chapter 9 - early approaches to psychology

Question 1

what are wundt’s ideas about perception? how do these ideas relate to empiricism and rationalism?

Answer 1

• it is passive; automatically receiving and encoding sensation (bottom-up)
• perception is a passive process governed by the physical stimulation present, the anatomical makeup, and past experiences (empiricism)
• apperception is active and voluntary (rationalism)

Question 2

how would wundt describe the causes of human behavior and thought?

Answer 2

• psychological experiences are tied to physiological experiences, and could be studied more objectively
• willpower can organize the mind’s content into higher-level thought processes

Question 3

how does structuralism connect to the work of the british empiricists?

Answer 3

• consciousness being built from the mental elements, thinking the mind is entirely passive (empiricism)
• use of the laws of association
• reduces complex mental states to the simplest processes
• relates to reductionist natures of empiricism

Question 4

how is structuralism a good example of the potential limits of paradigms?

Answer 4

• structuralism was purely based on introspection and the three mental elements (sensation, images, affections)
• due to that, the paradigm is very limited and narrow (not good)
• we do not have access to the elements of consciousness just from thinking about it (we cannot see the steps of the thinking process, like pixels forming into vision)

Question 5

how would titchener describe the causes of human behavior and thought?

Answer 5

• the what, how, and why of mental processes
• what: the three mental elements (sensations, images, affections)
• how: the ways the elements combine
• why: determining the neurological correlations of mental events