H&S 5 Flashcards
Edward Bradford Titchener
Relation to and views compared to Wundt
(1867 – 1927)
- Wundt’s student. Claimed to bring his version of psych to the US, which he called structuralism, but it was actually very different.
- Rejected Wundts apperception.
- Focused on mental contents/elements rather than on their organization.
Structuralism
Central task of psychology
Discover the nature of the elementary conscious experiences—
–analyze consciousness into its component parts and thus determine its structure.
Experimental Psychology: A Manual of Laboratory Practice
1901 – 1905:
- These manuals stimulated the growth of lab work in psych in the US and influenced a generation of experimental psychologists.
- Widely used and translated into many languages.
View on women in academia
- His group the Titchner experimentalists had regular meetings that did not allow women, women were considered “too pure” to participate in their smoke filled discussions.
- Though he wouldn’t allow women in the experimentalist meetings, he encouraged and supported their advancement in psychology.
- Accepted women into his grad studies program at Cornell when other universities were rejecting them.
- More than one third of his PhDs were women.
- Also supported hiring women faculty, which many saw as radical.
Titchener’s Introspection
describe the elements of conscious state rather than report the observed stimulus by its familiar name
Three essential problems for psychology (the bulk of his work)
- Reduce conscious processes to their simplest components
- Determine laws by which these elements of consciousness were associated
- Connect the elements with their physiological conditions
Aims same as those of the natural sciences
- after scientists decide which part of the natural world they wish to study, they proceed to discover its elements, demonstrate how the elements are compounded into complex phenomena, and formulate laws governing those phenomena.
- Titchner’s research was devoted to the first problem, discovering the elements.
proposed three elementary states of consciousness
- Sensations – the basic elements of perception that occur in the sounds, sights, smells, and other experiences evoked by physical objects in our environment.
- Images – the elements of ideas, found in the process that reflects experiences that are not actually present at the moment, such as a memory of a past experience.
- Affective states – also called affections. The elements of emotion—found in experiences such as love, hate, and sadness. (had only one dimension—pleasure/displeasure)
characteristics of mental elements
- quality—the characteristic, such as “cold” or “red”—that clearly distinguishes each element from the other elements
- intensity—a sensations strength, weakness, loudness, or brightness
- duration—the course of a sensation over time
- clearness—refers to the role of attention in conscious experience; experience that is not the focus of our attention is clearer than experience toward which our attention is not directed (affective states did not have the quality of clearness because Titchner believed you couldn’t directly focus attention on an emotion)
Late 1920’s—rethinking “structural psychology”—
started calling it existential psych, reconsidering his introspective approach in favor of a phenomenological approach which examines consciousness as I happens rather than breaking into elements.
Criticisms of Structuralism
The zeitgeist moved on without Titchner around 1910, and people began to see structuralism as an attempt to hold on to outdated methods and principles.
- Criticized for attempting to analyze conscious processes into elements—artificial.
- Stucturalist definition was criticized—chose to ignore several specialties because those areas did not fit their view of psych, concept was too limited to embrace new work and directions
- Structuralism collapsed when he died.
Criticisms of Introspection
Though Titchener made introspection more precise, and modified it to conform to science, it was still attacked.
- he struggled to define it
- observers could not use meaning words, such as table, because structuralists were interested in elementary experience. However, an introspective language, to give them an objective way to describe things, was not developed, and therefore there were often inconsistencies and disagreements between observers.
- some said it was really a form of retrospection, because some time elapsed before subjects reported their experience
- in the early 1900’s Freud proposed the unconscious mind—if part of our mental functioning is unconscious, then clearly introspection is of no use in exploring it
Titchener and Külpe
The criticism of introspection dealt with the kind of introspection practiced in Titchener and Kulpe’s labs, which dealt with subjective reports of elements of consciousness (unlike Wundt’s internal perception method, which was more objective and quantitative)
Kant
a century before Titchener’s work Kant had written that any attempt at introspection altered the conscious experience by introducing an observing variable into the content of conscious experience.
Comte
had also attacked the introspective method, arguing that if the mind were capable of observing its own activities it would have to divide itself into two parts—one doing the observing and the other being observed.
