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The Greeks
During the 5th and 6th centuries BCE, the Greeks began to study human behavior. They made assumptions that maybe our behavior had less to do with the Gods and more to do with what we thought. They set the stage for the development of many different sciences, including Psychology. -
Feb 8, 1550
Nicolaus Copernicus
During this time, Nicolaus Copernicus published the idea that the Earth was not the center of the universe, and that the sun was actually in the center. This also has significance to what Galileo discovered. -
Feb 8, 1570
Galileo Galilei
Used a telescope to confirm predictions about star position and movement based on Copernicus's work. This was when we began to refine the concept of experimentation through observation. -
Dualism
The idea that the mind and body are separate and distinct, an idea orignially made popular by 17th century philosophers. -
Rene Descartes
He disagreed with the idea of dualism, instead suggesting that there was a link between the mind and the body. He said that the mind controlled the body's movements, sensations, and perceptions, thus prooving that they influence each other through a link. -
Inheritable Traits (Sir Francis Galton)
Sir Francis Galton was an English mathematician and scientist who want to understand how heredity influences a person's abilities, character, and behavior. He traced people's family trees, and realized that greatness ran in the family. He believed that a great environment produces great people, while poor environment create the dredges of society. This is the study of inheritable traits the Sir Francis Galton created. -
Structuralism (Wilhelm Wundt)
Wilhelm Wundt was a German psychologist who created the first Laboratory of Psychology. He is known as the person who established modern psychology as a separate, formal field of study. Stuctualism focuses on the basic elements of human experience. -
Functionalism (William James)
William James taught the first class in psychology at Harvard University in 1875. He is often called the "Father of Psychology" in the United States. It took him 12 years to write the first psychology book entitled, "The Principles of Psychology". Functionalism is the psychological study of how mental processes help animals and people adapt to their environment. -
Gestalt Psychology (Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Kohler, Kurt Koffka)
Gestalt psychology was created by a group of German psychologists that disagreed with the principles of structuralism and behaviorism. They thought perception was a sum of its parts, that it involves a whole pattern (Gestalt). They studied how sensations are assembled into perceptual experiences. -
Psychoanalytical Psycholgoy (Sigmund Freud)
Sigmund Freud was very interested with the unconscious mind. He believed that our conscious experiences were only the tip of the iceberg, and that in our subconsious lay the primitive biological urges that are in conflict with society and morality. He thought these urges were responsible for most of human behavior. He developed free association, where a patient said everything that came to mind even if it was absurd or irrelevant. This is what psychoanalytical psychology was all about. -
Behavioral Psychology (Ivan Pavlov)
Ivan Pavlov was a Russian physiologist who taught a dog to salivate at the sound of a tuning fork. The tuning fork was the stimulus that coaxed the reflex of salivation. This is what behavioral psychology is all about. These behaviorists study the observable behaviors of humans. They were only concerned with the physical, not the congnitive. -
Cognitive Psychology (Jean Piaget, Noam Chomsky, Leon Festinger)
These psychologists focused on how we process, store and use information and how it influences us. They believed that our behavior is influenced by a variety of mental processes, including perceptions, memories and expectations. -
Humanistic Psychology (Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, Rollo May)
These psychologists described their way of thinking as how human nature evolves and how it is self-directed. It is a different way of thinking because it doesn't believe that humans are being controlled by events in the environment or by unconscious forces. -
Biological Psychology
Psychobiologists study how the brain, the nervous system and horomones and genetics influence our behavior. They rely mostly on medical advancements such as Pet and CAt scans to determine things about human behavior. -
Sociocultural Psychology
It is the newest approach to psychology, involving the study of te influence of cultural and ethnic similarites and differences on behavior and social functioning. They also study the impact and integration of the immigrants that come to America each year. They are mostly concerned with issues such as gender and socioeconomic status and how these things impact our behavior.