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History and Methods

Terms in this set (37)

educated in physiology, set up the first psychology laboratory in Leipzig, Germany, in order to scientifically study how people sense and perceive the world around them.
Wilhelm Wundt
the scientific study of human behavior and mental processes.
Psychology
believed that consciousness was made up of basic elements that were combined in different ways to produce different perceptions, much like hydrogen and oxygen would form water if combined the right way.
Structuralists
-the technique favored by structuralists for examining mental experience.
-involves reporting on one's own conscious thoughts and feelings.
-eventually fell into disfavor as it was a subjective way to study consciousness, and couldn't be used to study children and animals.
Introspection
set up the first psychology lab in the U.S.
Edward Titchener
-less interest in what made up mental experiences than in how mental experiences or processes were adaptive for people.
Functionalists
(most famous functionalist) believed that consciousness, and behavior in general, helped people and animals adjust to their environments. Understanding the mind meant understanding what the mind accomplished.
William James
focuses on understanding how physiological and biochemical processes might produce psychological phenomena.
-from this perspective, explanations for behavior are ultimately reducible to the workings of genes, the nervous system, hormones,, neurotransmitters, and so forth.
biological approach
focuses on how thoughts, feelings, and behaviors stem from the interaction of innate drives and society's restrictions on the expression of those drives.
psychodynamic approach
believed that the most important urges are the sexual and aggressive ones.
Sigmund Freud
focused on attachment and interpersonal connection as a primary drive. The reasons for much of your behavior, then, are unconscious, and rooted in childhood.
psychodynamic theorists
explains behavior primarily in terms of learned responses to predictable patterns of environmental stimuli. Pavlov's studies of classical conditioning and Skinner's studies of operant conditioning exemplify this approach.
behaviorist approach
developed in large part as a reaction against behaviorism.
-this approach focuses on explaining behavior in terms of expectations, feelings, thoughts, etc.
cognitive approach
might study problem solving, attention, expectations, memory, and other thought processes.
cognitivists
central claim is that people aren't merely machines whose behaviors are determined for them by a genetic code, a conflicted childhood, brushes with stimuli, or cold mental calculations.
humanistic approach
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