Chapter 1: What is Psychology?

Flashcards defining core vocabulary, concepts, historical movements, and major perspectives covered in Chapter 1: What is Psychology?

Psychology

The scientific study of behavior and mental processes using systematic methods.

Learning Styles Myth

The debunked concept (highlighted by Husmann & O'Loughlin, 2019) that students perform better when study strategies match a preferred VARK learning style.

Critical Thinking

An active process of reflecting, questioning, and evaluating evidence to determine whether claims or statements are justified.

Skepticism

A psychological frame of mind that involves challenging ideas and claims rather than accepting them at face value.

Objectivity

The practice of evaluating evidence free from personal opinion, belief, intuition, or hunches.

Structuralism

An early approach to psychology, associated with Wilhelm Wundt, that aimed to investigate immediate experience by identifying the basic elements of the mind and the laws of their interactions.

Introspection

A structuralist research method involving self-reports of immediate sensory experiences during controlled experiments without interpretation or meaning.

Functionalism

An early school of psychology, associated with William James, that focused on the function or purpose of the mind and how consciousness helps individuals adapt and survive in their environment.

Stream of Consciousness

William James's conceptualization of consciousness as a continuous, ongoing whole rather than broken-down static elements.

Behavioral Approach

A psychological perspective focusing on observable, measurable behaviors and how they are determined by interactions with the environment.

Reinforcement

In operant conditioning (B.F. Skinner), the process of rewarding a behavior following its occurrence to increase the probability that it will be repeated.

Psychodynamic Approach

A psychological perspective founded by Sigmund Freud that emphasizes unconscious thoughts, childhood experiences, and conflicts between biological drives and societal demands.

Psychoanalysis

A therapeutic method created by Sigmund Freud aimed at uncovering unconscious conflicts using techniques such as free association and dream analysis.

Free Association

A psychoanalytic technique where a patient spontaneously expresses whatever comes to mind without organization or censorship.

Humanistic Approach

A psychological perspective that stresses positive personal qualities, capacity for growth, and free will rather than environmental or unconscious control.

Self-Actualization

The innate drive to fully develop one's abilities and potential, positioned as the peak level in Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.

Cognitive Approach

A psychological perspective that focuses on mental processes such as information processing, storage, transformation, and retrieval, viewing the mind through a computer analogy.

Biological Approach

A psychological perspective that examines behavior and mental processes through the study of the body, particularly the brain, nervous system, functional networks, and structural connections.

Functional Networks

In neuroscience, the correlations in activity between distinct brain areas when performing a specific function.

Structural Connections

The physical neural pathways and wiring that connect different areas of the brain.

Sociocultural Approach

A psychological perspective that explores how social and cultural environments shape human behavior and mental processes across different groups or regions.