Exam 2 Flashcards
(20 cards)
Why is Wundt considered the founder of psychology?
Wundt has the first instance of measuring the mind, also established the first laboratory, edited journal, and experimental psychology
- Can’t register both a beep and a pendulum at the same time, both have 1/8 of a second between the two
Why is Wundt considered the founder of psychology and not Fechner?
Wundt founded the first school of thought, Fechner also did not attempt to begin a new science (as stated by himself)
- Created and taught the first psychology class
Describe Wundt’s cultural psychology and its effect on psychology at the time.
-Wundt created the first laboratory and trained many individuals that then opened their own laboratories across the world
-Establishing Psychology as a study across the globe
-Also established the beginning of cultural psychology, heavily believed in social forces
-Required diligent training of observers
Describe Wundt’s immediate and mediate experiences and explain how they relate to Wundt’s goal of analyzing the mind.
Immediate: experiences requiring no conscious thought
- “The pan is hot.”
Mediate: experiences that are described consciously
- “Than pan is surrounded by heat.”
Important: made an attempt at measuring the brain’s higher level thinking processes
Define Voluntarism.
A Wundt theory focused on the mind’s self-organizing system
- Basic: how we organize our thought processes and got to the next (do it ourselves voluntarily)
Differentiate Wundt’s quantitative introspection and qualitative introspection (think about the data).
- Quantitative: Measured using physical stimuli (weights) and observable differences
- Qualitative: Measured using personal introspection
Describe Wundt’s tridimensional theory of feelings and how he proposed to use it to study emotions.
Wundt’s explanation for feelings is based on three dimensions:
1. Pleasure/Displeasure
2. Tension/Relaxation
3. Excitement/Depression
Believed that if an individual identified with one category, then their emotions could be further explained and broken down
Define apperception.
Wundt’s name for the unified self
Discuss the importance of Ebbinghaus’s work with nonsense syllables.
Book Fact: amount of time it takes for an individual to forget a list of nonsense syllables
Own fact: Discovered the serial position effect and realized that we recall things better with association. The beginning and end are more commonly recalled than the middle.
Discuss Brentano’s act psychology.
More straight forward than Wundt, we see what’s there, we don’t rely on mental context to know what to see
Describe Stumpf’s phenomenology and his main disagreement with Wundt.
Believed that our experiences were not further broken down (Mediate) . We experience things as it happens
Explain how Külpe’s method of introspection differed from Wundt’s.
He believed that you could study introspection experimentally,
- Participants did not perform their own introspection analysis, so observers would prompt them to discuss their complex thought processes, also more detailed that Wundt wanted from his own participants
Describe Külpe’s goals for expanding psychology.
Was originally a student of Wundt, wanted to expand Wundt’s idealogy and expand to the higher mental processes with better introspective methods
Discuss Titchener’s views and treatment of women.
- Believed in structuralism, focused on the mechanistic view of the brain and its function
- Spread Wundt’s belief in experimental psychology (instead of philosophical)
- Allowed women to study under him but did not allow them in their podcast room because smoke was too much for the ladies
List Titchener’s essential problems for psychology.
How to reduce consciousness to components, determine laws by which these elements of consciousness were associated, connect the elements to their psychological conditions/reactions
What are Titchener’s three elementary states of consciousness?
- Sensations - basic elements of perception
- Images - memories, imagination
- Affective states - elements of emotion
Describe stimulus error.
Stimulus error is the tendency for individuals to describe a stimulus as simply what it is instead of describing the attributes of the stimulus
Describe Titchener’s 4 attributes of sensations.
- Quality - characteristic
- Intensity - sensation’s strength
- Duration - length of time sensation is experienced
- Clearness - role of attention in conscious experience
Discuss criticism surrounding structuralism and Titchener’s version of introspection.
- Could not accept multiple forms of psychology: animal, child, elderly)
- Relied upon intensely trained participants which is unrealistic and not empirically done
- Reliance upon subjective self reports from participants vs Wundt’s objective and quantitative approach
What was the difference between Wundt’s beliefs and Titchener’s?
Titchener wished to break the mind down into its components while Wundt wanted to focus on the mind as a whole
