History & Theory of Psychology

The whole module is designed to deal with this question: what is the mind?! Philosophers and Psychologists have disagreed on what the Mind is for as long as they have asked this question

Psychology

The scientific study of the mind (literally of the ‘soul’)

Goal of psychology

To seek objective descriptions of mental phenomena and how they relate to behaviour and the physical environment

Theory

A generalised statement about the relationships between certain facts and events.

Law

A formal statement describing a regularity with no anticipated or known exceptions

Law of Effect by Thorndike (1898)

Behaviour followed by reward may be repeated; behaviour followed by punishment may be stopped

Endel Tulving’s (1972) theory of memory

Memory is divided into subsections

• Semantic Memory: Facts, concepts, knowledge

• Episodic Memory: personal experiences

• Procedural: Body memory

How are theories useful?

Theories can lead to the development of models of behaviour that describe how different observations relate to one another