The document provides an overview of various schools and perspectives in psychology including: - Structuralism focused on analyzing the basic elements of consciousness. Prominent figures included Wundt and Titchener. - Functionalism examined how the mind helps people adapt to their environment. Figures included William James and John Dewey. - Biological perspectives studied heredity, genes, and endocrine glands to understand behavior. The document also briefly mentions psychodynamic, behaviorist, cognitive, humanistic, existential, Gestalt, and socio-cultural perspectives.

1. PY-304: Schools & Perspectives
in Psychology

2. Introduction to Schools and Perspectives of Psychology
Major assumptions, contributions and basic concepts.
Schools of Psychology
Brief history of Psychology, Structuralism, Functionalism, Greek contribution
Biological Perspective
Heredity, Genes and Chromosomes, Endocrine glands
Psychodynamic Perspective
Classical psychoanalysis, Neo-Freudians
Behavioristic Perspective
Classical conditioning, Operant conditioning, Social learning
Cognitive Perspective
Cognitive perspective by Aron Beck, Cognitive perspective by Albert Ellis, Cognitive
perspective of appraisal and coping, Cognitive behavioral model
Humanistic Perspective: Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers
Existential Perspective: Thomas Szaz, Victor Frankel
Gestalt Perspective : Fritz Perls
Socio-Cultural Perspective
Islamic Perspective in the light of teachings of Quran & Sunnah
Current Trends
Paradigm Shift in Modern Psychology

3. CH-1: Introduction to
Schools & Perspectives of Psychology

5. Historical Perspective
Majority of the institutions offer history of Psychology as a discipline.
Within the discipline of psychology
its own journals,
its own division (Division 26) within the American Psychological
Association, and
its own research center (The Archives of the History of American
Psychology) at the University of Akron, Ohio
(www3.uakron.edu/ahap/).

6. Historical Perspective
Seven thousand years ago, people assumed that psychological
problems were caused by evil spirits. To allow those spirits to escape
from a person’s body, ancient healers chipped a hole in a patient’s
skull with crude instruments—a procedure called trephining.

7. Historical Perspective
The origins of the field of psychology can be traced to two different time periods,
some 2,000 years apart. Thus, psychology is among the oldest of all scholarly
disciplines as well as one of the newest.
1. First, we can trace ideas and speculations about human nature and behavior
back to the fifth century BC, when Plato, Aristotle, and other Greek philosophers
were grappling with many of the same issues that concern psychologists today.
These ideas include some of the basic topics you covered in your introductory
psychology classes: memory, learning, motivation, thought, perception, and
abnormal behavior.
2. Conversely, psychology emerged as one of the newer fields of study and begin
our coverage approximately 200 years ago, when modern psychology emerged
from philosophy and other early scientific approaches to claim its own identity as
a formal field of study.

8. According to the 17th-century
philosopher Descartes, nerves
were hollow tubes through
which “animal spirits”
conducted impulses in the same
way that water is transmitted
through a pipe. So when a
person got too close to a fire,
heat was transmitted to the
brain through the tubes
Franz Josef Gall, an 18th-
century physician, argued that a
trained observer could discern
intelligence, moral character,
and other basic personality
characteristics from the shape
and number of bumps on a
person’s skull. His theory gave
rise to the field of phrenology,
employed by hundreds of
practitioners in the 19th
century.

9. 
Traces of psychology’s roots back to the ancient Greeks: considered
the mind to focus for scholarly concerns. Later philosophers argued
for hundreds of years about some of the questions psychologists still
grapple with today.
The 17th-century British philosopher John Locke: “tabula rasa” view
(Latin).
His views contrasted with those of Plato and the 17th-century French
philosopher René Descartes, who argued that some knowledge was
inborn in humans.
the formal beginning of psychology as a scientific discipline in the late
19th century, in Leipzig, Germany, Wilhelm Wundt established the first
experimental lab for psychological studies.
At about the same time, William James was setting up his laboratory
in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

10.  Development of tools, techniques, and methods to achieve the increased
precision and objectivity.
Until the last quarter of the
nineteenth century, philosophers
studied human nature by
speculating, intuiting, and
generalizing based on their own
experience.
However, a major transformation
occurred when philosophers began to
apply the tools and methods already
successful in the biological and
physical sciences to explore questions
about human nature. Only when
researchers came to rely on carefully
controlled observation and
experimentation to study the human
mind did psychology begin to attain an
identity separate from its philosophical
roots.

11. Economic opportunities in the Twentieth Century
• Rise in number of psychologists & psychological labs in USA.
• Establishment of universities & more teaching jobs but less financial
support.
• Psychology departments came to be judged on the basis of their
practical worth such as solving social, educational, and industrial
problems.
• The influx of immigrants to the United States, along with their high birth
rate, made public education a growth industry.
• emphasis in American psychology shifted from experimentation in the
academic laboratory to the application of psychology to the issues of
teaching and learning.

12. The World Wars
• World Wars I and II accelerated the growth of applied psychology by
extending its influence into such areas as personnel selection,
psychological testing, and engineering psychology.
• War had a personal impact on the ideas of several major theorists.
After witnessing the carnage of World War I, for example, Sigmund
Freud proposed aggression as a significant motivating force for the
human personality. Erich Fromm, a personality theorist and antiwar
activist, attributed his interest in abnormal behavior to his exposure to
the fanaticism that swept his native Germany during the war.

13. Prejudice and Discrimination
• Discrimination against women
• Discrimination based on ethnic origin

14. Transitions in 17th & 18th century
• Inspiration by Mechanism (Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) & Isaac Newton (1642–
1727).
• Determinism and Reductionism
• Automata
• People as Machines
• Modern computers as duplicate of human cognitive processes and a form of
artificial intelligence. Scientists and inventors of 20th century predicted that there
would be no limit to what machines might be designed to do or to the humanlike
functions they might perform.

15. Empiricism: The pursuit of knowledge through the observation of nature
and the attribution of all knowledge to experience (the 17th century became
illuminated by discoveries and insights that reflected the changing nature of
scientific inquiry).
• The primary role of the process of sensation
• The analysis of conscious experience into elements
• The synthesis of elements into complex mental experiences through the process of
association
• The focus on conscious processes
Prominent Figures:
• René Descartes (1596–1650)
• John Locke (1632–1704)
• George Berkeley (1685–1753)
• James Mill (1773–1836)
• John Stuart Mill (1806–1873)

16. • René Descartes
(mathematics and the humanities;1596–1650)
• Pioneer in the era of modern psychology
• Application of scientific knowledge to practical concerns.
• Anticipated the notion of conditioning in dogs
• Theory of mind-body interaction,
the mind and body works as a mutual interaction.
• redirected the attention from the abstract theological concept of soul to the
scientific study of the mind and mental processes. The outcome was that
methods of inquiry shifted from subjective metaphysical analysis to objective
observation and experimentation.
• Reflex action theory: The idea that an external object (a stimulus) can bring
about an involuntary response (without any involvement of cognitive processes).
• Derived and innate ideas: Derived ideas are produced by the direct application
of an external stimulus; innate ideas arise from the mind or consciousness,
independent of sensory experiences or external stimuli (God, the self,
perfection, and infinity).

17. • John Locke (1632–1704)
(Natural philosophy & Medicine)
• Tabula Rasa View: human mind is a blank or clean
slate on which experience would write.
• Sensation and reflection: there are two kinds of
experiences, one deriving from sensation and the
other from reflection. The ideas that derive from
sensation—from direct sensory input from physical
objects in the environment—are simple sense
impressions. These sense impressions operate on
the mind, and the mind itself also operates on the
sensations, reflecting on them to form ideas. Thus, all
ideas arise from sensation and reflection, but the
ultimate source remains our sensory experiences.
• Simple and complex ideas: Simple ideas are
elemental ideas that arise from sensation and
reflection; Through the process of reflection, however,
the mind actively creates new ideas by combining
simple ideas which are complex ideas.
• Theory of Association: The notion that knowledge
results from linking or associating simple ideas to
form complex ideas (Association as learning).

18. Empirical philosophers such as Locke and Berkeley had discussed the
subjective nature of human perception, arguing that there is not
always—or even often—an exact correspondence between the nature of
an object and our perception of it.
As a result, scientists shift their focus on the role of the human observer
to account fully for the results of their experiments. They began to study
the human sense organs—those physiological mechanisms through which
we receive information about our world—as a way of investigating the
psychological processes of sensing and perceiving.
Physiology became an experimentally oriented
discipline during the 1830s, primarily under the
influence of the German physiologist
Johannes Müller, through experimental methods.

19. Substantial contributions by many psychologists in the 19th century were
made to the study of brain functions by conducting research directly on
brain tissue. Their efforts constituted the first attempts to map the brain’s
functions; to determine the specific parts of the brain that controlled
different cognitive functions.
Two additional experimental approaches to brain research
1. Clinical method
2. Electrical stimulation

20. Phrenology
German physician Franz Josef Gall (1758–1828), dissected the brains of
deceased animals and humans.
confirmed the existence of both white and gray matter in the brain, the
nerve fibers connecting each side of the brain to the opposite side of the
spinal cord, and the fibers connecting both halves of the brain.
Investigated the shape & size of brain
examined the bumps and dents of a
great many people and mapped the
location of 35 human attributes.

21. Applications of the experimental method to the mind, the subject matter of
the new psychology: Hermann von Helmholtz, Ernst Weber, Gustav Theodor
Fechner, and Wilhelm Wundt. (German scientists, trained in physiology,
influenced by the developments in modern science).
Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894): the speed of the neural impulse
and research on vision and hearing.
Ernst Weber (1795–1878): physiology of the sense organs, (skin) senses
and muscular sensations. Two-point threshold: Just noticeable difference
between two stimuli.
Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–1887): proposed two ways to measure
sensations.
1. to determine whether a stimulus is present or absent, sensed or not
sensed.
2. Absolute threshold of sensitivity.

22. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the methods of the natural
sciences were being used to investigate purely mental phenomena.
Techniques had been developed, apparatus devised, important books
written, and widespread interest aroused.
Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920): Founding Father of Modern Psychology
• established the first laboratory in Leipzig, Germany
• edited the first journal,
• began experimental psychology as a science.
• Areas under investigation: sensation and perception,
attention, feeling, reaction, and association

23. Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909)
By working alone, isolated from any academic center of psychology, began
to experiment successfully on the higher mental processes. Hermann
Ebbinghaus became the first psychologist to investigate learning and
memory and forgetting experimentally.
• 2300 Nonsense syllables

24. A group of psychologists who become associated ideologically,
and sometimes geographically, with the leader of a movement.
Typically the members of a school of thought share a theoretical or
systematic orientation and investigate similar problems.

25. Structuralism
Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) focused on the study of the building
blocks of the mind. He considered psychology to be the study of
conscious experience. His perspective, which came to be known as
structuralism, focused on uncovering the fundamental mental
components of perception, consciousness, thinking, emotions, and
other kinds of mental states and activities. To determine how basic
sensory processes shape our understanding of the world.
Wundt and other structuralists used a procedure called
introspection, in which they presented people with a stimulus—such
as a bright green object or a sentence printed on a card—and asked
them to describe, in their own words and in as much detail as they
could, what they were experiencing. Wundt argued that by analyzing
their replies, psychologists could come to a better understanding of
the structure of the mind.

26. Structuralism
Edward Bradford Titchener (1867–1927):
Follower of Wundt, founder of Structuralism.
• Focused on elements or contents of consciousness,
but his overriding concern was their organization; that is, their synthesis into
higher-level cognitive processes through apperception. In Wundt’s view, the
mind had the power to organize mental elements voluntarily, a position that
contrasted with the passive, mechanistic explanation favored by most of the
empiricists.
• In Titchener’s view, psychology’s fundamental task was to discover the nature
of the elementary conscious experiences—to analyze consciousness into its
component parts and thus determine its structure.
• Subjective conscious experience; According to Titchener, the subject matter
of psychology is conscious experience as that experience is dependent on
the person who is actually experiencing it. This kind of experience differs from
that studied by scientists in other fields (e.g, light and sound in a room).

27. Structuralism
Introspection:
Titchener’s used the method of introspection, relied on observers who were
rigorously trained to describe the elements of their conscious state rather
than reporting the observed or experienced stimulus by a familiar name
(e.g., an apple—in everyday life this is beneficial and necessary). In his
psychology laboratory, however, this practice had to be unlearned.
Titchener adopted Külpe’s label, systematic experimental introspection, to
describe his method. Titchener used detailed, qualitative, subjective reports
of his subjects’ mental activities during the act of introspecting as opposed to
Wundt’s objective and quantitative measurements.

28. Structuralism
Critique:
• Introspection can’t reveal the structure of the mind.
• Role of outside observer to confirm the accuracy of others’
introspections.
• Introspection was not a truly scientific technique.
• People may have difficulty describing some kinds of inner
experiences, such as emotional responses.
Those drawbacks led to the development of new approaches in
replacement of structuralism.

29. Functionalist perspective became prominent in the early 1900s
(American psychologist William James).
concentrated on what the mind does and how behavior functions
 asked what role behavior plays in helping people adapt to their
environments. (e.g., the function of the emotion of fear in preparing us
to deal with emergency situations).
examined how behavior enables people to satisfy their needs and
how our “stream of consciousness” thinking permits us to adapt to our
environment.
The American educator John Dewey drew on functionalism to
develop the field of school psychology, proposing ways to best meet
students’ educational needs.

30. Functionalism is concerned with how the mind functions or how it is used by an
organism to adapt to its environment. The functional psychology movement
focused on a practical question: What do mental processes accomplish?
Functionalists studied the mind not from the standpoint of its composition—its
mental elements or its structure— but rather as an addition of functions and
processes that lead to practical consequences in the real world.
With the emphasis on mental functions, the functionalists became interested
in the potential applications of psychology to everyday problems of how
people function in and adapt to different environments. The rapid
development of applied psychology in the United States may be considered
the most important legacy of the functionalist movement.

31. • Theory of evolution.
The variability among individual members of a species
was inheritable.
• Survival of the Fittest
• Individual differences
• Those life forms that survive the struggle and reach
maturity tend to transmit to their offspring the skills or
advantages that enabled them to thrive.
• Further, because variation is one of the general laws of
heredity, offspring will show variation among themselves
(some will possess the useful qualities developed to a
higher degree than their parents). The qualities tend to
survive, and in the course of many generations changes
may occur. These changes can be so extensive as to
account for the differences among species found today.
• Similarity between animal and human mental processes.
• Emotional expressions in humans and animals.

32. • Francis Galton’s work on mental inheritance and the
individual differences in human capacities.
• Hereditary Genius (1869); Galton explained that individual
greatness or genius occurred within families far too often to
be explained solely by environmental influences.
• Eugenics: If people of considerable talent were selected
and mated generation after generation, the result would be
a highly gifted human race.
• Galton studied issues in measurement and statistics. He
applied statistical concepts to problems of heredity (sorting
the prominent men in his sample into categories according
to the frequency with which their level of ability occurred in
the population).
• The probability of eminence(distinction) in certain
families may not high enough to consider seriously any
possible influence of a superior environment, better
educational opportunities, or social advantages. Galton
argued that eminence—or the lack of it—was solely a
function of heredity, not of opportunity

33. Galton’s prominent work in Psychology
• Correlation & regression analysis.
• Originated the concept of mental tests.
• The Association of Ideas
Galton worked on two problems in the area of association: the
diversity of associations of ideas and reaction time (the time required
to produce associations). Word Association Test.
• Mental Imagery
hereditary similarities through imagery: He found that similar images
were more likely to occur between siblings than between people who
were unrelated.

34. • Stream of consciousness: consciousness is a continuous
flowing process and that any attempt to reduce it to
elements will distort it. The function of consciousness is to
guide us to those ends required for survival.
Consciousness is vital to the needs of complex beings in a
complex environment; without it, human evolution could not
have occurred.
• Emphasis on the non-rational. He noted that intellect can
be affected by the body’s physical condition, that beliefs
are determined by emotional factors, and that reason and
concept formation are influenced by human wants and
needs.
• James emphasized Pragmatism: the validity of an idea or
conception must be tested by its practical consequences.

35. • Theory of emotions: the arousal of the physical response precedes the
appearance of the emotion, especially for what he termed “coarser”
emotions such as fear, rage, grief, and love. For example, we see the wild
animal, we run, and then we experience the emotion of fear. “Our feeling
of the [bodily] changes as they occur is the emotion.”
• The Three-Part Self James suggested that a person’s sense of self is made
up of three aspects or components.
1. The material self consists of everything we call uniquely our own, such as our
body, family, home, or style of dress.
2. The social self refers to the recognition we get from other people. we present
different sides of ourselves to different people.
3. The third component, the spiritual self, refers to our inner or subjective being.
Our choice of clothing and manner of dress influence and reflect not only our
material self, but also our social and spiritual selves. Further, how we are
perceived, recognized, and judged by other people can all be influenced by how
we dress.

36. • As functionalism did not adhere to structuralism’s subject matter and
methods thus, in Titchener’s view, any approach to psychology that
deviated from the introspective analysis of the mind into elements
could not truly be called psychology.
• Structuralists also criticized functionalists’ interest in practical
concerns, thus reawakening the longstanding controversy between
pure and applied science. Whereas, functionalists argued that both
pure and applied psychology could adhere to rigorous scientific
procedures and that valid research could be performed in factories,
offices, and classrooms as well as in university laboratories. It is the
method and not the subject matter that determines the scientific worth
of any field of inquiry.

37. Practical application of psychology to real-life problems is among
functionalism’s most important and lasting contributions.
• Research on animal behavior, which was not part of the structuralist
approach, became a vital area of study in psychology.
• The functionalists’ also incorporated studies of infants, children, and
people with mental disabilities.
• Supplemented the introspective method with data obtained from other
methods, such as physiological research, mental tests,
questionnaires, and objective descriptions of behavior. These
approaches, rejected by the structuralists, became vital sources of
information for psychology.
• Functionalism left its imprint on contemporary American psychology
most significantly through its emphasis on the application of the
methods and findings of psychology to the solution of practical
problems.