, memories and expectations.

  • Humanistic Psychology

    Humanistic Psychology
    Humanists such as Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers and Rollo May described human nature as evolving and self-directed. It differs from behaviorism and psychoanalysis in that is does not view humans as being controlled by events.