Are the orange circles equal?

Are the lines equal?

Lec 1: Nature & Scope
of Psychology
Khadeeja Rana
 Questions from Past Papers
• Critically evaluate different schools and systems of psychology. Discuss
their scientific status in contemporary psychology.
• What makes Structuralism stand out as different from other schools
and how it fits in recent trends in Psychology? Discuss.
• Describe the aims and methods of Structuralism and Functionalism
• Define Psychology, give its scope and write in brief about various
schools of Psychology.
• What are the major approaches or perspectives in modern
psychology?
• Define psychology and describe in brief about various schools of
psychology
• State the definition of psychology as a science. Show your familiarity
with the scope of Psychology.
 Historical Background
• Psychology has been around since the beginning of
mankind but discovered much later
• Plato argued that there was a clear distinction between
body and soul, believed very strongly in the influence of
individual difference on behavior, and played a key role in
developing the notion of "mental health"
• Aristotle theorized about learning and memory,
motivation and emotion, perception and personality.
• First psychology laboratory founded by Wilhelm Wundt,
(who later came to be known as the father of psychology)
at Leipzig, Germany in 1879
 Historical Background
• Until the end of 19th Century, psychology was regarded as
a branch of Philosophy. Psychology as a scientific
discipline began to emerge in the late 1800's.
• The classic movement in psychology to adopt these
strategies were the behaviorists, who were renowned for
controlled laboratory experiment and rejection of any
unseen or subconscious forces as causes of behavior.
• The cognitive psychologists adopted this rigorous
scientific, lab-based approach too.
• In the 1900’s the field matured to include topics such
as emotions, stress, cognition etc.
 Definition

• Term “psychology” was coined by German philosopher

Rudolph Goclenius in 1590
• Psychology is derived from two Greek words, psyche
meaning soul and logos meaning study
• Wilhelm Wundt defined psychology as the science which
studies the 'internal experiences'
• Psychology is defined as the scientific study of behavior
and mental processes.
• Behavior: that which can be observed and measured
• Mental processes: thoughts, feelings, internal processes.
 Psychology as a Science

• Scientific method is a systematic and organized

series of steps that scientists adopt for exploring any
phenomenon in order to obtain accurate and
consistent results.
• The 5 steps involve observation, description,
analysis, interpretation and replication.
• Psychology deals with overt behavior which is
experienced by our senses, can be measured and
understood in scientific terms and can be dealt with
through psychological interventions
 Psychology as a Science

• Psychology uses empirical approach to study

phenomenon through direct observation or
experiment rather than on argument or belief.
• Instead, experiments and observations are
carried out carefully and reported in detail so
that other investigators can repeat and
attempt to verify the work.
 Psychology as a Science
• Researchers should remain totally value free when
studying; they should try to remain totally unbiased
in their investigations. I.e. Researchers are not
influenced by personal feelings and experiences.
• Objectivity means that all sources of bias are
minimized and that personal or subjective ideas are
eliminated. The pursuit of science implies that the
facts will speak for themselves, even if they turn out
to be different from what the investigator hoped.
 Psychology as a Science
• Hypothesis Testing: a statement made at the
beginning of an investigation that serves as a
prediction and is derived from a theory
• Replicability: whether a particular method and
finding can be repeated with different/same
people and/or on different occasions, to see if
the results are similar.
• Predictability: aiming to be able to predict future
behavior from the findings of our research.
 Nature of Psychology
1. Possesses a well-organized theory, supported by
psychological laws and principles
2. It has applied aspect in the form of various
branches, of applied psychology
3. It believes every behavior has its roots and factors
that cause and maintain it.
4. It emphasizes objectivity by advocating reliability
an validity in the assessment of behavior.
5. It employs scientific methods and techniques in the
study of behavior
 Nature of Psychology

6. The results of the study of behavior are open to

verification under similar study conditions by other
experimenters and researchers
7. The established facts and principles of behavior
have universal applicability in practical life and in
other bodies of knowledge
8. An appropriate quantitative description of behavior
is possible through assessment tools and statistical
measures in psychology
 Scope of Psychology
• A degree in Psychology can enable you to work in a variety of
settings:
1. Education/teaching
2. Research and training
3. Clinics/Hospitals
4. Recruitment and Selection
5. Specialized professional settings such as armed forces, police,
NGOs, social welfare etc.
Psychological knowledge is applied to diverse fields
such as management, environment, business, industry and other
areas.
 Historical Schools
of Psychology
• The following early approaches or conceptual models
guided the work of psychologists
1. Structuralism
Founder: Edward Titchener
Focused on the fundamental elements that form the
foundation of thinking, emotions, consciousness and
other mental states. Primarily used the procedure of
introspection in which subjects were asked to look within
when exposed to a stimulus.
 Structuralism
• Focused on the study of the basic elements,
sensations and perceptions that make up our
conscious mental experiences
• Main presumption: All human experience can be
understood as the combination of simple events o
elements of sensations and mental processes
• Our task is to identify the basic elements of
consciousness like a physicist would break down the
basic particles of matter. Or like making a picture
with several jigsaw puzzle pieces
 Main Ideas
• At Wundt’s laboratory, studied and experiments
were conducted on fundamental elements that form
the foundation of thinking, emotions and
consciousness
• Systematic, organized and objective procedures
were used to enable replication of studies
• The procedure used to study the structure of the
mind was introspection, where subjects were asked
to describe what they were experiencing when
exposed to a stimulus
 Impact

• Gained popularity and attracted leading scientists

and students alike from all over Europe and US.

• James McKeen Cattell: worked on individual

differences and development of mental tests
• Emil Kraeplin: worked on finding physical causes of
mental illness, gave a classification of mental
disorders in 1883
 Criticism
• Reductionist
It reduces all complex human experience to simple
sensations
• Elementalistic
The structuralists sought to look at individual elements
first, and then combine parts into a whole, rather than
study the variety of behavior directly.
• Mentalistic
Only verbal reports of human experience and awareness,
ignoring the study of subjects who could not report their
introspection like children, or those with speech disorders.
 Functionalism

Founder: William James (father of American/modern

psychology)
• Focused on the function of the mental activity and
role of behavior, how the mind functions and
adapts to an ever-changing environment
• Emerged as a reaction to Structuralism. Studied the
role that behavior plays in allowing people to better
adapt to their environment.
• Primarily focused on longitudinal research as a
method of investigation
 Contributors

• William James studied the stream of consciousness,

emotions, memory, attention, the self, habit
formation, and the mind-body connection.
• “We should study consciousness but should not
reduce it to elements and structure”
• Each individual has uniqueness in his way of looking
at the world, which cannot be reduced to formulas
or numbers. Therefore his approach focused more
on qualitative interpretation.
 Contributors
• John Dewey: one of the key founders of
Functionalism
• American educator, developed the field of School
Psychology and Educational Psychology
• “Teachers are strongly influenced by their
psychological assumptions about children and the
educational process”
• Teaching must be in accordance with child’s
developmental readiness.
• Applied psychology flourished after Functionalism
 Gestalt Psychology
• Founder: Max Wertheimer
• Emphasized that perception is more than the sum of
its parts, studying how sensations are assembled
into meaningful experiences
• Instead of considering the individual parts that make
up thinking, gestalt psychologists concentrated on
how people consider individual elements as units or
wholes
• The word gestalt means “whole pattern”
 Gestalt vs Structuralists
• The main concept that the Gestaltists posed
was that the “WHOLE” is more than the sum
of its parts, and it is different from it too.
• In contrast to the structuralist approach of
breaking down conscious experience into
elements, or focusing upon the structure, the
Gestalt school emphasized the significance of
studying any phenomenon in its overall form.
 Gestalt Laws of Organization

We tend to organize bits and pieces of information into

meaningful wholes through the following laws of
design:
1. Proximity: Close or nearer objects are perceived
and grouped together as coherent and related.
2. Similarity: Similar elements are visually grouped,
regardless of their proximity to each other. They
can be grouped by color, shape, or size.
Proximity
Similarity
 Gestalt Laws of Organization

3. Continuation: the human eye will follow the

smoothest path when viewing lines, regardless of
how the lines were actually drawn.
4. Closure: It is the perceptual tendency to fill in the
gaps and completing the contours enabling us to
perceive the disconnected parts as a whole.
5. Figure and Ground: the ability of the brain to process
the blank space, picking out the object from its
background
Continuity
Closure
Figure and Ground
Figure and Ground
 Gestalt Psychology

Kurt Koffka

• Wrote the famous book “Principles of Gestalt

Psychology” (1935)
• Asserted that people’s behavior is determined
by how they perceive the environment rather
than by the nature of the environment.
 Gestalt Psychology
Wolfgang Kohler
• Gave the concept of “insight” and “transposition”, as
a result of his observations of caged chimpanzees
and chickens
Insight = ability to visualize the problem and the
solution internally, in the mind’s eye leading to
innovations and inventions
Transposition = transfer of knowledge from one
situation to another on the basis of relationship
between two stimuli
 Gestalt Psychology

• The concept of Gestalt applies to everything,

objects, ideas, thinking processes and human
relationships. It is used in logos, designing and
illusions.
• Three German psychologists Max Wertheimer,
Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Kohler are regarded
as the founders of gestalt school as each one of
them has done significant work in his
respective field.