Psych 252

Ebers Papyrus

Ancient Egypt experiments → have fated away → wholes in the skull

Mental illness in the Middle Ages

GAllen a ancien Roman physician - founded hysteria -when your uterus moves around your body-treatment was marvise

Modern Approach

To create data base of info to stand test of time

Ways of knowing

authority, reason, experience

Authority

(gaining knowlege from figures like parents pope etc) cons be wrong pros expertise

Reason/ rationalism

Knowledge can be gained from reason alone (Ex Henry cotton removed organs because infection spread from tooth) the validity of a logical consequence depends on the truth of the premise

Experience/empiricism

Process of learning things through direct exp. or observation cons limited not objective

belief perseverance

tendency to stick to our initial beliefs even when evidence contradicts them EX doomsday cult

availability heuristic

estimating the likelihood of events based on their availability in memory; if instances come readily to mind (perhaps because of their vividness), we presume such events are common EX changing test answers

Confirmation bias

Once we have a theory we tend to find evidence to support it EX clairvoyant dreams

Determinism

All events have causes- events can be predicted but only to a degree greater than chance- behavior is probabilisticaly determined

Discoberability

Possible for humans to understand theses cause

Characteristics of scientific thinking

Objectivity (best to eliminate bias), replication ( someone take your methods and gets similar results), data driven (support claims with evidence), conclusions subject to revision (scientist change their minds), focus on empirical que. (Questions that are answered through observation and experience)

Pseudoscience

Any field that appears to follow scientific methods but is actually based on unscientific methods (relies on anecdotal evidence) people believe because reduces complex phenomena to simple ideas

Goals of psychology

describe behavior (look for regularly occurring events) , explain behavior (we want to know cause or behavior), predict behavior( identify circumstances that reliably lead to behavior), control/application (apply to help people- daily life or through items)

3 categories of ethical responsibility

Responsibility o individual subjects, resp. to discipline of science, resp. to science as a whole

History of formation of research ethics

Nuremberg code: nazi medical experiments lead to Nuremberg code of ethics. Unethical stuff (live cancer cell research, Tuskegee exp., little Albert, Milgram obedience study)

Belmont Report

Moment in history when legal consequences were made to keep researches accountable/in check

APA guidelines

IRB, no harm, Informed consent, confidentiality, Deception

Preserving scientist integrity (accurate data presentation)

Plagiarism, data fabrication, why does fraud happen (publish or perish, ownership or ideas, competition, money, human factor)

Safeguards against scientific fraud

Reputation (stigma), replication, peer review

When light findings lead to ethical dilemma

Galileo- created a fertilizer but also supported chemical welfare and DVM falso memory debate by desse "the word sweet" lost in the mall- loftus (people rember being lost in mall even though it didn't happen )

APA ethical principles

Beneficence and Nonmaleficence (is the obligation to act in ways that promote a patient’s well-being. Nonmaleficence is the obligation to avoid causing harm)

Fidelity and Responsibility (being true to the principle of psych

Integrity (not misrepresenting data)

Justice

Respect for People's Rights and Dignity

Research with animals in it

Why use them? Control and freedom to use procedures unsafe for humans How to protect animal participants? Proper care, justify costs/benefits, simulation programs

Middlemist

Dependent variable- micturition

Hypothesis invasion of space increase arousal and stress methods took place in a 3 urinal restroom 3 conditions c1 confederate was immediately next to them (they put A not working sign to make this happen on one of the urinals) c2 confederate was in the farthest urinal and c3 was a control conclusion (watched with a scope prism for cues) when there is personal space invasion there was a delay in onset and decrease in persistence in urination

Basic vs. Applied Research

Applied research is research that seeks to answer a question in the real world and to solve a problem. Basic research is research that fills in the knowledge we don't have; it tries to learn things that aren't always directly applicable or useful immediately. (Less funding)

Mundane realism vs. experimental realism

- Mundane realism:How closely a study mimics the physical look and events of everyday life. This type is more common in field experiments outside the lab,

- Experimental realism: (lab) How much a study feels real, engaging, and psychologically impactful to the participants. Participants take the task seriously and react with genuine emotions.

Quantitative vs. Qualitative

Quantitative data is numerical, qualitative is what you observe with your senses.

operational definition

clear, exact statement of how a researcher measures or manipulates an abstract concept—such as intelligence, anxiety, or hunger—for a specific study EXThe number of times a child hits a bobo doll during a 5-minute observation window. ( want them to be objective and precise)

How to develop a research question

Observing day to day events Zeigarnick effect (wait staff often rember things without writing down but forgot after task was done) Kitty Genovese (Lived in NY and was stabbed no one helped) Darwin (a classic example of adaptive radiation and divergent evolution, where a single ancestral species rapidly diversifies into multiple new species to fill different ecological niches)

Serendipity

Looking for something else but by accident discovering something new unintentionally EX viagra (erectile dysfunction- initially looking into heart disease)

Theory

A hypothesis that has been tested with a significant amount of data ( ThE BEST theories- summarize existing data, organize knowledge into laws, tentatively explain phenomenon, serves as the basis of prediction constructs)

Constructs

internal attributes or characteristics that cannot be directly observed but are useful for describing and explaining behavior EX intelligence motivation

Hypothesis

a proposed explanation made on the basis of limited evidence as a starting point for further investigation.

nominal fallacy

the false belief that we have explained the causes of a phenomenon by identifying and naming it; for example, believing that we have explained lazy behavior by attributing it to "laziness"

Relationship between theory and data deduction

Process of reasoning from theory to prediction

Why can't we prove a theory

Logical fallacy of affirming the consequent EX Modus Tollens method of denying," where you prove a conditional claim false by showing its expected outcome did not happen ( then statement called consequent)

What makes a good theory?

productivity, falsification (proven false) , parsimony (simplest explanation)

Problems measuring psychological concepts

No direct mapping between concepts and measures, multiple ways to get a concept

Evaluations measures

Relabilty (are result's replicable when measured) and validity ( does the measure map onto the construct it is designed to)

random vs systematic error

random: result from sampling variability, occurs any time a sample is selected from a population

systematic: Tendencey to continually overestimate or underestimate a value (look for multiple way to measure one thing to avoid) (adds up to 0 then it's fine(

Measurement error

observer error (the individual who makes the measurements can introduce simple human error) environmental changes (fire alarm goes off), participant changes ( fire alarm triggers person affects persons ability to preform to their ability)

validity

Face validity (how test appears to the person taking it), criterion validity ( accurately predict behavior- produce similar results to other established measures), construct validity ( does the test unruly are giving measure the entire construct- broad measure)

content validity vs. convergent vs discriminante

-Questions on the measure make sense with regard to the construct

-thing your testing correlated to something your testing (EX apply to college- essays sports etc)

-measures should not correlate to things that are related

Variable

Something people differ on

Categorical vs continuous variables

-measurement scales

-Categorical variables consist of separate, indivisible categories (ethnicity)

-Continuous variables yield values that fall on a numeric continuum (age)

Nominal

level of measurement where variables are categorized without a specific order, such as names or labels. (Are men more likely to get phone numbers when dog present numbers)

Ordinal scales

level of measurement where variables are categorized in a specific order, such as rankings or ratings, but the intervals between the ranks are not meaningful. Examples include satisfaction ratings or class rankings.

Interval scale

level of measurement where variables are categorized in a specific order, and the intervals between the values are meaningful, but there is no true zero point. Examples include temperature in Celsius or Fahrenheit.

Ratio scale

the concepts of order and equal interval are carried over from ordinal and

interval scales, but, in addition, the ratio scale has a true zero point—that is, for ratio scores, a score

of zero means the complete absence of the attribute being measured.

Mean

Arithmetic average adding all scores and dividing by the total number of scores

Median

The score in the exact middle arrange all from lowest to highest