Associationism

The association psychology refers to a psychological direction that the classical concept of association used as the main explanatory principle. And thought concepts are therefore of elemental contents of consciousness, especially sensations composed. Therefore, the association psychology can be characterized as reductionist or atomistic psychology. Seen the history of science, the association psychology has promoted the progress of empirical- experimental research in the fields of perception, memory and cognitive psychology doubt.

Concept of association in antiquity and in the British empiricists

The concept of association appears already in the " Phaedo " by Plato. In the work "On the memory and the memory" of Aristotle association means that thoughts are determined by the environment and not " God-given " are. Thus, the memory of an absent object represents a either by similarity or dissimilarity with a present object.

These thoughts tie in with the British empiricists, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume, Alexander Bain and David Hartley.

Classical laws of association

The classical association psychology, whose main representative Hermann Ebbinghaus, Georg Elias Müller and Theodor are pulling used laws of association, eg

• The law of similarity,
• The law of contrast,
• The law of the spatial and temporal relationship ( contiguity ).

Work of Ebbinghaus and his successors

Ebbinghaus developed from the principle of association starting, an experimental approach to the study of memory performance, in which nonsense syllables are used as teaching material especially. In general, the legitimate context of psychic phenomena has been recognized by the association psychology, but it was interpreted as mechanical.

Notwithstanding the ( from today's perspective ) inadequate foundations of association theory were discovered by their representatives fundamental insights into basic memory and Reproduktionsgesetzmäßigkeiten how the curve of forgetting or of retaining by Ebbinghaus. It says that keeping the logarithm of the time elapsed since the indentations time is approximately proportional.

Methods of Ebbinghaus

From Ebbinghaus and his successors fundamental methodological principles were developed:

• The so-called savings method ( ie, reduced number of required for the re-learning of a substance repetitions),

• The method of reproduction (ie, the percentage of correct memories after a certain period of time )

• The method of recognition, which is also still used today in altered form as a criterion for the memory.

However, the association psychology ignored the systemic nature of mental activity and significant differences in their appearance and level of development.

Idealistic interpretation of the association psychology

Idealists like Thomas M. Brown, John Stuart Mill, A. Bain and Johann Friedrich Herbart are also the association psychology associate. In the idealistic interpretation of the association was to construct a means of scientific analysis into a means of separation of consciousness in primary forms with the aim of using them not only the entire mental activity, but also the objective reality.

Materialistic interpretation of the concept of association

Ivan Mikhailovich Sechenov and IP Pavlov developed a materialistic and deterministic conception of the association concept: the reflex theory of consciousness. Setschenow explained in his " brain reflexes " (1863), certain intellectual and dedicated actions by neurological mechanisms that have been demonstrated in the laboratory. Pavlov (1934 ) meant by association the connection of reflexes, but not of isolated elements of consciousness. The conditioned response is an association between psychological and somatic processes.

In the present, is meant by association, not only the connections between ideas, but also the linking of other mental contents, eg of ideas with feelings of stimulus situations with verbal and motor behavior or remarks of behavioral sequences. The U.S. educational psychology leans very heavily on the association psychology.

Secondary laws of association

In addition to the classical laws of association, so-called secondary laws of association were formulated in the course of extensive experimental investigations, eg the effect of the duration of the initial impression that the frequency of repetitions, the number of competing impressions, but also the constitutional mental and physical differences of impression recipients and their living habits.

The association psychology is to be regarded as the starting point of behaviorism and psychoanalysis, whose development is also evident from the examination of the association theory.

Sources

• General Psychology
• History of Psychology