ABSTRACT

The history of psychology from the formal founding in the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century was commonly understood in terms of dominant and competing systematic visions. A multitude of innovative instruments, techniques, and ideas came forward resulting in substantive advances in accelerating numbers of content areas of basic experimental psychology and in growing numbers of applications of psychology. Humanistic psychology and closely related fields such as existential psychology and phenomenological psychology remain somewhat on the periphery of the larger discipline, especially in the United States. Neobehaviorism prospered as the dominant orientation in American psychology in the latter part of the twentieth century. Cognitive psychology has further adopted from its predecessors a nomothetic or general explanation of cognitive phenomena rather than an idiographic perspective. D. A. Norman argued that the science of cognition has neglected but should not ignore belief systems, consciousness, development, emotion, interaction, language, learning, memory, perception, performance, skill, and thought.