Psychology chapter 1

Psychology

• Derives from the Greek roots “psyche,” meaning mind/soul. It is literally the study of the mind or soul and people defined it that way until the early 1900s. Research deals with what we observe and mind is unobservable. Second, talking about “the mind” implies it’s an object. Mental activity is a process and think of it as the flow of the river and not the river. In the early 1900s, psychologists defined their field as the study of behavior.

• Systematic study of behavior and experience. The word experience let’s us discuss your perceptions without implying that a mind exists independently of your body. Remember, psychology is more than just clinical work; it's the study of behavior and experience. Don't expect to gain mind-reading abilities, but rather a better understanding of why people act the way they do.

General statements about psychology that are reoccurring

• Aspects of behavior depend on a variety of things, such as age, health, past experience, and even whether one is asleep or awake. Progress depends on good measurement.

• Research progress has been slower in areas like emotion and personality. Biologist Sidney Brenner’s quote is a good idea of this. Progress depends on good measurement.

• Confidence in the conclusions should depend on the strength of the evidence.

Major philosophical issues and questions in psychology

• Free Will vs Determinism

• The mind-brain problem

• The nature-nurture issue

Free will vs Determinism

Determinism: Every event has a cause that one can observe or measure. Behavior is guided by external and internal forces. Even though it’s an assumption, scientific research is valuable.

Free will: Behavior is caused by independent decisions. But your will is the product of your heredity and experiences. Whether you have or don’t have free will depends on what you mean by “free”. The test of determinism is empirical (direct experience/physical experiments). If everything you do has a cause, your behavior is predictable, and researchers should gradually improve their ability to make predictions. But psychologists’ predictions are much like predicting the weather, the predictions can become gradually accurate, but never completely accurate, simply because many influences are operating. 

The mind-brain problem

• Universe is matter and energy. What is consciousness?

• This is a philosophical question of how experience relates to the brain is the mind-brain problem. 

Dualism: The mind is separate from the brain but controls it, and therefore, the rest of the body.

Monism: Conscious experience is inseparable from the brain

The nature-nurture issue

How behavior differences relate to heredity and environment differences

Service providers to individuals

• Clinical psychologists

• Psychiatrists

• Other mental health professionals

Clinical psychologists

• Advanced degree in psychology (MS, PhD/PsyD)

• Specialty in helping people with psychological problems

Psychiatrists

• MD degree plus 4 years residency training in psychiatry, PsyD

• Deal with emotional disturbances

• Can prescribe drugs

Other mental health professionals

• Psychoanalysts: Psychoanalysts are therapy providers who rely on the theories and methods pioneered by the early 20th-century Viennese physician Sigmund Freud and later modified by others. Freud and his followers attempted to infer hidden, unconscious, symbolic meaning behind people’s words and actions, and psychoanalysts today continue that effort.

• Clinical social workers: work similarly to clinical psychologists but with different training. In most cases, a clinical social worker has a master’s degree in social work with a specialization in psychological problems.

• Psychiatric nurses (nurses with additional training in psychiatry) provide similar services to clinical social workers.

• Counseling psychologists: help people make decisions about education, vocation, marriage, health maintenance, and other issues. They have a doctorate degree (PhD, PsyD, or EdD) with supervised experience in counseling. Whereas a clinical psychologist deals mainly with anxiety, depression, and other emotional distress, a counseling psychologist deals mostly with life decisions and family or career readjustments.

• Forensic psychologists: provide advice and consultation to police, lawyers, and courts.

Service providers to organizations

• Industrial/organizational (I/O) psychology: study of people at work. Deals with hiring the right people for jobs, training people, developing work teams, determining salaries, providing feedback to workers, and structuring the work to aid productivity and satisfaction. They attend to the individual workers and the organizations, including the impact of economic conditions and government regulations.

• Human Factors/ergonomics: They try to facilitate the operation of machinery to increase efficiency and safety. They first worked in military settings, where complex techniques require soldiers to spot nearly invisible targets, understand speech through deafening noise, track objects in 3 dimensions, and make life-or-death decisions in a split second. The military turned to psychologists to redesign the tasks to fit the skills that their personnel could master and soon applied their expertise to many designs like devices. The field combines psychology, engineering, and computer science. 

• Military psychologists: Specialists who provide services to the military. Some are similar to industrial/organizational psychologists, conducting intellectual and personality tests to identify people suitable for certain jobs within the military, and then helping to train people for those jobs. Other military psychologists consult with the leadership about strategies, enemies and culture. Others provide clinical and counseling services to soldiers.Some military psychologists conduct research on how to deal with battlefield stress, sleep deprivation, and other difficulties. Matthews (2014) argued that military psychologists will become more important, as future conflicts pertain more to influencing people than attacking them.

• School psychology: Many children have school problems at one time or another. Some children may have trouble sitting still or paying attention, misbehaving, problems with academic skills, or even mastering their schoolwork quickly and become bored. School psychologists are specialists in the psychological control of students, usually in kindergarten through high school. They identify the children’s educational needs, devise a plan to meet those needs, and then either implement the plan themselves or advise teachers how to implement it. School psychology can be taught in a psychology department, an education department, or a department of educational psychology. In some countries it’s possible to practice school psychology with only a bachelor’s degree. In the U.S. the minimum education requirement is usually a master’s degree, but a doctorate may become necessary in the future. Most school psychologists work for a school system, but some work for mental health clinics, guidance centers, and other institutions.

• Community psychologists: work as professors, researchers, program directors, or policy developers to promote mental health and well-being for a community; rather than working with one person at a time.

Psychologists in teaching and research

• Developmental psychology: studies of how behavior changes with age. May include areas of language, memory, and taste preference

• Learning and motivation: studies how behavior depends on the outcomes of past behaviors and current motivations.

• Cognitive psychology: Cognition means thought and knowledge. A cognitive psychologist studies those processes. They typically focus on how people make decisions, solve problems, and convert their thoughts into language.

• Biological psychology: A biopsychologist or behavioral neuroscientist explains behavior in terms of biological factors, such as activities of the nervous system, the effects of drugs and hormones, genetics, and evolution.

• Evolutionary psychologists: explain behavior in terms of the history of the species. Attempts to explain why we tend to act in particular ways.

• Social psychology and cross-cultural psychology: Social psychologists study how an individual influences others, and how others influence an individual. Cross-cultural compares behavior of people from different cultures.

The Early Era

Astronomy, physics, chemistry and biology as sciences developed gradually over centuries by observing and/or conducting experiments. Psychology began as a deliberate attempt to start as new science. Early psychology was ambitiously focused on rapidly accumulating knowledge to rival established sciences.

Wilhelm Wundt and the first psychological laboratory

• Wundt, in 1879, created the first laboratory exclusively for psychological research. His work is recognized as the start of scientific psychology in Germany. His interests were wide-ranging, but one of his goals was to find the elements of experience, comparable to those of chemistry. And sensations and feelings were the elements of experience. To test his ideas about the components of experience, he asked his subjects to engage in introspection (to look within oneself). 

Edward Titchener and structuralism

The main question of psychology was the nature of natural experiences, according to Titchener, Wundt’s student. Structuralism: An attempt to describe the structures that compose the mind. 

William Jamed and Functionalism