Research methodology and it's history .pptx

Research methods

1. Module 3 Dr. Koninika Mukherjee

2. agenda Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution: Man as Machine Beginnings of early scientific & experimental psychology: Contributions of Wilhelm Wundt Structuralism (Titchener) Functionalism (William James)

3. European Recovery The so-called Dark Ages in western Europe came to an end around 1000. the feudal system and the papacy evolved into dominant and integrative social structures. Teachers of law, grammar, rhetoric, and logic were in high demand in urban centers. Students and masters formed themselves into corporate entities called universities, with defined powers and rights. These were founded at Bologna (1088), Paris (1150), Oxford (1167), Padua (1222), Salamanca (1218), Vienna (1365), Prague (1348), and other urban centers, often in conjunction with the expansion in cathedral construction. Toward the end of the medieval period universities began issuing certificates, such as the baccalaureate, master’s, and doctoral degrees ( Pyenson & Sheets- Pyenson , 1999).

4. European Recovery The first Crusade (1095) brought the Western world in contact with Islamic scholarship, which had preserved the works of early Greek thinkers. The medical schools of many medieval universities adopted Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine as their primary text.

5. Augustine The early Christian fathers, such as Augustine, had followed Plato, Philo, and Plotinus in treating the soul as an immaterial spiritual entity temporarily imprisoned in the material human body, the view also embraced by Avicenna. The theory of the inner senses or “inner wits” was an amalgamation of the psychology of Aristotle and the neurophysiology of Galen. The inner senses were usually identified as common sense , i magination , estimation , memory , and reason . They were thought to be in the ventricles (fluid-filled cavities) of the brain, which were identified with reasonable accuracy by Galen. However, Galen himself believed that psychological capacities were instantiated in the substance of the brain rather than the ventricles.

6. Theory of inner senses Avicenna developed the most popular and influential version in his Canon of Medicine (Kemp, 1997). Avicenna claimed that the three ventricles of the brain perform five distinct cognitive operations. The anterior ventricle receives impressions from the various sensory organs and nerves, which are integrated by the common sense located at the front of the ventricle. The middle ventricle is responsible for both the reconstruction of stored images to form complex representations and estimation, based upon instinct or associative learning. The posterior ventricle is responsible for memory of cognitive reconstructions and estimations produced in the middle ventricle. mania, melancholia, and accidie (a debilitating form of apathy) were attributed to disturbances of the different ventricles (Kemp, 1990). The theory was abandoned when the 16th-century anatomist Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564) demonstrated that the sensory nerves are connected to the rear of the brain and not to the anterior ventricle.

7. Thomas AQUINAS T ravelled to Cologne and study with Albertus Magnus, who persuaded him of the virtues of Aristotelian philosophy. Aquinas attained his master’s degree from the University of Paris, where he taught for a few years. His major work, Summa Theologica , appropriated those elements of Aristotelian theory most congenial to Christian theology.

8. Renaissance The Renaissance , meaning “rebirth,” originated in southern Italy in the 14 th century, eventually spreading to Northern Europe. It promoted innovative developments in art, literature, architecture, music, mathematics, and— eventually— religion and science. Humanistic thinkers such as Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374), Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494), and Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466– 1536) were highly critical of the institutional hierarchy and dogmatism of the established church and recommended a return to a more personal relationship with God. Petrarch is often treated as the founder of Renaissance humanism , insofar as his writings heralded the increased focus on the psychology of human individuals, including their place in the social and political order. The Renaissance promoted pioneering explorations of human nature in the art and anatomy of Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), the political writings of Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527), and the poetry and drama of William Shakespeare (1564–1616), but did little to advance the systematic scientific study of human psychology.

9. Scientific Revolution The period characterized as the scientific revolution was marked by revolutions in theory, particularly in astronomy, physics, and medicine. The most famous of these was the overthrow of the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic geocentric ( Earthcentered ) theory in favor of the Copernican heliocentric (sun-centered) theory . S ome of Galileo’s colleagues at the University of Pisa refused to look through his telescope because they considered it redundant: They maintained that astronomical questions had already been settled by Aristotle and scripture.

10. Galileo & The NEW Science Yet from around the 16th century onward, natural philosophers came to adopt the view that theories ought not to be accepted until they have been empirically tested, ideally via what came to be known as a crucial experiment, enabling scientists to adjudicate between competing theoretical explanations of the same range of empirical data. They eventually became what the ancients and medievals had deplored, empiriks . Galileo’s new science represented an integration of the ancient naturalist (Ionian) and mathematical (Pythagorean) traditions. These paradigmatic elements are also to be found in the work of the major scientists of the scientific revolution, such as Robert Boyle (1627–1691), Descartes, William Gilbert (1544–1603), William Harvey (1578–1657), Robert Hooke (1635–1703), Kepler, and Newton.

11. Man – The Machine The mechanistic forms of efficient causal explanation that displaced teleological or final causal explanation in astronomy and physics were eventually extended to biology and psychology. One of the first and most influential mechanistic explanations of a biological process was William Harvey’s account of the circulation.

12. MIND AND MECHANISM One of Descartes’ most significant contributions to the history of science and psychology was his application of the mechanistic principles of efficient causal explanation to the behavior of organic beings. In his Treatise on Man (the second part of The World ), he advanced mechanistic explanations of the biological and psychological functions of animals and humans. Although Galen had identified simple reflexes such as the pupillary reflex, Descartes was the first to provide a detailed physiological account of reflexive behavior, which he characterized as automatic and involuntary.

13. Involuntary BEHAVIOR Descartes claimed that sensory organs are connected to pores in the brain via a system of “delicate threads” within the nerves and that the pores in the brain can direct animal spirits though the nerves to the muscles. In the case of a person who withdraws a foot when it encounters fire, Descartes supposed that the moving particles of the fire interact with receptors in the foot, which pull on the nerve threads connected to the pores of the brain. This action in turn causes the release of animal spirits, which flow through the nerves to the muscles of the foot, causing it to be withdrawn from the fire.

14. Substance Dualism Descartes did not simply maintain, as many contemporary cognitive psychologists would maintain, that some human behaviors are non-reflexive because they involve some form of internal cognitive processing and thus require a more complex mechanistic explanation. Rather, he claimed that voluntary human behavior could not be explained mechanistically at all. According to Descartes, some human behavior is generated through the action of a distinct immaterial soul, whose essence is thought. He claimed that the immaterial mind, the seat of reason, consciousness, and will, interacts with the material body via the pineal gland in the brain, which enables the immaterial mind to direct the animal spirits to different muscles and generate different forms of behavior at will.

15. Machine man The French military physician Julien Offroy de La Mettrie had no such qualms and boldly declared that “man is a machine”. La Mettrie claimed that the man machine is materially continuous with the animal machine: “From animals to man there is no abrupt transition” (1748/1996,p. 13). He maintained that the man machine differs from the animal machine only in terms of the degree of complexity of its material organization. He claimed that differences between human and animal psychology and behavior are merely differences in degree and not fundamental differences in kind. H uman psychology and behavior are merely more complex forms of animal psychology and behavior. Thus, La Mettrie argued that thought and language could be attributed to animals, although in attenuated form.

16. Scientific Psychology The academic discipline of scientific psychology was founded institutionally in Germany at the end of the 19th century. Christian Wolff (1679–1754), professor of mathematics at the University of Halle, popularized the use of the term psychology in Europe in the 18th century. Wolff distinguished between rational psychology, concerned with rationally demonstrable principles about the human soul (such as its simplicity), and empirical psychology, concerned with the empirical description and measurement of psychological faculties such as sensation, memory, and intellect (Wolff, 1732, 1734).

17. JOHANN FRIEDRICH HERBART Herbart was invited to the University of Konigsberg in 1809 to occupy the position previously held by Kant. Herbart agreed in part with Kant’s contention that psychology could never be an experimental science, because he believed experimentation necessitated dividing up its subject matter; and because the mind acted as an integrated whole, the mind could not be fractionated. B ut he believed that the activities of the mind could be expressed mathematically; in that sense, psychology could be a science.

18. Psychic Mechanics Herbart’s system has been referred to as psychic mechanics because he believed that ideas had the power to either attract or repel other ideas, depending on their compatibility. Ideas tend to attract similar or compatible ideas, thus forming complex ideas. Similarly, ideas expend energy repelling dissimilar or incompatible ideas, thus attempting to avoid conflict.

19. Self-preservation In Herbart’s view, an idea is never destroyed or completely forgotten; either it is experienced consciously, or it is not. According to Herbart, all ideas struggle to gain expression in consciousness, and they compete to do so. Herbart used the term self-preservation to describe an idea’s tendency to seek and maintain conscious expression. Although ideas can never be destroyed, they can vary in intensity, or force. For Herbart, intense ideas are clear ideas, and all ideas attempt to become as clear as possible.

20. Apperceptive Mass According to Herbart, at any given moment, compatible ideas gather in consciousness and form a group. This group of compatible ideas constitutes the apperceptive mass. Another way of looking at the apperceptive mass is to equate it with attention; that is, the apperceptive mass contains all ideas to which we are currently attending. An idea outside the apperceptive mass (that is, an idea of which we are not conscious) will be allowed to enter the apperceptive mass only if it is compatible with the other ideas contained there now. If the idea is not compatible, the ideas in the apperceptive mass will mobilize their energy to prevent the idea from entering.

21. Repression Herbart used the term repression to describe the force used to hold ideas incompatible with the apperceptive mass in the unconscious. He also said that if enough similar ideas are repressed into the unconscious, they could combine their energy and force their way into consciousness, thereby displacing the existing apperceptive mass. Herbart used the term limen (threshold) to describe the border between the conscious and the unconscious mind .

22. Wilhelm WUNDT

23. Mediate and Immediate Experience Wundt believed that all sciences are based on experience and that scientific psychology is no exception. T he experience of the natural scientist is mediated by recording devices and is not direct. For Wundt the subject matter of psychology was to be human consciousness as it occurred. So, psychology was to be based on immediate experience . Wundt set two major goals for his experimental psychology: to discover the basic elements of thought, and to discover the laws by which mental elements combine into more complex mental experiences.

24. Elements of Thought According to Wundt, there are two basic types of mental experience: Sensation : A sensation occurs whenever a sense organ is stimulated, and the resulting impulse reaches the brain. Sensations can be described in terms of modality (visual, auditory, taste, and so on) and intensity (such as how loud an auditory stimulus is). Within a modality, a sensation can be further analyzed to determine its qualities. Feeling : All sensations are accompanied by feelings. From his own introspections, he formulated his tridimensional theory of feeling, according to which any feelings can be described in terms of the degree to which they possess three attributes: pleasantness-unpleasantness, excitement-calm, and strain-relaxation.

25. Mental Chronometry In his book Principles of Physiological Psychology, Wundt expressed his belief that reaction time could supplement introspection as a technique for studying the elemental contents and activities of the mind. He believed that they could provide a mental chronometry , or an accurate cataloging of the time it took to perform various mental acts. However, Wundt eventually abandoned his reaction-time studies because of the following reasons: H e found that reaction times varied too much from study to study, from subject to subject, and often for the same subject at different times. Reaction time also varied with the sense modality stimulated, the intensity of the stimulus, the number of items to be discriminated and the degree of difference among them, how much practice a subject received, and several other variables.

26. Psychological Versus Physical Causation It is the will that makes psychological causation qualitatively different from physical causation. Wundt believed humans can willfully arrange the elements of thought into any number of configurations ( creative synthesis ). According to the principle of heterogony of ends , a goal-directed activity seldom attains its goal and nothing else. Something unexpected almost always happens that, in turn, changes one’s entire motivational pattern. Wundt also employed the principle of contrasts to explain the complexity of psychological experience. He maintained that opposite experiences intensify one another. The principle toward the development of opposites , states that after a prolonged experience of one type, there is an increased tendency to seek the opposite type of experience. This latter principle not only applies to the life of an individual but also to human history in general (Blumenthal, 1980).

27. Voluntarism Wundt’s goal was not only to understand consciousness as it is experienced but also to understand the mental laws that govern the dynamics of consciousness. Of utmost importance to Wundt was the concept of will as it was reflected in attention and volition. Wundt believed that humans could decide what is attended to and thus what is perceived. Furthermore, he believed that much behavior and selective attention are undertaken for a purpose; that is, such activities are motivated. The name that Wundt gave to his approach to psychology was voluntarism because of its emphasis on will, choice, and purpose.

28. EDWARD BRADFORD TITCHENER Born in Chichester, England (1867–1927). He then went to Oxford where he developed an interest in experimental psychology Titchener then went to Leipzig and studied for two years with Wundt. Titchener agreed with Wundt that psychology should study immediate experience—that is, consciousness. He defined consciousness as the sum of mental experience at any given moment and mind as the accumulated experiences of a lifetime.

29. Difference with wundt Unlike Wundt, who sought to explain conscious experience in terms of unobservable cognitive processes, Titchener sought only to describe mental experience. Titchener, accepting the positivism of Ernst Mach, believed that speculation concerning unobservable events has no place in science. It was the structure of the adult, normally functioning, human mind that Titchener wanted to describe, and thus he named his version of psychology structuralism .

30. Mental Elements From his introspective studies, Titchener concluded that the elemental processes of consciousness consist of: sensations (elements of perceptions), images (elements of ideas), and affections (elements of emotions).

31. Law of Contiguity Titchener (1910) made the law of contiguity his basic law of association: “…….whenever a sensory or imaginal process occurs in consciousness, there are likely to appear with it (of course, in imaginal terms) all those sensory and imaginal processes which occurred together with it in any earlier conscious present…. Now the law of contiguity can, with a little forcing, be translated into our own general law of association” (pp. 378–379).

32. Limitations of STRUCTURALISM Although it was now used scientifically (that is, in a controlled situation), introspection was still yielding different results depending on who was using it and what they were seeking. Also, there was lack of agreement among highly trained introspectionists concerning the correct description of a given stimulus display. Another argument against Titchener’s introspection is that it was really retrospection because the event being reported had already occurred. Therefore, what was being reported was a memory of a sensation rather than the sensation itself.

33. LIMITATIONS T he structuralists were not interested in the study of abnormal behavior even though Freud and others were making significant advances in understanding and treating individuals who were mentally ill. Similarly, the structuralists essentially ignored personality, learning, psychological development, and individual differences while major breakthroughs occurred in these areas. Also damaging was the structuralists’ refusal to seek practical applications. Titchener insisted that he was seeking pure knowledge and was not concerned with the solution of everyday problems.

34. Functionalism The functionalists urged the broadening of psychology to include research on animals, children, and abnormal humans. They also accepted an eclectic methodology; from mazes to mental tests. The functionalists’ interest in the “why” of mental processes and behavior led directly to a concern with motivation. The functionalists tended to be more ideographic than nomothetic, that is, they were more interested in what made organisms different from one another than what made them similar.

35. Stream of Consciousness According to James, consciousness is personal. Second, consciousness is continuous and cannot be divided up for analysis . Third, consciousness is constantly changing. Fourth, consciousness is selective. Some of the many events entering consciousness are selected for further consideration and others are inhibited. Finally, and perhaps most important, consciousness is functional. According to James, its purpose is to aid the individual in adapting to the environment.

36. Pragmatism According to pragmatism, which is a cornerstone of functionalism, any belief, thought, or behavior must be judged by its consequences. According to the pragmatic viewpoint, truth is not something “out there” in a static form waiting to be discovered, as many of the rationalists maintained. Instead, truth is something that must be gauged by effectiveness under changing circumstances. What works is true, and because circumstances change, truth must be forever dynamic. H e delineated two types of personality: the tenderminded ( rationalistic, intellectual, idealistic, optimistic, religious, and dogmatic, and they believe in free will t ough-minded ( empiricistic , sensationalistic, materialistic, pessimistic, irreligious, skeptical , and fatalistic). James viewed pragmatism as a way of compromising between the two worldviews.

37. Emotions James reversed the traditional belief that emotion results from the perception of an event. Perception, according to James, causes bodily reactions that are then experienced as emotions. T he Danish physician Carl George Lange (1834– 1900) published virtually the same theory at about the same time. In recognition of the contributions of both men, the theory is now known as the James–Lange theory of emotion.

38. “ A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind ” (James, 1892/1985, p. 46)