HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

An Article Critique Due On Human Development

An Article Critique Due On Human Development

Introduction

The article under revie is “Toward a general systems theory of social behavior: A psychocybernetic perspective” by Joseph Sirgy Publishe in Wiley Interscience in 2007. The article explains that cognitive and human development is the sequence of change in human thinking occurring over time. The study of cognitive development has traditionally focused on the time period from infancy to adulthood. Several influential perspectives have emerged.

One of the most dominant perspectives has been the constructivist theory formulated by Swiss psychologist, Jean Piaget. Piagetian theory proposes children actively participate in constructing their mental worlds.

Discussion

Critical analysis of the Article

In this article, the role of music in early experimental psychology is examined. Initially, the research of Wilhelm Wundt is considered, as tone sensation and musical elements appear as dominant factors in much of his work. It is hypothesized that this approach was motivated by an understanding of psychology that dates back to Christian Wolff's focus on sensation in his empirical psychology of 1732. Wolff, however, had built his systematization of psychology on Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, who combined perception with mathematics, and referred to music as the area in which sensation is united with numerical exactitude. Immanuel Kant refused to accept empirical psychology as a science, whereas Johann Friedrich Herbart reintroduced the scientific basis of empirical psychology by, among other things, referring to music (Khan, 2001).

Music has certainly been a key factor in experimental psychology. What music is or is not, however, remains an open question. There is a continuous transition here from musical elements on the one hand, via tone sensation, to noise on the other. Yet Wundt did not make any distinction between noises and tone systems, arguing that they “appear to be qualitatively alike” (Wundt, 1902, p. 55). What therefore strikes one is that nonlinguistic sound stimuli seem to have had a dominant and special role in experimental psychology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a result, one of the most persistent questions is the extent to which these references were just a coincidence or if they had some type of scientific motivation. In this paper, the author has followed up this question by looking closer at the role of musical stimuli in the development of modern German experimental psychology before the advent of Gestalt psychology.

More specific in context, theories of social cognition ...