Alright. So we just learned a lot of history, so let's just take a moment to kind of put it all together and talk about what contemporary psychology looks like. So here we have a nice little timeline that kind of shows all of these different perspectives or subfields. It starts in 1870 with the rise of structuralism and goes right through modern times and in this timeline, the solid lines are going to indicate when that field was popular or prominent, and then these dotted lines will indicate when that field was less prevalent. So, you can see some of our earlier theories just die out completely.
You can see we have some theories that just become less prevalent in modern times. You can see we have some theories that start off strong and just stay strong, things like cognitive psych, evolutionary psych, all of those. And you can see we have some that maybe started off a bit less prevalent or just, you know, things like the biological perspective where they just couldn't do research. They were limited by technology. Like we talked about, cultural psych was kind of being looked at in structuralism, Then obviously functionalists were interested in evolution, but those skills didn't really take off and become prominent until, like, the 80s or 90s.
So, that is our little timeline for those of you who enjoy visual depictions. Now, in terms of what contemporary psychology looks like, the main perspectives that are being used today include social psych, cognitive psych, neuroscience, developmental, evolutionary, and cultural psych. Now, I do want to be clear. I have a little asterisk here because there are more subfields of psychology, things like sports psychology, health psych, forensic psych—you name it. There are lots of, like, smaller subfields, but these are the main and largest subfields of psychology.
Now in terms of fields that are less prominent today but whose principles are still getting used, we have psychoanalysis. Some of the therapeutic techniques of psychoanalysis have been modified and are still used today. Behaviorism. This is actually many behaviorist techniques are also used in therapies nowadays, things like behavioral therapy or cognitive behavioral therapy. You'll also see a lot of behaviorism in, like, marketing, like, the psychology of marketing uses a lot of behaviorist principles.
Like we talked about, we're going to see a lot of Gestalt principles in research on sensation and perception. And then for humanism, a lot of humanistic therapy practices are still being used. And nowadays we actually have a subfield of psychology called positive psychology, which is distinct from humanism but kind of has its roots in some humanistic theories. And then finally, we have structuralism and functionalism, which are considered historical perspectives. However, they did clearly have an impact on the field because, like we talked about, Wilhelm Wundt was very interested in culture and obviously William James with functionalism was very interested in evolution.
So they certainly had a kind of trickle-down effect in psychology. Now, I have one little 'think like a psychologist' tip here because quite often students have this sort of instinctive and honestly, psychologists do this too, where they kind of want to pit these against each other and be like, well, which one is better? Like, which one is right? And honestly, all of these perspectives are important. Like we talked about, humans are infinitely complex and so it's important that we're thinking about, you know, how to understand behavior and cognitions and mental processes through multiple lenses and with multiple perspectives.
They know that's going to help us gain a more holistic and complete understanding of human psychology. So, you know, it is very true that you can show a social psychologist and a developmental psychologist and a cognitive psychologist the exact same behavioral phenomenon and they will probably explain it 3 completely different scientifically valid ways and none of them are going to be more right or more wrong than the other. And that type of ambiguity can frustrate students a little bit. Quite often they're just like, but what's the right answer?
And that is totally understandable, But my advice to you would be to embrace the ambiguity and just understand that each of these perspectives is just trying to examine human behavior through a different lens. The lens is not better or more accurate than a different perspective. They're just different, and that is very valuable and very necessary. So that is our little summary of the history of psychology and kind of where the field of psychology is at now, and I will see you guys in our next video. Bye bye.
