Psychology and Association Test Essay

Experimental psychology is an area of psychology that utilizes scientific methods to research the mind and behavior. While students are often required to take experimental psychology courses during undergraduate and graduate school, you should really think of this subject as a methodology rather than a singular area within psychology. Many of these techniques are also used by other subfields of psychology to conduct research on everything from childhood development to social issues. Experimental psychologists work in a wide variety of settings including colleges, universities, research centers, government and private businesses. Some of these professionals may focus on teaching experimental to students, while others conduct research on cognitive processes, animal behavior, neuroscience, personality and many other subject areas. Those who work in academic settings often teach psychology courses in addition to performing research and publishing their findings in professional journals. Other experimental psychologists work with businesses to discover ways to make employees more productive or to create a safer workplace, a specialty area known as human factors psychology. Do you enjoy researching human behavior? If you have a passion for solving problems or exploring theoretical questions, you might also have a strong interest in a career as an experimental psychologist. Experimental psychologists study a huge range of topics within psychology, including both human and animal behavior. If you’ve ever wanted to learn more about what experimental psychologists do, this career profile can answers some of your basic questions and help you decide if you want to explore this specialty area in greater depth. An experimental psychologist is a type of psychologist who uses scientific methods to collect data and perform research. Experimental psychologists explore an immense range of psychological phenomena, ranging from learning to personality to cognitive processes. The exact type of research an experimental psychologist performs may depend on a number of factors including his or her educational background, interests and area of employment. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics:â€Å"Experimental or research psychologists work in university and private research centers and in business, nonprofit, and governmental organizations. They study the behavior of both human beings and animals, such as rats, monkeys, and pigeons. Prominent areas of study in experimental research include motivation, thought, attention, learning and memory, sensory and perceptual processes, effects of substance abuse, and genetic and neurological factors affecting behavior. † Experimental psychologists work in a wide variety of settings including colleges, universities, research centers, government and private businesses. Some of these professionals may focus on teaching experimental methods to students, while others conduct research on cognitive processes, animal behavior, neuroscience, personality and many other subject areas. Those who work in academic settings often teach psychology courses in addition to performing research and publishing their findings in professional journals. Other experimental psychologists may work with businesses to discover ways to make employees more productive or to create a safer workplace, a specialty area known as human factors psychology. Experimental psychology is an approach to psychology that treats it as one of the natural sciences, and therefore assumes that it is susceptible to the experimental method. Many experimental psychologists have gone further, and have assumed that all methods of investigation other than experimentation are suspect. In particular, experimental psychologists have been inclined to discount the case study and interview methods as they have been used in clinical and developmental psychology. Since it is a methodological rather than a substantive category, experimental psychology embraces a disparate collection of areas of study. It is usually taken to include the study of perception, cognitive psychology, comparative psychology, the experimental analysis of behavior, and some aspects of physiological psychology. Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) was a German physician, psychologist, physiologist and philosopher, known today as the â€Å"Father of Experimental Psychology† Some Famous Experimental Psychologists: Wilhelm Wundt later wrote the Principles of Physiological Psychology (1874), which helped establish experimental procedures in psychological research. After taking a position at the University of Liepzig, Wundt founded the first of only two experimental psychology labs in existence at that time. (Although a third lab already existed – William James established a lab at Harvard, which was focused on offering teaching demonstrations rather than experimentation. G. Stanley Hall founded the first American experimental psychology lab at John Hopkins University). Wundt was associated with the theoretical perspective known as structuralism, which involves describing the structures that compose the mind. He believed that psychology was the science of conscious experience and that trained observers could accurately describe thoughts, feelings, and emotions through a process known as introspection. Psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus was one of the first to scientifically study forgetting. In experiments where is used himself as the subject, Ebbinghaus tested his memory using three-letter nonsense syllables. He relied on such nonsense words because relying on previously known words would have made use of his existing knowledge and associations in his memory. In order to test for new information, Ebbinghaus tested his memory for periods of time ranging from 20 minutes to 31 days. He then published his findings in 1885 in Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology. His results, plotted in what is known as the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve, revealed a relationship between forgetting and time. Initially, information is often lost very quickly after it is learned. Factors such as how the information was learned and how frequently it was rehearsed play a role in how quickly these memories are lost. The forgetting curve also showed that forgetting does not continue to decline until all of the information is lost. At a certain point, the amount of forgetting levels off. What exactly does this mean? It indicates that information stored in long-term memory is surprisingly stable. In the realm of mental phenomena, experiment and measurement have hitherto been chiefly limited in application to sense perception and to the time relations of mental processes. By means of the following investigations we have tried to go a step farther into the workings of the mind and to submit to an experimental and quantitative treatment the manifestations of memory. The term, memory, is to be taken here in its broadest sense, including Learning, Retention, Association and Reproduction. The principal objections which, as a matter of course, rise against the possibility of such a treatment are discussed in detail in the text and in part have been made objects of investigations. I may therefore ask those who are not already convinced a priori of the impossibility of such an attempt to postpone their decision about its practicability. Gustav Fechner did not call himself a psychologist, some important historians of psychology like Edwin G. Boring consider the experimental rising of this science in Fechner’s work (1979, p. 297). More specifically, it was Fechner’s famous intuition of October 22, 1850 that, according to Boring (quoted by Saul Rosenzweig, 1987), gave opportunity to his work as a psychophysicist (Rosenzweig also remembers that this date that serves as reference to this event, is curiously close to Boring? birthday, October 23rd). In a more concise way, if we think Fechner’s psychophysics work as the junction of a philosophical doctrine (that correlates spirit and matter as aspects of the same being), an experimental methodology (correlating the variations of stimulus and sensations perceived) and an assemblage of mathematical laws (the famous Weber-Fechner law); in addition, the last two aspects are considered especially relevant to the rising of psychology. Nevertheless, to think that the rising of a science is restricted to the establishment of experimental procedure and to a mathematical formalization, is to forget a whole field of questioning in which the instruments created by Fechner could, in the middle of the 19thcentury, overcome some obstacles and answer some questions, notably the ones made by the critic philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Ernst Weber was a German physiologist and Psychologist. He was regarded as a predecessor of experimental psychology and one of the founders of Psychophysics, the branch of psychology that studies the relations between physical stimuli and mental states. He is known chiefly for his work on investigation of subjective sensory response (sensations) to the impact of external physical stimuli: weight, temperature, and pressure. Weber experimentally determined the accuracy of tactile sensations, namely, the distance between two points on the skin, in which a person can perceive two separate touches. He discovered the two-point threshold – the distance on the skin separating two pointed stimulators that is required to experience two rather than one point of stimulation.