Create a thesis and an outline on Psychology as the Study of the Mind or the Soul. Prepare this assignment according to the guidelines found in the APA Style Guide. An abstract is required.

I need help creating a thesis and an outline on Psychology as the Study of the Mind or the Soul. Prepare this assignment according to the guidelines found in the APA Style Guide. An abstract is required. The year 1879 is generally regarded as the year in which psychology as a formal science was officially born. A German scholar named Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), who was trained in both philosophy and medicine, had written in his first book on sense perception in 1862 that psychology could become science only if it employed the experimental method in studying the workings of the mind. In a subsequent publication in 1873, he announced that he intended to make psychology a science, and he established the first psychology laboratory in Leipzig, Germany, in 1879. Others in both North America and Europe were also doing psychological research at this time. Still, Wundt’s laboratory was the first to be formally established and have its research results published in a scholarly journal. These are among the reasons that he is credited as the primary founder of the modern psychology discipline.

Many of America’s early psychologists received their training in Wundt’s lab. The focus of research in the Leipzig Laboratory was on sensation, perception, imagery and attention. Wundt doubted that more complex processes could be studied experimentally. One of Wundt’s favourite research methods was “trained introspection.” Wundt and his associates and students trained research subjects to carefully observe and analyse their own mental experiences – including sensations, mental images, and emotional reactions – under controlled conditions. The training of subjects in introspection was rigorous and exhaustive. Wundt hoped that by providing such training, he could produce reliable, verifiable, objective results. In the long run, however, it proved to be impossible to use introspection to produce reliable results and the approach was abandoned as a research technique by other psychologists.

In the early days of psychology, there were two dominant theoretical perspectives. Structuralism was the name given to the approach pioneered by Wundt. The term originated from Edward Titchener, an American psychologist who Wundt had trained. Structuralism relied on trained introspection, a research method whereby subjects related what was going on in their minds while performing a certain task.