Sample Essay on History of Psychology
Psychology is a diverse field of sciences that helps everyday people with all sorts of everyday problems. There are many different subfields within psychology that specialize in different areas. These branches include biopsychology, clinical psychology, cognitive psychology, counseling psychology, developmental psychology, educational psychology, experimental psychology, and much more. It seems for whatever field that you can think of there is a psychologist for that field.
You can trace the roots of psychology back to the ancient Greeks and Romans, but the formal beginning of psychology can be traced to 1879, when Wilhelm Wundt established a laboratory in Leipzig, Germany. William James was also setting his laboratory up in Cambridge, Massachusetts at this time. Wilhelm Wundt developed the perspective known today as structuralism. Structuralism focuses on the basic elements that constitute the foundation of thinking, consciousness, emotions, and other kinds of states and activities. Structuralists use introspection to study the mind. Introspection is a procedure where subjects are asked to describe what they are experiencing when presented a stimulus. Wundt thought that if you analyzed the reactions of the people, you could understand the structure of the mind better. The perspective that challenged structuralism is known as functionalism. Functionalism focuses on what the mind does and how behavior functions. They studied the role of behavior in allowing people to adapt to their environments. William James was the leader of this new perspective that became prominent in the early 1900s. Another perspective in the 1900s was gestalt psychology. It focuses on how perception is organized. They don’t focus on individual parts, instead they concentrate on how people consider individual elements together as units or wholes.
Today there are five major perspectives of psychology; biological, psychodynamic, cognitive, behavioral, and humanistic. Biological views behavior from the perspective of biological functioning. Psychodynamic is based on the belief that behavior is motivated by unconscious inner forces over which the individual has little control. Cognitive focuses on how people think, understand, and know about the world. Behavioral suggests that observable behavior that can be measured objectively should be the focus of study. Humanistic suggests that all individuals naturally strive to grow, develop, and be in control of their lives and behavior. Whatever perspective a psychologist has determines where they stand on one of the key issues in psychology.
There are many different types of research that psychologists do to learn about things they have questions about. They can use archival research. In which you use already existing data to test your hypothesis. You can make a naturalistic observation where an investigator simply observes some naturally occurring behavior and does not make a change in the situation. There is survey research in which people chosen to represent some larger population are asked a series of questions about their behavior, thoughts, or attitudes. You can do a case study, which is an in-depth, intensive investigation of an individual or small group of people. There is correlational research that examines the relationship between two sets of variables to determine whether they are correlated. In all these psychologists use the scientific method to carry out there research.
There are certain ethics to abide by when you perform research. You must protect participants from physical and mental harm. You must guarantee the right of participant’s privacy regarding their behavior. You must make sure that participation is completely voluntary. You also must inform participant about the nature of procedures prior to their participation in the experiment.
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