COLLEGE OF HUMANIES, SOCIAL AND BEHAVIOURAL SCIENCES
DEPARMENT OF GRADUATE COUNSELLING PSYCHOLOGY
Assignment:
Presentation: The Rise of Experimental Psychology
Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Course:
PSYC706: HISTORY AND SYSTEMS OF PSYCHOLOGY
By:
Ackeem Salmon
To:
Cheryl Thompson, Ph.D.
April 7, 2015
What is Experimental Psychology?
The phrase “experimental psychology” refers to a specific methodological approach to the study of psychology as well as to several specific areas of research within psychology which predominantly use experimental methods. Experimental psychology involves the collection of reliable and quantifiable behavioral data. Often empirical tests are conducted under controlled conditions in order to study a particular psychological phenomenon or to test hypotheses concerning that phenomenon
History of Experimental Psychology
Scientific psychology began as a physiological psychology born of a marriage between the philosophy of mind, on the one hand, and the experimental phenomenology that arose within sensory physiology on the other. Philosophical psychology, concerned with the epistemological problem of the nature of knowing mind in relationship to the world as known, contributed fundamental questions and explanatory constructs; sensory physiology and to a certain extent physics contributed experimental methods and a growing body of phenomenological facts (Boring, 1950 as quoted in Hergenhahn and Henley, 2014). In one version of this story that can be traced back at least to Ribot (1879) as quoted in (Hergenhahn and Henley, 2014) the epistemology of the 17th and 18th centuries culminated in the work of Kant, who denied the possibility that psychology could become an empirical science on two grounds. First, since psychological processes vary in only one dimension, time, they could not be described mathematically. Second, since psychological processes are internal and subjective, Kant
References: Benjamin, L. T. (2010). A History of psychology: Original and contemporary research. MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Hergenhahn, B.R and Henley, T. B. (2014). An Introduction to the History of Psychology 7th Ed. USA: Cengage Learning.