Edward Bradford Titchener

Titchener, Edward Bradford, 1867-1927, American psychologist, b. Chichester, England, grad. Oxford, 1890. He studied in Leipzig (Ph.D. 1892) under Wundt (whose Principles of Physiological Psychology he translated), and in 1892 he became head of the new psychological laboratory at Cornell, where he was research professor from 1910. His works include Experimental Psychology (2 vol., 1901-5), Lectures on the Elementary Psychology of Feeling and Attention (1908), and Systematic Psychology (1929).

(born Jan. 11, 1867, Chichester, Sussex, Eng.—died Aug. 3, 1927, Ithaca, N.Y., U.S.) British-U.S. psychologist. Trained in Leipzig under Wilhelm Wundt, he later taught at Cornell University (1892–1927). He helped establish experimental psychology in the U.S., and he also became the foremost proponent of structural psychology, a field concerned with the components and arrangement of mental states and processes. His principal work is Experimental Psychology (1901–05).

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Edward Bradford Titchener, D.Sc., Ph.D., LL.D., Litt.D. (January 11,1867-August 3,1927) was an Englishman and a student of Wilhelm Wundt before becoming a professor of psychology and founding a psychology laboratory in the United States at Cornell University.

He was educated in Europe. He would put his own spin on Wundt's psychology of consciousness after he emigrated to the United States. He translated and brought in the English language the concept of empathy, which had been developed and coined by Robert Vischer (in German). Titchener attempted to classify the structures of the mind, not unlike the way a chemist breaks down chemicals into their component parts - water into hydrogen and oxygen, for example. Thus, for Titchener, just as hydrogen and oxygen were structures, so were sensations and thoughts. He conceived of hydrogen and oxygen as structures of a chemical compound, and sensations and thoughts as structures of the mind. This approach became known as structuralism.

Professor Titchener received honorary degrees from Harvard, Clark, and Wisconsin, translated Külpe's Outlines of Psychology and other works, became the American editor of Mind in 1894, and associate editor of the American Journal of Psychology in 1895, and wrote:

• An Outline of Psychology (1896; new edition, 1902)
• A Primer of Psychology (1898; revised edition, 1903)
• Experimental Psychology (four volumes, 1901-05)— 1.1 1.2 2.1 2.2
• Elementary Psychology of Feeling and Attention (1908)
• Experimental Psychology of the Thought Processes (1909)
• A Textbook of Psychology (two volumes, 1909-10)
• A Beginner's Psychology (1915)

External links

• Picture, biography and bibliography in the Virtual Laboratory of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science