Katy Field's List: Ed Psych

• It's author was not only completely conversant with the psychological literature in English, but with that in French, German, and Italian; and, as a result, The Principles presented the discipline for the first time as a truly international endeavor.
• The more traditional topics (e.g., the functions of the nervous system, sensation, the perception of time, space, objects, and reality, imagination, conception, reasoning, memory, association, attention, emotions, and will) were rarely dealt with in a traditional manner; and a whole series of non-traditional topics (e.g., habit, the stream of thought, consciousness of self, discrimination and comparison, the production of movement, instinct, and hypnotism) were introduced in ways that forever changed the discipline.
• Of all James's contributions, however, there are three for which he has been especially famous in the history of psychology: his analysis of the stream of thought, his characterization of the self, and his theory of emotion.
• the James-Lange theory of emotion,[17] James then went on the argue that emotion consists of our experience of these bodily changes. As he put it, 'My theory...is that the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion...
• James's views, especially those on the stream of consciousness, played a major role in shifting psychology away from elementalism toward a functional, process oriented account of mind (and eventually behavior).
• James's concern with emotion, motivation, and the nature of the self, the social self, and self-esteem, not only lay the groundwork for dynamic psychology, but for a dynamic psychology that recognized the importance of social factors in personality.

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