Chapter 5 + Some of 8 Flashcards
Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920)
> Wundt studied with both Müller and Helmholtz before becoming a professor at Leipzig in 1875.
> His eminence was such that he attracted scholars from around the world to his laboratory to learn his introspective techniques.
> Wundt also invented a non-experimental approach called “cultural psychology” which was a pre-cursor of social psychology.
What are some of Wundts contributions?
> The first is that he founded what is often called the first laboratory in experimental psychology, at Leipzig in 1879.
> The second is that his laboratory attracted a great many young scholars, often Americans, who then went on to develop psychology elsewhere
A survey of historians of psychology placed Wundt on the list of the most eminent psychologists of all time in which place?
> In fact, a survey of historians of psychology (Korn et al., 1991) placed Wundt first in a ranking of the most eminent psychologists of all time.
How did Wundt’s approach extend beyond the lab? What did this fact establish?
> As far as he was concerned, laboratory research was suitable only for relatively simple psychological processes
> More complex psychological processes, such as our ability to use language, could not be explained by experimental, laboratory methods. Rather, they required observations of the products of language and thought as they occurred naturally
> Thus, in the beginning, Wundt established the precedent that at least two kinds of method are necessary in psychology:
1) laboratory-based experimentation, which was suited to the investigation of simple psychological phenomena.
2) naturalistic observation and was suited to the exploration of psychological processes as these were influenced by social and cultural factors
In terms of laboratory experience, what influenced Wundt’s lab experiments?
> established disciplines, especially chemistry (Experimental Chemistry)
> The goal in both instances is to identify elementary units ( the constituents of experience. (Lab vs Naturalistic observation))
> influenced by J.S. Mill’s notion of “mental chemistry”
It may seem obvious that introspection should be a useful psychological method, but beginning with Wundt, a large part of the history of psychology is concerned with:
> attempting to develop a scientifically respectable introspective method.
What were the two forms of introspection Wundt formed?
> he made a distinction between two forms of introspection: self-observation and inner perception
> Self-observation of the sort casually engaged in by everyone cannot be the basis of scientific psychology because it is open to personal bias.
> Inner perception comes closer to the method required because it involves deliberately observing one’s own mental processes. However, such observations would still be too subjective to be trustworthy unless they were made under strictly controlled conditions.
Can Eminence Be Measured?
> Korn, David, and Davis (1991) surveyed prom-inent historians of psychology. A part of the survey, they asked these historians to list those psychologists they considered to be the 10 most important of all time, in order of importance. After the scores had been averaged, , the rank-ing was as follows: Wilhelm Wundt, William James, Sigmund Freud, John B. Watson, Ivan Pavlov, Hermann Ebbinghaus, Jean Piaget, B.F. Skinner, Alfred Binet, and G.T. Fechner.
> Cattell’s rating was a lot diferent i.e.: Cattell’s original “top 10” were William James, J. McK. Cattell, Hugo Münsterberg, G. Stanley Hall, J. Mark Baldwin, Edward B. Titchener, Josiah Royce, George T. Ladd, John Dewey, and Joseph Jastrow.
> Haggbloom et al. (2002) attempted to
construct a list of the most eminent twentieth-century psychologists by means of a variety of measures- Nevertheless, there was substantial agreement between their list and the list compiled by Korn, Davis, and Davis (1991)
> Some of the respondents to Korn et al. expressed misgivings about attempting to rank-order psychologists at all because such procedures may reinforce existing biases and overlook important but not widely known psychologists.
> Thus, Korn et al. argue that the following should be included on any “top 10” list: Francis C. Sumner, Margaret Floy Washburn, Kenneth B. Clark and Mamie Phipps Clark, (black psychologists)
Why was the scientific method important to Wundt?
> By doing experiments, one can present a participant with a simple, objective stimulus condition and have the participant report on the experiences that result.
His experiments often required the use of apparatus, and one piece of apparatus that he discussed at length was the:
> metronome
In his experiments, what kind of participants did Wundt use?
> Wundt used trained participants.
> Participants need to be informed about what they are supposed to be experiencing before they can do this kind of task properly.
What did the metronome experiment say about our consciousness?
> Especially if you are using an electronic metronome, the successive beats have exactly the same physical characteristics.
> However, the successive beats do not have the same psychological characteristics
> Difficult to hear unrhymically
> Overall: Our consciousness is rhythmic-ally disposed”
Why is rhythm such a central feature of our experience? What process did this give rise to?
> Wundt observed that a great many aspects of our lives are rhythmically organized, from breathing to our heart-beat, from walking to running.
> Gave rise to apperception, by which we organize and make sense out of our experience.
> Our experience is not simply a sum of the individual impressions (such as individual beats) that we pay attention to, but rather a creative synthesis of those impressions (creative synthesis = unified whole)
As a result of our metronome experiment, we can see that the flow of experience can be described as:
> a sequence of stages or levels
> We begin with individual beats, which we apprehend.
- By apprehension, Wundt (1973: 35) meant the process by which individual impressions enter one’s consciousness.
> The span of apprehension referred to how many impressions we could be aware of at one time, and Wundt thought that this number was about six.
What do you experience when the metronome is beating out that particular rhythm?
> Wundt (1973: 53) observed that immediately after you hear one beat, you begin to anticipate the next one (tension until the next occurs)
> However, this tension disappears once you hear the next beat, at which point you experience relief.
> In addition, this slow rhythm tends to make you feel a bit sad or depressed; however, if sped up = happiness and excitement
Wundt found that by manipulating the speed of the metronome, you can discover a set of basic feelings. What are these sets? What theory did these sets result in?
> tension-relief and excitement-depression.
> Wundt also noted that some rhythms strike us as pleasant while others strike us as unpleasant.
> This results in Wundt’s famous tridimensional theory of feeling.
What is Wundt’s tridimensional theory of feeling?
> Any feeling can be thought of as located within the three-dimensional space. Wundt believed that this model was completely general. “We find everywhere the same pairs of feelings that we produced by means of the metronome”
> He believed that emotion was a central aspect of all psychological processes not incidental accompanist to other processes
In Wundtian psychology, there was a close relationship between:
> emotion and volition, or acts of the will.
> An example used by Wundt is of a person who displays an emotion such as anger in the way that he or she looks, but who does not act on the basis of the anger.
> In contrast, a person who hits another person out of anger with that person. In such a case there is a simple motive behind the action, and then “we call the volitional process an impulsive act”
> However, when there are conflicting emotions, then acts of the will develop more slowly and are called voluntary acts. We all experience this sort of thing when we are uncertain about what to do and mull over different alternatives until we reach a decision.
One of Wundt’s most durable hypotheses deals with the relationship between the: What is this relationship called?
> Relationship between the intensity of a stimulus and its pleasantness
> The relationship between the two is commonly called the Wundt curve.
> On the vertical axis is plotted the degree to which a person feels positive or negative in a particular situation. How positive or negative you feel is a function that rises and then falls as stimulus intensity increases (that is, as an inverted U).
> The Wundt curve implies that we will get the most pleasure from moderate levels of stimulus intensity.
Who modified Wendt’s curve?
> Daniel E. Berlyne (1924-76), late of the University of Toronto.
> Berlyne (1971) tried to redefine the axes of the curve so as to cover a wider range of situations. For example, imagine the word intensity replaced by the word novelty
> The idea is that when a stimulus is extremely novel it is experienced negatively. With repetition, the stimulus becomes increasingly familiar and is eventually experienced as pleasant.
> Finally, as the stimulus is overexposed it becomes boring (that is, neither pleasant nor unpleasant).
Another application of the Wundt curve is to:
> try to understand some of the ways in which styles wax and wane in a culture like ours
> An initially novel way of doing things at first attracts no favour and may even be experi-enced as noxious; then gradually it becomes accepted as a legitimate form of expression and finally is increasingly ignored as old-fashioned or irrelevant.
Wundt believed in a form of
> psychophysical parallelism that differed somewhat from the rigid doctrine proposed by Fechner
> Wundt agreed that “there is no psychical process which does not run parallel with a physical process”
> However, there was not a point-for-point correspondence between every mental event and every event in the nervous system.
> therefore it has a “universal importance, since all mental values and their development arise from immediately experienced processes of consciousness, and therefore can alone be understood by means of these processes”
Wundt characterized cultural-historical psychology as the study of
> “those mental products which are created by a community of human life, and are, there-fore inexplicable in terms merely of individual consciousness, since they presuppose the reciprocal action of many.”
Wundt explicitly rejected the possibility of studying the development of thought by studying:
> the development of children’s thinking.
> Such a developmental approach is pointless, because a child develops within a particular culture, and cultures vary widely from the primitive to the advanced.
> Child development is not invariant across cultures, but is a product of the culture within which development takes place.
> One such cultural artifact that is a particularly important index of the mental life of a culture is language.
Wundt’s aim in creating a cultural psychology was to:
> “trace the evolution of mind in man”
> To do so, one needed to adopt in psychology the same approach that Darwin had adopted in biology.
In addition to theorizing about the cultural development of language, Wundt also had a fairly sophisticated theory of
> the way individuals produce and understand their language
> In order to understand a sentence we reverse the process and synthesize an idea out of the parts of the sentence.
> speaking and understanding language involves a hierarchical process that moves back and forth between general ideas and particular words.
