Introduction to psychology

Psychology is the scientific study of behaviour and cognitive processes. By behaviour, psychologists
mean the overt activities such as facial expressions. Similarly, by cognitive processes, psychologists
mean to all the internal mental processes, such as, thinking, problem solving, decision making etc, in
short, covert activities.

History of psychology:

Historically, the study of psychology is divided into two approaches to understand the mind and
behaviour.

1. Philosophy: philosophy seeks to understand the general nature of many ascepts of the world.
Philosophers like Plato, Aristotle and Rene Descartes tried to understand human mind and its
connection with physical body.
2. Physiology: physiology seeks a scientific study of life sustaining functions in living matter,
through empirical methods. Medical doctors and physiologist wonder about the physical
connection between mind and body.

Both of these finding led to the emergence of new field called psychology.

William Wundt is one who developed psychology as a discipline by making first psychological
laboratory at the university of Leipzig, Germany, in the year 1879. He is often called as the father
of experimental psychology and also the father of psychology because he separated psychology
from philosophy.

School of thoughts among psychology:

1. Structuralism:

It seeks to understand the structure of mind and its perception by analysing these perceptions into
constituent components such as attention, affection, memory, sensation and etc.

Wundt contributed into the development of structuralism, and some psychologists often sees him as
the father of structuralism whereas others see Edward Titchener as the father of structuralism.

Objective introspection: wundt believe that consciousness, the state of being aware of external
events, could be broken down into non-living pieces like thoughts, experiences, emotion, and other
basic elements. In order to introspect them, one needs to learn to think objectively about their own
thoughts. He named this process as objective introspection, it is a process which objectively examine
and measures one’s own thoughts and mental activities. The introduction to introspection as an
experimental method was an important change in the field of psychology because the main
emphasis in the study of the mind shifted from a rationalist approach towards an empirical
approach. The methods of introspection have some challenges associated with it –

1. People may not be able to say exactly what goes through their mind or may not be able to
put it into adequate works.
2. What people say may not be accurate.
3. The fact that people are asked to pay attention to their thoughts or to speak out loud while
they are working on a task may itself alter the processes that are going on.

Rationalism vs Empiricism:
Rationalist believe that the route to knowledge is through thinking and logical analysis. Hence, does
not need any experiments to develop new knowledge, whereas empiricist believe that we acquire
knowledge via empirical evidences- that is, evidence through experience and observation.

Rationalism is important in theory development whereas empiricism directly leads to empirical

investigation of psychology.

2. Functionalism:

It seeks to understand what people do and why they do it. It is strongly influenced by Darwin's
theory of natural selection, its proponents argued that since consciousness is a uniquely human
characteristics it must serves important functions for us – otherwise it would never has evolved.

With these thoughts in mind William James and other functionalist focused on understanding the
functions of consciousness- how it helped human beings cope with the challenging and changing
would around them.

3. Psychoanalysis:

Developed by Sigman Freud. He was neurologist, who came with the concept of unconscious mind in
the field psychology. His theory was named as psychoanalytical theory, which contains many ascepts
like – structure of personality – id, ego, superego which works of pleasure principle, reality principle,
and ideal principle. Later, his daughter, Anna Freud, expanded his theory, by adding concepts related
to child development – psychosexual stages of development – oral, anal, phallic, latency and genital.

Freud had many followers such as Eric Erickson, who also contributed in the field of personality and
developmental psychology by his theory.

The development of psychoanalytic theory plays a major role in the history of psychology. Till today,
many psychologists agreed with him and this theory later, helped in the psychotherapy.

Many more concepts was introduced by Freud like, free association, dream analysis, defence
mechanisms.

4. Behaviourism:

Behaviourism mainly focused on observable behaviour. It also suggests that behaviour can be change
and individual learn them through observation or either accidently. Many researchers contributed in
the development of behaviourism, such as Watson, Ivan Pavlov, Skinner etc. experiemnets like littlw
albert was conducted during this period, which states how we learn behaviour, how we can change
them and so on. Many therorists came up with the theories like – classical conditioning, operant
conditioning, observable learning, etc.

Classical conditioning means, learning to make an involuntary response to a stimulus other than the
original, natural stimulus that normally produces it.

Goals of psychology:

There are 5 goals of psychology:

1. Description
2. Prediction
3. Explanation
4. Control
5. Application

Issues in psychology

1. Stability vs Instability
2. Nature vs Nurture
3. Rationality vs Irrationality

Major Perspective of Psychology:

1. Biological
2. Behavioural
3. Psychoanalytical
4. Cognitive
5. Socio-cultural

THIS CONCEPTS ARE GIVEN IN BARON PSYCHOLOGY