Psychology’s Roots and Perspectives

1. Psychology’s Roots and Perspectives Thinking Skill: Demonstrate an understanding of how Psychology has evolved as an academic discipline

2. Psychology’s Roots Pre-scientific Psychology • Influence of Philosophy • Are ideas inborn or is the mind a blank slate filled by experience? “nurture works on what nature endows…”

3. Psychology’s Roots • Pre-scientific Psychology • Empiricism • knowledge comes from experience via the senses • science flourishes through observation and experimentation • 7th Century B.C. Psamtik I, King of Egypt • First “Scientific Method”?

4. Psychology’s Roots • Wilhelm Wundt opened the first psychology laboratory at the University of Leipzig • Conscious perception (apperception) experiment • Birth of modern psychology (1879)

5. Psychology’s Roots • Structuralism • used introspection (looking inward) to explore the elemental structure of the human mind

6. Psychology’s Roots • Functionalism • focused on how behavioral processes function - how they enable organism to adapt, survive, and flourish • William James • “Father of American Psychology”

7. Psychology’s Roots • Gestalt psychology emphasized the immediate experience of the whole organism • Antithesis of Wundt Max Wertheimer Kurt Koffka Wolfgang Köhler

8. Psychology’s Roots • Sigmund Freud’s Psychoanalysis • Unconscious forces

9. Psychology’s Roots • Behaviorism –the science of observable behavior • John Watson • BF Skinner “Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief.” -John B. Watson

10. Psychology’s Roots Contemporary Definition of Psychology • The science of behavior (what we do) and mental processes (sensations, perceptions, dreams, thoughts, beliefs, and feelings)

11. Contemporary Perspectives

12. Applying the Perspectives Marsha wants to ask her boss for a salary increase however, her heart races and she begins to perspire uncontrollably every time she even approaches her boss.