psych exam #1

wilhelm wundt

person who created the first lab dedicated to the study of psych in Germany

structuralism

idea of studying the basic structures of the mind, ideal created by wundt, approach that attempted to isolate and analyze the mind’s basic elements

william james

person who travelled to gerrmany, learned psychology, first psych lab in the US, became a teacher at harvard (Father of american psychology)

psychology

the scientific study of mind and behavior

Rene Descartes

person who thought the body is made of a material substance, the mind an immaterial substance, and every person a material container of an immaterial thing

dualism

the view that mind and body are fundamentally different things

thomas hobbes

believed that the mind and body arent fundamentally different things—the mind is what the brain does

materialism

the view that all mental phenomena are reducible to a physical phenomena

realism

referred by john locke, the idea that our perceptions of the physical world are a faithful copy of information from the world that enters our brains through our sensory apparatus

idealism

referred by Kant, idea that our perceptions of the physical world are our brains best interpretation of the info that enters through our sensory apparatus

empiricism

the view that all knowledge is acquired through experience, locke referred to this as people being “blank slates”

nativism

kant rebuted locke by saying this idea, which is that some knowledge is innate rather than acquired

introspection

technique used by structuralists, which is the analysis of subjective experience by trained observers

functionalism

idea overtaking structuralism, an approach that emphasized the adaptive significance of mental process

unconcious

a conceptual place coined by freud, the part of the mind that contains information of which people are not aware

psychodynamic theory

theory established by freud, we have “unconcious thoughts” we are not aware of which are shaped by childhood experience

john watson

person who believed everything about a person can be known by just watching or observing, big behaviorist, ruled out thoughts, feelings and mental life as boring, vague

behaviorism

idea that restricts scientific inquiry to observable behavior

gestalt psychology

making sense of the world and emphasizing the way in which the mind creates perceptual experience

max wertheimer

argued that “illusory motion” occurs because the mind has theories about how the world works, (idealism)

Frederic Bartlett

person who studied why people sometimes remembered things as they aren’t, memory is not a simple recording device—our minds will construct memories based on theories of how the world works

jean piaget

studied 3-year-olds to see their responses to scenarios change after developing theories about how the world works

developmental psychology

the study of how psychological phenomena change over the life span and theories about the world develop

social psychology

the study of the causes and consequences of sociality and people drawing inferences about others

cognitive psychology

the study of human info processing, computer as an analogy for the mind, rebutted behaviorism

john garcia

person who noticed people associate two stimulis that are paired, meaning that organisms are evolved to respond to stimuli and come “biologically prepared”

evolutionary psychology

study of the ways in which the human mind has been shaped by natural selection, or adaptations that shape traits and behaviors

paul broca

preformed an autopsy on a man whose left side of the brain had been damaged and could understand words but not produce them

fMRI

a technology that produces “brain scans” showing the amount of blood that is flowing in different parts of a persons brain at a particular time

cognitive neuroscience

the study of the relationship between the brain and mind (especially in humans)

behavioral neuroscience

the study of the relationship between the brain and behavior (especially in nonhuman animals)

cultural psychology

the study of how culture influences mental life

stimulus to reaction

nature is to nature as…

scientific method

process of forming research questions to develop and test theories of human or animal behavior, or a procedure using empirical evidence to establish facts

theories

explanations of natural phenomena or our ideas about how certain things work

hypothesis

scientific research prediction that is falsifiable

construct validity

the degree of which the operational definition accurately describes the important features of the phenomenon being studied

power

the key feature of a detector with the ability to detect the presence of differences or changes in the magnitude of a property

reliability

the key feature of a detector to produce consistent results if the same thing is measured twice, also detects the absense of difference

demand characteristics

aspects of an observational setting that cause people to behave as they think someone else wants or expects—acting not normally

naturalistic observation

a type of descriptive research which is a technique that gathers info by unobtrusively observing people in their natural environments

observer bias

the tendency for observers’ expectations to influence both what they believed they observed and what they actually observed

double-blind study

a study in which neither the researcher nor the participant knows how the participants are expected to behave

correlation

a relationship between variables in which variations in the value of one variable are synchronized with variations in the value of the other

descriptive research

research that describes various aspects of human and animal behavior and is good for new phenomena

correlational research

research that examines relationships between variables and allows prediction of behavior

positive

correlation where when one increases so does the other

negative

correlation where when one increases the other decreases

third-variable problem

idea that natural correlation between two variables cannot be taken as evidence of a causal relationship between them because a third variable might be causing them both

manipulation

technique used for determining the causal power of a variable by actively changing its value

independent variable

variable manipulated by the researcher

dependent variable

the variable being measured in an experiment

extraneous variable

other variable that may cause an effect on your dependent variable

random assignment

procedure that assigns participants to conditions by chance to the independent variable

internal validity

an attribute of an experiment that allows it to establish causal relationships, and everything goes right inside the experiment

external validity

an attribute of an experiment in which variables have been operationally defined in a representative way

population

a complete collection of people or entire group you are making conclusions about

sample

a partial collection of people drawn from a population, subset of the population

random sampling

a technique for selecting participants that ensures that every member of a population has an equal chance of being included in the sample

doubt your conclusions

the first rule of critical thinking is to

consider what you dont see

the second rule then of critical thinking is