Early Schools of Thought: Study with Video Lessons, Practice Problems & Examples

Structuralism

In this video, we're going to be talking about the birth of psychology. So psychology began with Wilhelm Wundt, and those W's are pronounced like these because he was German. So Wundt is considered the father of modern psychology. Just to give you some context and talk about some of his achievements, Wundt taught the first-ever psychology course at the University of Heidelberg. He also published the first-ever psychology textbook and he opened the first psychology research lab at the University of Leipzig in 1879.

So, just to kind of take a step back and really set the stage here, in the late 1800s, psychology did not exist as a field at all. Wundt and his students and followers really had to pioneer everything from the ground up. They had to figure out how to study humans in a lab, how to ask research questions, what aspects of the human experience to focus on, and how to develop theories to guide their research, all from scratch. What Wundt decided to study was the immediate conscious experience. When we say "conscious" here, we are talking about thoughts that you are aware of.

Any thought that you are aware of is a conscious thought. What Wundt meant by this "immediate conscious experience" is basically when a person has some kind of sensory experience—let's say they taste something, hear something, smell something—what are the immediate conscious thoughts that follow that event? That's what he wanted to study. Now, if that sounds strange to you, you are not alone. With our modern perspective and hindsight, it is quite a unique question to ask.

But what Wundt was doing was essentially modeling psychology off of existing sciences. When you think about biology, chemistry, or physics, those sciences often try to break things down into their building blocks to better understand them, and that's what Wundt was trying to do with human thought. He was trying to break it down into its most basic building blocks. There is an internal logic there; it just might not sound right from our modern perspective, but he had a good reason. Wundt's approach came to be known as structuralism.

Structuralism is the earliest school of thought that emerged in psychology. This approach to psychology tried to isolate and analyze the basic elements of thought. The most important founders to be aware of are, of course, Wilhelm Wundt himself, as well as one of his students, Edward Titchener, who did quite a bit of research in this field. The main question in structuralism is basically what happens in the mind when a person experiences something, such as a certain behavior or sensory experience.

To better understand that research question, Wundt and Titchener pioneered a new methodology called introspection. Introspection is an analysis of one's subjective experience. They would train lab assistants and participants to report on their moment-to-moment conscious experiences when they were presented with a stimulus. For example, they would have them bite into an apple and the person would report being crunchy, juicy, sweet, sour. Those were their sensory experiences and the order in which they happened. They would have them touch velvet or listen to a note from a piano and do the exact same thing. That was introspection.

You have probably already thought of the limitations of this approach, which is that every person's experience is unique. We are literally talking about people's subjective experiences, so because of that, results really can't be evaluated or generalized in any meaningful way. In terms of Wundt's actual research findings, history was not super kind—it doesn't really stand up to the test of time. However, when thinking about Wilhelm Wundt and structuralism, we are going to be acknowledging the historical contributions that he made.

He created psychology, made it into a credible science, turned it into a course being taught at universities, and established research laboratories. Structuralism has a place in history as the earliest school of thought to emerge in psychology.

Over the next few videos, we're going to be talking about how psychology began to evolve from this in the decades that followed. So, I will see you there. Bye-bye.

Early Schools of Thought Example 1

So this one asks us, which of the following research questions would a structuralist ask? So let's run through these and see what we're thinking. So a reads, what specific conscious thoughts happen in the mind when a person hears a song? And I think we got it in one, you guys, because I'm seeing words like what, conscious, and then the person is experiencing some kind of event. And this is very much how a structuralist would be thinking and posing a question.

Remember, what is happening in the mind when a person experiences X? And that's exactly what we're seeing here. So our answer is going to be a. Let's just run through b through d quickly to make sure that we understand why those are incorrect. So b is asking, why might it be evolutionarily advantageous for humans to feel emotions like guilt and shame?

So if we're thinking evolutionarily advantageous, that's probably almost guaranteed to be functionalism, not structuralism, so that's why b is incorrect. C is asking, how do a person's unconscious motives impact their behaviors? And if we're thinking about the unconscious, we're probably talking about Freud and his psychoanalytic theory, so c is incorrect. And then d is asking, how do humans process visual stimuli in coherent wholes? And that is a whole different domain of psychology called Gestalt psychology which you'll be learning about very soon.

So our answer here is going to be a. And there you go.

___________ is considered the Father of Psychology.

• A. Sigmund Freud.
• B. John Locke.
• C. William James.
• D. Wilhelm Wundt.

Functionalism

In this video, we're going to be talking about the second school of thought to emerge in psychology, which is functionalism. Functionalism began with William James, who is sometimes known as the father of American psychology. William James was an American scholar, and he was very fascinated by this new scientific field that was emerging. He actually went to Europe and met with Wilhelm Wundt and learned all about psychology, and James loved it. However, he did not like structuralism.

He thought that the idea of breaking our conscious experience down into building blocks was kind of a waste of time. James wanted to focus less on what the mind is doing and more on why it's doing it. He was very heavily inspired by Darwin's theory of natural selection, which was quite new at the time. If you're unfamiliar, the idea behind natural selection is that attributes that promote survival and reproduction become more prevalent in the population over time because individuals who have those attributes survive and reproduce, and so forth. James was thinking, well, if this applies to physical attributes like our opposable thumbs, for example, then it should also apply to mental processes and behavior, because presumably, those things also evolved, and if they have evolved, then they must be adaptive in some way.

This led to the rise of functionalism, which is an approach to psychology that emphasizes the adaptive significance of mental processes. They're trying to figure out why humans have this behavior, why we think in this way, how that would have been adaptive over time. The most important founders to be aware of are William James as well as James Roland Angell.

Angell was a very prolific researcher. He conducted a ton of research under functionalism. The main research question being asked here is how or why does a person do something, such as why do human beings have a bias toward fairness, or why do humans have color vision? Why would those things have evolved? What is their adaptive significance? The functionalists were a bit more creative than the structuralists in terms of methodology. Remember, those structuralists loved their introspection.

That was their main method, but functionalists really branched out and pioneered methodology for psychology. They used observation, experimentation, longitudinal studies, which involve studying the same group over time, as well as questionnaires. They also studied quite varied populations, including children, men, women, and people of all different age groups. Methodologically, they were quite varied and broad. If we had to think of a limitation for this perspective, it's that functionalism tended to overlook individual differences.

When thinking about the adaptive significance of a behavior, they looked at the most predominant behavior in a group of people and considered why that would have evolved over time, which is a perfectly valid research question in itself. However, this approach potentially loses the nuance of each individual in the sample. For example, all humans have memory—we can all remember things. This is a skill that evolved over time. However, different individuals might have very different strategies for how they remember things, illustrating their individual differences. So, you could lose that nuance in your research. Similarly, all humans cope with stress in some way, which is very adaptive, but different individuals might cope with stress in very diverse ways and both be successful.

Functionalism as a school of thought in itself is considered a historic perspective. You're not going to meet a functionalist anymore. However, the ideas of functionalism are very much alive and well in psychology. These ideas are very common in evolutionary psychology, but you'll also find these ideas even within other subfields of psychology. So even though functionalism itself is no longer its own school, the ideas behind functionalism are still prominent today.

Alright, that is William James and functionalism, and I will see you guys in our next video. Bye bye.

Early Schools of Thought Example 2

Okay. So this one asks us, which of the following research questions would a functionalist ask? So let's run through them and see what we're thinking. So A reads, "What happens in the mind when a human feels velvet?" And that's feeling very, like, structuralist to me.

Right? It's kind of like, what is the conscious experience during this event? Very structuralism, so we're going to cross that out. B reads, "What part of the brain is used for vision?" And that was just really not a main focus of the functionalists.

To be fair, it was the early 1900s, and they weren't exactly doing cutting-edge neuroscience. They had no neuroimaging techniques. So that was just not a main goal of functionalism at the time. So B is out. C reads, "How does the social environment, including culture, impact morality?"

That one's kind of tricky. So, you know, morality is something that a functionalist might be interested in. That's something that did have to evolve over time. But I'm also seeing a lot of emphasis on, like, social environment and culture, and that's not really something that functionalists were particularly known for. They weren't really taking into account, like, culture and things like that.

So we'll leave that blank and we'll see if D is fitting a little bit better. So D reads, "Why might it be evolutionarily advantageous for humans to feel emotions like guilt and shame?" And that is a beautiful functionalist question. So we are going to cross off C and we are going to circle D because it has that nice strong emphasis on the adaptive significance. You know, why was it evolutionarily advantageous for humans to have this thing or feel these emotions?

That is very classic functionalism there. So our answer is going to be D. And there you go.

Functionalism was heavily influenced by…

• A. The idea of philosophical materialism.
• B. Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection.
• C. John Locke’s theory that humans are born as blank slates.
• D. Ivan Pavlov’s original experiments demonstrating classical conditioning in dogs.

Psychoanalytic Perspective

Alright, so structuralism and functionalism were really more concerned with psychological research, but someone was about to come and shake everything up, so enter Sigmund Freud. Now, Sigmund Freud was a neurologist working in Austria, and he worked with patients who had been diagnosed with hysteria as well as other nervous disorders. And this was basically like a blanket diagnosis for anybody who had unusual symptoms, but they could not find a clear medical diagnosis for them, so they would all get lumped together under this, like, hysteria diagnosis. And while he was working with his patients, he came to believe that his patients had mental conflicts or childhood trauma that was buried in their unconscious. And the unconscious is a really important idea here.

So the idea behind the unconscious is basically that it's a part of our mind that we cannot consciously access. So we are unaware of the things that are in our unconscious is the idea. And Freud believed that these mental conflicts and childhood trauma that we can be distressed by something that we're not even really consciously aware of, or even the idea that mental distress can cause pretty severe physical symptoms, it's not really new to us today. It's almost, like, obvious to us. But at the time, this was a very novel idea.

This had never really been like medically documented in the Western world. So Freud was like pioneering over here, you know, way back then. So he basically what he would do with his patients is he would just talk to them, and he realized that the more that they were able to just discuss what they were feeling and what they were thinking and talk through these conflicts or traumas, he noticed that they began to have symptom reduction and they were actually getting better. And based on that, Freud developed psychoanalysis, which is a therapy that is designed to give people access to their unconscious. So basically, we'll talk about this in more detail in future chapters, but long story short, you talk and talk and talk a ton to your therapist until you are able to access this unconscious, and that will kind of unlock all of these mental conflicts or traumas, and you can bring it to the surface and talk through it.

So that's kind of the idea behind psychoanalysis. Now, Freud did not only do therapy, he also did some theoretical work, And so over time throughout his career, Freud developed the psychoanalytic theory. And this is an approach to psychology that emphasizes the influence of the unconscious, so we're seeing a common theme here, on thoughts and behaviors. So how are these conflicts and emotions that you have buried in your unconscious influencing the emotions and thoughts and behaviors that you are consciously aware of? And Freud applied his theory to better understand things like personality, human development, as well as to inform his clinical practice.

Now, when we're thinking about psychoanalytic theory or the psychoanalytic perspective more generally as a school of thought, Some important founders to be aware of are, of course, Sigmund Freud himself as well as Carl Jung and Alfred Adler are some names that you might see come up in relation to this perspective. And the main question that they were asking was, you know, how do unconscious motives and early childhood experiences influence well-being and behavior? So anytime you see the unconscious, especially in relation to early childhood, that's almost always going to be a Freud or a psychoanalytic thing. And then the main methodology here being psychoanalysis to help people tap into that unconscious. Now there is a big limitation here, which is that many of Freud's theories lack empirical evidence.

So we will talk about this in more detail in some upcoming chapters but just to kind of give you a little bit of insight, a lot of Freud's theories are just untestable premises which is not great for a scientific theory. Scientific theories should be testable. Right? So that's kind of a problem, and then some of the ones that are testable, you know, have not stood up to modern-day scientific testing. He does have some ideas that have been scientifically validated over time, and his therapeutic practices have been modified over the last few decades and are still used today.

So, you know, for better or worse, Freud had a really huge influence on the field of psychology, not only in the domain of therapy but also in personality and development, and we're going to be talking about him at several points throughout this course. So we're kind of stuck with him. Alright. So that is our little intro into Freud and the psychoanalytic perspective, and I will see you guys in the next one. Bye bye.

Early Schools of Thought Example 3

This one asks us which of the following statements best describes psychoanalytic theory? So rather than read through all of these verbatim, I'm just going to skim through and look for those keywords that we know tend to be associated with psychoanalytic theory, things like unconscious, mental conflicts, childhood trauma, etcetera. So skimming through, I'm seeing terms like development, we have adaptive significance, unconscious in c, and then neural mechanisms in d. So c reads, it's an approach to psychology that emphasizes the influence of the unconscious on mental processes, and that sounds like a beautiful description of psychoanalytic theory. So our answer here is going to be c.

Freud believed that a number of things could lead to hysteria (or hysteria-like symptoms). Which of the following concepts did Freud NOT focus on?

• A. Cultural context.
• B. Childhood trauma.
• C. Mental conflicts.
• D. Unconscious thoughts and desires.