Germany

International Psychology: Germany 1. Germany’s curriculum for a professional psychology program is still fairly new. The program was established in 1941 and included a standardized curriculum as well as accompanying regulations for the curricula. Today there are an estimated 450 professors who teach 32,000 students in 43 German universities. 70-80 percent of these psychology students are female. The curriculum is characterized as a generalist program where students learn the skills necessary to solve problems and come up with scientific solutions. Psychological institutes in Germany range from those with over 1000 psychology majors to schools that have less than 300 students. The program is still expanding introducing a Bachelor’s and Master’s program as well as a credit transfer system. Research such as that done at the University of Munich with a revised list of affective //German// words known as the Berlin Affective Word List Reloaded (BAWL-R has helped researchers to study word processing with controlled stimulus material. This in turn creates stimulus material for more experiments dealing with the "affective processing of German verbal material." The Association of German Professional Psychologists contains about 13,000 psychologists and was founded in 1946. The psychologists are "employees in civil services and other settings, as freelancers in a private practice or as owners of consulting companies". These psychologists have several prerequisites to become members such as "an academic degree (Diplom) or Bachelor/Master degree in psychology, obtained at a German university, or an equivalent degree from abroad", and a committment to "observe the Code of Conduct and accept the control related to practising as a psychologist by the independent Arbitration and Disciplinary Court of the BDP". BDP works in such areas as Forensic Psychology, Health and Environmental Psychology ,Political Psychology ,Employed Psychologists , Psychologists in indipendent practice etc. The goal of BDP is to enhance the practice, training and communication in psychology in Germany.

2. Psychology was thought to be founded in Germany by Wilhelm Wundt in Leipzig in 1879. Other early psychologists were Hermann Helmholtz who worked with perception in the 1850s, Gustav Fechner, author of Elements of Psychophysics written in 1860 and Hermann Ebbinghaus who published works on memory in 1885. These figures are thought as somewhat of a segway into the second half of the 19th century which built upon experimental psychology. Another individual who was not thought of as much as a psychologist but made several contributions to psychology prior to the 19th century was Immanuel Kant, a rationalist who believed in empiricism also. Historians believe that although psychology was a philosophical concept, it did not stand alone as an academic discipline until early in the 19th century. The Lehrbuch or teaching books of psychology were the textbooks of the times. Each came out between 1816 and 1854. The volumes are organized into four groups: those that were innovative for their time, those that tried to develop psychology as a natural science, others that tried to relate psychology to important philosophical contexts and a single textbook written for Gymnasien, a German psychology institute. German psychology was influenced by such thinkers as Leibniz, Wolff and ideas from the classical Greek philosophy during the first half of the 19th century.

3. Prominent German psychologists are those such as Wilhelm Wundt(1832-1920) who developed the first psychology lab in Leipzig, Germany. This separated psychology into its own discipline. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) was a German mathematician and philosopher who wrote about monads and contributed the idea of thresholds dealing with perception. Immanuel Kant(1724-1804) another German philosopher also contributed to psychology with his rationalist-empiricist views. Jakob Fries (1773-1843) is another German psychologist who wrote on Kant’s deduction method. Hermann Helmholtz (1821-1894) was a psychologist recognized for his work with perception. Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850-1909) was known for his work with memory. Hugo Munsterberg made contributions to applied psychology (1863 - 1916) while Karl Buhler (1879 - 1963) helped to establish the first psychological institute in Dresden and worked with perception and Gestalt psychology. Several other German psychologists such as Herbart(1816), Fischhaber(1824), MuBmann(1827), Reinhold(1835), Beneke(1845& 1851), Waitz(1849), Schilling(1851) and George(1854) contributed to the Lehrbuch’s that were aforementioned. More modern versions of these textbook's were published by Volkmann(1856) and Lindner(1858) linking empirical studies in physiology and other concentrations with psychology itself.

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 * "Psychology; Research from University of Munich has provided new data on psychology. " //Psychology & Psychiatry Journal// 30 May 2009: ProQuest Psychology Journals, ProQuest. Web. 22 Feb. 2010. ||

"Psychologists - A List of Famous Psychologists." Psychology - Student Resources - Psychology Articles. Web. 17 Feb. 2010. <[]>.