5 Steps to a 5 AP Psychology, 2010-2011 Edition - Laura Lincoln Maitland [23]
Margaret Floy Washburn was Titchener’s first graduate student and the first woman to complete her Ph.D. in psychology.
Functionalism
American psychologist William James thought the structuralists were asking the wrong questions. James was interested in the function or purpose of behavioral acts. He viewed humans as more actively involved in processing their sensations and actions. James and other psychologists, such as James Cattell and John Dewey, who studied mental testing, child development, and educational practices, exemplified the School of Functionalism. Functionalists focused on the application of psychological findings to practical situations and the function of mental operations in adapting to the environment (stream of consciousness) using a variety of techniques. Their goal was to explain behavior. Functionalism paved the way for behaviorism and applied subfields of psychology.
Mary Whiton Calkins, who studied psychology under James at Harvard, became the first woman president of the American Psychological Association. She viewed her psychology of selves as a reconciliation between structural and functional psychology.
Principal Approaches to Psychology
Major modern perspectives or conceptual approaches to psychology are behavioral, psycho-dynamic, humanistic, biological, evolutionary, cognitive, and sociocultural.
Behavioral Approach
The behavioral approach focuses on measuring and recording observable behavior in relation to the environment. Behaviorists think behavior results from learning. Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov trained dogs to salivate in response to the sound of a tone, demonstrating stimulus-response learning. Pavlov’s experiments at the beginning of the 20th century paved the way for behaviorism, which dominated psychology in America from the 1920s to the 1960s. Behaviorists examine the ABCs of behavior. They analyze antecedent environmental conditions that precede a behavior, look at the behavior (the action to understand, predict, and/or control), and examine the consequences that follow the behavior (its effect on the environment). Behaviorists have rejected the study of consciousness/mental processes because such private events cannot be verified or disproved. American behaviorist John B. Watson said that psychology should be the science of behavior. B. F. Skinner worked mainly with laboratory rats and pigeons, demonstrating that organisms tend to repeat responses that lead to positive consequences and not to repeat responses that lead to neutral or negative consequences. He thought that free will is an illusion. Like Aristotle and Locke before them, behaviorists such as Watson, E. L. Thorndike, and B. F. Skinner took the position that behavior is determined mainly by environment and experience rather than by genetic inheritance. In Germany, Gestalt psychologists studying perception disagreed with structuralists and behaviorists, maintaining that psychologists should study the whole conscious experience.
Psychoanalytic/Psychodynamic Approach
In Austria, Sigmund Freud also disagreed with behaviorists. He treated patients with mental disorders by talking with them over long periods of time to reveal unconscious conflicts, motives, and defenses in order to enhance each patient’s self-knowledge. His psychoanalytic theory focused on unconscious internal conflicts to explain mental disorders, personality, and motivation. Freud thought the unconscious is the source of desires, thoughts, and memories below the surface of conscious awareness, and that early life experiences are important to personality development. Variations of psychoanalysis by Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Karen Horney, Heinz Kohut, and others are collectively known as the psychodynamic approach.
Humanistic Approach
By the middle of the 20th century, in disagreement with both behaviorists and psychoanalysts, Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, and other psychologists thought that