scientific historical background of psychology

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im just trying to asked about the SCIENTIFIC BACKGROUND OF PSYCHOLOGY because i want to expand my knowledge about my report in school. and i find it very hard to find the exact fact about my report. There are variety of background i found in the web but none of them suits my topic, they are too complex. thank you! more power.

-- restifil suarez (tpie_21@yahoo.com), July 18, 2004

Answers

The scientific background of psychology is a very complex topic. Normally it is said that Wilhelm Wundt set up the first research lab dedicated specifically to experimental psychology in Leipzig, Germany in 1879. Wundt's approach to psychology, however, was superseded, to a large extent, by behaviorism (the assertion that psychology is the study of observable behavior alone, rather than of "the mind") in the 1920s in the US. With the advent of computers in the 1960s, many psychologists began to turn to modeling mental processes with computer programs. Even then, all of these very general claims are crude, very incomplete (e.g., what about social psychology, personality theory, and clinical psychology?) and easily disputable. As always, the devil is in the details. Try reading through a standard history of psycology textbook.

-- Christopher Green (christo@yorku.ca), July 18, 2004.

Hello Restifil.

It might be helpful for you, when considering the "scientific" background of psychology to start with the issues of: (1) what constitutes a psychological experiment; and (2) how contemporary psychology texts came to define an experiment as the mathematical/empirical relationship between "Independent and Dependent variables." The following links would be helpful in this regard.

http://www.comnet.ca/~pballan/PsyExpers.htm

http://www.psychology.uoguelph.ca/papers/winston/whatisexp/whatcountso cr.html

Cheers,

Paul F. Ballantyne

-- Paul F. Ballantyne (pballan@comnet.ca), July 18, 2004.


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