Science Seeks to answer questions about:

How & why we think as we do. How & why we feel as we do. How & why we act as we do.

Socrates (469-399 BCE) & Plato (428-348 BCE) The mind is separable from the body. The mind continues after the body dies. Knowledge is innate.

Aristotle (384-322 BCE) Knowledge does not preexist. Knowledge grows from the experiences

stored in our memories.

Rene Descartes (1595-1650) Agreed with Socrates & Plato.

The mind is distinct from the body & able to survive its death.

Innate ideas exist. Concluded that fluid in the brain’s cavities

contained “animal spirits” which flow from the brain through what we call nerves to the muscles, provoking movement.

John Locke (1632-1704) The mind at birth is a tabula rasa

(blank slate). Experience writes on the slate.

Francis Bacon (1561-1626) One of the founders of modern

science. Science became centered on

experiment, experience, and common-sense judgment.

Locke & Bacon’s ideas helped form modern empiricism.

Empiricism: the view that knowledge originates in experiences and that science should, therefore, rely on observation and experimentation.

Knowledge is Innate

The mind is a Tabula Rasa

Socrates Aristotle

Plato John Locke

Rene Descartes Francis Bacon

Psychology Birthday Event Visit www.cwu.edu/~warren/today.html Find out what important events happened

on your birthday.

Psychology’s First Experiment (1879) Wilhelm Wundt

Created a machine that measured the time lag between people hearing a ball hit a platform and pressing a telegraph key.

People responded in 0.1 of a second when asked to press the key as soon as the sound occurred.

People responded in 0.2 of a second when asked to press the key as soon as they were consciously aware of perceiving the sound.

Edward Bradford Titchener Aimed to discover the structural elements

of the mind. His method was to engage people in self-

reflective introspection, training them to report elements of their experience.

structuralism.

Challenges of Structuralism Required verbal people. Unreliable – results varied from person to

person & experience to experience. Sometimes we just don’t know why we feel

what we feel or do what we do.

William James Assumed thinking, like smelling,

developed because it was adaptive – contributed to our ancestors’ survival.

Consciousness Serves as a function. Enables us to consider our past, adjust to our

current circumstances, and plan our future. functionalism.

What if in June you were told you would not receive your diploma, even though you completed all the coursework and passed state tests?

Mary Whiton Calkins Despite Harvard’s objections, James

admitted her into his graduate seminar. All other students (men) dropped out. James tutored Calkins alone. After finishing all requirements for a

Harvard Ph.D. and outscoring all the male students on the qualifying exams, Harvard denied her the degree she had earned.

Mary Whiton Calkins Instead she was offered a degree from

Radcliffe College, an undergraduate sister school for women.

Calkins resisted the unequal treatment & refused.

Went on to become the first female president of the American Psychological Association.

Margaret Floy Washburn First woman to receive a Ph.D. in

psychology.

Rooted in philosophy and biology.

Early Psychologists Ivan Pavlov – learning Sigmund Freud – personality Jean Piaget - children

Prior to the 1920s Focus on inner sensations, images, and

feelings; consciousness and emotion; and how childhood experiences and unconscious thought processes affect our behavior.

Psychology defined as “the science of mental life”

1920s-1960s Rise of behaviorism which defined psychology

as “the scientific study of observable behavior”

1960s and Beyond Emergence of humanistic psychology in

response to Freudian psychology & behaviorism.

Pioneered by Carl Rogers & Abraham Maslow. Emphasized the importance of current

environmental influences on our growth potential, the importance of having our needs for love and acceptance satisfied, and healthy people.

1960s and Beyond continued Cognitive Revolution

Emergence of cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience which explores how our mind perceives, processes, and retains information

To encompass psychology’s concern with observable behavior AND with inner thoughts and feelings, today we define psychology as the science of behavior and mental processes.

Behavior = any action we observe & record Mental Processes = internal subjective

experiences we infer from behavior

Psychology is less a set of findings than a way of asking and answering questions.

Charles Darwin Proposed the evolutionary

process of natural selection: nature selects the traits that best enable organisms to survive and reproduce in a particular environment.

Are our human traits born within us or do they develop through experience?

Nurture works on what nature endows.

Every psychological event (every thought, every emotion) is simultaneously a biological event.