Who did E.B. Titchener profess to be a follower of?
Wilhelm Wundt
What was Titchener's approach to psychology?
Structuralism
How did Titchener believe the mind organized mental elements which contrasted with British Empiricists?
Voluntarily
According to Titchener, psychology's fundamental task was what?
To discover the nature of the elementary conscious experiences. To analyze consciousness into its component parts and thus determine its structure (structuralism).
Structuralism
early school of thought promoted by Wundt and Titchener; used introspection to reveal the structure of the human mind
Where did Titchener spend his most productive years?
Cornell University
Although Titchener was English he was often mistaken as what?
German
What 6 languages did Titchener speak?
Latin, Greek, German, French, Italian, Dutch.
Where did Titchener study philosophy and the classics?
Oxford
Where did Titchener earn his doctorate?
Leipzig (1892)
Why did Titchener not stay at Oxford after earning his doctorate?
Because colleagues were skeptical of a scientific approach to philosophy.
What did Titchener refer to as the only scientific psychology worthy of the name?
Structuralism
What stimulated the growth of lab work in psychology in the United States and influenced a whole generation of experimental psychologists?
Titchener's "Manuals". His four-volume Experimental Psychology: A Manual of Laboratory Practice (1901-1905).
How did Titchener add the word "empathy" to the English language?
By translating the German word for sympathy as empathy from a paper written by a German psychologist.
In 1904, Titchener formed a group of psychologists from Cornell, Yale, Clark, Michigan and Princeton. What was the group called?
Titchener Experimentalists
Who did the Titchener Experimentalists disallow in their group?
Women, They were too pure to smoke and smoking was encouraged.
Women from what college tried to attend the Titchener Experimentalist meetings?
Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania
Lucy May Boring
Married to E.G. Boring. PhD from Cornell. Worked on husband's projects quietly after marriage.
Who strongly protested Titchener's exclusion of women from his meetings?
Christine Ladd-Franklin
Who supported women's advancement in psychology and accepted them into graduate programs?
Titchener
What number of Titchener's awarded 56 doctorates were awarded to women?
More than 1/3.
Who was the first woman to earn a doctoral degree in psychology?
Margaret Floy Washburn
Who was Titchener's first doctoral student?
Margaret Floy Washburn
Margaret Floy Washburn
First female to be awarded a PhD in psychology; 2nd president of the APA (1921)
Society of Experimental Psychologists
2 years after Titchener's death, the Titchener's Experimentalists were reborn and named this. Allowed women.
According to Titchener, what is the proper subject matter for psychology? How does it differ from the subject matter of other sciences?
Conscious experience as that experience is dependent on the person who is actually experiencing it. Other sciences are independent of the experiencing persons.
stimulus error
Confusing the mental process under study with the stimulus or object being observed
Who warned against stimulus error?
Titchener
How did Titchener expect the objects of our observations to be described?
In terms of the elementary conscious content of the experience.
What happens when observers focus on a stimulus object instead of on the conscious content of the object?
They fail to distinguish what they have learned in the past about the object (for example, it's called an apple) from their own direct and immediate experience.
How did Titchener define consciousness?
The sum of our experiences as they exist at a given time.
Titchener described the mind as a sum of what?
An individual's experiences accumulated over a lifetime.
Although similar, what did Titchener describe as the difference between the mind and consciousness?
Consciousness involves mental processes occurring at the moment, whereas mind involves the total of these processes.
What did Titchener consider psychology's only legitimate purpose?
To discover the facts of the structure of the mind. Had no practical purpose.
What did Titchener's form of introspection, or self-observation rely on?
Observers who were rigorously trained to describe the elements of their conscious state rather than reporting the stimulus by its familiar name.
Whose label, systematic experimental introspection did Titchener adopt to describe his method?
Kulpe
What did Titchener use during the act of introspecting?
Subjects detailed, qualitative, subjective reports of mental activities during the act.
How did Titchener differ from Wundt?
Titchener was interested in the analysis of complex conscious experience into its component parts, not in the synthesis of the elements through apperception. Titchener emphasized the parts, Wundt the whole.
Titchener's goal was to discover what?
The so-called atoms of the mind.
One historian suggests that Titchener's approach to introspection was formed before he went to Leipzig and was influenced by the writings of who?
James Mill
What did Titchener describe his subjects as, which is in line with chemistry and the mechanistic spirit?
Reagents
A reagent is what?
Essentially passive, and agent used to elicit or prompt responses from some other substance.
What did Titchener consider the three essential problems for psychology?
1. Reduce conscious processes to their simplest components.
2. Determine laws by which these elements of consciousness were associated.
3. Connect the elements with their physiological conditions.
Titchener's three elementary states of consciousness
sensations
images
affective states
Sensations
basic elements of perception and occur in the sounds, sights, smells, and other experiences evoked by physical objects in our environment
Images
Elements of ideas found in the process that reflects experiences that are not actually present at the moment, such as a memory of a past experience.
Affective States or affections
Elements of emotion and are found in experiences such as love, hate and sadness.
How many elements of sensation did Titchener uncover through his research?
44,500 individual sensation qualities: 32,820 visual sensations and 11,600 auditory sensations. Each element was believed to be conscious and distinct from all others, and each could be combined with others to form perceptions and ideas.
What did Titchener believe to be the four attributes of mental elements that allow us to distinguish between them?
Quality
Intensity
Duration
Clearness
quality of sensation
Characteristic "Cold" or "Red" that clearly distinguishes each element from every other element.
intensity of sensation
Sensations strength, weakness, loudness or brightness.
Duration of sensation
The course of a sensation over time.
Clearness of sensation
The role of attention in conscious experience; experience that is the focus of our attention is clearer than experience toward which our attention is not directed.
Affective states only have three of the four attributes. What three?
Quality, intensity and duration.
Why does affective states lack clearness as an element?
Titchener believed in was impossible to focus our attention directly on an element of feeling or emotion. When we try to do so the affective quality, such as the anger or sadness, disappears.
Some sensory processes, particularly involving vision or touch, possess a 5th attribute. This is what?
Extensity
Extensity
the extent to which a sensation fills or occupies space
Titchener, rejecting Wundt's tridimensional theory, suggested that affections had only one dimension. What was it?
Pleasure/displeasure
What 2 dimensions of Wundt did Titchener reject?
tension/relaxation and excitement/depression
In the 1920's Titchener began to question the term structural psychology. He took to calling his approach what?
Existential psychology
When Titchener began to question introspection, he began to favor which method?
Phenomenological approach
phenomenological approach
Examining experience just act it occurs without trying to break it down into elements.
When did the era of structuralism collapse?
When Titchener died
What did Kant say about introspection?
That any attempt at introspection necessarily altered the conscious experience being studied because it introduced an observing variable into the content of the conscious experience.
What did Comte say about introspection?
If the mind were capable of observing its own activities it would have to divide itself into two parts-one doing the observing and the other being observed.
What were the two attacks on Titchener's version of introspection?
Definition of introspective method.
Question of what precisely the structuralist introspects were trained to do.
What did critics of the structuralists have to say about attempting to analyze conscious processes into elements?
That the whole of an experience cannot be recaptured by any later association or combination of elementary parts. Experience does not come to us in individual sensations, images or affective states but rather in unified wholes.
What school of psychology revolted against structuralism?
Gestalt
What is the broad definition of introspection?
Giving verbal report based on experience.
In what areas of psychology is introspection vial verbal reports still used?
Psychophysics (Tones), People exposed to unusual environments (weightlessness in space), Clinical reports from patients, responses on personality tests and attitude scales.Industrial/organizational psychologists. Cognitive psychologists.
Contributions of Structuralism
Research Methods: Based on observation, experimentation, and measurement.
Highest traditions of science.
More scientific approach to the method of introspection.
The catalyst for other schools of thought: Served as a point of criticism.
Scientific advances need something to oppose