Origins of Psychology - Approaches [A-Level Psychology]

welcome to approaches in Psychology and if this is the start of your course welcome to psychology a simple definition of psychology is it's the scientific study of the brain and behavior it's actually one of the youngest fields of science starting around 150 years ago of course before then people were interested in Behavior but the theorizing was limited to philosophers and the brain was studied but from the perspective of medicine so in this video we'll start with the work of vilim vs who can be argued to be the first person to study behavior using scientific techniques we can use his work to Define what it actually means to study the brain and behavior scientifically and then I'll finish this video with a timeline of psychology up to the current day introducing the different psychological approaches we'll then cover in more depth later on in this approaches unit the psych boost app now has free features flashcards multiple choice quizzes and see if you can work out the key term from his definition with the key term ter tester try paper one for free right now and Patron supporters can watch psych boost videos ad free learn from over 17 hours of exclusive exam tutorial videos and access hundreds of digital and printable resources including my Maps quiz sheets worksheets teaching slides and more psychological terminology in this video the future approaches videos and honestly every video on this channel I'm going to be using a lot of complex terminology that's likely completely new to you a big part of becoming a good psychology student is learning these terms and being able to use them effectively in your own writing so if you're just starting off with psychology or even if you've been studying the subject for a while it's a really good idea to have a key term list if you hear a new word you can always pause these videos and make a note of the definition you'll often see keywords highlighted on the text on screen if it's read it's a word mentioned in the part of the specification I'm explaining so you can be asked directly about it or purple if it's a word you should know if you're going to write a good essay on the top topic I do have a free key term list for each unit on my website you can print those off and fill them in as we go I'll leave a link to the PDFs in the video description origins of psychology so if this video is about the start of psychologies a science it would be a good idea to start by defining what it means to call psychology a science let's begin by actually defining science a good definition is finding out systematically and objectively about the physical and natural world using empirical methods such as observation and experimentation okay there are a lot of complex words just in that definition so let's break them down systematic is working according to a fixed or controlled method so scientists have standardized plans or systems to their investigations this helps researchers be confident that they've measured what they' planned to measure they haven't just made a mistake because of how they've conducted their study it also means other scientists can take the plan and attempt to replicate findings using the same method efforts this is a check the original results are not due to chance objectivity is about a lack of bias so the research design results and conclusions are not influenced by the personal opinions of the researcher and just an attempt to support why they already believe to be true objectivity is possibly more of a problem with psychology than other Sciences this is because psychologists are studying humans and are likely to have strong opinions on the behaviors they study like relationships aggression and gender Behavior can also be open to interpretation a psychologist has to avoid allowing their personal expectations and beliefs influence how they interpret the behavior they record empiricism is the idea that scientists must base their conclusions on testing ideas with data collected from the world not just accepting Theory or logical arguments this is the basis of what's known as a scientific methodology scientific knowledge comes from formulating testing and modifying hypotheses but we only accept these hypotheses on the basis of systematic observation and taking careful measurements when conducting well-designed experiments following the scientific method is really important if we're going to trust the results of any psychological studies and it's the reason research methods are such a big part of any course in Psychology it's often not students favorite unit where it is fundamental in understanding and evaluating everything else that we study now that we have a pretty clear idea of what we mean when we say psychology is a science let's explore the origins of psychology and how it became one V and the origin of psychology this is vhim v he's thought by many psychologists to be the father of experimental psychology before V much of what we would describe now as psychology would be classified as philosophy or medicine but after observing the success of the physical sciences like physics biology and chemistry and the role of experimentation in the subjects V wanted to change the way that the mind was studied from philosophy to controlled empirical science scientific research in the 1870s R out the world's first psychological laboratory The Institute of experimental psychology in leig a city in Germany F was the first person to call himself a psychologist and he produced one of the world's first books on psychology as well as the first academic Journal that published psychological experiments all of this helped establish psychology an independent field of scientific research and before long he had students from all over the world wanting to train at Institute many of these students went on to become professors in top universities in America Europe and Russia spreading V scientific methods in his own research V was particularly interested in the structure of sensation and perception V's approach to research in these processes was called structuralism this is describing the mind in terms of its simplest definable components after V identify these separate components he would try to explain how these components actually fit together this was an attempt to uncover the hidden structure of the Mind the method vun used in his research was called introspection vun would first train participants to record their conscious experience as objectively as possible and then ask them to focus on a sensory object often a ticking metronome and ask them to systematically report their experience of the object by breaking their thoughts down into separate elements so the participants focus inwards and Report Sensations feelings and images vun was careful to control these studies he controlled the experimental conditions and the environment the experiment was conducted in vun was able to record patterns of behavior that he could then use to develop General theories of mental processes it's important to make clear fun isn't directly observing these mental processes he's making inferences this means making a guess or an assumption on the internal mental processes happening in his participants based on their behavior with enough observations of people all behaving the same way in an experiment researchers can make inferences on the processes that might be driving their behavior but inferences are effectively educated guesses so we could of course be wrong in our inferences as an example let's say I make why think is a funny joke to my class and they laugh I observe their behavior and I assume based on my observation that they found what I said amusing and enjoyed the joke however this is a guess an inference it could be in fact in fact it's pretty likely that they didn't find it funny and they only laughed because they felt sorry for me or because it' be too socially awkward not to laugh evaluating V's work and influence on psychology the main positive criticism of vun is compared to what came before his work is scientific this is mainly due to the controlled nature of his experiments large samples and clear methods that were open to replication this has inspired later scientific psychologist to also study the mind using control methods however compared to more modern psychological methods F's research is not classified as scientific because of the subjective nature of his introspective methods participants can't be trusted to accurate report on their own mental States it's likely those self-reports are biased mistaken or attempting to give V the results they thought he wanted an issue called demand characteristics however due to the difficult of studying unobservable mental processes like emotional states introspection is still used in some research and is also used in many forms of therapy Fun's work is also not fully scientific because of his use of inferences these inferences are assumptions and could be mistaken this criticism led to later psychologists the behaviorists completely ignoring the study of internal mental States and focusing only on fully observable stimulus response mechanisms because of this the behaviorist findings were more reliable and behaviorism is seen as an approach that's more in line with scientific principles despite its weaknesses the use of inferences has been influential especially to cognitive psychologists these psychologist also research internal mental States but rather than ask participants what's happening in their mind they ask participants to complete tasks under experimental conditions the participants ability to complete these tasks are used to make inferences about the structure of mental processes like memory attention and perception by taking a scientific approach to psychological research V was one of the first to argue that behaviors have a cause so are determined and these causes can be studied objectively historical explanations of mental disorders and criminality often had a religious perspective using ideas like sin or demonic influence following on for vun scientifically determined approaches to mental health have led to effective biological iCal treatments and forensic psychology is used to understand and change the behavior of criminals so that was V at the start of what we consider modern psychology in those evaluations I mentioned the names of some later approaches to psychology so before move on to individual videos diving deep into each psychological approach let me give you an overview of the development of psychology over the following 250 years by introducing each approach timeline of psychology this is a timeline up to the modern day I'll give you a very quick introduction to each approach that you're going to learn over the next few videos by placing each approach on this line so here we have V's opening of the first psychological Institute a little later in the timeline we have a psychologist whose name you might recognize this is Sigman Freud he developed an approach to understanding the Mind called psychodynamics this was less scientific than vun as Freud bases ideas on case studies Freud used introspection as part of his th apeutic work with individual patients from this work he developed the idea of an unconscious mind arguing there are processes that direct our behavior that we're totally unaware of he defined the structure of Personality claimed to use defense mechanisms such as repression denial and displacement to goope with anxiety as well as forming a theory of childhood development called the psychosexual stages we then have a group of psychologists called the behaviorists this includes two researchers we need to know in detail p love and Skinner these researchers rejected introspection and the idea that you could ever scientifically study internal mental processes calling the mind a black box they argued with the tools available to them it was only scientific to study a creatur stimuli what you do to it and measure what the creature outputs Its Behavior these researchers tended to use animals so they could use large samples and fully control their environments the behaviors are known as learning theorists as they study how creatures learn from their environment another group of learning theorists called social learning theorists agreed with most to behaviorism but argue that when applied to human learning we cannot ignore the fact that we have internal mental processes especially when you consider humans learn not just from their own direct experiences but from watching other people for example if you perform a behavior and get reward for it in order for me to imitate that behavior in my mind I must have paid attention to your behavior I must have retained a memory of you doing that behavior I must feel confident I'm actually able to reproduce your behavior and I must actually feel motivated to reproduce your behavior if any of those internal mental processes are missing I'm not going to imitate your behavior also in the 1960s another group of psychologists called the humanists emerged and they very much disagreed with using science to explain human behavior they disagreed with the idea that the complexity of Human Experience could be reduced us down to being caused by simple environmental or biological factors that are testable in the lap they also disagreed with the scientific assumption that behavior has a cause so is determined by biological environmental or unconscious forces instead they argue humans have free will in deciding how to act they also thought psychology is too focused on mental illness and instead created a psychology that explains how to become the best version of yourself what they called achieving self actualization in response to the computer Revolution an area of psychology developed called cognitive psychology these psychologies view the mind and brain as similar to a computer the computer's inputs keyboard and mouse and outputs speaker and Screen the brain has inputs our senses and outputs our voice and body movement the computer has Hardware the CPU and software the programs that Ru on the CPU cognitive psychologists say the CPU is just like the biological Hardware of the brain brain and information is processed in the brain like software runs on a CPU cognitive psychologists attempt to explain this mental software and do this by creating theoretical models of mental processes like memory and placing biological psychology last but in reality it's first because biological psychology has its roots in medicine and for hundreds of years there have been unusual cases of brain damage that have suggested certain areas of the brain all linked with certain abilities but it's only really been the last few decades that we developed tools like fmri scanners that give psychologists the ability to study the active brain and DNA sequences that given genetic researchers the ability to scientifically study the inheritance of behavior and mental health conditions so welcome to the approaches unit I hope you're looking forward to finding out more about the various ways psychologists study the brain and behavior I want to thank everyone over on patreon for supporting the channel because of you I've been able to teach parttime meaning I can make psych boost on YouTube for everyone I do have extra resources are exclusive to my patrons so if you decide to sign up you can grab those over my website and these include over 100 exam questions tutal videos of course including questions on the approaches unit I hope this was helpful and I'll see you in the next psych Boost video

Channel: Psych Boost

Views: 16,525

Keywords: aqa psychology, aqa alevel psychology, Psychology, Alevel, Alevel psychology

Id: HgueSGSLY-4

Length: 15min 31sec (931 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 09 2024