Wundt is undergoing a resurgence in popularity.  Over 100 years after his work, we have finally caught up with him.  Actually, he was massively misrepresented by poorly educated American students in Germany, and especially a rather ego-driven Englishman named Titchener.  Wundt recognized that Titchener was misrepresenting him, and tried to make people aware of the problem.  But Boring -- the premier American historian of psychology for many decades -- only knew Wundt through Titchener.

One misunderstanding revolves the title of one major work: Physiological psychology. But physiological psychology originally meant experimental psychology -- using methods of physiology -- although not the experimental psychology of the behaviorists in the twentieth century.

Wundt and his students used an experimental version of introspection -- the careful observation of one’s  perceptions -- and outlined some pretty specific details to the method:

1. The observer must know when the experience begins and ends.
2. The observer must maintain "strained attention."
3. The phenomenon must bear repetition.
4. And the phenomenon must be capable of variation -- i.e. experimentation.

Regarding sensations, for example, it was determined that there are seven "qualities" of sensations:  The visual, auditory,  olfactory, gustatory, cutaneous, kinesthetic, and organic.   Several of these have additional aspects.  Vision, for  example, has hue, saturation, and value.  And qualities could vary in intensity, duration, vividness, and (for the visual  and cutaneous senses) extension.

Wundt's labs were enormously productive places, describing things like selective attention, short-term memory, etc. -- even including the famous limitations on short-term memory to 7 or so "pieces" of information that would not be noticed again until the 1970's.

Consciousness

One of the things that would make Wundt's work so foreign to American psychologists was what he referred to as the principle of actuality:  He said that consciousness is, in fact, a reality, and that it is the subject matter of psychology.  This is, of course, true -- although we managed to overlook it for a good 80 years or so when behaviorism ruled the academic world in the US, Britain, and Russia.

Mental processes are an activity of the brain, and not material.  Wundt accepted Spinoza's metaphysics of parallelism and spent a great deal of effort refuting reductionism.  He believed that consciousness and its activities simply did not fit the paradigms of physical science -- even though psychology emerges from biology, chemistry, and physics.  With that emergence, consciousness has gained a certain capacity for creative synthesis -- another of Wundt's key concepts.

Although consciousness operates "in" and "through" the physical brain, its activities cannot be described in terms of chemistry or physics.  The color blue, the sound of an E minor chord, the taste of smoked salmon, the meaning of a sentence....  are all eminently psychological or subjective events, with no simple physical explanations.  When does that wavelength, retinal activity, neural firing, and so forth become "blue?"

Wundt also prefigures the Gestalt psychologists in rejecting the associationism of Locke and Hume:  Psychological structures are more than just the sum of their parts!

He and his students concluded that consciousness is composed of two "stages:"  First, there is a large capacity working memory called the Blickfeld.  Then there is a narrower consciousness called Apperception, which we might translate as selective attention, which is under voluntary control and moves about within the Blickfeld.

This selective attention idea became very influential.  It led, among other things, to Kraepelin's theory of schizophrenia as a breakdown of attention processes.

Psycholinguistics

Another aspect of Wundtian psychology was its psycholinguistics, which actually takes up the first 2 books of Völkerpsychologie.  Wundt suggested that the fundamental unit of language is the sentence -- not the word or the sound.  He identified the sentence not just with a sequence of words and sounds, but as a special mental state.  Sounds, words, the rules of grammar, etc., all have their meaning only in relation to that underlying mental sentence.

Wundt actually invented the tree diagram of syntax we are all familiar with in linguistics texts!  Language starts with S (the sentence) at the top, and selective attention separates the subject (the focus or figure) from the predicate (the ground), and so on, in contrast to the popular bottom-up, associationistic conception the behaviorists proposed.  Wundt's ideas are now the standard -- yet no one remembers they were his in the first place!

Looking at the language of children, Wundt and his students proposed that language has its origins in emotional sounds and gestures -- another theory that is returning into favor.

Emotions

According to Wundt we are first of all emotional creatures.  All of our mental activities involve emotion.  And emotion precedes cognition!  He was very much the romantic  (in the philosophical sense!).

He used a variety of terms:  Feelings were what he called the basic, short-lived experiences;  Moods were the more long-lived versions.  Emotions proper were the more complex experiences.  And motivations were the more "pressurized" versions of emotion that lead to behavior.

Wundt disagreed with William James and the James-Lange theory of emotions.  James believed that we first respond to a situation, and then we experience the emotion.  Wundt pointed out that introspection clearly shows that the emotion comes first -- then we have physiological and behavioral consequences.

He felt that we could not come up with some organized list of emotions:  They blend into each other too much.  But we could determine several quality dimensions with which to describe them, three in particular:

1. pleasure vs displeasure
2. high vs low arousal
3. strained (or controlled) attention vs relaxed attention

Volition

Wundt felt that volition -- acts of will, "decision and choice" -- were so significant to understanding psychology, that he wound up calling his theory voluntaristic psychology.

Volition is really motivation, and volitional action is motivated behavior.  It comes out of a creative synthesis of other emotional qualities.  Students of psychology often learn about Wundt's reaction time experiments -- he really saw these as studies of volition.

The work done in his labs on volition would influence the Belgian phenomenologist Albert Michotte, who in turn would influence people such as Heider, Lewin, and Festinger who would be very influential in the new specialty called social psychology.

Volition and volitional acts can range from impulses and automatic, nearly reflexive acts to complex decisions and acts that require great effort. Many controlled actions become automatic over time, which then frees us up for more complicated volitional work.  In fact, it was the development of logical thought that Wundt considered the very highest form of will that humans are capable of.  He was quite optimistic about our potential in that regard!