CHAPTER 1 PSYC 101

Is psychology simply a mental health profession, or is there more to it than that?

Psychology is not simply a mental health profession, but rather a science

What other types of things do psychologists do?

teaching, researching, consulting, counseling x

Define Psychology

The science of behavior and mental processes

What are examples of observable behavior?

speech and physical movement

what are examples of mental processes?

remembering and thinking

What are the four major research perspectives within psychology?

Biological, cognitive, behavioral, and sociocultural

What is the biological perspective?

physiological hardware being viewed as a determiner of behavior (emphasizes internal factors)

What is the cognitive perspective?

emphasis on how our mental processes work and impact our behavior (emphasizes internal factors)

What is the behavioral perspective?

explains that we behave as we do because of our past history of conditioning by our environment (emphasizes external factors)

what is the sociocultural perspective?

focuses on the impact of other people and culture on our behavior and mental processing (emphasizes external factors)

What are key words that relate to the biological perspective?

Brain chemistry, brain, nervous system, genetics

What are key words that relate to the cognitive perspective?

mental processes, perception, memory, problem solving, thinking, beliefs

What are key words that relate to the behavioral perspective?

experience, learning, reinforcement

What are key words that relate to the sociocultural perspective?

other people, culture

What is hindsight bias (I-knew-it-all-along phenomenon)?

the tendancy, after learning about an outcome, to be overconfident in one’s ability to have predicted it

what three categories do research methods fall under?

1. Descriptive

2. Correlational

3. Experimental

What is the descriptive research method?

provide objective and detailed descriptions of behavior and mental processes

What is the correlational research method?

where two variables are measured to see if they are related

What is the experimental research method?

most common because it allows researcher to explore cause-effect relationships

When can the experimental research method NOT be used?

When experiments would be unethical

What is the main goal of psychology?

To explain cause-effect relationships

What are the three types of descriptive methods?

1. observational techniques

2. case studies

3. survey research

What are observational techniques?

when the researcher unobtrusively observes behavior of interest (laboratory, naturalistic, or participant)

What are case studies?

research method in which the researcher studies an individual in depth over an extended period of time

What is survey research?

research method where the researcher uses questionnaires and interviews to collect information about the behavior, beliefs, and attitudes of particular groups of people

What can descriptive methods NEVER be used to do?

Descriptive data only allows researchers to speculate about cause-effect relationships, which must then be tested with experiments

What is a naturalistic observation?

descriptive research method in which the behavior of interest is unobtrusively observed in its natural setting

Why would a naturalistic observation be conducted?

when researchers are interested in how humans or other animals behave in their natural habitats

What are two well-known examples of naturalistic observations of other species?

Dian Fossey - Mountain gorillas

Jane Goodall - chimpanzees

What is a participant observation?

descriptive research method in which the observer becomes part of the group being observed

Why would a participant observation be conducted?

Briefly describe the Rosenhan (1973) study, and understand why it is an example of a participant observation.

A study where a group of people posed as patients with symptoms of a major mental disorder to see if doctors at a psychiatric hospital could distinguish them from real patients. Apparently the staff couldn’t, but the patients could. (The observers become a core part of the experiment)

Define population

the entire group of people that a researcher is studying

Define sample

The subset of a population that actually participates in a research study

What is random sampling?

a sampling technique that obtains a representative sample of a population by ensuring that each individual in a population has an equal opportunity to be in the sample