history

Ebbinghaus became the first psychologist to investigate learning and memory experimentally. In doing so, he not only showed that Wundt was wrong on that point but also changed the way in which association, or learning, could be studied.
His goal was nothing less than to apply the experimental method to the higher mental processes. Most likely influenced by the popularity of the work of the British associationists, Ebbinghaus chose to under- take his breakthrough research in the area of human learning.
Study of learning and memory began his study with the initial formation of the associations. In this way he could control the conditions under which the chains of ideas were formed and thus make the study of learning more objective.
Nonsense syllables, which revolutionized the study of learning.
Syllables presented in a meaningless series to study memory processes. wanted to use material that would be uni- formly unassociated, completely homogeneous, and equally unfamiliar—material with which there could be few, if any, past associations. T influenced by the popularity of the work of the British associationists, Ebbinghaus chose to under- take his breakthrough research in the area of human learning.
Ebbinghaus reasoned that the difficulty of learning material could be measured by this frequency; that is, by counting the number of repetitions needed for one perfect reproduction of the material. Here we see the influence of Fechner, who measured sensations indirectly by measuring the stimulus intensity necessary to produce a just noticeable difference in sensation.
Brentano
Whereas Wundt’s psychology was experimental, Brentano’s was empirical. According to Brentano, the primary method for psychology should be obser- vation, not experimentation, although he did not totally reject the experimental method.
Brentano opposed Wundt’s fundamental idea that psychology should study the content of conscious experience. He argued that the proper subject matter for psychology is mental activity, such as the mental action of seeing rather than the mental content of what a person sees. Thus, Brentano’s act psychology questioned the Wundtian view that mental processes involve contents or elements.
Act psychology: Brentano’s system of psychology, which focused on mental activities (e.g., seeing) rather than on mental contents (e.g., that which is seen).
Stumpf
Phenomenology: introspective method that examined experience as it oc- curred and did not try to reduce experience to elementary components. Also, an approach to knowledge based on an unbiased description of immedi- ate experience as it occurs, not analyzed or reduced to elements. proposed a philosophy of phenomenology, considered a precursor of Gestalt psychology he published a theory of emotion that attempted to reduce feelings to sensations, an idea relevant to con- temporary cognitive theories of emotion.
Kulpe
Imageless thought: Külpe’s idea that meaning in thought can occur without any sensory or imaginal component.
Wundt attempted to reduce conscious experience to its component parts; that is, to its sensations and images. All experience, Wundt stated, is composed of sensations and images. Yet the results of Külpe’s direct introspection of the thought pro- cesses supported the opposite viewpoint—that thought can occur without any sensory or imaginal content.
Titchener
Like Wundt, Titchener was praised as an outstanding teacher whose lectures were always well attended; often the halls were filled to overflowing. When Boring went to attend his first class by Titchener, he found students “spillin
Titchener, referred to Fechner as the father of exper- imental psychology
Titchener offered his own approach, which he called structuralism, yet claimed it represented psychology as set forth by Wundt. In reality, the two systems were radically different, and the label “structuralism” can properly be applied only to Titch- ener’s psychology.
In studying conscious experience, Titchener warned against committing what he called the stimulus error, which confuses the mental process with the object we are observing. For example, observers who see an apple and then describe that object as an apple—instead of reporting the elements of color, brightness, and shape they are experiencing—are guilty of committing the stimulus error. The object of our observation is not to be described in everyday language but rather in terms of the elementary conscious content of the experience.
Titchener posed three essential problems for psychology:
1. Reduce conscious processes to their simplest components.
2. 2. Determine laws by which these elements of consciousness were associated.
3. 3. Connect the elements with their physiological conditions.
Titchener defined three elementary states of consciousness: sensations, images, and affective states. Sensations are the basic elements of perception and occur in the sounds, sights, smells, and other experiences evoked by physical objects in our environment. Images are the elements of ideas, and they are found in the process that reflects experi- ences that are not actually present at the moment, such as a memory of a past experi- ence. Affective states, or affections, are the elements of emotion and are found in experiences such as love, hate, and sadness.
Darwin
harles Darwin proposed a theory of evolution changed the focus of the new psychology from the structure of consciousness to its functions. It was then inevitable that a func- tionalist school of thought would develop.
Psychologists realized that the study of animal behavior was vital to their understand- ing of human behavior, and they focused their research on the mental functioning of animals, thus introducing a new topic into the psychology laboratory.
Darwin told his friend Lyell that if he helped Wallace get his paper published, then all his years of hard work—and, more important, the credit for originating evolutionary theory—would be forfeited
Galton
Galton’s first important book for psychology was Hereditary Genius (1869). science of eugenics. Eugenics, he wrote, dealt with “questions bearing on what is termed in Greek, Eugenes, namely, good in stock, hereditarily endowed with no- ble qualities”
Mental tests: Tests of motor skills and sen- sory capacities; intelli- gence tests use more complex measures of mental abilities. the higher the intelligence, the higher the level of sensory functioning.
Romanes
he formed these somewhat startling opinions by collecting data by the anecdotal method defined as the use of observational, often casual, reports or narra- tives about animal behavior. Many of the reports Romanes accepted came from uncriti- cal, untrained observers, whose observations could be careless or biased.
Romanes derived his findings on animal intelligence from these anecdotal observa- tions through a curious and eventually discarded technique called introspection by analogy.
A technique for studying animal behavior by assuming that the same mental processes that occur in the observer’s mind also occur in the ani- mal’s mind.
Spencer
The philosophy that brought Herbert Spencer recognition and acclaim was Darwinism, the notion of evolution and the survival of the fittest.
Spencer argued that the development of all aspects of the universe is evolutionary, includ- ing human character and social institutions, in accordance with the principle of “survival of the fittest” (a phrase Spencer coined). It was this emphasis on what came to be called social Darwinism—applying the theory of evolution to human nature and society—that met with such enthusiasm in America.
Only the best would survive
Synthetic philosophy: Herbert Spencer’s idea that knowledge and experience can be ex- plained in terms of evolutionary principles.
James
the term “neurasthenia” and referred to the condition as a peculiarly American nervous- ness. He listed a variety of symptoms: insomnia, hypochondria, headache, skin rash, ner- vous exhaustion, and something called brain collapse (Lutz, 1991). James called the syndrome “Americanitis” (Ross, 1991).
During the 1875–1876 academic year, James taught his first psychology course, which he called “The Relations Between Physiology and Psychology.” Thus, Harvard became the first university in the United States to offer instruction in the new experimental psy- chology. James had never taken formal courses in psychology; the first psychology lec- ture he attended was his own. He asked the college for money to purchase laboratory and demonstration equipment for his classes and was given $300.
Stream of consciousness: William James’s idea that consciousness is a continuous flowing process and that any attempt to reduce it to elements will distort it.
Introspective observation is what we have to rely on first and foremost and always; the looking into our own minds and reporting what we there discover.
Although James did not make widespread use of the experimental method, he ac- knowledged it as an important path to psychological knowledge, primarily for psycho- physics research, the analysis of space perception, and research on memory.
James reversed the order. He stated that the arousal of the physical response precedes the appearance of the emotion, especially for what he termed “coarser” emotions such as fear, rage, grief, and love. For example, we see the wild animal, we run, and then we ex- perience the emotion of fear. “Our feeling of the [bodily] changes as they occur is the emotion” (James, 1890, Vol. 2, p. 449).
View of self
1. The material self consists of everything we call uniquely our own, such as our body, family, home, or style of dress.
2. The social self refers to the recognition we get from other people. James pointed out that we have many socialselves; we present different sides of ourselves to different people.
3. The third component, the spiritual self, refers to our inner or subjective being.
Whiton Calkins
Variability hypothesis: The notion that men show a wider range and variation of physi- cal and mental devel- opment than women; the abilities of women are seen as more average.
Calkins had never been allowed to enroll formally at Harvard University, but William James welcomed her to his seminars and urged the university to grant her the degree.
Harvard declined to grant a doctoral degree to a woman, even though Calkins’s examination (administered informally by James and other faculty members) was de- scribed as the “most brilliant examination for the Ph.D. that we have had at Harvard”
Harvard offered her a degree from Radcliffe College, which had been established by Harvard to provide undergraduate education for women. Calkins refused; she had completed the graduate degree requirements at Harvard, not Radcliffe. Harvard was discriminating against her only because she was a woman.

Edward Lee Thorndike

law of effect. When the situation occurs you act like it reoccurs.

Law of excersise; the more is used the more strongly the act becomes with that situation

Thompson wooley and stteter hollingworth]
The variability hypothesis, or the functional inequality of women (the notion that men were inherently intellectually superior to women).
Hollingworth data refuted the variability hypothesis and other notions of female inferiority.
Hall
Hall compiled an outstanding record of firsts in American psychology. He received the first American doctoral degree in psychology, and he claimed to be the first American student in the first year of the first psychology laboratory. (Later data of history reveal that he was the second; see Benjamin, Durkin, Link, Vestal, & Acord, 1992.) Hall began what is often considered to be the first psychology laboratory in the United States as well as the first American journal of psychology. He was the first president of Clark Univer- sity, the organizer and first president of the APA, and one of the first applied psychologists.
Recapitulation theory:
Hall’s idea that the psychological develop- ment of children re- peats the history of the human race.
Dewey
Reflex arc: The con- nection between sen- sory stimuli and motor responses.
Dewey was arguing that neither behavior nor conscious experience could be re- duced to elements, as Wundt and Titchener claimed to do. Thus, Dewey was attacking the core of their approaches to psychology. The proponents of the reflex arc argued that any unit of behavior ends with the response to a stimulus, such as when a child withdraws his or her hand from a flame

The functional psychologists, with their exclusive focus on consciousness, had no use for the unconscious mind, although James did admit to the notion of unconscious processes.
The task of functionalism is to discover how a mental process oper- ates, what it accomplishes, and under what conditions it occurs.
Functionalism encompasses all mind-body functions and recognizes no real distinction between mind and body. It considers them as belonging to the same or- der and assumes an easy transfer from one to the other.
Angell
James declared that simple sensations do not exist in conscious experience but exist only as the result of some convo- luted process of inference or abstraction. I
Angell suggested that because consciousness has survived, it must therefore perform some essential service for the organism.
Cattel
Cattell chose to conduct experiments on reaction time—the time required for different mental activities—and the results of this work reinforced his desire to become a psychologist. discover the nature of certain facts and relation- ships” (see Poffenberger, 1957, p. 139).
I felt myself making brilliant discoveries in science and philosophy. he discovered psychology, which he studied on his own.
Galton’s influence on Cattell that was responsible for the emphasis on statistics that came to characterize the new American psychology.
They examined a number of proposed tests, none of which was in general use, and selected as their basis the one prepared by Arthur S. Otis, who had studied with Terman. Otis’s most important contribution to testing was the multiple-choice type of question. The Yerkes group then prepared the Army Alpha and Army Beta. (The Beta is a version for non-English-speaking and illiterate people; instead of oral or written directions, instructions are given by demonstration or pantomime.) lewis Terman and adopted the concept of the in- telligence quotient (IQ). The IQ measure—defined as the ratio between mental age and chronological age—had originally been developed by the German psychologist William Stern. The Stanford-Binet has undergone several revisions and continues to be widely used.
Henry translated the IQ test

Lighner was the founder father of the first psychology clinic