Functionalism Authors: Sirotkina Elena, Shabitdinova Ilvira Functional psychology

Functionalism Authors: Sirotkina Elena, Shabitdinova Ilvira

Functional psychology or functionalism is a general psychological philosophy. It considers mental life and behavior in terms of active adaptation to the person's environment. As such, it provides the general basis for developing psychological theories. Functionalism appeared in the USA in the late 19th century as an alternative to Structuralism. Edward Titchener, the main structuralist, gave psychology its first definition as a science of the study of mental experience, of consciousness, to be studied by trained introspection.

William James is considered to be the founder of functional psychology. John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, Harvey A. Carr, and especially James Rowland Angell were the main proponents of functionalism at the University of Chicago

Another group at Columbia, including James McKeen Cattell, Edward L. Thorndike, and Robert S. Woodworth, were also considered functionalists and shared some of the opinions of Chicago's professors. Egon Brunswik represents a more recent version. The conscious experience is a substance of functionalism.

Behaviorists criticized functionalism because it was not based on controlled experiments and its theories provided little predictive ability. Perhaps, a combination of both the functionalist and behaviorist perspectives provides scientists with the most empirical value but, even so, it remains philosophically (and physiologically) difficult to integrate the two concepts without questions about human behavior. For example, consider the interrelationship between three elements: the human environment, the human autonomic nervous system and the human somatic nervous system. The behaviorist perspective explains a mixture of both types of muscle behavior, whereas the functionalist perspective resides mostly in the somatic nervous system. Evolutionary psychology is based on the idea that knowledge concerning the function of the psychological phenomena affecting human evolution is necessary for a complete understanding of the human psyche. Like evolutionary psychology, James's functionalism was inspired by Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection.

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