<P> A different strain of experimentalism, with more connection to physiology, emerged in South America, under the leadership of Horacio G. Piñero at the University of Buenos Aires . Russia, too, placed greater emphasis on the biological basis for psychology, beginning with Ivan Sechenov's 1873 essay, "Who Is to Develop Psychology and How?" Sechenov advanced the idea of brain reflexes and aggressively promoted a deterministic viewpoint on human behavior . </P> <P> Wolfgang Kohler, Max Wertheimer and Kurt Koffka co-founded the school of Gestalt psychology (not to be confused with the Gestalt therapy of Fritz Perls). This approach is based upon the idea that individuals experience things as unified wholes . Rather than breaking down thoughts and behavior into smaller elements, as in structuralism, the Gestaltists maintained that whole of experience is important, and differs from the sum of its parts . Other 19th - century contributors to the field include the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, a pioneer in the experimental study of memory, who developed quantitative models of learning and forgetting at the University of Berlin, and the Russian - Soviet physiologist Ivan Pavlov, who discovered in dogs a learning process that was later termed "classical conditioning" and applied to human beings . </P> <P> One of the earliest psychology societies was La Société de Psychologie Physiologique in France, which lasted 1885--1893 . The first meeting of the International Congress of Psychology took place in Paris, in August 1889, amidst the World's Fair celebrating the centennial of the French Revolution . William James was one of three Americans among the four hundred attendees . The American Psychological Association was founded soon after, in 1892 . The International Congress continued to be held, at different locations in Europe, with wider international participation . The Sixth Congress, Geneva 1909, included presentations in Russian, Chinese, and Japanese, as well as Esperanto . After a hiatus for World War I, the Seventh Congress met in Oxford, with substantially greater participation from the war - victorious Anglo - Americans . In 1929, the Congress took place at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, attended by hundreds of members of the American Psychological Association Tokyo Imperial University led the way in bringing the new psychology to the East, and from Japan these ideas diffused into China . </P> <P> American psychology gained status during World War I, during which a standing committee headed by Robert Yerkes administered mental tests ("Army Alpha" and "Army Beta") to almost 1.8 million GIs . Subsequent funding for behavioral research came in large part from the Rockefeller family, via the Social Science Research Council . Rockefeller charities funded the National Committee on Mental Hygiene, which promoted the concept of mental illness and lobbied for psychological supervision of child development . Through the Bureau of Social Hygiene and later funding of Alfred Kinsey, Rockefeller foundations established sex research as a viable discipline in the U.S. Under the influence of the Carnegie - funded Eugenics Record Office, the Draper - funded Pioneer Fund, and other institutions, the eugenics movement also had a significant impact on American psychology; in the 1910s and 1920s, eugenics became a standard topic in psychology classes . </P>

What other areas of study is psychology based on