Wilhelm Wundt Was a German scientist who was the first person to be referred to as a psychologist
Viewed psychology as a scientific study of conscious experience, and he believed that the goal of psychology was to identify components of consciousness and how those components combined to result in our conscious experiences introspect a process by which someone examines their own conscious experience as objectively as possible, making the human mind like any other aspect of nature that a scientist observe
William James Was the first American psychologist who espoused a different perspective on how psychology should operate
introduced to Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection and accepted it as an explanation of an organism's characteristics
Key to that theory is the idea that natural selection leads to organisms that are adapted to their environment, including their behavior
Functionionalism Focused on how mental activities helped an organism fit into its environment
Introduced by William James
Psychology's purpose was to study the function of behavior in the world, and as such, his perspective
Sigmund Freud Was an Austrian neurologist who was fascinated by patients suffering from "hysteria" and neurosis
The unconscious mind was a repository of feelings and urges of which we have no awareness
Psychoanalytic theory Focuses on the role of a person's unconscious, as well as early childhood experiences, and this particular perspective dominated clinical psychology for several decades
Introduced by Sigmund Freud
Max Wertheimer Kurt Koffka Wolfgang Kohler German psychologists who immigrated to the United States in the early 20th century to escape
various Gestalt principles
Major emphasis of Gestalt psychology deals with the fact that although a sensory experience can be broken down into individual parts, how those parts relate to each other as a whole is often what the individual responds to in perception
Ivan Pavlov studied a form of learning behavior called a conditioned reflex, in which an animal or human produced a reflex (unconscious) response to a stimulus and, over time, was conditioned to produce the response to a different stimulus that the experimenter associated with the origina stimulus
"classical conditioning" is only one form of learning behavior studied by behaviorists.
Behaviorism A major object of study by behaviorists was learned behavior and its interaction with inborn qualities of the organism
Largely responsible for establishing psychology as a scientific discipline through its objective methods and especially experimentation Introduced by John B. Watson
B.F.Skinner concentrated on how behavior was affected by its consequences
developed a chamber that allowed the careful study of the principles of modifying behavior through reinforcement and punishment
focus on positive and negative reinforcement of learned behaviors had a lasting influence in psychology that has waned somewhat since the growth of research in cognitive psychology