Structuralism

Structuralism was an early school of psychology that sought to analyze conscious experience into basic elements, using trained introspection to study sensations, images, and feelings.

Introspection: The examination and reporting of one's own conscious thoughts and experiences. Structuralists treated trained self-observation as their principal source of evidence.
Sensation: A basic conscious experience produced by stimulation of a sense organ. Structuralists treated sensations as elementary contents of immediate experience.
Wilhelm Wundt: A German psychologist who established an influential laboratory for experimental psychology in Leipzig in 1879. Wundt's experimental psychology helped establish the research setting later associated with structuralism.
Functionalism: A psychological approach that studies the purposes and adaptive functions of mental processes. Functionalists asked what consciousness does rather than cataloging its elemental contents.
Stimulus error: The mistake of naming an external object instead of describing the immediate experience it produces. Structuralists warned observers to report sensations rather than identify the objects causing them.
Feeling: A conscious affective experience, such as pleasure or displeasure. Feelings formed one of the basic classes in structuralist accounts of consciousness.
Edward B. Titchener: An English psychologist who introduced and developed structuralism at Cornell University. Titchener named the school and made the analysis of consciousness its defining aim.
Behaviorism: An approach to psychology that makes observable behavior, rather than private conscious experience, its primary subject. Behaviorists rejected introspection as a reliable foundation for scientific psychology.
Analytic introspection: A laboratory method in which trained observers report the components of their conscious experience. This was the disciplined form of introspection central to structuralist experiments.
Mental image: A sensory-like experience occurring without the corresponding external stimulus. Structuralists counted images among the elementary contents introspection could identify.

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