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Parent Fields of Psychology
The term, parent fields, refers to two long-established disciplines that substantially contributed to the development of psychology. The two primary parent fields of psychology are medicine and philosophy.
Medicine. Medicine is the science of diagnosing, treating, or preventing disease and other damage of the body or mind. From a historical perspective, the basic assumption of medicine relevant to psychology is that behavior is determined by genetic and biological structures. Therefore, the medical view has traditionally led scientists to look to such factors as physical development, the functioning of neurons, hormonal activity, and "instincts" to explain human behavior.
Historically, the primary goal or concern of medical doctors has been obtaining practical solutions to "real world" problems. Physicians have been largely interested in solving problems related to biological functioning, or "fixing" that which is "broken" or diseased. This is because physicians have had to deal primarily with damaged or diseased individuals, including those having behavioral problems. Therefore, this emphasis on biological factors has carried over into the medical perspective on human behavior, which has largely focused on abnormal behavior in the past. Medical scientists in the past have tended to examine instances of abnormal behavior with relatively little concern about normal behavior. The implicit assumption in medical theory has been that normal behavior is simply the reverse of abnormal behavior. "Normal behavior" was assumed to result from the absence of factors that produce abnormality, and consequently was given relatively less theoretical attention.
Because of their concern with abnormal behavior, a primary method employed by medical scientists historically has been the case study, or case history, technique of collecting information (see your textbook on page 39 for an additional discussion of this method). The case study method involves collecting very detailed information about one person or a small group of people who exhibit the characteristics or problems of interest (e.g., symptoms of an illness). Because only small proportions of individuals typically show evidence of any given disease at any particular time, it is often not possible to conduct large-scale studies with large groups of people (which many scientists consider to be important for research to be considered "high quality"). The same limitation--from a methodological perspective--holds true for abnormal, or "diseased," behavior; very few people exhibit the particular problem at any given time, making large-scale studies difficult to conduct. The problem with the case study method is that it is risky to make generalizations about "typical" human behavior based on a small group of individuals, particularly those who were selected for study precisely because they were different from the general population. Many research psychologists consequently consider the case study method--and theories based heavily on case study observation--to be of very limited value for scientific investigation.
Philosophy. The other important parent field of psychology is philosophy. Philosophy is an academic discipline investigating the nature of existence, based on logical reasoning rather than empirical methods. The term, "empirical," means that knowledge related to some topic was obtained by venturing out into the world to collect new information or evidence about it. In contrast to being empirical, philosophers have mustered support for their explanations of the universe historically by applying reason and logic to what is already known about the world, or what is commonly agreed upon by scholars. Because of their position that logic can be applied to any issue in order to understand it, philosophers have not traditionally focused on specific single issues (i.e., specific disorders such as schizophrenia) to the same extent that medical scientists did. Instead, their primary goal or concern historically has been more general--in a sense, understanding the workings of the entire universe, including human behavior. Likewise, their interest has been less on solving specific problems, but more related to understanding an issue "for its own sake." The focus therefore has been more on gathering basic information about the universe, including human nature and behavior. Such an emphasis was carried over by some philosophers as they migrated into the fledgling field of psychology. For this reason, a number of psychologists focus predominantly on normal behavior and development, rather than on abnormal behavior and pathology.
Because of the emphasis of philosophy on logic as the predominant requirement for understanding issues, the primary method of philosophy in early times was anecdotal observation, and in more recent times, introspection. Anecdotal observation is based on the notion of anecdotes. An anecdote is a short tale about an event that is often told to make a particular point or to teach a lesson. Therefore, anecdotal observation is the rather informal, unsystematic collection of information based on what one has experienced personally, or based on what the person has heard about others' experiences. For example, suppose philosophers wanted to explain why humans behave aggressively. They would often support arguments related to their explanation by pointing to instances of aggression that they themselves were familiar with, or that were common knowledge (e.g., the causes of a particular war). They would not "go out into the world" and collect new data based on systematic, more objective techniques.
As philosophers concerned about human nature became interested in collecting information about behavior more directly, they reasoned that they could employ themselves and their students as sources of information. They assumed that by training individuals to examine their own mental processes, they would be able to collect information about how the human mind operates. This technique of "looking into" oneself and examining one's own thoughts and feelings is called introspection. However, as the field of psychology developed and increasingly embraced the standards of science, psychologists began to criticize introspection as too subjective and unverifiable. No method existed for substantiating the personal experiences reported to occur inside an individual, making the information obtained through introspection suspect and virtually a matter of opinion. Although this early version of introspection is no longer considered a legitimate technique for some cognitive and emotional processes, many contemporary researchers have come to rely a great deal in recent times on judgments made by individuals about their own thoughts and feelings. This technique of reporting on one's own behavior is called self-report, and is often employed when administering questionnaires, interviews, and surveys. However, current psychologists recognize that self-report must be corroborated with other more objective methods of measuring behavior.
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Primary Theoretical Orientations, Historically
Because of the different concerns of medicine and philosophy, the two disciplines have tended to adopt different theoretical orientations, or perspectives. Theoretical orientation refers to the general theory the disciplines favor or advocate. Theory, as discussed in class, is the set of assumptions, rules, and principles employed to make sense of existing information and to understand new evidence. As presented in the diagram at the beginning of this handout, medicine has tended to endorse the faculty position as its primary theoretical orientation; philosophy is largely responsible for developing the associationism position. The term, "faculty," means an ability or a capacity. The term, "association," refers to the idea that learning consists of the gradual development of mental associations with the environment.
The faculty position. The fundamental premise of the faculty position is that behavior patterns are innate (inborn) and genetically inherited. That is, humans are born with their important behavioral tendencies because instructions for how to behave are carried in our genes (although early faculty theorists were not aware of genes or how biological information is actually transmitted from one generation to the next). Modern versions of this position maintain that, as we grow and develop over the course of time, the genetic instructions given to us at the time of conception gradually affect the formation of nervous system structures and the chemical substances that allow the nervous system to operate (we will talk about neurotransmitters and hormones in the next topic area). Extreme versions of this position argue that everything that we do is programmed, or determined, by biological instructions handed down to us by our ancestors through genes.
A prominent early faculty theorist was Descartes. Like other faculty theorists, he argued that humans are essentially "biological machines" that operate according to natural physical laws in the same way that other objects in the universe do. According to Descartes, this biological make-up greatly influences the nature of the human mind, and we can learn about something that is as intangible as "the mind" by observing its operation in conjunction with the body (e.g., the brain). This position is called interactive dualism. Faculty theorists assert that we are born with a set of basic general abilities, including thinking and feeling, that tend to "push" humans in typical directions. That is, we tend to think in certain ways as humans, but we are not "told" specifically what to think. Descartes went even further; he maintained that we are born with specific ideas and a particular way of understanding of the world. For example, he even proposed that we are born with the concept of "God" and that all humans have a basic urge to seek out and have communion with God.
The associationism position. The central assumption of the associationism position is that behavioral tendencies are acquired gradually through experience with the world. Concepts and events become associated or linked to one another as an individual encounters aspects of the external world. Eventually, ideas may become linked to one another as the individual has experiences that link them together. For example, the concept of "dog" may become linked with the concept of "frightening" if a person is severely startled by a barking dog. However, associationist theorists would argue that "dog" and "frightening" are not inherently or automatically likely to become linked together for humans. In contrast, some faculty theorists might argue that we are born with the tendency to fear potentially threatening animals, and a dog might be one example of an animal that we would be more likely to perceive as threatening. Therefore, the link between "dog" and "frightening" might already exist to some degree in our genetic make-up.
In its extreme form, this position is the opposite of the faculty position. The extreme version holds that an individual is born with virtually nothing in terms of behavioral tendencies; all habits, preferences, and ideas result from experience. A prominent early theorist who maintained such an extreme view was Locke. He argued that humans are essentially "blank slates" (the Latin phrase tabula rasa is often used in these discussions because it means "blank slate"). In this view, our slate, or chalkboard, is blank until something writes upon it; that something in the theory is the environment. Therefore, the assumption is that we have nothing until the environment affects us and pushes us to react in a certain way. This viewpoint maintains that what we are like is determined totally by the type of encounters (learning experiences) we have with the environment, as we gradually build up associations with it.
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Historical Examples of the Two Primary Theoretical Orientations
Two examples for each of the theoretical approaches will illustrate how they translate into specific explanations.
The faculty position. With respect to the faculty position, early theories linked all behavior to obvious physical characteristics--that is, features of the human body that could be easily observed. The features were those about which Western civilization already had strongly established ideas. The first example of a faculty position was that developed in ancient Greece, a culture that placed importance on the notion of basic elements that make up the universe. Greek philosophers speculated that four basic elements were the building blocks for everything in the physical universe: earth, water, fire, and air. Today, we focus on atoms as the building blocks of the material world (e.g., hydrogen atoms or iron atoms), structures that are not obvious or easily observed, and theoretically much more complex. Ancient Greek philosophers extended this "building block logic" to explanations of human behavior, and focused on aspects of the human body to account for the origins of our behavioral tendencies.
This first example of the faculty position is called temperament theory, attributed initially to Hippocrates (who lived around 400 B.C.) and revived several hundred years later by Galen (who lived around 100 A.D.; it is important to know who these two men are, but the dates are not important). Both Hippocrates and Galen were physicians, obviously subscribing to the faculty position associated with medicine. Temperament theory is a faculty position because it maintained that behavior is determined by four basic body fluids (also called humors). The body fluids can therefore be considered building blocks of behavior because the characteristics of the fluid influence how a person feels and tends to respond to the environment. Actually, the relative amount of each of the four fluids was thought to determine the psychological nature of the person. Whatever fluid existed in the greatest amount had the greatest effect on the personality of the person. Temperament theorists assumed that mental health is dependent on the balance among the body fluids; the fluids should exist in relatively equal proportions in the body in order to have a balanced, stable personality type.
The four body fluids proposed to exist in temperament theory are yellow bile, black bile, phlegm, and blood. The color of the fluids was thought to reveal the nature of the influence on behavior. Yellow bile, because the color is that of fire, was thought to relate to having a "hot temper," and being generally angry, quick to retaliate, and irritable. Black bile, the color of night, was thought to cause a person to be prone to depression and being negative and gloomy. Phlegm, because it is cloudy and murky in color (it is the mucus that is produced by the lungs and digestive system), was proposed to cause the person to have a quiet, serious demeanor. Finally, blood was associated with the tendency to be lively, vivacious, and extremely confident, because its red color was associated with energy and strength.
Actually, black bile does not really exist in the human body (the dark fluid noticed by Greek physicians probably resulted from diseased conditions). Furthermore, little evidence has been found to support such a link between the proposed body fluids and behavioral tendencies. However, the lack of connection between body fluid and behavior did not become apparent until the development of the scientific method following the Middle Ages. Consequently, temperament theory remained the single most important explanation of human behavior in Western civilization up through the Middle Ages. Moreover, at least one modern personality theory draws upon the conceptual notions of temperament theory today in describing the existence of four different clusters of personality traits. (Can you also think of other contemporary medical and biological views that are based on exactly the same notion that chemical substances [body fluids] affect behavior?)
The second example of the faculty position is phrenology, the study of bumps on the head, which flourished primarily in the 1700 and 1800's. As with temperament theorists, phrenologists attempted to relate observable physical characteristics--bumps on the head--to the causes of behavior. In phrenology, it was not the obvious color of body fluids, but rather the existence of protrusions on the skull that were thought to be related to behavior. During this time, people in Western civilization were beginning to realize that thinking and behavior were controlled by the head, rather than by organs in the chest or abdomen (e.g., the notion that emotions, such as love, were experienced in the heart). The logic underlying phrenology apparently was that, if abilities and faculties originate in the head, growth or accumulation of those behavioral tendencies should register physically in some way. That is, the tissue of the brain where that ability or tendency was regulated and housed should also grow. It was assumed that each behavioral tendency (e.g., to love, to be aggressive, to think) was isolated in a specific region of the brain. The logic is that brain tissue in the regions that developed the most should be greater than in other areas of the brain. The greater tissue should therefore push against the skull, causing a bump or protrusion. The bump was presumed to be an outward sign of greater development in that area, and could be used to diagnose which traits and abilities an individual had the most of. Phrenologists mapped out the surface of the entire head and came to the conclusion that the mind may be characterized by 42 elements, or regions of the brain. See the diagram at the end of this document for an example of such a map of the head. The field of phrenology fell out of favor when more scientific research could not find such a link between specific regions of the cerebrum and behavior. (However, as with temperament theory, can you think of modern day approaches that are similar to, but more supported by evidence than, phrenology?)
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The associationism position. An example of an early associationism theory is the view advocated by Wilhelm Wundt, who established the first psychological laboratory in 1879. He conducted the first research in an area that is now called cognitive psychology. He studied perception of simple stimuli in the environment and attempted to discover the basic building blocks of the mind, or mental units. His research attempted to discover the content of the mind, how it develops from perception of the environment, and how mental units become associated with one another through learning. He used introspection, but also other, more scientific methods and is credited as one of the earliest psychologists to conduct scientific research.
A second example of the associationism position is behaviorism, a viewpoint that was strongly opposed to the ideas advocated by Wundt. (This is a major theoretical approach that will be examined in this course following the psychoanalytic approach.) The founder of this perspective, John B. Watson, argued strongly against focusing on mental structures and processes, as well as concepts such as "the mind." He advocated that the mind should be treated as if it were empty, because it cannot be studied using objective, scientific methods. Rather, he argued that observable environmental factors should instead be studied to determine how they influence behavior, because both the environment and overt behavior can be studied using objective techniques. Psychology, therefore, should study how the association between aspects of the environment (stimuli) and behavior develop, which he defined as the process of learning.
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The Important Dates in Psychology That You Should Remember
1879- Wundt established the first psychology laboratory
1900- Freud formally introduced his theory of personality--psychoanalytic theory
1920's- the rise of behaviorism in America
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