Child Psych Essay, Research Paper

Child PsychologyThe term psychology refers to the science that deals with mental processes and behavior. Since the beginnings of psychological study, one area of great interest has been the child. Experts feel that individuals with some form of childhood trauma can have the inability to function in today s society. These thoughts have led many people on a life-long search for answers to our biggest problems. With increases in many disturbing crimes, researchers have theorized that changing the way children are mentally conditioned will bring a decrease to these issues. To fully evaluate this topic, we must discuss the history of child psychology, review the link between childhood and adulthood, and inspect the problems caused by children and their inability to deal with uncertainty. The history of psychology can be traced into many areas of historical reference. The Greek views of human behavior focused on the fact that human beings are animals, and so are like other animals in many ways, but that humans are distinguished by their ability to reason. Until the great scientific revolution, the leading structure for psychological explanation was provided by the views of Aristotle. In the 17th century, Rene Descartes simplified this spectrum of functions into a dualism, in which all mental functions, including perception, were mechanically determined. The soul, however, was a nonmaterial spirit that interacted with the body through the pineal gland (an organ in the brain that is not duplicated on both sides). This view of the mechanical causation of ideas led to the theory of associationism, a theory of how sensations could be combined to form ideas. 1 Without any major advances in psychology, research continued for the next two hundred years. In 1879, Wilhelm Wundt, in Leipzig, Germany founded the first purely psychological laboratory. Through his original research on sensation and perception the basic laws of perception and association were formulated and elaborated.

The new psychology of introspection, or self-examination of experiences, was brought to the United States in 1892. An Englishman, Edward B. Titchener, who studied under Wundt, taught that psychology represented the study of experience dependent on the experiencing individual at Cornell University for thirty-five years.