World War Ii And Its Effects
Realizing that the growth of applied psychology represented a potential threat to its preeminence, the leaders of APA reorganized during World War II. Under this reorganization plan APA merged with other psychological organizations resulting in a broader association organized around an increasingly diffuse conceptualization of psychology.;
Now the association’s scope included professional practice and the promotion of human welfare as well as the practice of the science of psychology. This flexibility in scope has remained to the present.;
Psychology boomed after the end of World War II with the greatest increase in membership coming between 1945 and 1970. Several factors fueled this growth:
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Many returning servicemen saw the great need for better psychological services firsthand during the war.;There was special interest in the domains of clinical and applied psychology.
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The GI Bill, the new Veterans Administration Clinical Psychology training program, and the creation of the National Institute of Mental Health contributed to the increased interest in psychology.
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For the first time psychology was a field, in both science and practice, that was richly funded for training and research. This was, as one scholar termed it, The Golden Age of Psychology.
Development Theory Of The Mind
The fundamental task is to work out a comprehensive development theory of the mind from animal psychology to the highest cultural achievements in language, religion and ethics. Unlike other thinkers of his time, Wundt had no difficulty connecting the development concepts of the humanities with the biological theory of evolution as expounded by Charles Darwin.
The Delineation Of Categories
Wundt considered that reference to the subject , value assessment , the existence of purpose , and volitional acts to be specific and fundamental categories for psychology. He frequently used the formulation “the human as a motivated and thinking subject” in order to characterise features held in common with the humanities and the categorical difference to the natural sciences.
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Career In Zurich And Leipzig
In 1875, Wundt was promoted to professor of “Inductive Philosophy” in Zurich, and in 1875, Wundt was made professor of philosophy at the University of Leipzig where Ernst Heinrich Weber and Gustav Theodor Fechner had initiated research on sensory psychology and psychophysics and where two centuries earlier Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz had developed his philosophy and theoretical psychology, which strongly influenced Wundt’s intellectual path. Wundt’s admiration for Ernst Heinrich Weber was clear from his memoirs, where he proclaimed that Weber should be regarded as the father of experimental psychology: I would rather call Weber the father of experimental psychologyIt was Weber’s great contribution to think of measuring psychic quantities and of showing the exact relationships between them, to be the first to understand this and carry it out.
Publications Libraries And Letters
The list of works at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science includes a total of 589 German and foreign-language editions for the period from 1853 to 1950 MPI für Wissenschaftsgeschichte: Werkverzeichnis Wilhelm Wundt.The American psychologist Edwin Boring counted 494 publications by Wundt that are, on average, 110 pages long and amount to a total of 53,735 pages. Thus Wundt published an average of seven works per year over a period of 68 years and wrote or revised an average of 2.2 pages per day. There is as yet no annotated edition of the essential writings, nor does a complete edition of Wundt’s major works exist, apart from more-or-less suitable scans or digitalisations.
Apart from his library and his correspondence, Wundt’s extraordinarily extensive written inheritance also includes many extracts, manuscripts, lecture notes and other materials Wundt’s written inheritance in Leipzig consists of 5,576 documents, mainly letters, and was digitalised by the Leipzig University Library. The catalogue is available at the Kalliope online portal.
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Transition To Contemporary Psychology
Phrenology began as “organology”, a theory of brain structure developed by the German physician, Franz Joseph Gall . Gall argued that the brain is divided into a large number of functional “organs”, each responsible for particular human mental abilities and dispositions; hope, love, spirituality, greed, language, the abilities to detect the size, form, and color of objects, etc. He argued that the larger each of these organs are, the greater the power of the corresponding mental trait. Further, he argued that one could detect the sizes of the organs in a given individual by feeling the surface of that person’s skull. Gall’s ultra-localizationist position with respect to the brain was soon attacked, most notably by French anatomist Pierre Flourens , who conducted ablation studies which purported to demonstrate little or no cerebral localization of function. Although Gall had been a serious researcher, his theory was taken by his assistant, Johann Gaspar Spurzheim , and developed into the profitable, popular enterprise of phrenology, which soon spawned, especially in Britain, a thriving industry of independent practitioners. In the hands of Scottish religious leader George Combe , phrenology became strongly associated with political reform movements and egalitarian principles . Phrenology soon spread to America as well, where itinerant practical phrenologists assessed the mental well-being of willing customers .
Overview Of Wundt’s Work
Wundt was initially a physician and a well-known neurophysiologist before turning to sensory physiology and psychophysics. He was convinced that, for example, the process of spatial perception could not solely be explained on a physiological level, but also involved psychological principles. Wundt founded experimental psychology as a discipline and became a pioneer of cultural psychology. He created a broad research programme in empirical psychology and developed a system of philosophy and ethics from the basic concepts of his psychology bringing together several disciplines in one person.
Wundt’s epistemological position against John Locke and English empiricism was made clear in his book Beiträge zur Theorie der Sinneswahrnehmung published in 1862, by his use of a quotation from Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz on the title page:
“Nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu, nisi intellectu ipse.” . Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses, except the intellect itself.
Principles that are not present in sensory impressions can be recognised in human perception and consciousness: logical inferences, categories of thought, the principle of causality, the principle of purpose , the principle of emergence and other epistemological principles.
Wundt’s most important books are:
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Toward A Functional Psychology
While Titchener and his followers adhered to a structural psychology, others in America were pursuing different approaches. William James, G. Stanley Hall, and James McKeen Cattell were among a group that became identified with functionalism. Influenced by Darwins evolutionary theory, functionalists were interested in the activities of the mindwhat the mind does. An interest in functionalism opened the way for the study of a wide range of approaches, including animal and comparative psychology .
William James is regarded as writing perhaps the most influential and important book in the field of psychology, Principles of Psychology, published in 1890. Opposed to the reductionist ideas of Titchener, James proposed that consciousness is ongoing and continuous; it cannot be isolated and reduced to elements. For James, consciousness helped us adapt to our environment in such ways as allowing us to make choices and have personal responsibility over those choices.
The Coming Of Age: 1936
During the first three decades of the 20th century, Allports conception of social psychology emphasized basic research, with little consideration given to addressing specific social problems or broader issues bearing on reform. However, by the mid-1930s, the discipline was poised for further growth and expansion. The events that had the greatest impact on social psychology at this critical juncture in its history were the Great Depression in the United States and the social and political upheavals in Europe generated by World Wars I and II.
During this time of global strife, the most influential social psychologist was Kurt Lewin, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany. Lewin was instrumental in founding SPSSI and served as its president in 1941. He firmly believed that social psychology did not have to choose between being either a pure science or an applied science. His oft-repeated maxim No research without action, and no action without research continues to influence social psychologists interested in applying their knowledge to current social problems. By the time of his death in 1947 at the age of 57, Lewin had profoundly shaped the future course of social psychology.
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Inspiration In A Bed Of Roses
The story of;Seligmans epiphany in his rose gardenwhich started the movement of positive psychologyhas become;somewhat a folk legend. This is how the story goes:
Seligmans daughter, who was 5;at the time, had been trying to get her fathers attention when he turned around and snapped at her. Unhappy with this response, his daughter asked him whether or not he remembered how she used to whine when she was 3;and 4?
She told him that when she turned 5;she decided to stop and if she was able to stop whining, then he was able to stop being a grouch!
This revelation of developing what was right, rather than fixating on what was wrong, sparked what Seligman would go on to promote during his career as APA presidentthat we should teach our children and ourselves to look at our strengths rather than our weaknesses .
Positive psychology can be viewed as the fourth wave in the evolution of psychology, the first 3;waves being, respectively, the disease model, behaviorism, and humanistic psychology.
This approach contrasts with how, in its early years , the practice of psychology focused mainly on cure and treatment of psychic ailments, which is a decidedly negative focus.
Some of the greatest names in the early field of psychology were foundational, such as Freud, Adler, and Jung. But over time, psychology began to acquire a negative outlook and stereotype, with its focus on the darkest chambers of the human mind and the near total exclusion of its sunlit highlands.
The Emergence Of Psychoanalysis
Up to this point, early psychology stressed conscious human experience. An Austrian physician named;Sigmund Freud;changed the face of psychology in a dramatic way, proposing a;theory of personality;that emphasized the importance of the;unconscious mind.
Freuds clinical work with patients suffering from hysteria and other ailments led him to believe that early childhood experiences and unconscious impulses contributed to the development of adult personality and behavior.
In his book;”The Psychopathology of Everyday Life“ Freud detailed how these unconscious thoughts and impulses are expressed, often through slips of the tongue and;dreams. According to Freud, psychological disorders are the result of these unconscious conflicts becoming extreme or unbalanced.
The;psychoanalytic theory;proposed by Sigmund Freud had a tremendous impact on 20th-century thought, influencing the mental health field as well as other areas including art, literature, and popular culture. While many of his ideas are viewed with skepticism today, his influence on psychology is undeniable.
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Beginnings Of Modern Psychology
Many of the Ancients’ writings would have been lost had it not been for the efforts of the Muslim, Christian, and Jewish translators in the House of Wisdom, the House of Knowledge, and other such institutions in the Islamic Golden Age, whose glosses and commentaries were later translated into Latin in the 12th century. However, it is not clear how these sources first came to be used during the Renaissance, and their influence on what would later emerge as the discipline of psychology is a topic of scholarly debate.
Why Is William James Famous
William James is famous for helping to found psychology as a formal discipline, for establishing the school of functionalism in psychology, and for greatly advancing the movement of pragmatism in philosophy.
William James, , American philosopher and psychologist, a leader of the philosophical movement of pragmatism and a founder of the psychological movement of functionalism.
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Education And Heidelberg Career
Wundt studied from 1851 to 1856 at the University of Tübingen, at the University of Heidelberg, and at the University of Berlin. After graduating as a doctor of medicine from Heidelberg , with doctoral advisor Karl Ewald Hasse, Wundt studied briefly with Johannes Peter Müller, before joining the Heidelberg University’s staff, becoming an assistant to the physicist and physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz in 1858 with responsibility for teaching the laboratory course in physiology. There he wrote Contributions to the Theory of Sense Perception . In 1864, he became Associate Professor for Anthropology and Medical Psychology and published a textbook about human physiology. However, his main interest, according to his lectures and classes, was not in the medical field he was more attracted by psychology and related subjects. His lectures on psychology were published as Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology in 18631864. Wundt applied himself to writing a work that came to be one of the most important in the history of psychology, Principles of Physiological Psychology, in 1874. This was the first textbook that was written pertaining to the field of experimental psychology.
The Many Disciplines Of Psychology
Psychology is not one discipline but rather a collection of many subdisciplines that all share at least some common approaches and that work together and exchange knowledge to form a coherent discipline .;Because the field of psychology is so broad, students may wonder which areas are most suitable for their interests and which types of careers might be available to them. Table 1.5, Some Career Paths in Psychology, will help you consider the answers to these questions. You can learn more about these different fields of psychology and the careers associated with them at http://www.psyccareers.com/.
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Amending The Ethics Code
In February 2010, the APA’s Council of Representatives voted to amend the association’s Ethics Code to make clear that its standards can never be interpreted to justify or defend violating human rights. Following are the two relevant ethical standards from the Ethics Code, with the newly adopted language shown in bold:
1.02, Conflicts Between Ethics and Law, Regulations, or Other Governing Legal Authority
If psychologists’ ethical responsibilities conflict with law, regulations, or other governing legal authority, psychologists clarify the nature of the conflict, make known their commitment to the Ethics Code and take reasonable steps to resolve the conflict consistent with the General Principles and Ethical Standards of the Ethics Code. Under no circumstances may this standard be used to justify or defend violating human rights.
1.03, Conflicts Between Ethics and Organizational Demands
If the demands of an organization with which psychologists are affiliated or for whom they are working are in conflict with this Ethics Code, psychologists clarify the nature of the conflict, make known their commitment to the Ethics Code, and take reasonable steps to resolve the conflict consistent with the General Principles and Ethical Standards of the Ethics Code. Under no circumstances may this standard be used to justify or defend violating human rights.
Wundt’s Teaching In The Institute For Experimental Psychology
The list of Wundt’s lectures during the winter terms of 18751879 shows a wide-ranging programme, 6 days a week, on average 2 hours daily, e.g. in the winter term of 1875: Psychology of language, Anthropology, Logic and Epistemology; and during the subsequent summer term: Psychology, Brain and Nerves, as well as Physiology. Cosmology, Historical and General Philosophy were included in the following terms.
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Research On Reception Of His Work
Leipzig was a world-famous centre for the new psychology after 1874. There are various interpretations regarding why Wundt’s influence after the turn of the century, i.e. during his lifetime, rapidly waned and from his position as founding father Wundt became almost an outsider. A survey was conducted on the basis of more than 200 contemporary and later sources: reviews and critiques of his publications , references to Wundt’s work in textbooks on psychology and the history of psychology , biographies, congress reports, praise on his decadal birthdays, obituaries and other texts. A range of scientific controversies were presented in detail. Reasons for the distancing of Wundt and why some of his concepts have fallen into oblivion can be seen in his scientific work, in his philosophical orientation, in his didactics or in the person of Wundt himself:
Founders Of Experimental Psychology: Wilhelm Wundt And William James
Wilhelm Wundt, acclaimed as the father of experimental psychology, established the first psychological research and teaching laboratory within the Philosophy Department at Leipzig in around 1876 . He regarded his psychology as a branch of philosophy, an attempt to apply the experimental methods of natural science to essentially philosophical problems concerning the nature of mind and its metaphysical status. This view of the subject persisted, in Germany, at least until the Nazi era. Wundt’s research program aimed to investigate the elements of consciousness, and the laws governing the combination of these elements . Although his theoretical system made a place for emotional feelings as one class of element, in practice the main focusof Wundt’s experimentally based research program was on the elements of sensation and their compounding into ideas. As has been the case in the Empiricist philosophical tradition, these ideas were conceived of as, to all intents and purposes, mental images. Indeed, Wundt insists, much in the spirit of Hume, that there is no fundamental difference in kind between the ideas arising directly from perception and memory images. Thus, Wundtian experimental psychology was largely a study of cognitive processes, and, for him , the mental image played essentially the same crucial, representational role in cognition that it had played for most of his philosophical predecessors.
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