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Functionalism and the American Scene - Coggle Diagram
Functionalism and the American Scene
Ancient Influences
Functionalism
Concerned with how the mind functions & how it is used by organisms to adapt to the environment
Evolution
suggestion that living things change with time
The social zeitgeist brought by industrial revolution
Unceasing intellectual and scientific change
The zeitgeist demanded a theory of evolution
Charles Darwin
The voyage of the Beagle
Natural selection/Survival of the Fittest
Elimination of those not fit for the environment
Evolution’s role in psychology
Influenced all areas of psychology
Focus on animal psychology
Acceptance of methodology and data from many fields
Focus on the description and measurement of individual differences
Emphasis on the functions rather than the structure of consciousness
Darwin’s book, The Expressions of Emotions in Man and Animals
Argues that human emotions are remnants of animal emotions that had once been necessary for survival
Comparative psychology studies the similarities and differences of human and non-human behavior from both an evolutionary and biological point of view
Francis Galton
Mental Inheritance
Believed that genius is inherited
Proposed Eugenics
Mental Tests
Tests of sensory capacities
later was found not correlated with meaningful real-life intelligence accomplishment
Statistical Methods
Collected vast amounts of data on individual differences and needed a way to analyze it
Correlation and Scatter plot
Pearson's r
Normal curve, Mean and
Standard deviation
Galton’s work in other areas
Mental imagery
Illumination
Coloring
The use of questionnaires in research
Developed the word-association technique
Sigmund Fred: Free association
Carl Jung: Word-association test
Herbert Spencer
Spencer–Bain Principle
Thorndike’s connectionism and Skinner’s operant behavior
Social Darwinism
Applied the notion of survival of the fittest to societies and entities within societies
Synthetic philosophy
Development and Founding
The Founding of Functionalism
Began as a protest against the restrictions and limitations of Wundt’s version of psychology and of Titchener’s structuralism
NO single leader and no single form to functionalism
Today, nearly all psychologists are functionalists
Characteristics of Functional Psychology
A practical science
Research on many participants
Concerned for the “why” of mental processes
Accepted both mental processes and behavior
More ideographic than nomothetic
William James
Established the first psychology laboratory in America
the American precursor to functional psychology
the founder of American Psychological Association
published The Principles of Psychology in 1890
pointed that conscious experience should be a whole/ in a flow, reducing it would distort the experience
pointed that the extensively trained observers’ report could hardly represent others outside the laboratory
pointed that human conscious and human mind carries some characteristics that could serve a function of adaption and survival
The Subject Matter of Psychology
“Psychology is the science of mental life, both of its phenomena and their conditions”
Stream of consciousness
Personal
Continuous
Always changing
Selective
Functional
The Methods of Psychology
Introspection must be a basic method
study subjective immediate experience
Importance of the experimental method
on psychophysical researches
Importance of the comparative methods
study psychological functioning of different populations
Noted the major difference between structural and functional psychologies
The theory of emotions
Contradicted current thinking about the nature of emotional states
Proposed that the arousal of the physical response precedes the appearance of the emotion
James-Lange theory of emotions
Three components of self
Material self
Social self
Spiritual self
Granville Stanley Hall
Organized the first psychology laboratory
Founded the first psychology journal,
American Journal of Psychology
Helped organize and was first president of the American Psychological Association
The founder of American’s Psychology
Developmentalist
Recapitulation theory
wrote the Adolescence book
first psychologist to describe adolescence
aging
The Clark Conference
Organized the first opportunity for Americans to meet Freud
The Chicago School
John Dewey
Published the first American textbook in psychology, “Psychology”.
Became chair at University of Chicago
Wrote “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology”
Three elements of the reflex (sensory processes, brain processes, motor response) viewed as a coordinated system directed toward a goal
The survival of the organism.
Consider how the response adjusts to the environment
Psychological value
Saying that responses and ideas always occur as a unit in a functional context
fFrmal beginning of functionalism
James Angell
Presented the three major points of functionalism
Mental processes mediate between the needs of the organism and the environment
Mind and body act as a unit in an organism’s struggle for survival
Functional psychology is interested in mental operations
Expanded influence of functionalism via institutional development of doctrine, laboratories, staff and students
Harvey A. Carr
Functionalism: The Final Form
Defined the subject matter of psychology as mental activity
The function of mental activity: to acquire, fixate, retain, organize, and evaluate experiences and to use these experiences to determine one’s actions
Criticisms of Functionalism
Structuralists criticized that functionalism was not psychology at all as it
Contributions of Functionalism
Brought a shift in emphasis from structure to function
Broadened studies in psychology: incorporated studies of infants, children, and people with mental disabilities
Promoted research on animal behavior
Supplemented the introspective method with data obtained from other methods