Section 1
Reading-room
“Physiological psychology is, therefore, first of all psychology”
Wilhelm Wundt
Before reading
Exercise 1.
Famous personalities in psychology:
H. Ebbinghaus
F. C. Donders
H. Helmholtz
G. Fechner
Who are these people? What are they famous for? Name 3 facts for each personality mentioned above to describe their contribution to psychology.
Exercise 2.
Find information about Wilhelm Wundt and present it to your group mates. Prepare power-point presentation to make your talk more interesting.
Exercise 3.
Translate and transcribe the following words:
· Discipline, typically, Socrates, Aristotle, significant, audio, visual, apparatus, chronometry, process, hypnosis, adult, technology, colleague
Reading
The beginnings of psychology as a science
The following statement, expressed by German experimentalist Hermann Ebbinghaus, suggests a key idea about the history of psychology: though psychology is relatively new as a formal academic discipline, scholars have pondered the questions that psychologists ask for thousands of years. According to psychology historian Morton Hunt, an experiment performed by the King of Egypt, as far back as the seventh century B.C., can be considered the first psychology experiment (Hunt, 1993, p. 1). The king wanted to test whether or not Egyptian was the oldest civilization on earth. His idea was that, if children were raised in isolation from infancy and were given no instruction in language of any kind, then the language they spontaneously spoke would be of the original civilization of man – hopefully, Egyptian. The experiment, itself, was flawed, but the king deserves credit for his idea that thoughts and language come from the mind and for his ambition to test such an idea.
Typically, historians point to the writings of ancient Greek philosophers, such Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, as the first significant work to be rich in psychology-related thought. These philosophers considered important questions like what free will is, how the mind works and what the relationship of people to their society is.
Psychology also derived its origins from physiology, another subject that had been studied for thousands of years. In fact, the father of psychology, William Wundt, was originally a professor of physiology. Wundt wanted to apply the methodical, experimental methods of science to the study of human consciousness. To this end, he founded the first-ever psychology laboratory at the University of Leipzig in Germany, earning him the monumental distinction of psychology's founder (1897). At his laboratory, Wundt spent hours exposing individuals to audio and visual stimuli and asking them to report what they perceived. In this way, he studied one component of consciousness, perception. The technology involved two categories of hardware: first, apparatus for exposing experimental subjects to controlled and precisely known forms of stimulation; second, apparatus for recording and measuring responses.
In Figure 1 the experimenter (sometimes called the “manipulator” in early studies) presents the subject (often called the “observer”) with a series of different weights shielded from sight by a wooden screen. The [p. 235] observer has to compare the weights but is limited to a choice between the responses “heavier than”, “lighter than”, or “equal”.
Fig.1
Several years before the founding of his Leipzig laboratory, Wilhelm Wundt had become interested in the study of reaction times. He regarded these as making possible a “mental chronometry”; that is, the timing of mental processes, especially decisions or acts of volition. He utilized methods pioneered by F. C. Donders, a Dutch physiologist. Figure 2 illustrates a simple reaction time situation. One person controls the presentation of stimuli while the other “reacts” by depressing a telegraph key. In this case, the duration of each reaction is recorded by a Hipp chrononoscope.
Fig.2
Around this time, other German scientists began doing similar work. Herman Von Helmholtz investigated color vision, hearing, and rate of nerve conduction and Gustav Fechner studied and quantified sensory experience.
Even as the fame of the Leipzig style of experimentation spread, others elsewhere were laying the foundations for different kinds of experimentation. Some medically oriented investigators, especially in France, began using hypnosis for a systematic study of human reactions under abnormal conditions. These were “clinical experiments” directed at the illumination of psychopathology rather than the exploration of normal adult consciousness.
When we compare these French studies to what was happening in Wundt's Leipzig laboratory, we become aware of the fact that, in addition to their material technology, psychological experiments also involve a social technology. Wundt had many students and graduate assistants who alternated in the roles of experimenter and experimental subject. Whatever role they took, they were well informed about the general purpose of the experiments in which they participated. That was very different from clinical experiments in which there was typically a vast gulf, both socially and intellectually, between experimenters and subjects. More generally, the social technology of psychological experimentation with human subjects involves an elaborate set of rules and relationships which provides a social framework for the collection of psychological data. Within this framework, the roles of all participants in the experimental situation are strictly defined.
The school of thought that arose from the work of Wundt and his colleagues is called structuralism. The basic goal of structualists was to study consciousness by breaking it down into it components – mainly perception, sensation, and affection. Their basic method was to train their subjects in introspection, which was careful, systematic observation of one's own conscious experience.
Answer the following questions:
1. What is considered to be the first experiment in Psychology? Was it a real experiment?
2. What ideas of ancient philosophers gave rise to Psychology as we know it today?
3. When was the first experimental laboratory found? What was the aim of this laboratory and who worked there?
4. Describe experimental designs created by Wundt and his colleagues. Were there any other experiments of the same kind conducted anywhere else?
5. What differences can be found when comparing German and French approaches to experimental work?
6. What can you say about structuralism as the school of thought that arose mainly from Wundt’s works?
Grammar Commentary
I. The following statement, expressed by German experimentalist Hermann Ebbinghaus, suggests a key idea about the history of psychology…
Suggest:
to offer an idea or a plan for someone to consider, e.g.:
The report suggested various ways in which the service could be improved.
· suggest (that):
I suggest that everyone should express his opinion, and then we will have a vote.
· suggest what/why/where etc:
Can anyone suggest what we should do to increase sales?
· suggest doing something:
If there is a mechanical problem, we suggest contacting the manufacturer directly.
Offer:
· [transitive] to let someone know that you will give them something if they want it
offer someone something, e.g. a cup of tea, a book, a seat:
They haven’t offered me the job yet.
· [intransitive/transitive] to let someone know that you are willing to do something for them
offer to do something:
I offered to buy the tickets.
II. …relationships which provides a social framework for the collection of psychological data
At his laboratory, Wundt spent hours exposing individuals to audio and visual stimuli …
Some nouns borrowed from the Latin and Greek languages have retained specific forms for singular and plural. Here are some of them:
· Datum - data
· Stimulus - stimuli
· Phenomenon - phenomena
· Thesis - theses
· Antenna - antennae
Some of these nouns are developing regular plural forms used alongside with the irregular ones, such as antenna – antennas, formula - formulas and even data - datas
Exercise 1.
Insert offer or suggest in the following sentences:
1. He ……….. his help in solving this problem.
2. They …………… a method to verify the results of the experiment.
3. I …………. we look into the matter in more detail.
4. I ………….. our working out the plan together.
5. She …………….. to research the material on the matter and make a report at the next conference.
Exercise 2.
Translate into English using to offer or to suggest:
1. Я не смог присутствовать на конференции, поэтому он предложил мне выступить с докладом на заседании.
2. Я не смог присутствовать на конференции и поэтому предложил выступить с докладом на заседании.
3. Он предложил мне воспользоваться его личной библиотекой.
4. Он предложил мне несколько редких трудов из его личной библиотеки.
5. Я предложил привлечь к организации эксперимента независимого специалиста.
6. Я предложил поучаствовать в организации эксперимента в качестве независимого специалиста.
7. После долгой дискуссии они предложили компромисс.
8. После долгой дискуссии я предложил помощь в нахождении копромисса.
Exercise 3.
Make as many sentences as possible using to offer/to suggest and the following word combinations:
To conduct an experiment on
To ask the advice of
To use the services of
To discuss the possible consequences of
To consider all the strong and weak points of
To report the findings at
To develop the new theory in
A report at the conference
A monthly scientific journal
The police
A specialist
A psychoanalyst
Closing the experiment
Expressing the ideas
Starting an open discussion
Monkeys
A library
Colleagues
A new book
Exercise 4.
Find the plural of the following nouns (make sure you know how to pronounce them correctly):
A vertebra, a nucleus, a magus, a basis, a stratum, a modus, a crisis, a criterion, a means, an analysis, a series, a formula, a diagnosis, a species, a hypothesis
Group the nouns according to the way they form the plural:
· A vertebra - …
· A nucleus - …
· A basis - …
· A stratum - …
· A means - …
Exercise 5.