Voluntarism, Structuralism, and Other Early Approaches to Psychology

Chapter 9

Wilhelm Wundt Measuring a Voluntary Process

Schools of Psychology

School: A group of scientists who share common assumptions, goals, problems, and methods. Similar to Kuhns notion of paradigm. Some schools in Psychology Voluntarism Structuralism Behaviorism Gestalt Etc.

ORIGINS: Voluntarism & Structuralism

RationalismKant, Herbart PsychophysicsWeber, Helmholtz

active mind understand mental process & ones control of process wholism; not reductional

Voluntarism Wundt, followers

EmpiricismLocke, Hume

Structuralism (Titchener, followers)

reductionalistic Zeitgeist: scientific; sum of mental elements psychology struggling = consciousness for recognition; is it laws: how elements combine

a worthy science?

Voluntarism

Will: According to Wundt, that aspect of humans that allows them to direct their attention anywhere they wish. Voluntarism: The name given to Wundt's school of psychology because of his belief that through the process of apperception, individuals could (voluntarily) direct their attention toward whatever they wished.

Wilhelm Maxmilian Wundt

Born at Neckarau, in Baden. Impressive lineage, but shy as a child Failed high school, teacher said work in the postal service Tried again in a new city and made it Studied medicine at Tbingen and Heidelberg (summa cum laude!) Studied briefly with Johannes Mller at Berlin before joining the University of Heidelberg, where he became an assistant to the physicist and physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz

Wilhelm Maxmilian Wundt

While at Heidelberg, he wrote Contributions to a Theory of Sense Impressions (1862) and Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology (1863) Took a one-year position at the University of Zrich Offered appointment to teach scientific philosophy at the University of Leipzig Initially taught courses in Anthropology, logic and language.

Psychology is Born!!!!

It took him 4 years at Leipzig, but by 1879 his laboratory was functioning. The Institute for Experimental Psychology Not listed in university catalog until 1883. Eventually, classes at the institute exceeded 250 Moved in 1882 to a nine room space. Given own building in 1897 (which he designed). Wundt supervised 186 doctoral theses at Leipzig

Wilhelm Maxmilian Wundt Psychologys Goals

Believed that psychology had become an experimental science. Experimentation can be used to reveal the basic processes of the mind. Only naturalistic observation could be used to reveal the higher processes. Let us remember the rule, valid for psychology as well as for other science, that we cannot understand the complex phenomena, before we have become familiar with the simple ones which presuppose the former.

Wilhelm Maxmilian Wundt Psychologys Goals

Mediate Experience: Experience that is provided by various measuring devices and is therefore not immediate, direct experience. Data of other sciences, we might call them hypothetical constructs today. Immediate Experience: Direct subjective experience as it occurs. Data of psychology

Wilhelm Maxmilian Wundt Wundts Use of Introspection

Introspection: Reflection on one's subjective experience, whether such reflection is directed toward the detection of the presence or absence of a sensation (as in the case of Wundt and Titchener) or toward the detection of complex thought processes (as in the cases of Brentano, Stumpf, Klpe, Husserl, and others). Pure vs. Experimental Introspection

Wilhelm Maxmilian Wundt Elements of Thoughts

Sensation: A basic mental experience that is triggered by an environmental stimulus.

Occurs when a sense organ is stimulated and the resulting impulse reaches the brain. Described in terms of modality and quality.

Feelings: The basic elements of emotion that accompany each sensation. Wundt believed that emotions consist of various combinations of elemental feelings. Tridimensional Theory of Feeling: Wundt's contention that feelings vary along three dimensions: pleasantnessunpleasantness, excitement-calm, and strain-relaxation.

Wilhelm Maxmilian Wundt Perception and Apperception

Though sensations and feelings are the elements of consciousness, they are rarely experienced in isolation. Most often many sensations occur simultaneously and perception occurs. Perception: Mental experience that occurs when sensations are given meaning by the memory of past experiences. Perception is passive and involuntary. That part of a perceptual field a person attends to is apperceived. Apperception is active and voluntary.

Wilhelm Maxmilian Wundt Creative Synthesis

Creative Synthesis: The voluntary arrangement and rearrangement of mental elements that can result from apperception. The voluntary nature with which attended sensations can combine separates psychology from physical sciences where the laws are involuntary.

Wilhelm Maxmilian Wundt Mental Chronometry Donders Reaction Times Donders, Franciscus Cornelius (1818-1889) Used reaction time to measure the time it took to perform various mental acts. Reaction Time: The period of time between presentation of and response to a stimulus. A measure of the time required to perform internal processes.

Wilhelm Maxmilian Wundt Mental Chronometry Donders Reaction Times

Simple Reaction Time

Wilhelm Maxmilian Wundt Mental Chronometry Donders Reaction Times

Discrimination

Wilhelm Maxmilian Wundt Mental Chronometry Donders Reaction Times

Choice Reaction Time

Wilhelm Maxmilian Wundt Mental Chronometry

Mental Chronometry: The measurement of the time required to perform various mental acts. 20% of Wundts early work involved expanding Donders work to new situations.

Wilhelm Maxmilian Wundt Psychological vs. Physical Causation

Principle of the Heterogony of Ends: The fact that goal-directed activity often causes experiences that modify the original motivational pattern. Goal directed activities do not achieve their goal and nothing else. Principle of Contrasts: The fact that experiences of one type often intensify opposite types of experiences, such as when eating something sour will make the subsequent eating of something sweet taste sweeter than it would otherwise. Principle Toward the Development of Opposites: The tendency for prolonged experience of one type to create a desire for the opposite type of experience.

Vlkerpsychologie

Vlkerpsychologie: (translation, group or cultural psychology) Wundt's 10-volume work, in which he investigated higher mental processes through historical analysis and naturalistic observation. Took 20 years to write

Vlkerpsychologie The Misunderstanding of Wundt

People have viewed Wundts work very elementistically. Wundt was a rationalist more than anything. His major student, Titchener, was an English empiricist. People assumed that the views brought to America by Titchener were representative of the ideas that Wundt taught to Titchener.

Edward Bradford Titchener

Born in Chichester, England Went to Oxford and became interested in Experimental Psychology Went to study at Leipzig with Wundt Offered a faculty position at Oxford and Cornell Chose Cornell because it had research facilities Created largest psychology doctoral program in America Remained British, despite living life in America

Edward Bradford Titchener Psychologys Goals

Psychology is the study of consciousness (sum total of mental experience at a given moment). The mind is the accumulation of experiences across the lifetime. Psychologys goals are to determine the what, how, and why of mental experiences.

Edward Bradford Titchener Psychologys Goals

The what of mental experience was a catalog of all the basic experiences that make up mental life. The how was to answer how they combine (voluntarily according to Wundt). He wanted to find a periodic table of the elements of mental life which would then have rules inherent in them describing their relationships. The why involved a search for the neurological correlates of mental events. Structuralism: The school of psychology founded by Titchener, the goal of which was to describe the structure of the mind.

Edward Bradford Titchener Titcheners Use of Introspection

For Wundt, introspection was used to report the presence or absence of a sensation in the presence or absence of a physical event. Titcheners subjects had to search for the elemental ingredients of their experience. An introspectionist must report the basic, raw, elemental experience from which the complex experience derives. Stimulus Error: Letting past experience influence an introspective report.

Edward Bradford Titchener Mental Elements (the what)

Elemental processes of consciousness consist of sensations (elements of perceptions), images (elements of ideas), and affections (elements of emotions). Sensations and images could have the properties of quality, intensity, duration, clearness, and extensity. Affections could have the attributes of quality, intensity, and duration, but not clearness or extensity.

Edward Bradford Titchener Law of Combination (the how)

Titchener rejected Wundts notions on apperception (attention is merely the clearness attribute of a sensation) Instead the laws of association (mostly the law of contiguity) explain how basic elements are combined. whenever a sensory or imaginal process occurs in consciousness, there are likely to appear with it (of course in imaginal terms) all those sensory and imaginal processes which occurred together with it in any earlier conscious present.

Edward Bradford Titchener Neurological Correlates of Mental Events (the why)

Attempting to explain the mind-body relationship was bordering on metaphysical speculation. Physiological processes provide a continuous substratum that give psychological processes a continuity. Although the nervous system does not cause mental events, it can explain some characteristics.

Edward Bradford Titchener Context Theory of Meaning

Context Theory of Meaning: Titchener's contention that a sensation is given meaning by the images it elicits. That is, for Titchener, meaning is determined by the law of contiguity. Vivid sensations form a core and elicited images (associated sensations) form a context to give the core meaning.

Edward Bradford Titchener The Decline of Structuralism

Though elements of Voluntarism still exist, Structuralism is DEAD. Introspection was subject to individual differences. Introspection was retrospection Introspecting itself changed the events. Structuralism excluded developments in anything other than Titchnerian Experimental Psychology. Structuralists refused to seek practical knowledge. Structuralism was unable (and unwilling) to assimilate evolutionary thinking.

Other Early Approaches to Psychology Franz Clemens Brentano

Italian by heritage, born in Marienburg, Germany. Many prominent relatives, including a brother who won a Nobel prize Obtained a doctorate in philosophy, then ordained into priesthood (1864). Dissertation titled, On the Manifold Meaning of Being According to Aristotle

Other Early Approaches to Psychology Franz Clemens Brentano

Initially taught at University of Wrzburg (1866) Quit priesthood, disagreed with infallibility of pope and criticized scholasticism (1873). Professor of philosophy in University of Vienna (1874) Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874) Tried to get married!!!!! (1880) Austrian church refused to accept his resignation Had to move to Leipzig for a year Moved to Florence, Italy (1895) Protesting Italys entrance into WWI, he moved to Zrich, Switzerland (1917).

Other Early Approaches to Psychology Franz Clemens Brentano

Act Psychology: The name given to Brentano's brand of psychology because it focused on mental operations or functions. Act psychology dealt with the interaction between mental processes and physical events. Intentionality: Mental acts always intend something. That is, mental acts embrace either some object in the physical world or some mental image (idea). Phenomenological Introspection: The type of introspection that focuses on whole and intact mental phenomena rather than on isolated mental elements.

Other Early Approaches to Psychology Carl Stumpf

Studied under Brentano, and like Brentano, became a priest but couldnt accept the doctrine of papal infallibility. Was chair of Psychology at the University of Berlin. Wolfgang Kohler took the position after him. Max Wertheimer and Kurt Koffka studied with Stumpf. The proper object of study were intact mental phenomena, not mental elements (phenomenology).

Other Early Approaches to Psychology Carl Stumpf

Clever Hans Phenomenon: The creation of apparently high-level intelligent feats by nonhuman animals by consciously or unconsciously furnishing them with subtle cues that guide their behavior. Rosenthal Effect (experimenter bias): Experimenters may provide subtle cues telling participants how to act in an experiment.

Other Early Approaches to Psychology Edmund Husserl

Pure Phenomenology: The type of phenomenology proposed by Husserl, the purpose of which was to create a taxonomy of the mind. Husserl believed that before a science of psychology would be possible, we would first need to understand the essences of those mental processes in terms of which we understand and respond to the world.

Other Early Approaches to Psychology Edmund Husserl

Husserl wanted to create a taxonomy of the mind by which all humans experience themselves, others, and the world. Mental Essences: Those universal, unchanging mental processes that characterize the mind and in terms of which we do commerce with the physical environment.

Other Early Approaches to Psychology Oswald Klpe

Received doctorate with Wundt and continued to work for him for 8 years. Outlines of Psychology (1893) was dedicated to Wundt Met and shared room with Titchener Worked at the University of Wrzburg, The University of Bonn, and the University of Munich. Klpes work moved towards philosophy

Other Early Approaches to Psychology Oswald Klpe Imageless Thought Disagreeing with Wundt, not all thoughts had to come from a specific image, sensation, or feeling. Systematic Experimental Introspection Imageless Thoughts: According to Klpe, pure mental acts without those acts having any particular referents or images. Searching, doubting, confidence, and hesitation

Other Early Approaches to Psychology Oswald Klpe Mental Set

Mental Set (Einstellung): A problem-solving strategy that can be induced by instructions or by experience and is used without a person's awareness. When participants are focused on a problem, there is a determining tendency that persists until the problem is solved. A bookkeeper can balance the books without even realizing they are adding or subtracting.

Other Early Approaches to Psychology Hans Vaihinger

All we ever experience directly is sensations, therefore all we can ever be aware of is sensations. Societal living requires that we give meaning to our sensations and we do that by inventing terms, concepts, and theories and then acting as if they were true. We dont know if our fictions correspond to reality, but we act as though they do. This tendency is part of human nature.

Other Early Approaches to Psychology Hermann Ebbinghaus

Born in Barmen, Germany Studied at the Universities of Bonn, Halle, and Berlin Influenced by Fechners Elements of Psychophysics Memory: An Investigation in Experimental Psychology (1885) Principles of Psychology (1897) Outline of Psychology (1902) Dedicated to Fechner Psychology has a long past, but only a short history.

Other Early Approaches to Psychology Hermann Ebbinghaus

Did extended experimental work on memory. Used the nonsense syllable as a pure measure of memory to remove prior associations. Used one participant, himself. Showed that complex mental phenomenon can be studied experimentally. Overlearning, meaningfulness, distributed vs. massed practice. Began to show laws of mental life.

Other Early Approaches to Psychology Hermann Ebbinghaus