Examples of gestalt

Within the AP® Psychology section of perception are the multifaceted principles of Gestalt. Gestalt principles are the different ways individuals group stimuli together in order to make a whole that makes sense to them. These principles are divided up into five categories: proximity, similarity, continuity, connectedness, and closure. By perceiving objects as well as the world around us we reflect these Gestalt principles. In this AP® Psychology review, we will cover these aspects of the Gestalt and apply them to the AP® exam to get you that 5 you are looking for.

Proximity

The Gestalt principle of proximity is when an individual perceives several objects that are close together as belonging together. An example of this is in the picture above. In the picture the dots are all the same color, size, and shape. The only reason that we perceive two different blocks of dots is because of their position, and how close they are to each other. If these dots were to be miles and miles apart, then we would not perceive them as being a group.

Similarity

If proximity is due to position, then the Gestalt principle of similarity is how we piece information together by how similar objects are. For example, if there were five dogs of all different breeds and five cats of different breeds, then we would group them as cats and dogs. Here, positions do not matter, because we are looking into how similar the objects are to each other.

Another example is the picture above. When looking at these dots one would say that there are two groups. There are white dots and there are blue dots. We perceive these two groups as such, because they have the same shape. The only difference we see is in similarity, or in this case, the color. If all of the dots were blue, then we would say that there was one group of blue dots.

Continuity

The third Gestalt principle is continuity.

Continuity is that our brains tend to see objects as continuous or smooth rather than disjointed or discontinuous. A great example of this phenomenon is a movie. Movies are just millions of pictures put together and flipped through at a fast rate. Your brain brings all of these pictures, these disjointed pictures, together into one cohesive, smooth unit.

Another great example of continuity is music. Music is individual notes that are strung together. Our brains bring those notes together into one smooth unit through continuity.

Connectedness

Connectedness is the fourth principle of the Gestalt principles. Connectedness is when we see connections in disjointed objects. One example of this is when you can see the image that will be made on a connect the dots picture before you connect the dots. For example, when people find constellations in the sky they see a picture made up of dots.

Another example of connectedness is a mosaic. A mosaic is made up of tiny broken pieces of glass or tile that are all put together in a collage to make a new, unified whole.

Closure

Closure is the final Gestalt principle. Closure is when individuals fill in the blanks. This means that the brain sees the big picture even when an element of that picture may be missing. An example of this is in the alphabet.

You may not have noticed that some letters were missing (see image above), because your brain knows what that sequence of letters is supposed to look like, and you perceived that the missing letters were there.

Another example of the Gestalt principle of closure is seen in the picture to the left. While these roughly drawn shapes are not finished, we can perceive that these shapes are a circle and a rectangle. Our ability to see closure with almost finished objects fills in the missing information.

This idea was used on the AP® Psychology free response question on the 2011 AP® Psych exam. The question can be seen here. Within this case study the participants had to complete an incomplete figure as well as to tell what was happening and the expected result of the experiment.

This FRQ relates to the idea of closure, because the case study should be able to finish the incomplete figures.

Why are These Principles of Gestalt Important?

The principles of Gestalt are extremely important in that they dictate how we perceive life. Life is just a giant whirlwind of stimuli, and to make sense of these stimuli we must group them together. For example, people do not need to examine every brick on the house to determine that it is a house. Here we have grouped the bricks together to realize that that was a wall. Then, we group together those walls to make a house. If there are other houses next to it, then we group those houses into a development. Multiple developments are then grouped into a community. Grouping of stimuli allows us to make sense of the world so that we do not have to focus on the tiny details.

Why Are the Gestalt Principles Important for the AP® Psychology Exam?

Applying the AP® Psychology material, such as the Gestalt principles, is essential for a high score on the AP® Psychology exam.

Gestalt principles are a vital portion of the free response question portion of the exam in particular, because examiners love to see application of ideas. The free response question that would include the application of the Gestalt principles would include a scenario of perception. Here the students would be given a scenario in which an individual would see something, and then the student must give the Gestalt principles that explain why the individual perceived this.

Free response questions are worth a large percentage of the AP® Psychology exam; therefore, it is essential that the student looks over the Gestalt principles of perception and be able to apply these ideas to real life examples.

You can also find thousands of practice questions on Albert. io. Albert.io lets you customize your learning experience to target practice where you need the most help. We’ll give you challenging practice questions to help you achieve mastery of AP Psychology.

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10 Real Life Examples Of Gestalt Principles – StudiousGuy

If you see two circles of the same size and colour which are placed next to each other, you tend to perceive that they have a relationship with each other rather than just being two different circles.

It is how most people see elements as a whole or try to group them into whole. Gestalt is a term used in psychology which expresses the idea that the whole of something is more important and convenient to our understanding than the individual parts.

Gestalt theory is a hypothesis which states that people tend to organize visual elements into groups or unified wholes when certain principles are applied. According to it, the whole is different from the sum of its part.

Gestalt principles try to describe the ways by which the human mind interprets the visual elements. There are three general rules of Gestalt principle.

The Principle of Continuity states that whenever our eyes begin to follow something, they will continue to travel in that direction until they encounter another object.

The eyes create momentum as they are compelled to move through one object and continue to another. Let’s check the examples of Continuity.

The logos of Amazon, Proquest, USA Network, and Coca Cola follow the continuation principle of Gestalt. In the logo of Amazon, there is an arrow starting from A and ending at Z which depicts that Amazon has everything from A to Z. Similarly, in the logo of the famous soft-drink brand, Coca Cola, our eyes follow the “C” from Coca to Cola, beginning from the “C” in the word Cola through L and A. These types of visual aids help our eyes to follow an upcoming object.

Google Maps have become a necessity for an individual who has shifted to a new city or for the ones who like to travel. Google Maps also follow the rule of continuity. When we set a destination on the google map, it shows us the pathway from the starting point to the destination.

We follow that pathway to reach our destination.

Closure occurs when an element is incomplete or is not enclosed in space. It, subconsciously, involves filling of the missing gaps or information. When enough of the shape is shown and it is still incomplete, our minds tend to fill in the blanks and construct the whole of the shape. Let’s see the relevant examples of the closure principle.

We can find some unfilled gap in logos of WWF or EA sports. For instance, in the logo of WWF, there is an image of a panda, and it has some missing spaces on its back and head. It is probably where the white fur of the panda would be. However, we are well aware of the shape and colour of the panda; and so, we automatically and subconsciously fill the missing gaps.

The above image is an advertisement for lenses. In this ad, the advertiser has tried to construct a smiley with the help of objects and sentences, and we perceive the smiley as a happy face as the advertisers would have apprehended.

Though there is not an entire image on a smiley emoji, we perceive the missing details and imagine it to be a happy face. It is a technique used by advertisers to attract people.

Principle of similarity states that we tend to perceive things that physically resemble each other as a part of the same object. There may be a similarity in any one of them; colour, shape, texture, or any other element. Let’s see the examples of the principle of similarity.

In the logos of NBC, Panda Security Touts, and Sun Microsystems, objects and patterns have similar visual characteristics, though they are not identical in colour, shape, or size. In the logo of Panda Security Touts, logomark is perfectly linked with the wordmark. Similarly, in the logo for NBC, all the leaves are of different colours but are perceived as similar and in the group because of their same shape.

Principle of proximity states that when two or more elements are close to each other, the position of these elements portray the relationship between separate parts and render a specific meaning to that group.

Let’s see the examples of the proximity principle.

In the above image, dots on the left appear to be the part of one group, whereas the ones on the right seem to be in three different groups.

When we look at the IBM logo, we see three letters composed of short horizontal lines stacked above each other instead of the eight horizontal lines interspersed with uniform gaps.

The word “Pragnanz” is a German term meaning “good figure.” The Law of Pragnanz is also referred to as the “law of good figure” or “the law of simplicity.” This principle states that humans naturally perceive objects in the simplest form.

The Olympic logo has five circles. We tend to see this logo straightforwardly. The logo is perceived to consist of five circles which are juxtaposing each other. The logo is less likely to be apprehended as an assortment of curves, shapes, colours, and lines.

The human eye can differentiate an object from the surrounding. We perceive certain objects as being in the foreground and other objects as being in the background. Let’s check the examples of this principle.

The above logo for “Hope for African Children Initiative” simultaneously depicts the map of Africa and the waning silhouettes of an adult and a child.

In this image, we see faces and vases which depend on our way of perception. If we see the white as the figure, then we perceive men and vice-versa.

Gestalt - what is it and how to close it

What is the popular trend in psychology Gestalt therapy? About her techniques, the consequences of incomplete gestalts in relationships and the benefits of closed gestalts - in the material Forbes Life

Background

Gestalt therapy is a fashionable psychological direction, the beginnings of which appeared in 1912.

Gestalt is literally “form” or “figure” in German. The concept itself was introduced by the Austrian philosopher and psychologist Christian von Ehrenfels in 1890 year in the article "On the quality of the form." In it, he insisted that a person is not able to contact material objects directly: we perceive them with the help of the senses (primarily vision) and refine them in consciousness. The scientist did not engage in further development of the theory, and the idea of Gestalt was taken by three German experimental psychologists - Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Keller and Kurt Koffka. They studied the peculiarities of human perception and asked themselves the question: why does a person single out something specific, “his own” from the whole variety of events and circumstances? This is how the direction of Gestalt psychology was born, the main principle of which psychologists put forward integrity.

Despite the fact that everyone liked the new direction, due to the political mood, it did not develop.

Two of the founding psychologists, Jewish by origin, were forced to emigrate from Germany to the United States in 1933. At that time, behaviorism reigned in America (the study and change of human and animal behavior through incentives: rewards and punishments. - Forbes Life), and Gestalt psychology did not take root.

Other psychologists returned to the idea of Gestalt - Frederick Perls (also known as Fritz Perls), Paul Goodman and Ralph Hefferlin. At 19In 1957 they published Gestalt Therapy, Arousal and Growth of the Human Personality. This monumental work marked the beginning of the real development of the direction.

What is Gestalt

“Gestalt is a kind of holistic structure, an image consisting of many parts, attributes, combined into one figure,” says psychologist, gestalt therapist and teacher Olga Lesnitskaya. She explains that a great example of a gestalt is a piece of music that can be transposed into different keys, which will cause all the notes to change, but you will not stop recognizing it - the whole structure will remain the same.

When a piece of music is played out, the listener has a feeling of completeness, the integrity of the form. And if the musician ends his performance on the penultimate, usually dominant chord, then the listener will have a feeling of incompleteness, suspension and expectation. “This is an example of an unfinished, unclosed gestalt,” the specialist emphasizes.

If we transfer this musical metaphor to life, events and situations are most often called gestalts: closed gestalts cause a feeling of satisfaction, which in the future releases attention and energy for the new; unclosed - continue to occupy a place in the mind, spending psychic energy.

Therefore, any unrealized process, desire, intention, something that did not end in the desired way and did not cause a corresponding experience, psychologists in gestalt technology call an unclosed gestalt.

“If the experience was strong, then over time, the person’s mental defenses suppress and force him out, the severity of the experience decreases, the person may not even remember the situation,” explains Lesnitskaya. An example of an unfinished gestalt is a performance for which a person has been preparing for a long time, but has not dared to go out and show himself. Or failed relationships that could be if a person decided to say words of love. “Also, for example, it can be an insult to parents for some event, which now seems to have been forgotten, but at that moment it became the starting point for increasing the distance. In general, events of varying degrees of strength can be an unclosed gestalt: from an unfulfilled childhood dream to a dress not bought on a trip, ”Lesnitskaya sums up.

What does it mean to close a gestalt?

“It is important for us that the image be whole, complete,” says psychopractitioner, gestalt therapist Maria Kryukova.

“For example, a picture in which a triangle has no corners, or a word written with omission of vowels, we will still perceive as a whole and understand what the author had in mind, automatically bringing it to a complete image. We "finish" the missing. It is this principle of wholeness, also called holism, that is central to Gestalt psychology.

That is why we hear music as a melody, not as a set of sounds, we see the picture as a whole, and not as a set of colors and objects. According to the Gestalt approach, in order for the perception to be “correct”, it is important to complete it, complete it, find a place for the missing puzzle and find the puzzle itself. Sometimes closing a gestalt is vital. “Imagine a situation in which you are very thirsty. And a glass of water is what you need now, - he gives an example of the importance of closing Kryukov's gestalts. - You will look for this glass of water, simultaneously imagining the desired image on the machine - a glass or a bottle, cool or warm, with a slice of lemon or already any, in the end, if only water.

And if there is a table in front of you, laden with your favorite dishes, your eyes will still look for water. Food will not satisfy the need for water. But when you drink, the need will be satisfied, the gestalt will be considered complete, complete. The desire to drink will lose its relevance. And a new desire will arise.

Unfinished gestalts in relationships

As often happens, unfinished gestalts also occur in personal relationships. One of the clearest examples of this phenomenon is the experience of parting or losing a person, when something remains unclear, unspoken. “And then it’s quite difficult for a person to let go of the image of a loved one, to survive a breakup,” explains Lesnitskaya. “He replays the parting situation over and over again, picks up words that he didn’t say, his attention and energy are occupied with this process.” According to the psychologist, in the event of a loss, when a loved one passes away, prolonged mourning of one and a half to two years is a normal process that takes time.

But if mourning stretches for five, seven, 10 years, we can talk about an unfinished cycle of loss, about getting stuck on it. “There is a difficulty in closing the gestalt, because the person is no longer there, but the words that he wants to say are there. Very often, a person needs the help of a specialist in order to work through the loss, cope with it and let go, ”explains the specialist.

When parting with a partner, one can also talk about getting stuck and an unclosed gestalt, if years go by, and a person continues to remember and experience old feelings, scroll through options for a parting that has already happened, or scenarios for resuming relationships. “Parting with someone in the middle of a sentence, without an end to a relationship, understatement - all this can remain with us for the rest of our lives, get stuck in our memory and become a bleeding wound,” says psychopractitioner Kryukova.

Unclosed gestalt in family relationships can be, for example, a delayed and unfulfilled desire to have children, Lesnitskaya gives another example.

When, for example, one partner is not ready or does not want to have children, and the other agrees, although for him, in fact, it is important to become a parent. Then the one who made concessions, over and over again meets with resentment, irritation and doubts about the value of the relationship and the correctness of his choice.

There are often unfinished gestalts in parent-child relationships. “Situations arise in which an adult cannot find a common language with his parents precisely because of incomplete gestalts,” says Kryukova. “It happens that at some point in an adult, feelings of anger and resentment suddenly become more active, he feels some negative emotions in himself in relation to his parents,” adds Lesnitskaya. — For example, when a client was a child, his parents didn’t come to visit him for Parents’ Day at the camp, or once they didn’t pick him up from kindergarten. And now he, already an adult, sharply feels resentment and even anger.

Although, it would seem that the situation happened a long time ago.

Why are unclosed gestalts dangerous?

Experts talk about the danger of unclosed gestalts. “Let's say a person experienced rage, but he did not manage or did not dare to express this rage adequately and targeted. I couldn’t defend myself, protect myself, show strong emotion,” says Kryukova. - As a result, the need to express it will remain unsatisfied, and the gestalt will remain incomplete. A feeling of rage that has not been lived to the end, taking on hidden and insidious forms, will haunt a person. An irritation will sit inside him, which will constantly ask to come out, a person will look for situations (or even provoke them) in order to express aggression, the psychopractitioner explains. “And, most likely, he will express aggression towards people who have absolutely nothing to do with this,” adds Kryukova and gives the opposite example - “encapsulation” of emotions in himself, when a person with an open gestalt understands that people around him don’t what they are not guilty of, and does not want to take it out on them.

But such a "canned food" will poison a person from the inside. Moreover, persistent and prolonged rejection of some of their feelings, desires and relationships, in the end, leads to neurosis.

No less detrimental are the consequences of incomplete gestalts in personal relationships. “If a couple fails to talk, discuss, look for ways to fulfill the needs of everyone, close gestalts and move on to new ones, then over time, feelings of dissatisfaction, hopelessness, meaninglessness, inaudibility — and therefore feelings of their own uselessness — accumulate,” says the gestalt therapist Lesnitskaya. She explains that for someone this means the end of the relationship - the person distances himself and leaves them. For others, there may be several scenarios of development: for example, physical presence, but emotional withdrawal, accompanied by an increase in psychosomatic diseases. Another scenario is quarrels that arise out of the blue due to accumulated pain, family wars, open or with a touch of passive aggression, etc.

A more positive scenario is also possible, for example, going to family therapy as an attempt to hear each other and figure out what happening.

An incomplete gestalt will affect a person, his health, quality of life. There may be neuroses, problems with sleep, concentration. “But the most important thing, why incomplete processes are dangerous, is that they do not allow moving forward,” sums up Kryukova.

How to close a gestalt

“The good news is that it is not necessary to close a gestalt with a specialist,” says Lesnitskaya, but adds that it can be done much more efficiently with a specialist, because if the gestalt is not closed, it means that in order to complete it, what - that wasn't enough. “For example, skills, abilities, resources, support. Usually what was missing lies in the area of a person's blind spot. And it is the specialist who can see this and help restore clarity, ”explains the psychologist.

So, how to close a gestalt on your own? One of the techniques is the "empty chair". If there are unexpressed feelings for another person - mom, dad, brother, ex-partner, boss, departed relatives - then they can be worked on with the help of this technique. Choose a time and place where no one can disturb you, put two chairs opposite each other at a distance of one and a half to two meters, sit on one of them and imagine that a person is sitting opposite you to whom you want to say something. When you're ready, start saying whatever you have: you can scream, swear, cry, ask questions. Then sit on his chair and imagine yourself in the role of this person, answer the claims and questions. After that, return to your chair and become yourself again, listen to what the interlocutor said to you and answer him.

You may switch over several times until the emotions subside and a sense of completion emerges within you.

“This technique can lead to the closure of the old gestalt, or it can be the first step towards entering psychotherapy – each case is individual, it is important to be aware of this,” Lesnitskaya comments on the technique. “If very strong traumatic experiences come up, I would recommend contacting a Gestalt therapist and continue working with the help of a specialist.”

According to Kryukova, working through gestalts is not a quick job, it requires certain strength, knowledge and will, but the result is worth it. “Working with gestalts destroys automatisms, that is, the habit of acting in a certain way in situations of the same type, without thinking about what, how and why you are doing. As a result, your thinking changes, you begin to behave differently and feel differently, ”the specialist sums up.

What is Gestalt, or Why the waiter immediately forgets the completed order - T&P

"Theories and Practices" continues to explain the meaning of commonly used expressions that are often used in colloquial speech in absolutely the wrong meaning.

"You just need to close the gestalt" - such advice can be heard from well-wishers. But in order to understand what a gestalt is and to use this concept correctly, one needs to digress from psychotherapy for a while and turn to the psychology of perception.

Literally translated from German, Gestalt means “form, appearance, figure”, and the word Gestaltung, derived from it, means “decoration”. Other more or less suitable Russian counterparts are "integrity", "structure" and "model". The official date of birth of the term is considered to be 1890, when the philosopher Christian von Ehrenfels published his key work Über Gestaltqualitäten ("On the Qualities of Form"). This scientist supported Immanuel Kant's point of view that we cannot perceive the physical world directly. A person always interacts with information received from the senses - refining it in his mind.

Thus, any whole for us is more than the sum of its parts, because we put our perception into it.

This idea continued to develop during the 1910s-1930s, when psychologists began to actively study the perception of works of art. Scientists have found that when we look at a painting or a statue, the main role is played by a certain holistic perception of the object, which is not reducible to the properties of the sum of its constituent elements. Figuratively speaking, when we look at a painting by Renoir or another impressionist, we do not notice and evaluate each stroke, but we see a single whole, and it is this general combination of colors and shapes that impresses us. Such a holistic perception began to be called "gestalt".

In parallel, the Gestalt approach to perception grew into an independent branch of psychology - thanks to Max Wertheimer, a student of von Ehrenfels.

In 1912 he published Experimental Investigations in Motion Perception. The scientist described how two flashes of light flashing in two different places at different times can be perceived as one light source that has moved from one place to another - if you choose the right distance and time interval (the optical illusion worked at an interval of about 60 milliseconds).

Thus, the observer did not perceive two separate elements, but a single whole. This supported the idea that the whole model is different from the simple sum of the parts. Similar experiments were carried out with music - Ernst Mach, in his work "Analysis of Sensations", proved that changing the key and tempo of a melody does not interfere with identifying a motive. A similar experiment - but only with text - is now widely replicated in social networks: thanks to the ability to think in gestalts, you can understand a sentence, even if you change the order of letters in each word and leave only initial and final ones in place.

Gestalt research was continued by the Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin. He divided any image perceived by a person into a Figure (object) and a Background. The figure is what our attention is focused on, and the background is everything else. To show that figure and ground are mutually exclusive, Rubin created a famous drawing that can be "read" either as a picture of a vase or as a picture of two faces, depending on where you concentrate. When faces are the object, the vase becomes the background, but when the vase becomes the figure, the faces immediately and completely recede into the background.

From psychology, the term migrated to psychotherapy and firmly settled there, giving rise to a new direction - Gestalt therapy. After all, the concept of background and figure is preserved in everyday life - if we imagine that the reality in which we exist is the background, and various objects or processes are figures. When we have certain needs, we can “pull out” the figures from the background and consciously interact with them, and upon completion of the interaction, the figure again merges with the background.

For example, we are hungry and looking for food, and after chewing and swallowing a hamburger, we forget about this need and are distracted by something else.

In fact, a "figure", a gestalt, can be any process - infatuation with someone, a quarrel or a business started.

We remember incomplete processes better — this phenomenon is called the “Zeigarnik effect” after the Soviet psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik. While still a student, she noticed that the waiters in the cafe perfectly remember all the outstanding orders and instantly forget the completed ones. Later, Zeigarnik conducted a series of experiments that confirmed that unfulfilled tasks create a certain tension in human memory.

This tension helps us not to forget about our needs, but in order for a person to be psychologically healthy, gestalts must be brought to their logical conclusion in a timely manner. An incomplete gestalt can cause an obsessive desire to return to the situation and "replay" it. And the person begins to repeat the old schemes in the changed conditions - for example, provokes conflicts in new relationships that are unresolved with the former partner.