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In the fifth and sixth centuries, the Greeks had began to start studying human behavior and decided that people's lives were dominated by their own minds. -
French pilosopher, Rene Descartes, protested both Copernicus and Galilei's ideas by proposing that both the mind and body were connected. The mind controlled the body's movements, sensations, and perceptions. He was approaching the subject that the mind and body influence each other and create a person's experiences.
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Galton was a nineteenth century English mathematician and scientist that wanted understand how heredity can influence a persons abilities, character, and behavior. Through his research he learned that it is both a person's heredity and also that persons environment that interact to produce intelligence.
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Wilhelm Wundt helped take psychology to the next level by establishing that modern psychology as a separate formal field of study. He did this by creating the Laboratory of Psychology in Leipzig, Germany. Wundt was also trained in physiology, the study of how the body works, which was his real interest. He was what you called a structuralist, the interest in the basic elements of human experience.
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William James had many milestones in his life. He was able to write the first textbook on psychology titled, The Principles of Psychology. It took him twelve years to write.
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Russian physiologist, Ivan Pavlov, was leading the pioneering work that was opening a new course for psychological investigation. Those who investigated observable behaviors were known as behaviorists.
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Sigmund Freud was more interested in the unconscious mind while others were focused on the conscious mind. He believed that are conscious experiences weren't even half of things that can be explored from our mind. According to Freud, our unconscious motivations and conflicts are responsible for most human behaviors.
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In 1875, at Harvard University the first class in psychology was taught by William James. This gave him the title "father of psychology" here in the Unites States. -
In Leipzig, Germany, Wilhelm Wundt started the Laboratory of Psychology due to his efforts of pursuing the studies of human behavior in a "systematic and scientific" way. -
In this textbook James speculated that thinking, feeling, learning, and remembering, which are all activities of the mind. All together they have one major function: to help us as a species. -
A group of three German psychologists disagreed with the principles of structuralism and behaviorism. They argued that it is more perception than the sum of its parts. The psychologists studied how sensations are assembled into perceptual experiences. Due to their disagreement, their approach became a forerunner for cognitive approached. -
Cognitive psychology has continuously benefited form the contributions of people such as Jean Piaget, Noam Chomsky, and Leon Festinger. Cognitivists focus on how we process, tore, and use information and how it influences our mind. They believe behavior is more than a simple response to a stimulus but based on a variety of mental processes. -
As a reaction to behavioral psychology, humanistic psychology developed in the 1960s. With humanists, Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, and Rollo May they came together and described human nature as "evolving and self-directed." Compared to behaviorism and psychoanalysis, that humans are not controlled by events in our environment, instead any outside forces served as background to our own internal growth.