When was psychology born

The dominant influence of Western, white, and male academics in the early history of psychology meant that psychology developed with the biases inherent in those individuals, which often had negative consequences for members of society that were not white or male. Women, members of ethnic minorities in both the United States and other countries, and individuals with sexual orientations other than heterosexual had difficulties entering the field of psychology and therefore influencing its development.

They also suffered from the attitudes of white, male psychologists, who were not immune to the nonscientific attitudes prevalent in the society in which they developed and worked. In addition, the experimental subjects of psychology were mostly men, which resulted from underlying assumptions that gender had no influence on psychology and that women were not of sufficient interest to study.

An article by Naomi Weisstein, first published in Weisstein, , stimulated a feminist revolution in psychology by presenting a critique of psychology as a science. She also specifically criticized male psychologists for constructing the psychology of women entirely out of their own cultural biases and without careful experimental tests to verify any of their characterizations of women.

These include re-evaluating and discovering the contributions of women to the history of psychology, studying psychological gender differences, and questioning the male bias present across the practice of the scientific approach to knowledge.

Culture has important impacts on individuals and social psychology, yet the effects of culture on psychology are under-studied. In this sense, it has remained a descriptive science, rather than one seeking to determine cause and effect. For example, a study of characteristics of individuals seeking treatment for a binge eating disorder in Hispanic American, African American, and Caucasian American individuals found significant differences between groups Franko et al. The study concluded that results from studying any one of the groups could not be extended to the other groups, and yet potential causes of the differences were not measured.

This history of multicultural psychology in the United States is a long one. The role of African American psychologists in researching the cultural differences between African American individual and social psychology is but one example.

Sumner established a psychology degree program at Howard University, leading to the education of a new generation of African American psychologists Black, Spence, and Omari, Much of the work of early African American psychologists and a general focus of much work in first half of the 20th century in psychology in the United States was dedicated to testing and intelligence testing in particular Black et al.

That emphasis has continued, particularly because of the importance of testing in determining opportunities for children, but other areas of exploration in African-American psychology research include learning style, sense of community and belonging, and spiritualism Black et al.

The American Psychological Association has several ethnically based organizations for professional psychologists that facilitate interactions among members. Since psychologists belonging to specific ethnic groups or cultures have the most interest in studying the psychology of their communities, these organizations provide an opportunity for the growth of research on the impact of culture on individual and social psychology. Board of Education civil rights case.

Before the time of Wundt and James, questions about the mind were considered by philosophers. However, both Wundt and James helped create psychology as a distinct scientific discipline. Wundt was a structuralist, which meant he believed that our cognitive experience was best understood by breaking that experience into its component parts.

He thought this was best accomplished by introspection. William James was the first American psychologist, and he was a proponent of functionalism. Like Wundt, James also relied on introspection; however, his research approach also incorporated more objective measures as well. Sigmund Freud believed that understanding the unconscious mind was absolutely critical to understand conscious behavior.

This was especially true for individuals that he saw who suffered from various hysterias and neuroses. Freud relied on dream analysis, slips of the tongue, and free association as means to access the unconscious. Psychoanalytic theory remained a dominant force in clinical psychology for several decades. Gestalt psychology was very influential in Europe.

Gestalt psychology takes a holistic view of an individual and his experiences. Although they left their laboratories and their research behind, they did introduce America to Gestalt ideas.

Some of the principles of Gestalt psychology are still very influential in the study of sensation and perception. Behaviorism focused on making psychology an objective science by studying overt behavior and deemphasizing the importance of unobservable mental processes.

John Watson is often considered the father of behaviorism, and B. Thus, a humanistic movement within psychology began to take hold. Humanism focuses on the potential of all people for good. Both Maslow and Rogers were influential in shaping humanistic psychology.

During the s, the landscape of psychology began to change. A science of behavior began to shift back to its roots of focus on mental processes. The emergence of neuroscience and computer science aided this transition. Ultimately, the cognitive revolution took hold, and people came to realize that cognition was crucial to a true appreciation and understanding of behavior.

How did the object of study in psychology change over the history of the field since the 19th century? In part, what aspect of psychology was the behaviorist approach to psychology a reaction to? Freud is probably one of the most well-known historical figures in psychology. Where have you encountered references to Freud or his ideas about the role that the unconscious mind plays in determining conscious behavior?

In its early days, psychology could be defined as the scientific study of mind or mental processes. Over time, psychology began to shift more towards the scientific study of behavior. However, as the cognitive revolution took hold, psychology once again began to focus on mental processes as necessary to the understanding of behavior.

Behaviorists studied objectively observable behavior partly in reaction to the psychologists of the mind who were studying things that were not directly observable. Watson and the other behaviourists began to use these ideas to explain how events that people and other organisms experienced in their environment stimuli could produce specific behaviours responses. In the best known of his studies, an eight-month-old boy named Little Albert was used as the subject. Here is a summary of the findings: The boy was placed in the middle of a room; a white laboratory rat was placed near him and he was allowed to play with it.

The child showed no fear of the rat. The child cried when he heard the noise. After several such pairings of the two stimuli, the child was again shown the rat. Now, however, he cried and tried to move away from the rat. In line with the behaviourist approach, the boy had learned to associate the white rat with the loud noise, resulting in crying.

The most famous behaviourist was Burrhus Frederick B. Skinner to , who expanded the principles of behaviourism and also brought them to the attention of the public at large. Skinner Figure 1. And he used the general principles of behaviourism to develop theories about how best to teach children and how to create societies that were peaceful and productive.

Skinner even developed a method for studying thoughts and feelings using the behaviourist approach Skinner, , The behaviourist research program had important implications for the fundamental questions about nature and nurture and about free will. In terms of the nature-nurture debate, the behaviourists agreed with the nurture approach, believing that we are shaped exclusively by our environments.

They also argued that there is no free will, but rather that our behaviours are determined by the events that we have experienced in our past. In one demonstration of the misperception of our own free will, neuroscientists Soon, Brass, Heinze, and Haynes placed their research participants in a functional magnetic resonance imaging fMRI brain scanner while they presented them with a series of letters on a computer screen. The letter on the screen changed every half second.

The participants were asked, whenever they decided to, to press either of two buttons. Then they were asked to indicate which letter was showing on the screen when they decided to press the button. The researchers analyzed the brain images to see if they could predict which of the two buttons the participant was going to press, even before the letter at which he or she had indicated the decision to press a button.

Suggesting that the intention to act occurred in the brain before the research participants became aware of it, the researchers found that the prefrontal cortex region of the brain showed activation that could be used to predict the button pressed as long as 10 seconds before the participants said that they had decided which button to press.

Research has found that we are more likely to think that we control our behaviour when the desire to act occurs immediately prior to the outcome, when the thought is consistent with the outcome, and when there are no other apparent causes for the behaviour. Aarts, Custers, and Wegner asked their research participants to control a rapidly moving square along with a computer that was also controlling the square independently. The participants pressed a button to stop the movement.

When participants were exposed to words related to the location of the square just before they stopped its movement, they became more likely to think that they controlled the motion, even when it was actually the computer that stopped it. Because we normally expect that our behaviours will be met with success, when we are successful we easily believe that the success is the result of our own free will.

When an action is met with failure, on the other hand, we are less likely to perceive this outcome as the result of our free will, and we are more likely to blame the outcome on luck or our teacher Wegner, The behaviourists made substantial contributions to psychology by identifying the principles of learning.

Although the behaviourists were incorrect in their beliefs that it was not possible to measure thoughts and feelings, their ideas provided new ideas that helped further our understanding regarding the nature-nurture debate and the question of free will. The ideas of behaviourism are fundamental to psychology and have been developed to help us better understand the role of prior experiences in a variety of areas of psychology.

Science is always influenced by the technology that surrounds it, and psychology is no exception. Thus it is no surprise that beginning in the s, growing numbers of psychologists began to think about the brain and about human behaviour in terms of the computer, which was being developed and becoming publicly available at that time. The analogy between the brain and the computer, although by no means perfect, provided part of the impetus for a new school of psychology called cognitive psychology.

Cognitive psychology is a field of psychology that studies mental processes, including perception, thinking, memory, and judgment. These actions correspond well to the processes that computers perform. Although cognitive psychology began in earnest in the s, earlier psychologists had also taken a cognitive orientation. Some of the important contributors to cognitive psychology include the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus , who studied the ability of people to remember lists of words under different conditions, and the English psychologist Sir Frederic Bartlett , who studied the cognitive and social processes of remembering.

Bartlett created short stories that were in some ways logical but also contained some very unusual and unexpected events. The idea that our memory is influenced by what we already know was also a major idea behind the cognitive-developmental stage model of Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget Other important cognitive psychologists include Donald E.

The War of the Ghosts is a story that was used by Sir Frederic Bartlett to test the influence of prior expectations on memory. Bartlett found that even when his British research participants were allowed to read the story many times, they still could not remember it well, and he believed this was because it did not fit with their prior knowledge.

One night two young men from Egulac went down to the river to hunt seals, and while they were there it became foggy and calm. Now canoes came up, and they heard the noise of paddles and saw one canoe coming up to them. We wish to take you along. We are going up the river to make war on the people. I might be killed.

My relatives do not know where I have gone. And the warriors went on up the river to a town on the other side of Kalama. The people came down to the water and they began to fight, and many were killed.

So the canoes went back to Egulac and the young man went ashore to his house and made a fire. Many of our fellows were killed, and many of those who attacked us were killed.

They said I was hit, and I did not feel sick. When the sun rose he fell down. Something black came out of his mouth. His face became contorted. The people jumped up and cried. He was dead. Bartlett, In its argument that our thinking has a powerful influence on behaviour, the cognitive approach provided a distinct alternative to behaviourism. According to cognitive psychologists, ignoring the mind itself will never be sufficient because people interpret the stimuli that they experience.

And yet the girl might not be so easily fooled. She might try to understand why the boy is making this particular statement at this particular time and wonder if he might be attempting to influence her through the comment. Cognitive psychologists maintain that when we take into consideration how stimuli are evaluated and interpreted, we understand behaviour more deeply.

Cognitive psychology remains enormously influential today, and it has guided research in such varied fields as language, problem solving, memory, intelligence, education, human development, social psychology, and psychotherapy.

The cognitive revolution has been given even more life over the past decade as the result of recent advances in our ability to see the brain in action using neuroimaging techniques. These images are used to diagnose brain disease and injury, but they also allow researchers to view information processing as it occurs in the brain, because the processing causes the involved area of the brain to increase metabolism and show up on the scan.

We have already discussed the use of one neuroimaging technique, functional magnetic resonance imaging fMRI , in the research focus earlier in this section, and we will discuss the use of neuroimaging techniques in many areas of psychology in the chapters to follow. A final school, which takes a higher level of analysis and which has had substantial impact on psychology, can be broadly referred to as the social-cultural approach.

The field of social-cultural psychology is the study of how the social situations and the cultures in which people find themselves influence thinking and behaviour.

For instance, social psychologists have found that we are attracted to others who are similar to us in terms of attitudes and interests Byrne, , that we develop our own beliefs and attitudes by comparing our opinions to those of others Festinger, , and that we frequently change our beliefs and behaviours to be similar to those of the people we care about —a process known as conformity.

An important aspect of social-cultural psychology are social norms — the ways of thinking, feeling, or behaving that are shared by group members and perceived by them as appropriate Asch, ; Cialdini, Norms include customs, traditions, standards, and rules, as well as the general values of the group.

Many of the most important social norms are determined by the culture in which we live, and these cultures are studied by cross-cultural psychologists. Cultures influence every aspect of our lives, and it is not inappropriate to say that our culture defines our lives just as much as does our evolutionary experience Mesoudi, Children in Western cultures are taught to develop and to value a sense of their personal self, and to see themselves in large part as separate from the other people around them.

Children in Western cultures feel special about themselves; they enjoy getting gold stars on their projects and the best grade in the class. Adults in Western cultures are oriented toward promoting their own individual success, frequently in comparison to or even at the expense of others. Norms in the East Asian culture, on the other hand, are oriented toward interdependence or collectivism.

In these cultures children are taught to focus on developing harmonious social relationships with others. When asked to describe themselves, the members of East Asian cultures are more likely than those from Western cultures to indicate that they are particularly concerned about the interests of others, including their close friends and their colleagues Figure 1. Cultures also differ in terms of personal space, such as how closely individuals stand to each other when talking, as well as the communication styles they employ.

It is important to be aware of cultures and cultural differences because people with different cultural backgrounds increasingly come into contact with each other as a result of increased travel and immigration and the development of the Internet and other forms of communication.

In Canada, for instance, there are many different ethnic groups, and the proportion of the population that comes from minority non-White groups is increasing from year to year. The social-cultural approach to understanding behaviour reminds us again of the difficulty of making broad generalizations about human nature.

Different people experience things differently, and they experience them differently in different cultures. 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. One way that the findings of psychological research may be particularly helpful to you is in terms of improving your learning and study skills.

Psychological research has provided a substantial amount of knowledge about the principles of learning and memory. This information can help you do better in this and other courses, and can also help you better learn new concepts and techniques in other areas of your life.

The most important thing you can learn in college is how to better study, learn, and remember. These skills will help you throughout your life, as you learn new jobs and take on other responsibilities.

There are substantial individual differences in learning and memory, such that some people learn faster than others. But even if it takes you longer to learn than you think it should, the extra time you put into studying is well worth the effort.

And you can learn to learn—learning to study effectively and to remember information is just like learning any other skill, such as playing a sport or a video game. To learn well, you need to be ready to learn. You cannot learn well when you are tired, when you are under stress, or if you are abusing alcohol or drugs. Try to keep a consistent routine of sleeping and eating. Eat moderately and nutritiously, and avoid drugs that can impair memory, particularly alcohol. Memory supplements are usually no more effective than drinking a can of sugared soda, which releases glucose and thus improves memory slightly.

Psychologists have studied the ways that best allow people to acquire new information, to retain it over time, and to retrieve information that has been stored in our memories. One important finding is that learning is an active process. To acquire information most effectively, we must actively manipulate it.

One active approach is rehearsal—repeating the information that is to be learned over and over again. Although simple repetition does help us learn, psychological research has found that we acquire information most effectively when we actively think about or elaborate on its meaning and relate the material to something else. When you study, try to elaborate by connecting the information to other things that you already know. If you want to remember the different schools of psychology, for instance, try to think about how each of the approaches is different from the others.

As you compare the approaches, determine what is most important about each one and then relate it to the features of the other approaches. In an important study showing the effectiveness of elaborative encoding, Rogers, Kuiper, and Kirker found that students learned information best when they related it to aspects of themselves a phenomenon known as the self-reference effect.

This research suggests that imagining how the material relates to your own interests and goals will help you learn it. An approach known as the method of loci involves linking each of the pieces of information that you need to remember to places that you are familiar with.

You might think about the house that you grew up in and the rooms in it. You could put the behaviourists in the bedroom, the structuralists in the living room, and the functionalists in the kitchen. One of the most fundamental principles of learning is known as the spacing effect. Clifford Beers publishes A Mind That Found Itself , detailing his experiences as a patient in 19th-century mental asylums. Calling for more humane treatment of patients and better education about mental illness for the general population, the book inspires the mental hygiene movement in the United States.

At the symposium, Freud gives his only speech in the United States. John B. In contrast to psychoanalysis, behaviorism focuses on observable and measurable behavior.

Standardized intelligence and aptitude tests are administered to two million U. Soon after, such tests are used in all U. Francis Cecil Sumner earns a Ph. Stanley Hall at Clark University. Sumner later serves as chair of the Howard University psychology department. They take a compassionate approach to the treatment of mental illness, emphasizing both psychological and psychiatric disciplines.

Psychiatrist Hans Berger invents the electroencephalogram and tests it on his son. The device graphs the electrical activity of the brain by means of electrodes attached to the head.

After the Nazi party gains control of the government in Germany, scholars and researchers in psychology and psychiatry are persecuted. Many, including Freud, whose books are banned and burned in public rallies, move to Britain or the United States. Kurt Koffka, a founder of the movement, publishes Principles of Gestalt Psychology in By , more than 18, such operations have been performed.

The procedure, intended to relieve severe and debilitating psychosis, is controversial. Skinner publishes The Behavior of Organisms , introducing the concept of operant conditioning. The work draws widespread attention to behaviorism and inspires laboratory research on conditioning. Italian psychiatrist and neuropathologist Ugo Cerletti and his associates treat human patients with electrical shocks to alleviate schizophrenia and psychosis. ECT, while controversial, is proven effective in some cases and is still in use in Anna Freud publishes The Psychoanalytic Treatment of Children, introducing basic concepts in the theory and practice of child psychoanalysis.

President Harry Truman signs the National Mental Health Act, providing generous funding for psychiatric education and research for the first time in U. Studies are published reporting that the drug imipramine may be able to lessen depression. The anti-psychotic drug chlorpromazine known as Thorazine is tested on a patient in a Paris military hospital. Approved for use in the United States in , it becomes widely prescribed.

Penfield publishes results from his study of the neurology of epilepsy. Social Psychologist Gordon Allport publishes The Nature of Prejudice , which draws on various approaches in psychology to examine prejudice through different lenses.

In his studies of epilepsy, neuroscientist Wilder G. Penfield begins to uncover the relationship between chemical activity in the brain and psychological phenomena. His findings set the stage for widespread research on the biological role in psychological phenomena.

The development of psychoactive drugs in the s and their approval by the FDA initiates a new form of treatment for mental illness. Among the first such drugs is Doriden, also known as Rorer, an anti-anxiety medication approved in Led by Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow, who publishes Motivation and Personality in , this approach centers on the conscious mind, free will, human dignity, and the capacity for self-actualization.

Inspired by work in mathematics and other disciplines, psychologists begin to focus on cognitive states and processes. George A. Noam Chomsky publishes Syntactic Structures , marking a major advancement in the study of linguistics.

The book helps spawn the field of psycholinguistics, the psychology of language. The FDA approves the use of chlordiazepoxide known as Librium for treatment of non-psychotic anxiety in A similar drug, diazepam Valium , is approved in President John F.

Kennedy calls for and later signs the Community Mental Health Centers Act, which mandates the construction of community facilities instead of large, regional mental hospitals. Congress ends support for the program in , reducing overall funds and folding them into a mental health block-grant program. Neal E. Miller receives the National Medal of Science, the highest scientific honor given in the United States, for his studies of motivation and learning.

He is the first psychologist to be awarded this honor. The FDA approves lithium carbonate to treat patients with bipolar mood disorders. It is marketed under the trade names Eskalith, Lithonate, and Lithane.

By tracing chemical markers, PET maps brain function in more detail than earlier techniques. Richard Dawkins publishes The Selfish Gene, which begins to popularize the idea of evolutionary psychology.

This approach applies principles from evolutionary biology to the structure and function of the human brain. It offers new ways of looking at social phenomena such as aggression and sexual behavior. Richard Dawkins publishes The Selfish Gene , a work which shifts focus from the individual animal as the unit of evolution to individual genes themselves.

The text popularizes the field of evolutionary psychology, in which knowledge and principles from evolutionary biology are applied in research on human brain structure. The U. District Court finds the use of standardized IQ tests in California public schools illegal. The decision in the case, Larry P. Congress revises federal law on the insanity defense, partly in response to the acquittal of John Hinckley, Jr. The act places burden of proof for the insanity defense on the defendant.

The Stewart B. McKinney Homeless Assistance Act provides the first federal funds allocated specifically for the homeless population.