EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY M1

Aristotle

Who is the ancient Greek philosopher whose writings have been a significant influence on the study of psychological problems, and whose work continues to be relevant from his time to the present?

Philosophy and Physiology

In what academic discipline or courses did the origins of experimental psychology take place, laying the foundation for its development and evolution as a scientific field?

Mind-body problem

An important issue in the history of philosophy

Theory of Dualism

• physical laws govern the body, as are inanimate objects, but such laws do not govern the mind because they possess free will.

Idea of mutual interaction

•  the body could affect the mind, and the mind could affect the body.

• The mind was regarded as immortal and as possessing free will and a soul, the body could be studied as a mechanical system by rational, scientific means.

British empiricist philosophers

• John Locke

• Bishop George Berkeley

• David Hume

• David Hartley

John Locke, Bishop George Berkeley, David Hume, and David Hartley (British empiricist philosophers)

They believed that the mind could be modeled similarly, that is, in terms of elements (ideas) and forces (associations) that act on those elements in lawful ways.

The mechanical nature of mental phenomena

they discussed laws of association in thought and the physical basis of the perception of the external world. The idea was beginning to take hold that for scientific study, the mind could be treated like a machine.

1840

The year when Berlin Society formed.

Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894)

• a physicist and physiologist.

• use of a reaction-time experiment to study the speed of       neural impulses.

Berlin Society

 belief that all phenomena could be explained in terms of physics.

Johannes Muller

• German physiologist, argued that transmission of nervous impulses was instantaneous or perhaps approached the speed of light.

• He stated that we could never calculate the speed of nervous impulses.

Ernst Weber (1795-1878)

• anatomist and physiologist in Leipzig whose research centered on cutaneous sensation, or the sense of touch.

• He discovered that the amount of change needed for a jnd (just-noticeable difference) was a constant proportion of the magnitude of the standard stimulus, a fact that became known as Weber’s Law.

Gustav Fechner (1801-1887)

• Trained as a physicist but also contributed to philosophy, religion, aesthetics, and psychology.

• He wrote one book on life after death and another that argues that plants have a mental life.

• He continued Weber’s work and coined the term psychophysics.

Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920)

• Trained in physiology and medicine.

• Given credit for establishing the first laboratory of experimental psychology in 1879 in Leipzig and for establishing the first psychology journal.

• Did not believe that the higher mental processes such as memory, thought, and creativity could ever be studied experimentally.

Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850-1909)

• pioneering experiments on human learning and memory, which culminated in his important book, Memory, in 1885.

• His investigations spawned a critical area of inquiry concerning human learning and memory.

Primary Schools of Psychology

1. Struturalism

2. Functionalism

3. Behaviorism

4. Gestalt Psychology

Structuralism

• Conscious experiences

• To break down conscious experiences into their basic components: sensation, images, and affections

• Analytic Introspection

Functionalism

• The function of mental processes and how they help people adapt.

• To study mental processes in their natural contexts and discover what effects they have.

• Objective measures include informal observation and introspection.

Behaviorism

• Behavior: how it changed under different conditions, with emphasis on learning.

• Description, explanation, prediction, and control of behavior.

• Objective measures of behavior; formal experiments.

Gestalt Psychology

• Subjective experiences, with emphasis on perception, memory, and thinking.

• To understand the phenomenon of conscious experience in terms of the whole experience (not to break down experience into arbitrary categories).

• Subjective reports; some behavioral measures; demonstration.

1930 and 1940

• In what year(s) did behaviorism dominate American psychology?

• Experimental social psychology and experimental child psychology received considerable attention

1960s and 1970s

In what years did many scientists suggested that the computer may provide a model for the way the human mind encodes, stores, processes, and retrieves information.

Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP)

consists of a network of simple processing units that fall into distinct layers, with all of the processing units within a layer connected to all of the processing units in adjacent layers.

1990

US Congress declares the decade of the brain.

Psychophysiology

the intersection of psychology and physiology.

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)

works by measuring a correlate of brain activity, namely blood flow and oxygenation, in response to a targeted cognitive activity.

specialization

is simply the mark of a maturing science because no psychologist could be knowledgeable in all areas of contemporary psychology.

The Need for Scientific Method

collect and use psychological data to understand the behavior of others and to guide our own behavior.

commonsense psychology

Nonscientific data gathering that shapes our expectations and beliefs and directs our behavior toward others.

the source of psychological information and our inferential strategies.

Two very important factors constrain our ability to gather data in a systematic and impartial way

Confirmation Bias

• we tend to overlook instances that might contradict our beliefs, and instead, we seek confirmatory instances of behavior.

• sources that seem credible and trustworthy—friends and relatives, reports from the media, books we have read, and so forth—but, actually, these sources are not always very good ones for obtaining valid information about behavior.

Non Scientific Inference

• is a strong bias to overlook situational data in favor of data that substantiate trait explanations.

• Perceiving others by their traits can be useful for predicting their behavior, but it can also lead to overestimations of the likelihood that they will act in trait-consistent ways across a wide variety of different situations.

Overconfidence bias

• Our predictions, guesses, and explanations tend to feel much more correct than they actually are, and the more data we have available (accurate or not), the more confidence we have in our judgments about behavior.

• Gambler's fallacy

• exist in human information processing. They are believed to be the brain’s way of coping with an immense volume of information. They are shortcuts, and most of the time, they allow us to function well enough, but they are not always accurate.

The Scientific Mentality

Behavior must follow a natural order; therefore, it can be predicted. Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) .

Determinism

Research psychologists share the belief that there are specifiable (although not necessarily simple or obvious) causes for the way people behave and that these causes can be discovered through research.

Empirical data

• is data that is observable or experienced

• Aristotle advocated systematic observation and careful classification of naturally occurring events.

• they can be verified or disproved through investigation.

Seeking General Principles

Modern scientists go beyond cataloging observations to proposing general principles—laws or theories—that will explain them.

Laws and principles

have the generality to apply to all situations.

Theory

unify diverse sets of scientific facts into an organizing scheme, such as a general principle or set of rules, that can be used to predict new examples of behavior.

Good Thinking

• A central feature of the scientific method.

• includes being open to new ideas, even when they contradict our prior beliefs or attitudes.

• also follows the rules of logic. Conclusions will follow from the data, whether they are in agreement with our predictions or not.

Parsimony

is called Occam’s razor-important aspect of good thinking.

Self-Correction

• Modern scientists accept the uncertainty of their own conclusions.

• The content of science changes as we acquire new scientific information, and old information is reevaluated in light of new facts.

• Changes in scientific explanations and theories are an extremely important part of scientific progress.

Experience favors a “weight-of-evidence” approach

the more evidence that accumulates to support a particular explanation or theory, the more confidence we have that the theory is correct.

Publicizing Results

• Scientists meet frequently through professional and special interest groups and attend professional conferences to exchange information about their current work.

• The number of scientific papers published each year in scientific journals is growing, and new journals are constantly being added in specialized disciplines.

Replication

• another important part of the scientific approach. We should be able to repeat our procedures and get the same results again if we have gathered data objectively and if we have followed good thinking.

• Findings that are obtainable by only one researcher have very limited scientific value.

Objectives of the Psychological Science

• Description

• Prediction

• Explanation

• Control

• Applied Research

• Basic Research

Description

Referring to a systematic and unbiased account of the observed characteristics of behaviors. Good descriptions allow greater knowledge of behaviors because it provide information about what the behavior will be like. Examples of descriptive research designs include case studies and field studies.

Prediction

Refers to the capacity for knowing in advance when certain behaviors are expected to occur—to be able to predict them ahead of time—because we have identified other conditions with which the behaviors are linked or associated. for example, death of a loved one is associated with grief, and we can predict that a person will feel grief if a loved one died recently.

Explanation

includes knowledge of the conditions that reliably reproduce the occurrence of a behavior. To explain a behavior, we have to use an experimental research design in which we systematically manipulate aspects of the setting with the intention of producing the specific behavior. At the same time, we control for other factors that might also influence this behavior during the experiment.

Control

Refers to the application of what has been learned about behavior. Once a behavior has been explained through experimentation, it may be possible to use that knowledge to effect change or improve behavior.

Applied research

research that is designed to solve real-world problems. Eg. like helping patients to deal with grief or improving employee morale.

Basic research

designed to test theories or explain psychological phenomena in humans and animals.

Observation

• the systematic noting and recording of events. Only events that are observable can be studied scientifically.

• Many behaviors are observable, for example, smoking, smiling, talking, and also internal processes such as feeling, thinking, or problem solving.

• The key to studying internal processes is defining them as events that can be observed.

• Moods, however, cannot be observed directly in any reliable manner.

• Researchers typically ask people to report on their own moods by using questionnaires or other instruments.

Measurement

• The assignment of numerical values to objects, events, or their characteristics according to conventional rules.

• When we do research, we assign numbers to different sizes, quantities, or qualities of the events under observation.

subjects

Research participants are also called

Experimentation

• A process undertaken to test a hypothesis that particular behavioral events will occur reliably in certain, specifiable situations.

• When we experiment, we systematically manipulate aspects of a setting to verify our predictions about observable behavior under specific conditions. To do an experiment, our predictions must be testable.

Identifying Antecedent Conditions

• are the circumstances that come before the event or behavior that we want to explain.

• We compare different treatment conditions so that we can test our explanations of behaviors systematically and scientifically.

• Experimentation means that we are treating subjects differently when we expose them to different sets of antecedents. We expose them to different antecedent conditions and then measure their behavior to ascertain whether different treatments produce predictably different outcomes

Psychology Experiment

• is a controlled procedure in which at least two different treatment conditions are applied to subjects. The subjects’ behaviors are then measured and compared to test a hypothesis about the effects of those treatments on behavior.

• There must be at least two different treatments so that we can compare behavior under varied conditions and observe the way behavior changes as the treatment conditions change.

temporal relationship

• The type of cause-and-effect relationship we establish through experiments

• a time difference occurs in the relationship. The treatment conditions come before the behavior, or, stated somewhat differently, the cause precedes the effect.

Establishing Cause and Effect

The greatest value of the psychology experiment is that, within the experiment, we can infer a cause-and-effect relationship between the antecedent conditions and the subjects’ behaviors.

Pseudoscience

• is Greek for “false”—characterizes any field of study that gives the appearance of being scientific but has no true scientific basis and has not been confirmed using the scientific method.

Introduction, Method, Results, and Discussion. 

Major parts of writing a research report

Introduction

gives an overall orientation to the field of research methods, much as a literature review gives an overall picture of the state of research in a particular content area. 

Method

includes all the basic procedures used in conducting simple experiments, selecting subjects, and collecting data in a scientific way. 

Results

Coping with Data. reviews the common statistical procedures used to analyze data.

Discussion

looks at the major issues involved in drawing conclusions from data and communicating the findings

Writing a Research Report

The final chapter on report writing includes information on how each section of a research report is organized and written following the style of APA’s most recent publication,n Manual (6th edition).