Psychology as a Science

Abstract

Scientific psychology arose in the nineteenth century out of western philosophical inquiry into the nature and function of mind. This “new psychology” was symbolized by the laboratory of psychology at the University of Leipzig founded by Wilhelm Wundt in 1879; experimental methods were adapted from physiology and psychophysics to pursue traditional philosophical questions about mental life. Early laboratory experiments included the measurement of the time course of mental operations, the determination of sensory thresholds, and in time, more complex cognitive processes. Introspection under controlled laboratory conditions replaced philosophical introspection of conscious experience, but its importance waned as the science came to embrace a wider range of normal and abnormal mental and behavioral phenomena and as children and animals became the subjects of investigation, both in and of themselves and in comparison with adult human subjects. Schools and systems of psychology (e.g., Structuralism, Functionalism, Gestalt Psychology, and Behaviorism) competed to define the content of psychology and its methods. As psychology matured, the definition of the psychological experiment, the methods appropriate to it, and the statistical treatment of data changed to meet evolving conceptions of scientific psychology and the diverse subject matter that contemporary psychology came to encompass.

Re-inhabiting one’s body: A pilot study on the effects of dance movement therapy on body image and alexithymia in eating disorders

“…The importance of bodily experiences and body memory for the psychological functioning has been shown by cognitive neuroscience studies [28]. Recent research in interpersonal neurobiology considers the brain in the whole nervous system, existing in the whole body [29].…”

The Globalization of Knowledge in History

“…Psychological laboratories modeled upon Wundt's were rapidly established in these countries, as well as in France, the United Kingdom and India (Jing 2000, 573-574). In the beginning of the twentieth century, most psychological research was done in the US, Germany, Great Britain and France (Fuchs and Milar 2003). Throughout the twentieth century, the spread of psychology around the world was marked by the establishment of national psychological organizations, on the model of the American Psychological Association, which had been founded in 1892 (Rosenzweig 1992).…”

Meta-Analysis and the Development of Knowledge

“…Because of the belief that only the study of observable concepts (i.e., behaviors) is truly scientific, the primary methodology of the behaviorist was the examination of objective observable behavior in the laboratory; introspection, the prevailing methodology of its mentalist predecessor, was considered unscientific and not a legitimate methodology (Watson, 1913). Moreover, because the focus was on observable behaviors (with concepts like mental states and processes deemed either irrelevant or peripheral), the use of animal subjects to examine behaviors in the laboratory was an acceptable and widely shared practice (Benjamin, 2009; Fuchs & Milar, 2003; King, Viney, & Woody, 2009; Leahey, 2003; Mandler, 2002; Secord, 1977; Segal & Lachman, 1972). Even the behaviorists’ language demonstrated this paradigm, as their language revolved around the “stimulus-response” concept.…”