Psychology: Psychology and Human Behavior Essay example

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Suzanne Alonzo @01260245
Psychology is the study of mind and behavior. It was established as a science separated from biology and philosophy but in the middle of the 19th century, that’s when a debate started over how to describe and explain mind and human behavior. There were three men who really took forth in taking scientific research and applying them to the study of human behavior.
Hermann von Helmoltz and his assistant, Wilhelm Wundt were German physiologists who merged physiology’s methods into psychology. Helmoltz, developed a method where he asked participants to respond when he applied stimulus on different parts of their legs and then he would record their reaction time or the amount of time they felt the stimulus. Helmoltz realized that the neurological processes underlying mental events are very fast but not instantaneous. Helmoltz’s ideas and research were important but his assistant is the one who received the credit for structuralism.
Wundt taught the first university-level course of physiological psychology and opened up the first university laboratory that was devoted to psychology. He believed that scientific psychology should only be focused on studying consciousness, which is a person’s personal involvement of the mind and world. Consciousness is a wide range of personal experiences such as being cautioned of sound, sight, tastes etc. He wanted to identify the building blocks of psychological experiences just how chemists found the periodic table of elements. He found structuralism; Structuralism means the analysis of the basic elements that constitute the mind. This involved introspection, which means to observe the feelings of the participants who are experiencing the stimulus at that point in time. Wundt’s lab sprung psychology into gear and influenced psychology. Structuralism was criticized because it was unreliable due to introspection and prone to bias. It was also too narrow and subjective.
William James disagreed with Wundt and had his own perspective because he thought that
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