I. Intro to AP Psychology
Why take AP Psychology? See which one works for you.....
The course you are about to spend the next nine months on, Advanced Placement Psychology, will cover scores of different topics in Psychology (about one a week until May) touching on every main area there is. The good news is that if you despise a particular topic, the pain will not last long. The bad news is that if you fancy (don't you just love that word) an area, you will be forced to move on to the next hurdle in this sprint to the AP Exam. That is the nature of AP Psychology which is modeled after the typical Introduction to Psychology class you would take at any college from Yale University to Georgia Highlands College. Every psychology course after the introductory class is simply a more in depth look at a topic you briefly covered in the introductory course. For example, we will spend two weeks learning about psychological disorders, but when you get to college you have the option of taking a semester long class covering those same disorders in more depth. I will not bombard you with busy work throughout the year. I hated doing busy work as a student and, frankly, I hate grading it as a teacher. Everything we do will be geared toward you making the best possible score you are capable of on the AP Exam. So, let's get started... One way to think about the history of psychology is to organize the various theorists and theories into “waves” (or schools of thought). Each wave is a way of thinking about human thought and behavior that dominated the field for a certain period of time until a new way of looking at psychology started to dominate the field. Wave One—Introspection Archaeologists and historians find evidence that humans have always thought about our thought and behavior, so in a way, the study of psychology is as old as our species. Archaeologists find evidence of trephination—Stone Age humans carving holes through the skull to release evil spirits. Greek philosophers such as Plato and Democritus theorized about the relationship between thought and behavior. However, thinking about psychology is different than studying it scientifically. Many psychologists specializing in the history of the science date the beginning of scientific psychology to the year 1879. In that year, Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) set up the first psychological laboratory in an apartment near the university at Leipzig, Germany. Wundt trained subjects in introspection—the subjects were asked to record accurately their cognitive reactions to simple stimuli. Through this process, Wundt hoped to examine basic cognitive structures. He eventually described his theory of structuralism—the idea that the mind operates by combining subjective emotions and objective sensations. In 1890, William James (1842–1910) published The Principles of Psychology, the science’s first textbook. James examined how these structures Wundt identified function in our lives (James’s theory is called functionalism). Another early pioneer in the new science of psychology was Mary Whiton Calkins (1863–1930), who studied with William James and went on to become president of the American Psychological Association. Margaret Floy Washburn (1871–1939) was the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in psychology. Another student of William James, G. Stanley Hall (1844– 1924), pioneered the study of child development and was the first president of the American Psychological Association. Introspective theories were important in establishing the science of psychology, but they do not significantly influence current psychological thinking. Wave Two—Gestalt Psychology While Wundt and James were experimenting with introspection, another group of early psychologists were explaining human thought and behavior in a very different way. Gestalt psychologists like Max Wertheimer (1880–1943) argued against dividing human thought and behavior into discrete structures. Gestalt psychology tried to examine a person’s total experience because the way we experience the world is more than just an accumulation of various perceptual experiences. Gestalt theorists demonstrated that the whole experience is often more than just the sum of the parts of the experience. A painting can be represented as rows and columns of points of color, but the experience of the painting is much more than that. Therapists later incorporated gestalt thinking by examining not just a client’s difficulty but the context in which the difficulty occurs. Like the introspective theories, other than the contribution to specific forms of therapy and the study of perception, Gestalt psychology has relatively little influence on current psychology. Wave Three—Psychoanalysis If you ask someone to name a famous psychologist, he or she will most likely name Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). Freud revolutionized psychology with his psychoanalytic theory. While treating patients for various psychosomatic complaints, Freud believed he discovered the unconscious mind—a part of our mind over which we do not have conscious control that determines, in part, how we think and behave. Freud believed that this hidden part of ourselves builds up over the years through repression—the pushing down into the unconscious events and feelings that cause so much anxiety and tension that our conscious mind cannot deal with them. Freud believed that to understand human thought and behavior truly, we must examine the unconscious mind through dream analysis, word association, and other psychoanalytic therapy techniques. While many therapists still use some of Freud’s basic ideas in helping clients, Freud has been criticized for being unscientific and creating unverifiable theories. Freud’s theories were and are widely used by various artists. Many of Freud’s terms moved from being exclusively used by psychologists to being used in day-to-day speech (for example, defense mechanism). Wave Four—Behaviorism John Watson (1878–1958) studied the pioneering conditioning experiments of Ivan Pavlov (1849– 1936). Watson then declared that for psychology to be considered a science, it must limit itself to observable phenomena, not unobservable concepts like the unconscious mind. Watson along with others wanted to establish behaviorism as the dominant paradigm of psychology. Behaviorists maintain that psychologists should look at only behavior and causes of behavior—stimuli (environmental events) and responses (physical reactions)—and not concern themselves with describing elements of consciousness. Another behaviorist, B. F. Skinner (1904–1990), expanded the basic ideas of behaviorism to include the idea of reinforcement—environmental stimuli that either encourage or discourage certain responses. Skinner’s intellectual influence lasted for decades. Behaviorism was the dominant school of thought in psychology from the 1920s through the 1960s. Wave Five—Multiple Perspectives or Eclectic Currently, there is no one way of thinking about human thought and behavior that all or even most psychologists share. Many psychologists describe themselves as eclectic—drawing from multiple perspectives. As psychology develops in the new century, perhaps one way of thinking will become dominant. For now, though, psychologists look at thought and behavior from multiple perspectives. |
Vocabulary to Learn Today
Psychology Introspection Structuralism Functionalism |
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