Edward B Titchener Research Paper

Structuralism
Tierra Axom
Brewton-Parker College
478-733-0108

Abstract

Structuralism
• Definition: The system in which psychologists used introspection to try to find the basic elements of adult, human consciousness.
• The study of the elements of consciousness.
• The structure of the mind
• Major Structuralist Thinkers:
1. Wilhelm Wundt

2. Edward B Titchener
 Born in the Roman established town of Chichester, South of England
 Not wealthy
 His father fought with the Confederate Army, returned to England, married, and died while in his 30s.
 Titchener’s intellectual gifts earned him scholarships first to Malvern College and then to Oxford.
 He won numerous of awards while attending Malvern; soon his professors were saying they were tired of seeing him.
 Titchener studied philosophy and the also the classics.
 He was also attracted to Darwinian biology and developed an interest in comparative animal psychology.
 Even attending Oxford, Titchener learned of Wundt’s new physiological psychology.
 While staying in Leipzig in 1890, Titchener roomed with Ernest Meumann: who was an educational psychologist before passing from influenza.
 Anytime Wundt would publish a book, Titchener would come behind him and republish his books in English.
 After receiving his PhD, he was offered a job at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
 Just like Wundt, Titchener ruled his laboratory with authority.
 Both Wundt and Titchener, other required their students to maintain a unified front. Also they would work with the students in pursing their goal of analyzing consciousness.
 Titchener believed in formal psychological gear and the need to equip his laboratory with standardized pieces.
 He adopted Wundt’s practice using experimental demonstrations in his elementary lectures, and of producing his lectures.
 For Titchener it would have been a great idea to keep a journal to express his views on what he considered true scientific psychology.
 But unlike Wundt, Titchener never achieved sole responsibility and ownership of a journal.
 In 1844, Titchener married the love of his life Sophie K. Bedlow.
 She provided priceless assistance in his laboratory and with drawings for his books.
 Countless of people considered Titchener as a male chauvinist, but that statement is weird to others; because most of his doctorate students are females. For example, he helped a student by the name of Celestia Suzannah Parrish learn about the new experimental psychology. Parrish established the first psychology in the south at R-MWC in Lynchburg, Virginia. She also published in psychology based on the work she did at Cornell. She after she moved from R-MWC to the chair in psychology and pedagogy at the State Normal School.
 Titchener is also the founder of the Experimentalists; and informal club of psychology laboratory directors. Within this club, the members were to meet annually to discuss their research with each other and with their most promising graduate students.
 To help those who were always traveling from German to America, Titchener published a German-English dictionary of psychological terms.
 Titchener thought of psychology as the science of the generalized, normal, human, and adult mind.
 He really did not care for the abnormal minds, animals’ minds, minds of the children, or individual minds; but he was interested in the mind of an idealized
sense.
 During most of his career, he devoted his time to identifying and describing the components of mindful experience.
 Titchener thought of Wundt’s distinction between immediate experience, and mediate experience makes psychology’s subject matter different from that of the natural sciences. By saying this, psychology can never be considered a natural science.
 “All human knowledge is derived from human experience,” Titchener (1910, p.6)
 Also Titchener would say that experience is based completely dependent on the person.
 Titchener’s subject were not just controlled experiences, they had to be dissect it.
 Psychology studies the elements in their dependence on a mind, whereas physics studies them independently (Danziger,1980)
 Titchener established three basic elements of consciousness: sensations, images, and affections or feelings. Sensations are the elements of perceptions and are the basis for everything else in the mind. Images are the elements of ideas, which arise when a particular sensation has been experienced previously. Just like Wundt, Titchener thought of feelings as three dimensions: pleasantness-unpleasantness, arousing-subduing, and strain-relaxation. He also notion that there were attributes: quality (allows us to differentiate sensations), intensity (refers to the strength of an experience, duration (length of an experience), clearness (refers to how much an experience stands out from the background against which it appears), and extent (gives an experience a spatial dimension that tells how spread the image or sensation is). Titchener related attention to, making it a quality of sensations, comparing it with clearness. Also with attention comes meaning, with both they cannot be directly observed. Titchener would say that,” meaning is something we attribute to our conscious experiences based on the context in which we experience them.”
 Soon after in 1915, he turned the five elements into two elements: sensations and feelings.
 At the time when Titchener was teaching he influenced countless of people. He actually influence Margaret Floy Washburn, also she attended Cornell where Titchener was a teacher. Washburn was actually the first female to receive a Ph.D. in psychology, and also stayed an active structuralist researcher in her career. In both 1921 and 1931, Washburn was elected the president of the APA and to the National Academy of Sciences.
• Structuralism appeared as the first school of thought and some of the ideas associated with the structuralist school were advocated by the founder of the first psychology lab, Wilhelm Wundt.
• Often associated with this school of thought despite the fact that it was his student Edward B. Titchener who first coined the term to describe this school of thought.
• Wundt’s work helped to establish psychology as a separate science and contributed methods to experimental psychology.
• He referred to his view of psychology as volunteerism.
• Focused on breaking down mental processes into the most basic components.
• Along with Wundt, one of his students by the name of Edward B. Tichener, he went deeper into to structuralism. Even though he broke away from some of Wundt, but in the end he named Structuralism.
• Just like the structuralist had strengths, contributions, and criticisms also the functionalist did too. Functionalism was the first uniquely American system of psychology. Their interest is in functioning of an organism in it environment. They influenced the behaviorism, and also applied it to psychology. Also they influenced the educational system, especially with the belief that children should learn at the level for which they are developmentally prepared. When it comes to the contribution of functionalism: the research on animal behavior became legitimized, able to study children, mentally retarded, and insane, and other methods of data collection legitimized; physiological research. The criticism from others came pretty hard towards them; Titchener said that functionalism is not psychology at all.
• Strengths
• Criticism:
1. Structuralism was too concerned with internal behavior.
2. The use of introspection led to a lack of reliability in results.