What Event Defined The Start Of Scientific Psychology?
Prologue: The Story of Psychology Flashcards The most outstanding event defining the founding of scientific psychology was Wilhelm Wundt’s opening of the University of Leipzig psychology laboratory in 1879. The new science of psychology was soon organized into different schools of thought, including structuralism (founded by Edward Bradford Titchener, using introspection to explore the elemental structure of the human mind) and functionalism (founded by American William James, focusing on how mental and behavioral processes enable organisms to adapt, survive, and flourish).
- James also wrote an important psychology textbook, completed in 1890.
- Psychology’s three major levels of analysis are the biological, psychological, and social-cultural, the biopsychosocial approach.
- The complementary insights of psychologists studying behavior and mental processes from the neuroscience, evolutionary, behavior genetics, psychodynamic, behavioral, cognitive, and social-cultural perspectives offer a richer understanding than could usually be gained from any one viewpoint alone.
Psychology’s subfields encompass basic research (often done by biological, developmental, cognitive, personality, and social psychologists), applied research (sometimes conducted by industrial/organizational psychologists), and clinical science and applications (the work of counseling psychologists and clinical psychologists).
Contents
What event started scientific psychology?
1879. Wilhelm Wundt opens first experimental laboratory in psychology at the University of Leipzig, Germany. Credited with establishing psychology as an academic discipline, Wundt’s students include Emil Kraepelin, James McKeen Cattell, and G. Stanley Hall.
When did scientific psychology begin?
History and Origin of Science of Psychology Read this essay to learn about the history and origin of science of psychology! Psychology did not emerge directly as a science. It started as a branch of philosophy and continued for about 2000 years before emerging as a science.
Psychology began as a result of curiosity of cosmologists to understand about the mystic experiences and activities of people and events. These include their experiences in life, dreams, materialistic life, the urges they have and peculiarities in behaviours of people in different situations. The term psychology was first encountered in philosophical books of the 16th century.
It was formed from two Greek words ‘Psyche’ (soul) and ‘logos’ (doctrine). By soul, was meant the principle underlying all the phenomena of mental and spiritual life. The modern ideas about mind and its functioning were derived from Greek philosophy. One of the first stones in the foundation of psychology as a science was laid by the ancient Greek physician Alcmaeon in 6th century BC, who proposed that, ‘mental life is a function of the brain’.
This idea provides a basis to understand human psyche even today. The other notable Greek philosophers are Hippocrates (460-370 BC), Socrates (469-399 BC), Plato (428/ 7-348 BC) and Aristotle (384-322 BC). Hippocrates known as the father of medicine classifies people, into 4 types on the basis of body humors, viz., Sanguine (blood), Melancholic (black bile), Choleric (yellow bile) and Phlegmatic (phlegm).
Socrates recognised mind also in addition to soul. He had analysed the activities of mind in the form of thinking, imagination, memory and dreams. Further, his pupils Plato and Aristotle strengthened and continued the idea of Socrates. However, they did not have much belief in the existence of soul.
- So they stressed reasoning ability of man and called human being as a rational animal.
- Plato was more interested to know the role of mind in controlling human behaviour.
- He was the progenitor of dualism in psychology.
- He regarded material and spiritual substances, the body and mind as two independent and antagonistic principles, but he could not clarify his doubt satisfactorily.
Plato’s dualism was largely overcome by his pupil Aristotle who reunited psychological thought with natural studies and restored its close links with biology and medicine. He forwarded the idea of the inseparability of soul and the living body. He hypothesized that mind is the result of psychological activities and said it is necessary to understand psychological processes including the activities of sense organs which help the individual to experience his environment.
This assumption was accessible for verification because of its scientific base. It is true that the brain controls our conscious experiences and behaviour. Then came a French philosopher Rene Descartes (1596-1650), who postulated the existence of soul as a separate entity which is independent of body.
He said our body is like an automobile engine which will carry on its work without the supervision of soul and hence the body and soul are separate. He declared that man has a dual nature viz., mental and physical. By this way clarified the doubt raised by Plato.
- He asserted that the process of doubting is the proof for existence of soul.
- Cogito ergo sum -1 think, therefore I am).
- In other words the soul must exist in me, because I can think, and thinking is the main function of soul.
- Gradually as the scientific outlook was developed, philosophy started losing its prominence, so also soul.
Then psychology was defined as the ‘the study of mind’. The word mind was less mysterious and vague than soul and hence this definition was continued for some time. Psychology came into being as a scientific discipline by the establishment of first Institute of Psychology in 1879 at Leipzig in Germany by Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920).
- It is here the first professional psychologists acquired the skills of experimental work to study the mind.
- Wundt focussed his experiments as conscious experiences and he replaced the concept of mind with consciousness.
- He adopted the method of ‘Introspection’.
- As the time elapsed, the development of Psychology as an independent science got impetus.
Psychologists started discarding the different methods and approaches based on speculation and attempted to provide scientific base to the subject. These efforts resulted in the emergence of different schools of thought like Structuralism, Functionalism, Behaviorism, Gestaltism, Psychoanalysis, Humanistic school, etc.
What event in the history of psychology marked the birth of scientific psychology?
19th Century – In the 19th century, psychology was established as an empirical, accepted science. While measures would change, the model of research and evaluation would begin to take shape within this 100-year time span.
- 1878 : G. Stanley Hall becomes the first American to earn a Ph.D. in psychology.
- 1879 : Wilhelm Wundt establishes the first experimental psychology lab in Leipzig, Germany dedicated to the study of the mind.
- 1883 : G. Stanley Hall opens the first experimental psychology lab in the U.S. at Johns Hopkins University.
- 1885 : Herman Ebbinghaus publishes his seminal “Über das Gedächtnis” (“On Memory”), in which he describes learning and memory experiments he conducted on himself.
- 1886 : Sigmund Freud begins offering therapy to patients in Vienna, Austria.
- 1888 : James McKeen Cattell becomes the first professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. He would later publish “Mental Tests and Measurements,” marking the advent of psychological assessment.
- 1890 : William James publishes “Principles of Psychology.” Sir Francis Galton establishes correlation techniques to better understand the relationship between variables in intelligence studies.
- 1892 : G. Stanley Hall forms the American Psychological Association (APA), enlisting 26 members in the first meeting.
- 1896 : Lightner Witmer establishes the first psychology clinic in America.
- 1898 : Edward Thorndike develops the Law of Effect,
Who started scientific psychology?
Learning Objectives – By the end of this section, you will be able to:
Understand the importance of Wundt and James in the development of psychology Appreciate Freud’s influence on psychology Understand the basic tenets of Gestalt psychology Appreciate the important role that behaviorism played in psychology’s history Understand basic tenets of humanism Understand how the cognitive revolution shifted psychology’s focus back to the mind
Psychology is a relatively young science with its experimental roots in the 19th century, compared, for example, to human physiology, which dates much earlier. As mentioned, anyone interested in exploring issues related to the mind generally did so in a philosophical context prior to the 19th century.
Who was the first scientific psychology?
| Wilhelm Wundt | |
|---|---|
| Wilhelm Wundt in 1902 | |
| Born | 16 August 1832 Neckarau near Mannheim, Grand Duchy of Baden, German Confederation |
| Died | 31 August 1920 (aged 88) Großbothen, Saxony, Germany |
| Education | University of Heidelberg ( MD, 1856) |
| Known for | Experimental psychology Cultural psychology Structuralism Apperception |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Experimental psychology, Cultural psychology, philosophy, physiology |
| Institutions | University of Leipzig |
| Thesis | Untersuchungen über das Verhalten der Nerven in entzündeten und degenerierten Organen (Research of the Behaviour of Nerves in Inflamed and Degenerated Organs) (1856) |
| Doctoral advisor | Karl Ewald Hasse |
| Other academic advisors | Hermann von Helmholtz Johannes Peter Müller |
| Doctoral students | James McKeen Cattell, G. Stanley Hall, Oswald Külpe, Hugo Münsterberg, Ljubomir Nedić, Walter Dill Scott, George M. Stratton, Edward B. Titchener, Lightner Witmer |
| Influences | Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, Gustav Theodor Fechner, Johann Friedrich Herbart |
| Influenced | James Mark Baldwin, Emil Kraepelin, Sigmund Freud, Moritz Schlick |
Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt (; German: ; 16 August 1832 – 31 August 1920) was a German physiologist, philosopher, and professor, known today as one of the fathers of modern psychology, Wundt, who distinguished psychology as a science from philosophy and biology, was the first person ever to call himself a psychologist,
He is widely regarded as the “father of experimental psychology “. In 1879, at the University of Leipzig, Wundt founded the first formal laboratory for psychological research. This marked psychology as an independent field of study. By creating this laboratory he was able to establish psychology as a separate science from other disciplines.
He also established the first academic journal for psychological research, Philosophische Studien (from 1883 to 1903) (followed by another: Psychologische Studien, from 1905 to 1917), to publish the institute’s research. A survey published in American Psychologist in 1991 ranked Wundt’s reputation as first for “all-time eminence” based on ratings provided by 29 American historians of psychology.
When and where did psychology begin as a natural science?
Near the middle of the eighteenth century, Krueger, Godart, and Bonnet proposed approaching the mind with the techniques of the new natural science. At nearly the same time, Scottish thinkers placed psychology within moral philosophy, but distinguished its ‘physical’ laws from properly moral laws (for guiding conduct).
Where was the first psychology lab who started it when was it started?
1902 – The First Psychology Lab in Florida – This lab was very well equipped for an institution of this size, and it joined the other laboratories located on the second floor of the College Hall building. The 1902 Catalogue asserts that the lab established here by H. Where did we stand in the establishment of psychology laboratories in the national perspective? The 1st psychology lab in the U.S.A. was established in 1883 at Johns Hopkins University by G. Stanley Hall. By 1893, it is said that there were 20 psychology laboratories in American colleges and Universities (twice as many as in Europe), and by 1904 that number had increased to 49.
Who defined psychology as the scientific study?
William James developed a functionalist approach to the study of the human mind. According to him ‘Psychology is the study and science of mind’.
Who was the first scientific psychological researcher and why?
Why was Wilhelm Wundt considered the first scientific researcher?.
Why was Wilhelm Wundt considered the first scientific researcher? ResponsesWundt insisted observable behavior should be the goal of psychology since its measurement was objective.Wundt was the first person to study the mind in an academic setting.Wundt was a student of Ivan Pavlov, who insisted that research must be conducted in a laboratory.Wundt conducted experiments on reaction time using introspection in a psychology laboratory.Wundt formulated the first psychological theory, called functionalism, that became the basis of modern psychology.
: Why was Wilhelm Wundt considered the first scientific researcher?.
Who is the parent of scientific psychology?
Sigmund Freud – Dr. Sigmund Freud was known for his work in human physiology. He is famous in the field of physiological psychology. He probably thought of himself as the original Founding Father of Psychology, and many other people would agree. His is a name that most people have at least heard once or twice before ever stumbling into their first introduction to psychology course.
He actually began his career as a biologist and physiologist in Vienna. He was one of the first documented scientists to manifest his intense curiosity for the human mind and the observable behaviors it produces. His approach to psychology was deep with frequent analysis of people’s past traumas. He then connected these experiences with present problematic behaviors.
He then assisted patients in resolving said traumas to eliminate said behavioral responses.
Who wrote the first psychology?
Who Was Psychology’s First True Genius? Here’s a one-item test: “Who founded the science of psychology?” One possible answer would be “William James,” who wrote the first psychology textbook, Principles of Psychology, in 1890. You would get a few more points for answering “Wilhelm Wundt.” Indeed, Wundt started the first formal laboratory in 1879, at the University of Leipzig, and William James was initially inspired to study psychology when he read one of Wundt’s papers in 1868, whilst visiting Germany.
- But Wundt himself had started his as a lab assistant to the man I would nominate as psychology’s first true genius: Hermann Helmholtz.
- Helmholtz made at least two great contributions to modern psychology: 1.
- He was the first to measure the speed of a impulse.
- In doing so, Helmholtz completely overturned the previous assumption that nervous signals were instantaneous, traveling at an infinite speed.) 2.
He advanced the trichromatic theory of color vision, brilliantly inferring that there were three different types of color receptors in the eye, which responded specifically to blue, green, and red (an inference that was proven true a century later). Source: Hermann von Helmholtz. from Wikipedia Commons public domain There is one problem with identifying Helmholtz as psychology’s first genius: Helmholtz would not have defined himself as a psychologist. This is partly because there was no such field as psychology back in the early 1800s.
- Wilhelm Wundt was trained as a biologist, and William James as a philosopher.
- But both Wundt and James ended up defining themselves as psychologists.
- Helmholtz, on the other hand, started his career as a professor of physiology, and after dabbling in psychophysics for a while, switched his professional to become a professor of physics.
His last years were devoted not to the scientific study of the mind, but to thermodynamics, meterology, and electromagnetism. Indeed, Helmholtz’s contributions to physics won him his widest acclaim. Those contributions led the emperor to promote him to the nobility (hence his name became Hermann von Helmholtz).
(Helmholtz’s life was not exactly a rags to riches story, but it was certainly a noteworthy case of upward mobility. His father was a schoolteacher, and did not have the means to send his brilliant son to university to study physics. Instead, Helmholtz took advantage of a deal offered by the Prussian army – they would pay for his training in medicine, if he would agree to serve 8 years as an army surgeon after graduation).
Along the way to becoming a member of the aristocracy for his acclaimed accomplishments in physics, and inspiring budding psychologists like Wundt and James, Helmholtz also invented the opthalmoscope, and wrote a textbook on optics that was widely used for half a century.
- While he was supposed to be studying Latin in high school, he was instead making optical diagrams under his desk.
- While he was in medical school, he found time to play the piano, read Goethe and Byron, and study integral calculus (Fancher & Rutherford, 2015).
- Let’s look specifically at what was so ingenious about this young polymath’s studies of neural impulses and his theory of color vision, though.
Clocking the speed of a neural impulse. What’s the big deal about measuring the speed of a neural impulse? Well, before Helmholtz’s time, the experts believed that a neural impulse was instantaneous, traveling at infinite or near infinite speed. When a pin pricks your finger, on that view, your brain is immediately aware of it.
Helmholtz’s own advisor, the brilliant physiologist Johannes Müller, explained this presumed immediate transmission as outside the realm of scientific study, an example of the operation of the mysterious “life force” that underpinned the activities of all living organisms. But Helmholtz and some of Müller’s other students believed there was no such mysterious force.
Instead, they guessed that if you could shine a light on any process happening inside a living organism, you would discover merely the operation of basic chemical and physical events. As a young professor at the University of Konigsberg, Helmholtz devised an apparatus that hooked a frog’s foot to a galvanometer, in such a way that a current passed through the frog’s thigh muscle would trigger a kick that would turn off the electrical current.
What he discovered was that when he zapped the frog’s leg closer to the foot, the twitch happened measurably faster than when he zapped further up the leg. This device led him to estimate an exact speed – the signal seemed to be traveling along frog’s leg’s neurons at 57 mph. Then he repeated the study with living human beings.
He taught his subjects to press a button as soon as they felt a poke to their legs. When he zapped the toe, it took longer for the subject to register it than when he zapped the thigh. Obviously, the toe is further from the brain, so this indicated that the neural impulse took measurably longer to register when it had to travel farther.
This was amazing because people usually experience mental processes as happening instantaneously. And at the time, physiologists had been assuming that the underlying processes must also be instantaneous. If we were whales incidentally, it would take almost a full second for our brain to know that a fish had taken a bite out of our tail, and another full second to send a message back to tail muscle to swat the fish away.
During the next century, psychologists made great use of this “reaction time” method, using it to estimate how much neural processing is involved in different tasks (doing long division or translating a sentence in our second language versus adding two numbers or reading the same sentence in our native tongue, for example).
The three kinds of color-detecting receptors in the eye Johannes Müller, who was Helmholtz’s advisor, may have clung to an archaic belief in an instantaneously-acting life force, but he also championed some revolutionary new ideas, including the “law of specific nerve energies” – which was the idea that every sensory nerve conducts only one kind of information.
Psychology historian Raymond Fancher points out that one traditional view before then was that neurons were hollow tubes capable of transmitting any kind of energy – color, brightness, volume, tone, even or taste or skin pressure. But the new view was that each sense had its own separate neurons.
The trichromatic theory suggested that it was more specific than that – the eye might contain three different kinds of receptors, each one transmitting information about a particular section of the spectrum. Helmholtz noted that all the different colors of the spectrum could be reconstructed by combining lights of three primary colors – blue, green, and red.
If you shine a green light and a red light at the same spot, you will see yellow. If you shine a blue light and a red light at the same spot you will see purple, and if you shine all three colors, you will see white. Helmholtz inferred from this that perhaps the brain could determine which color you were looking at if it integrated information from three types of retinal receptors. 
Source: Sensitivity of three different color receptors in eye. Original by author, including elements from Wikipedia Commons. A century later, in 1956, a physiologist at the University of Helsinki named Gunnar Svaetichin found direct support for the trichromatic theory by using microelectrodes to record the signals sent by different cells in fish retinas.
- Sure enough, some were maximally sensitive to blue, some to green, and some to red.
- Even before this theory was directly supported, it had very important practical implications – television screens trick the eye into seeing colors not by reproducing all the colors of the rainbow, but by using only three kinds of pixels – red, green, and blue, and tweaking the brightness on each of those three channels produces images that our brain perceives as bright orange, dull tan, sparkling turquoise, and lustrous lavender.
Psychophysics and the discovery of human nature Thinking about Helmholtz, and his fellow “psychophysicists,” can make us aware of just how much we have learned about human nature in the last two centuries. Philosophers had debated a number of questions about how the mind maps the physical universe, but the psychophysicists were able to use new and rigorous scientific methods to actually answer some of these basic questions.
Physicists developed the methods to precisely measure the changes in physical energy in sound waves and light waves, and then the psychophysicists developed methods to record how people’s experiences changed, or did not change, along with those physical changes. What they discovered was that what the human brain experiences is not everything that is happening in the world.
Some forms of physical energy, like infrared light or ultra-high pitched sound waves, are invisible to us, but obvious to other animals (like bees and bats). Other forms of energy are highly salient to us, but not to our pet cats and dogs (who lack different kinds of color receptors, and see the world in black and white, except with really loud smells).
The Rational Animal : How evolution made us smarter than we think, and of:, Murder, and the Meaning of Life : A psychologist investigates how evolution,, and complexity are revolutionizing our view of human nature.
Related blogs References
Jameson, D., & Hurvich L.M. (1982). Gunnar Svaetichin: man of vision. Progress in Clinical and Biological Research, 13, 307-10. Fancher, R.E., & Rutherford, A. (2016). Pioneers of psychology (5th edition). New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
More from Psychology Today Get the help you need from a therapist near you–a FREE service from Psychology Today. 
More from Psychology Today The Flynn Effect, the increase in intelligence over generations, appears to be stagnating or even reversing in parts of Europe and the U.S. Loners come in many varieties, some of them perectly healthy. In the amygdala, the cerebellum, and elsewhere.
- In the post-World War II era, humanistic psychology helped dispel the myth that creativity is exceptional.
- And is intelligence overrated? At least 18,000 different gods, goddesses and various animals or objects have been worshipped by humans.
- It’s often challenging to change habits related eating, exercise, and jobs.
Understanding and managing emotions gives students the edge. : Who Was Psychology’s First True Genius?
What is the origin and nature of psychology?
The word Psychology has its origin from two Greek words ‘Psyche’ and ‘Logos’, ‘psyche’ means ‘soul’ and ‘logos’ means ‘study’. Thus literally, Psychology means ‘the study of soul’ or ‘science of soul’.1.
What marks the birth of psychology?
Psychology is defined as “the scientific study of behavior and mental processes”. Philosophical interest in the human mind and behavior dates back to the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Persia, Greece, China, and India, Psychology as a field of experimental study began in 1854 in Leipzig, Germany when Gustav Fechner created the first theory of how judgments about sensory experiences are made and how to experiment on them.
Fechner’s theory, recognized today as Signal Detection Theory foreshadowed the development of statistical theories of comparative judgment and thousands of experiments based on his ideas (Link, S.W. Psychological Science, 1995). Later, 1879, Wilhelm Wundt founded in Leipzig, Germany, the first Psychological laboratory dedicated exclusively to psychological research.
Wundt was also the first person to refer to himself as a psychologist. A notable precursor of Wundt was Ferdinand Ueberwasser (1752-1812) who designated himself Professor of Empirical Psychology and Logic in 1783 and gave lectures on empirical psychology at the Old University of Münster, Germany.
Other important early contributors to the field include Hermann Ebbinghaus (a pioneer in the study of memory ), William James (the American father of pragmatism ), and Ivan Pavlov (who developed the procedures associated with classical conditioning ). Soon after the development of experimental psychology, various kinds of applied psychology appeared.G.
Stanley Hall brought scientific pedagogy to the United States from Germany in the early 1880s. John Dewey ‘s educational theory of the 1890s was another example. Also in the 1890s, Hugo Münsterberg began writing about the application of psychology to industry, law, and other fields.
Lightner Witmer established the first psychological clinic in the 1890s. James McKeen Cattell adapted Francis Galton ‘s anthropometric methods to generate the first program of mental testing in the 1890s. In Vienna, meanwhile, Sigmund Freud developed an independent approach to the study of the mind called psychoanalysis, which has been widely influential.
The 20th century saw a reaction to Edward Titchener ‘s critique of Wundt’s empiricism. This contributed to the formulation of behaviorism by John B. Watson, which was popularized by B.F. Skinner, Behaviorism proposed emphasizing the study of overt behavior, because that could be quantified and easily measured.
- Early behaviorists considered the study of the ” mind ” too vague for productive scientific study.
- However, Skinner and his colleagues did study thinking as a form of covert behavior to which they could apply the same principles as overt (publicly observable) behavior.
- The final decades of the 20th century saw the rise of cognitive science, an interdisciplinary approach to studying the human mind.
Cognitive science again considers the “mind” as a subject for investigation, using the tools of cognitive psychology, linguistics, computer science, philosophy, behaviorism, and neurobiology, This form of investigation has proposed that a wide understanding of the human mind is possible, and that such an understanding may be applied to other research domains, such as artificial intelligence,
There are conceptual divisions of psychology in so-called “forces” or “waves,” based on its schools and historical trends. This terminology is popularized among the psychologists to differentiate a growing humanism in therapeutic practice from the 1930s onwards, called the “third force,” in response to the deterministic tendencies of Watson’s behaviourism and Freud’s psychoanalysis.
Humanistic psychology has as important proponents Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, Gordon Allport, Erich Fromm, and Rollo May, Their humanistic concepts are also related to existential psychology, Viktor Frankl ‘s logotherapy, positive psychology (which has Martin Seligman as one of the leading exponents), C.R.
Cloninger ‘s approach to well-being and character development, as well as to transpersonal psychology, incorporating such concepts as spirituality, self-transcendence, self-realization, self-actualization, and mindfulness, In cognitive behavioral psychotherapy, similar terms have also been incorporated, by which “first wave” is considered the initial behavioral therapy ; a “second wave”, Albert Ellis ‘s cognitive one ; and a “third wave”, with the acceptance and commitment therapy, which emphasizes one’s pursuit of values, methods of self-awareness, acceptance and psychological flexibility, instead of challenging negative thought schemes,
A “fourth wave” would be the one that incorporates transpersonal concepts and positive flourishing, in a way criticized by some researchers for its heterogeneity and theoretical direction dependent on the therapist’s view. A “fifth wave” has now been proposed by a group of researchers seeking to integrate earlier concepts into a unifying theory.
The events that had the greatest impact on social psychology at this critical juncture in its history were the Great Depression in the United States and the social and political upheavals in Europe generated by World Wars I and II.
Which major historical event influenced the development of psychology as a profession?
Programs in clinical psychology were established, as well as a significant increase in the number of psychologists operating in clinical settings. Therefore, world war II helped in the testing and expanding of the field as well.
