Psychology and Wilhelm Wundt (An Introduction to Psychology)

Know a little bit about Psychology

Script Writer: Ranzie Llaneta
Editor: Jairus Bredes & Ranzie Llaneta
Graphics: Ranzie Llaneta
Narrator: Alaizha Gundran

Script:
Intro
Personality,
Dreams,
Desires,
Motivations,
The Arts, all of these are a product of “THE HUMAN MIND”. One can say that the “Human Mind” is astonishing, as it is one of the most influential forces in the universe, yet behind this feat, it is considered as enigmatic, as it struggles to define itself, due to its complicated and elusive nature. But regardless of all of this, we still try to understand the mechanism and the governing rule behind this thing, and that is where Psychology enters.
The term Psychology is derived from the Greek word Psyche and logia, which means “to study the soul”. However, psychology is more than that. In fact, the definition of psychology has undergone a lot of revision throughout history. Today, psychology is defined as “the science of behavior and mental processes”. It is NOT ABOUT READING THE MINDS OF OTHERS; rather, it aims to ponder big questions in life like: are we truly free or not; What is consciousness?; What is more important nature or nurture?; What motivates people?; and more
Though the term psychology was first coined around the 16th century, early philosophers like Aristotle already tackled different psychological concepts like perception, sensation, thinking, and more. In fact, Aristotle’s work called “De Anima” is considered as the first systematic treatise in Psychology. According to his work, the soul is the s1ource of the rational thinking of a man. Fast Forward to the 17th Century, a person who is known for his quote “Cogito ergo sum” (Rene Descartes), proposed the idea of interactive dualism. For him, the mind and the body are two separate entities, which interact with each other to produce conscious experience.

For more than a century, psychology was considered as more of philosophy; however, in the mid-19th century, a German physiologist, named Wilhelm Wundt, brought psychology into a new era. Wundt was born in a German town of Neckarau, outside of Mannheim on August 16, 1832. He studied medicine at the University of Tübingen. However, he realized that being a doctor was not his vocation, so he turns himself into physiology, at the University of Berlin, Wundt studied physiology under the guidance of Johannes Müller, also known as the “father of experimental physiology. In 1857 he became a lecturer at the University of Heidelberg, and at the same time, he worked as a lab assistant to Hermann Helmholtz.
On 1862. Wundt introduced experimental psychology in the book “Contributions to the Theory of Sensory Perception”. However, he is much more known for his groundbreaking works, “Principles of Physiological Psychology” which was published in 1874. In this work, he emphasizes the connection between physiology and psychology. He also asserts that psychology should become a distinct scientific discipline, and with this goal, he opened the very first psychology research laboratory at Leipzig University in 1879. Throughout his teaching career, Wundt attracted a lot of students from different parts of the world. For over a year, more than 17,000 students migrated to Germany to attend his class. Wundt’s hard work became a fundamental step in the creation of the different schools of thought on Psychology from structuralism, functionalism, psychodynamic, more, and with this, it is safe to say that Wilhelm Maximillian Wundt is truly the founder of Psychology.

Reference:
Hockenbury, D. H., & Hockenbury, S. E. (2014). Psychology with updates on DSM-5. Macmillan Higher Education.
Kim, A. (2006). Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt.
Leahey, T. H. (1994). A history of modern psychology. Prentice-Hall, Inc.

[ajmarr]

The Colors of Affect: or How Wundt was Wight! (with apologies to Elmer Fudd)
The colors of the rainbow do not begin to reflect all of the infinite hues of reflected light. However, the myriad colors of the world are not separate things, but are in truth admixtures of three primary colors, red, yellow, and blue. This simple conceptual scheme provided the explanation of color that made the replication of color easy, to the delight no doubt of interior decorators the world over.

Deriving complex structure from elemental processes serves all the physical and biological sciences, and like the metaphors of disease and space and time, can encapsulate a world view in a phrase. However, feelings or affective states have not been so tractable, though an early psychologist would demur. He was the late 19th century psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, the founder of experimental psychology. Wundt wanted to know the rudiments of felt experience, or affect, and his aim was to see if affect, like color, can be derived from rudimentary components. Wundt believed that the affective components of the human mind could be determined by rigorously objective introspection. That is, he thought that affect or feelings could be broken down (or reduced) to their basic elements without sacrificing any of the properties of the whole. Wundt’s introspection was not a casual affair, but a highly practiced form of self-examination. He trained his students to make observations that were free from the bias of personal interpretation or previous experience, and used the results to develop a theory of affect which derived from three bi-polar dimensions. According to Wundt: “In this manifold of feelings… it is nevertheless possible to distinguish certain different chief directions, including certain affective opposites of predominant character.”
Wundt identified three bipolar dimensions whose permutations comprised moment to moment affective states: (i) pleasurable versus un-pleasurable, (ii) arousing versus subduing, and (iii) strain versus relaxation. An attentive reader would note that strain versus relaxation also reflect unpleasant and pleasant affective states, however these states differ from our workaday pleasures and pains because they are continuously rather than intermittently present. So, with this new perspective, Wundt in effect postulated one discrete and two continuous affective dimensions. For example, a delicious meal or touching a hot pan are pleasurable and un-pleasurable states that occur discretely, however the relative activity of the covert musculature is continuous, as is our moment-to-moment state of alertness, or attentive arousal.
What Wundt did not know and could not know at the time due to the rudimentary observational tools then available was the source of arousal and pleasure, which are respectively due to the activity of mid-brain dopaminergic and opioid systems. The neuromodulator dopamine elicits a feeling of alertness and energy, but not pleasure, and is induced through the experience and anticipation of novel positive events. On the other hand, opioids are responsible for pleasure, and are elicited in very small regions or ‘hot spots’ in the brain by exteroceptive (food, drink) and interoceptive stimuli (relaxation). Finally, arousal and pleasure are not just complementary but synergistic. In other words, pleasure stimulates arousal, and arousal stimulates pleasure. This reflects the fact that the neuronal assemblies or nuclei that induce dopaminergic and opioid activity abut each other in the midbrain, and when individually activated can have synergistic effects, or dopamine-opioid interactions. This can explain why high arousal and pleasure, or ecstatic, peak, or ‘flow’ experiences, correspond to novel and ‘meaningful’ experiences during relaxed states.
If we map the continuous affective dimensions of Wundt’s proposal to each other, when informed by affective neuroscience, Wundt’s color wheel can bloom, and account for and predict different affective states. The vertical axis would represent dopaminergic activity, from high to low, whereas the horizontal axis would represent the degree of covert neuro-muscular activation, or muscular tension, again from high to low. High arousal would be felt as a sense of energy or alertness, and low arousal would be felt as a sense of lethargy or depression. High tension would be felt as anxiety or nervousness, and low tension would be felt as a pleasurable state of calm or relaxation. Mapping these affective events to their physiological correlates gives us emergent subjective states that match the emotional labels of our affective wheel, or an ‘emotional circumplex’. Thus ‘elation’, or a state of pleasure and arousal would occur when arousal is high and tension is low, ‘frustration’ would reflect high arousal and high tension, ‘worry’ would reflect low arousal and high tension, and ‘relaxation’ would correspond to low arousal and low tension.
And so with a little tinkering of Wundt’s proposal, his observations are correct after all, and perhaps as the affective wheel turns can help psychologists arrange the colors of emotion in ways that would do interior decorators of the soul proud.

[Jdogg]

That may be, yet people still think that Sigmund Freud was the father, but in reality the field is so vast

[iam_aiko]

Wundt was NOT the founder of Psychology! He was the founder of experimental psychology! Important to differentiate:)

[jacob_stuni]

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[chonkybear]

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