PSYC 1010 Midterm: Notes from text for test 1

• School: York University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 1010
• Professor: Rebecca Jubis

Document Summary

Psychologists seek to describe, explain, and predict the occurrence of behaviors. Term psychology has greek origin; psyche means soul; logos means the study of a subject. It emerged as a scientific discipline just over a 100 years ago. Wundt made a campaign to make psychology an independent discipline rather than the stepchild of philosophy or physiology. In 1879, wundt established the first formal lab for research in psychology. According to wundt, psychology"s primary focus was consciousness; the awareness of immediate experiences. Structuralism and functionalism were the firs 2 major schools of thought. Structuralism was based on notion that the task of psychology is to analyze consciousness into its basic elements and investigate how these elements are related. Introspection systematic self-observation of one"s own consciousness experience (structuralists depend on this to examine contents of consciousness) Functionalism was based on the belief that psychology should investigate the function of purpose of consciousness, rather than its structure.