Psychology timeline

pre 1830s – Many observations on the operations of the human mind going back to antiquity as the philosophy of mind.

1890s– Psychoanalysis – School founded by Sigmund Freud and in 1911 the International Psychoanalytic Association was formed with Carl Jung the first president. .

1913 – Analytical psychology – a consequence of the separation of Carl Jung from the ideas of Sigmund Freud.

1950s – Cognitive revolution – connection of psychology to information theory, computer science, generative linguistics, and artificial intelligence. .

1958-1974 – Behaviourism (radical behaviourism) promoted by Harvard Professor B.F. Skinner

1970 – Behavioural genetics – In 1951 Calvin S. Hall introduced the term “psychogenetics” which was replaced by “behaviour genetics” which gained recognition as a discipline in 1960 with the textbook Behavior Genetics by J.L. Fuller and W.R. Thompson. Nowadays it is widely accepted that most behaviours in animals and humans are under some degree of genetic influence. Theodosius Dobzhansky was elected the first president of the Behavior Genetics Association in 1972; the BGA bestows the Dobzhansky Award on researchers for their outstanding contributions to the field. In the early 1970s, Lee Ehrman, a doctoral student of Dobzhansky, wrote seminal papers describing the relationship between genotype frequency and mating success in Drosophila,[9][10][11] lending impetus to the pursuit of genetic studies of behaviour in other animals.

1973 – Cognitive science – term coined and the first journal and society formed although the subject dates back to cyberneticists in the 1930s and ‘40s, computation in the 1940s and ‘50s with a major attack on behaviourism by Noam Chomsky in 1959.

1992 – Evolutionary psychology – became mainstream with the book The Adapted Mind by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby although in the 1970s-‘80s evolutionary biology had arrived in universities but its history can be found in the ethology of Dutch biologist Nikolaas Tinbergen and Austrian biologists Konrad Lorenz and Karl von Frisch and given major impetus by the book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis of Edward O. Wilson in 1975. Behavioral ecology placed less emphasis on social behavior by focusing on the ecological and evolutionary basis of both animal and human behavior.