Origins Of Psychology (again)

Question 1

Wundt

Answer 1

A01
• Studying the mind was philosophy. Wundt (the father of psychology) started controlled empirical scientific research
• Opened the first psychology lab in Leipzig, Germany (1870s) studying internal mental processes. Used introspection (looking inwards/self examination), analysing your own conscious experience to standard stimuli (such as metronome), reporting present experience such as sensations, emotional reaction, mental images
• Systematic approach, same stimulus, surroundings and instructions. Participants were highly trained
• Breaking thoughts about an object down into separate elements was an attempt to uncover the structure of the mind. This approach was called structuralism
A03
• Wundts work paved the way for later scientifically controlled research in psychology
• Wundts work was criticised by later behaviourist learning theorists who thought internal mental processes couldn’t be studied scientifically by introspection, they focused only on observable inputs (stimuli) and outputs (behaviour) seeing the mind as a ‘black box’ not open to objective scientific investigation
• The study of internal mental processes was later continued by cognitive psychologists who built models of how systems such as memory worked, however they used experimentation and not introspection