•

psychology has a tension in terms of its scientific merit, which leads to two kinds of psychology

•

clinical approach

•

scientific approach

•

late 1800s: psychology was born in Germany

•

late 1800s, a period where Germany was economically a very strong country, the strongest in Europe and perhaps in the world

•

invested their money in research to stay at the leading edge

•

wanted to keep the nation at the forefront in areas as diversified as health care and military might

•

had the will and means to consider new approaches to scientific research, more so than other countries at the time

•

Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894)

•

German physician and physicist

•

didn't call himself a psychologist

•

called himself an "empirical philosophy" which is coming pretty close to psychology

•

known for his mathematics of the eye, theories of vision, ideas on the visual perception of space, color vision research, and on the sensation of tone, perception of sound, and empiricism

•

what he did for psychology was that he showed if you are clever, you can study some of the issues related to the machinery of the mind

•

people thought before him that neural transmission happened so fast that you could not study it

•

did experiment with people in a chain holding hands, when you feel your left hand squeezed, squeeze your right hand, measured the total time that it took to go through multiple people

•

discovered it was approximately 25-28 meters per second, a measurable speed

•

Ernst Weber (1795-1878)

•

German physician who is considered one of the founders of experimental psychology

•

studied medicine at Wittenberg University

•

presented to participants two stimuli, e.g. which line is longer, which light is brighter, etc.

•

studied difference you had to add for people to tell the difference, the just-noticable-difference

•

this depended on the original length of the line or the original brightness

•

e.g. people could tell a 10ml line from a 12ml line, so a 20% difference they could perceive

•

he found "Weber factors" which were percentages of differences which we could perceive for each of our senses

•

he called what he was doing "psycho physics"

•

this showed that the mind was open for study, we can have a science of the mind

•

Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920)

•

physician, psychologist, physiologist, philosopher, and professor, known today as one of the founding figures of modern psychology

•

first person to ever call himself a psychologist

•

1874 University of Leipzig, first experimental lab devoted to psychology

•

1879 wrote the first the first psychology text book

•

favored procedure called introspection

•

inspect the contents of your consciousness

•

had so-called "trained observers" to look into their mind and report what they found

•

structuralism: what is the structure of conscious experience

•

many scientists did not feel introspection was scientific in the sense of the rest of science

•

making the experience verbal changed the experience

•

Darwin (1809-1882)

•

what he did to psychology parallels what he did to biology

•

when on the Beagle, he was collecting specimens, bringing them back, and trying to put them into taxonomic categories

•

biologists would look at the feature and group these specimens according to features

•

Darwin: we are focusing too much on WHAT the features are and we should be asking WHY they are the way they are

•

longer beaked finches tended to live where there were insects in holes

•

this mentality came into psychology: don't look for what the features are but why they are the way they are

•

William James (1842-1910)

•

American philosopher and psychologist who was also trained as a physician

•

one of the most influential philosophers the United States has ever produced

•

one of the founders of the functional psychology

•

experience life, sit in a chair and reflect on things like attention, memory, human will and consciousness.