How did the object of study in psychology change over the history of the field since the 19 th c

step 1 All right, let's talk about early psychology. And what do I mean by early psychology? Do I mean

How did the object of study in psychology change over the...

Key Concepts

Introspection and Early Structuralism

In the late 19th century, psychology primarily focused on the introspective examination of consciousness, with researchers attempting to break down mental processes into their basic components. This approach emphasized understanding the inner subjective experience and laid the groundwork for early experimental methods in psychology.

Functionalism

Emerging as a counter to structuralism, functionalism shifted the focus from the components of consciousness to the purposes and adaptive functions of mental processes. It emphasized how psychological processes help individuals adapt to their environments, thus broadening the scope of inquiry beyond mere introspection.

Behaviorism

In the early 20th century, behaviorism became predominant, arguing that psychology should only study observable and measurable behaviors rather than unobservable mental processes. This movement introduced a rigorous empirical methodology and influenced a wide range of research, emphasizing stimulus-response relationships.

Cognitive Revolution

From the mid-20th century, the cognitive revolution marked a paradigm shift by reintroducing the study of internal mental processes. This perspective integrated experimental methods to understand perception, memory, language, and problem-solving, thereby restoring the investigation of the mind but with more scientific precision.

Neuroscientific Integration

In recent decades, advances in neuroscience have led to an integrated approach where psychological phenomena are studied in conjunction with underlying biological processes. This integration has expanded the object of study to include not only overt behavior and cognitive functions, but also the neural mechanisms that generate them, providing a more comprehensive understanding of human behavior and mental processes.

Transcript

00:01 All right, let's talk about early psychology.

00:03 And what do i mean by early psychology? do i mean back, way back when, before we had the scientific method where people thought that if other people were acting strange, they might have been possessed by demons, and then we're cracking people's skulls open to let the demons out? no, that's not what i'm talking about.

00:24 That's a little too far back.

00:26 So let's talk about something that's a little bit more recent, but not quite modern psychology, which would be, sort of 19th century psychology.

00:37 And what do i mean by that? this is kind of get confusing, just as a reminder.

00:40 The 19th century means from the 1800s all the way up until the 1900s.

00:47 That's what i mean by 19th century.

00:50 Sometimes that's getting confusing.

00:52 I get it confused all the time.

00:54 Just so that we're all on the same page here.

00:57 So early 1800s, we've got things going on like, cranioscopy, which is basically measuring the skull for different personality characteristics, which is we now know not accurate at all.

01:20 But people were interested in what personalities were like.

01:22 They were really interested in why people differ in some different ways.

01:25 And this seems pretty, like a pretty good idea at the time.

01:29 We now know that this is pretty ridiculous, but at the time it seems to be good.

01:35 And then, you know, we don't have an actual field of psychology at this point, but people are really, really interested in concepts like anxiety, in crime or like what we would now call antisocial behavior.

01:56 We also see things in this area around the mid -19th century, so in 1948 -ish, we have a little bit of a discovery with phineas gage, if you've heard of him.

02:16 And he was the one who was working on a railroad, and he had a railroad tide that got driven through his skull, and it completely changed his personality.

02:24 We now know that this area of the brain that this piece of metal went through, went through his prefrontal cortex, and it changed his personality because it got rid of his higher order thinking.

02:34 But at the time, they didn't know that.

02:36 All they knew was that this man, who is relatively grumpy before, had a rod driven through his brain, and then his entire personality changed.

02:48 And this started something that was then a very, very popular treatment for people who were very aggressive or maybe disobedient in time.

02:58 And this was called a lobotomy.

03:03 So, again, not quite the field of psychology at this point, but this is leading up to what starts to get people to think about why it's important to study human behavior.

03:13 So those are some pretty big hits.

03:15 Let's erase it, get a little bit more room.

03:18 We can move on to some other stuff.

03:22 So after we've got people like veneas gage who help us discover these things, although through unfortunate circumstances.

03:30 We're also looking at psychology in the 1850s thereabouts.

03:36 We're thinking about human behavior, but we're thinking about it in the ways of physiology and philosophy.

03:50 So we're starting to ponder about why do humans act the way they do? what are their bodies and what are their brains do to contribute to how they behave? a little bit later on, we start to get something a little bit more formal...

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