Different opinions about what is psychology - Essay Example

But psychologists do experiments and make observations which others can repeat; they obtain data, often in the form of quantitative measurements, which others can verify. This scientific approach is very different from forming opinions on the basis of individual experience or arguing from premises that no one can test. As a science psychology is systematic. But one of the major aspects of science that is measurement is not possible in most of the situations. Psychological studies cannot be measured directly by physical scales.

Even then we can often design our experiments and arrange our observations so that we can use physical measures of space and time to tell us about psychological events. Thus, fundamental differences in viewpoints show up in the very definition of psychology and in ideas about what psychology should study and how. Such differences and the arguments as they spark can make psychology a lively field indeed. In the history of psychology, strong differences of opinion about what psychology should study and how it should do it were represented by schools of psychology-groups of like-minded psychologists, which formed around influential teachers who argued for one viewpoint or other.

Psychology as a separate area of a study split away from philosophy around 100 years back is captured in William James famous textbook of 1890, the principles of psychology. James Wundt & the other psychologists of the time thought of psychology as the study of mind. In the decades of the twentieth century, psychologists came to hold quite different views about the nature of mind and the best ways to study it. About the same time, fundamental questions were raised about what should be studied in psychology: should psychology be the study of mind, should it study behavior or should both mind and behavior is included Different influential psychologists of the time held quite different views on the nature of mind and the proper subject matter for psychology.

The prominent schools of psychology may be categorized as Structuralism, Gestalt, Functionalism, Behaviorism and Psychoanalysis. Structuralism: Around the ideas of mind, structuralisms thought as in chemistry, a first step in the study of the mind should be a description of the basic or elementary, units of sensation, image and emotion, which compose it. The main method used by the structuralists to discover these elementary units of mind was introspection. Subjects were trained to report as objectively as possible what they experienced in connection with a certain stimulus, disregarding the meanings they had come to associate with that stimulus.

These experiments using introspections have given us a great deal of information about the kinds of sensations people have, but other psychologists of the challenged the idea that the mind could be understood by finding its elements and the rules for combining them. Still the others turned away from describing the structure of the mind to study how the mind functioned.Gestalt psychologists maintained that the mind should be thought of as resulting from the whole pattern of sensory activity and the relationships and organizations within this pattern.

According to Gestalt psychologists, the mind is best understood in terms of the ways elements are organized. Functionalists did experiments on the ways in which learning, memory, problem solving and motivation help people and animals adapt to