

In contrast to structuralists, James thought consciousness flowed continuously and could not be separated into simpler elements without losing its essential nature. In 1875 William James, an American physician well-versed in philosophy, began teaching psychology as a separate subject for the first time in the United States, and he and his students began doing laboratory experiments. This approach looked at the structure of thought and came to be known as structuralism. Wundt's work separated thought into simpler processes such as perception, sensation, emotion, and association. In 1879 Wilhelm Wundt, a German physiologist and philosopher, established the first formal laboratory of psychology at the University of Leipzig in Germany. Muller, Hermann von Helmholtz, and Gustav Fechner) performed the first systematic studies of sensation and perception demonstrating that mental processes could be measured and studied scientifically. In the mid-nineteenth century a number of German scientists (Johannes P. For many years psychology was a branch of philosophy until scientific findings in the nineteenth century allowed it to become a separate field of scientific study. Psychology as a separate, scientific discipline has existed for just over 100 years, but since the dawn of time people have sought to understand human and animal nature. Psychologists conduct research very much like scientists in other fields, developing hypotheses or possible explanations of certain facts and testing them using various research methods. Psychology is a very broad social science with approximately 10 main fields The major unifying thread running throughout all of this diversity is use of the scientific method and the belief that psychological phenomena can be studied in a systematic, scientific way. For example, one might infer someone is feeling happy when he or she smiles, or has remembered what he or she studied when doing well on an exam. Mental processes, such as thinking, feeling, or remembering, often cannot be directly observed and must be inferred from observable behaviors. Behavior refers here to easily observable activities such as walking, talking, or smiling. It is the scientific study of human and animal behavior and mental processes. "Psychology" comes from the Greek words psyche, meaning "mind" or "soul," and logos, meaning word.
