James Angell

Born 1869, James Rowland Angell spent a great deal of time as the president of Yale University. In 1906 angel was elected as the president of the American Psychological Association. As part of his presidential address, Angell delivered an essay defining what he saw as the distinct differences between Structuralism and Functionalism. Angell defined structuralism as studying "conscious content"(Wertheimer 2008) in an attempt to analyze its basic elements, while functionalism "studies the operations of consciousness"(Wertheimer 2008). Angell stresses the fact that consciousness is not a passive process, rather, it is an active and adaptive reaction to atypical phenomena and situations. As such, Angell emphasizes three major aspects of functional psychology:

1. The primary curiosity of Functional psychology is in the interaction of mental processes with the larger biological context in which they are present. In particular the way in which cognitive processes interact with in the greater context of evolution by natural selection. Functional psychology is not concerned with the reduction of mental elements.
2. The cognitive faculties mediate the interaction between and organism's environment and its needs, specifically survival needs. Cognitive faculties prove to aid an organism by providing a means by which to consciously and deliberately adapt to changing environments and situations
3. The inseparability of mind and body, not as an actual, but as a method of study. Functionalism deals with the interaction of cognitive faculties and behavior, and by extension the interaction of cognitive faculties with the organism's environmental context.

The degree to which Angell weighted the importance of behavior in context to environment is a heavy influence to the later school of psychology known as behaviorism; in which the cognitive aspect is completely eliminated, in favor of studying only observable behavior.