Chapter 5: Wundt and His Contemporaries

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Chapter 5 Wundt and His Contemporaries

• A History of Psychology
• (3rd Edition)
• John G. Benjafield

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Can Eminence be Measured?

• Korn, David, and Davis (1991)
• Surveyed prominent historians of psychology
• Asked who they considered to be the 10 most
  important psychologists of all time, in order of
  importance
• Wundt, James, Freud, Watson, Pavlov, Ebbinghaus,
  Piaget, Skinner, Binet, Fechner
• Tradition dates back to the work of James McKeen
  Cattell (1903)
• James, McKeen Cattell, Münsterberg, Hall,
  Baldwin, Titchener, Royce, Ladd, Dewey, Jastrow

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Wilhelm Wundt (18321920)

• Studied with Müller and Helmholtz
• 1875 became a professor at University of
  Leipzig, Germany
• 1879 founded the first laboratory in
  experimental psychology
• Lab attracted many young scholars

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Wundts Methods

• Derived in part from more established
  disciplines, especially chemistry
• Influenced by J.S. Mills notion of mental
  chemistry
• However Mill was skeptical of the possibility of
  discovering mental elements through introspection
• While Wundt believed introspection appropriate
  if combined with experimental method

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Wundts Methods

• 1. Laboratory research suitable only for simple
  psychological processes
• 2. Complex proceses require naturalistic
  observations
• Ex. our ability to use language

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Wundts Lab

• (Biervliet, 1892)
• Approx. 20 persons of varying backgrounds and
  nationalities
• Divided into groups
• Each group
• Worked on a different problem
• Had one member who was the chief experimenter
• Had one or more members who served as
  experimental participants

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Introspection

• Two types of introspection
• Self-observation casually engaged in by everyone
  
• Open to personal bias
• Inner perception deliberately observing ones
  own mental processes
• Subjective unless made under controlled conditions

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Example of an Experiment in Wundts Lab

• Materials metronome
• Participant
• Not listening to the metronome in usual way
  (ie. while playing the piano)
• Task is to pay attention carefully to the
  experiences that the metronome elicits

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Example continued

• What are the participants experiences as the
  metronome beats?
• Wundt argued that consciouness is rhythmically
  disposed
• Successive beats have same physical
  characteristics but different psychological
  characteristics

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Terminology

• Apperception process by which we organize and
  make sense out of our experience
• Creative synthesis through apperception, our
  experiences become a unified whole and not just a
  series of elementary sensations
• Apprehension the process by which individual
  impressions enter ones consciousness
• Span of apprehension how many impressions we
  could be aware of at one time
• Wundt estimated this number at 6

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Wundt on Emotions

• Wundt believed that emotion was a central aspect
  of all psychological processes
• Close relationship between emotion and volition
  (acts of will)
• Voluntary acts occur when there are conflicting
  emotions acts of will develop more slowly

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Tridimensional Theory of Feeling

• Basic feelings vary along three dimensions
• Tensionrelief
• Excitementdepression
• Pleasantnessunpleasantness
• Any feeling can be thought of as located within
  the three-dimensional space
• Wundt believed that this model was completely
  general

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The Wundt Curve

• Wundt curve relationship between the intensity
  of a stimulus and its pleasantness
• Vertical axis the degree to which a person feels
  positive or negative in a particular situation
• How positive or negative you feel is a function
  that rises and then falls as a stimulus intensity
  increases
• Inverted U shape
• Wundt curve implies that we will get the most
  pleasure form moderate levels of stimulus
  intensity

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Psychophysical Parallelism

• Wundt
• There is no psychical process which does not run
  parallel with a physical processes
• No point-for-point correspondence between every
  mental event and every event in the nervous
  system
• Mental structures have to be understood in terms
  of their own law of combination

• Fecher
• There is no psychical process which does not run
  parallel with a physical process
• Point-for-point correspondence between every
  mental event and every event in the nervous system

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Complementary Explanations

• Psychology
• Studies the person
• Deals with the experiencing participant

• Physiology
• Studies the person
• Treats the person as an object

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Cultural Psychology

• Völkerpsychologie
• folk psychology
• cultural psychology
• Wundts aim was to trace the evolution of mind
  in man
• Needed to adopt in psychology the same approach
  that Darwin had adopted in biology

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Wundts Influence

• Figure against whom many subsequent psychologists
  reacted negatively
• Ideas often distored
• Wundts cultural psychology is now being
  appreciated
• Why? For its recognition that the human mind is a
  product of social and historical forces

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Hermann Ebbinghaus (18501909)

• Educated at University of Bonn, Germany
• Travelled extensively in England and France
• By chance, came across a copy of Fechners
  Elements of Psychophysics
• Ebbinghaus was impressed by the potential for
  applying objective methods to the study of
  psychological processes
• Went on to conduct a series of investigations of
  learning and memory

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Ebbinghaus Method

• Ebbinghaus pioneered the use of nonsense
  syllables
• A consonant followed by a vowel followed by a
  consonant
• Ex. pib, wol
• Benefits of using nonsense syllables
• They are relatively meaningless
• Therefore relatively uninfluenced by previous
  learning
• Provide a quantifiable measure of learning and
  memory
• In terms of the number of syllables remembered,
  the number of trials required to learn a list,
  etc.

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Ebbinghaus Method

• Ebbinghaus acted as his own participant
• Experiments involved constructing lists from a
  pool of 2,300 nonsense syllables
• All 2,300 were used before any were repreated
• Process
• Go through the list from beginning to end,
  reading the syllables at a rate governed by a
  metronome (150 beats per minute)

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Forgetting Curve

• Curve greatest immediately after learning
• Declined more gradually afterwards
• Remote associations associations formed between
  all items in the list, not only between adjacent
  items

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Mary Whiton Calkins (18631930)

• Studied at Harvard
• Was denied the degree because she was a woman
• 1905 served as the first woman president of the
  American Psychological Association

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Calkins Method

• Participants learned pairs of items
• Became possible to attempt to determine which
  factors were the most important determinants of
  learning
• Ex. influence of frequency
• Technique became standard method in the study of
  human learning
• But has never received the same recognition as
  Ebbinghaus
• Came to be called the Paired Associates Method

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Calkins Method

• Participant shown a list of pairs of items
• Ex. different colours paired with different
  numbers
• Participant is given one of the members of the
  pair and asked to give the first response that
  comes to mind

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Practical Applications

• (Calkins 1896 1966 534)
• The prominence of frequency is of course of
  grave importance, for it means the possibility of
  exercising some control over the life of the
  imagination and of definitely combating harmful
  or troublesome associations

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The Self

• Calkins psychology is the study of the self
• Self
• A totality one of many characters
• A unique being
• An identical being
• A changing being

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Franz Brentano (18381917)

• 1873 left Catholic priesthood
• 1874 Professor of Philosophy at the University
  of Vienna
• Student Carl Stumpf

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Franz Brentano

• Mental phenomena
• Ex. a musical chord, which I hear
• Physical phenomena
• Ex. hearing a sound

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Act Psychology

• Focus on the Act
• Vs. Wundt focus on the experience
• Mental acts can be named only by an active verb
• Mental acts are intentional
• Laid the groundwork for phenomenological
  psychology

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Classes of Mental Acts

• Ideating
• I see, I hear, I imagine
• Judging
• I acknowledge, I reject
• Loving-Hating
• I feel, I wish, I desire

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Phenomenological Psychology

• Developed by Carl Stumpf and Edmund Husserl
• Method attempt to describe consciousness as it
  presents itself to us
• Avoid presuppositions as to its nature or purpose
• Phenomenological approaches tend not to be
  experimental

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Edmund Husserl

• Developed Brentanos concept of intentionality
• Argued that by comparing a number of similar
  experiences, we can intuitively grasp their
  essential nature

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The Würzberg School

• First decade of the 20th century
• Group of psychologists at University of Würzberg,
  Germany
• Mentor of the group Oswald Külpe

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Würzbergers Method

• Studied complex mental processes by means of
  introspection
• Vs. Wundt only simple mental processes could be
  studied with introspection
• Systematic experimental introspection
• Participants looked back on their experiences
  after they had occurred and then described them
• Later retrospection

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The Würzberg School

• Imageless thoughts when no images correspond to
  a mental operation
• Determining tendencies give thinking a direction

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The Würzberg School

• Introduced several complications into psychology
• Introspection could no longer be regarded as a
  simple procedure for investigating simple
  phenomena
• Some important mental processes appeared to be
  inaccessible to introspection because they were
  unconscious