Cognitive and Behavioural Psychology

Chapters 1,2,3,5

What is Psychology?

The scientific study of both behaviour and mind

Mind

The contents of conscious experience, including sensations, perceptions, thoughts, and emotions

Basic Research of psychology examples

Abnormal, Behavioural genetics, behavoiural neuroscience, cognitive, comparative, developmental, personality, social

Applied research examples

Consumer, educational, forensic and legal, human factors, health, industrial and organizational, school

Clinical Psychologists

Identify, prevent, and relieve psychological distress and dysfunction

Take GRE, Graduate School, PhD or PsyD

Psychiatrists

Same as clinical psychologists, also determine the source of illness

Take MCAT, Medical School and Residency, MD or DD

Counselling Psychologist

Help people manage ongoing life crises or situations or transitions between the two

Take GRE, Graduate School, EdD or PhD

Post truth

relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion then appeals to emotion and personal belief

In this era of post-truth politics, it’s easy to cherry-pick data and come to whatever conclusion you desire

What was psychology originally known as?

Philosophy of the mind

Tabula Rasa

blank slate

Who documented the first psychological disorder?

A Persian Phyisicain

Psychology was the union of what two studies?

Physiology and philosophy

Empiricism

View that knowledge arises directly from observation and experience

Dualism

Philosophical idea that mind and body are separate

What did Rene Descartes argue?

That the mind is inherently immaterial

Is dualism practiced by psychologists today?

no

Behaviour

Any observable action (ex. words, gestures, responses?) that can be repeated, measured and affected by a situation to produce or remove some outcome. This can also refer to biological activity like cellular actions

Basic Research

Work done to understand fundamental principles of behaviour and mind

Applied Psychology

used to solve practical problems by influencing behaviour or changing environment

What does applied psychology today focus on?

Today focuses on taking research that was originally basic and applying it to practical problems

Transitional Research

Research that attempts to take basic findings and turn them into solutions for practical problems

Clinical Psychology

Identifying, preventing and relieving distress or dysfunction that is psychological in origin

What is the science of psychology rooted in?

Empiricist tradition (the idea that true knowledge about psychology can only be obtained through observation

Nativism

the idea that some forms of knowledge are inborn or innate

Biological Determinism

The view that all human behaviour is controlled by genetic and biological influences

Phrenology

The pseudoscientific study of the shape of the human skull in an attempt to associate with specific characteristics, thoughts or abilities

What do ponzo illusions demonstrate?

Not all knowledge is a result of experience

Who was Wilhelm Wundt?

Physiologist, medical doctor and philosopher

What was Wundt interested in?

Sensation and perception (he focused on mental experience and the mind)

What was Wundt considered the father of?

Modern Psychology (he was the first to self identify as psychologist)

Who was Edwards Tichener?

A student of Wundt who had the goal of breaking the brain into its fundamental pieces

Edward Titchener was a prominent psychologist known for his work on structuralism and introspection. He aimed to establish psychology as a scientific discipline.

Systematic Introspection

One of the first strategies to make inferences about the contents of the mind. It was an effort to standardize the way that people reported their own experiences.

When was the American Psychology Association formed?

1892

Structuralism

Who: Structuralism was a school of thought in various disciplines, including linguistics, anthropology, and psychology.

What: Structuralism aimed to analyze and understand phenomena by examining the underlying structures and systems that govern them.

Where: Structuralism emerged in Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, particularly in France and Switzerland.

When: Structuralism’s peak was from the 1950s to the 1970s, but its influence continued beyond that period.

Why: Structuralists believed that understanding the underlying structures of language, culture, and the human mind would reveal fundamental truths about human experience and society.

Voluntarism

Focused in the role of the will in organizing conscious experience (Wundt’s school of thought)

What method began receiving significant criticism?

Systematic Introspection

Who was the 1st person to get a Ph D.

Stanely Hall

Functionalism

An early movement that proponents believed that an understanding of a behaviour of process’ function was critical to understanding it’s operation

What theory heavily influenced the functionalist movement?

Darwin’s theory of evolution

Who is considered the father of American Psychology

William James

James Rowland Angell

Credited with defining the primary tenets of functionalism in his presidential address to the APA

Who was the Pioneer of educational psychology?

Edward Thorndike

Gestalt Psychology

Focuses on understanding how people perceived a unified whole out of the many chaotic individual elements and sensations

Behaviorism

An approach to psychology that suggests observable behaviour should be the only topic of study; ignoring conscious experiments

What grew with introspection

Skepticism

What became the dominant approach to psychology?

Behaviorism

Who was the lead thinker in behavioural psychology?

B.F Skinner

What are CT Scans and when were the founded

Computerized tomography

What does it do: Uses x-rays that pass though the body and can gernate images of “slices” of the body

Pros: Fast, cheap non-invasive

Cons: Radiation exposure

Ex. Detect changes in structure due to disease

Who was at the front of the conception and treatment of mental illness?

Sigmund Freud

Where did Freud believe mental illness came from?

The unconscious mind

Psychoanalysis

A form of psychotherapy seeking to help clients gain more insight into their unconscious thoughts, behaviours and revilations

What was Freud’s solution to solving mental health issues?

Analyze the unconscious mind to bring those feelings and thoughts to consciousness (ex. speech errors, patient, fantasies, free association, dream analysis)

Humanistic Psychology

An approach that emphasizes the ability of humans to make their own choices and realize their own potential

Which two psychologists unified under humanistic psychologist?

Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow

What is person centered therapy called?

Person-centered therapy is also known as client-centered therapy or Rogerian therapy.

Who created positive psychology?

Martin Seligman

What does positive psychology study?

Studies specific virtues of the human experiences (ex. happiness, trust, charity, gratitude)

What is the historical order of the studies of psychology?

Structuralism, Functionalism, Behavioralism, Cognitive Revolution

What is the fundamental disagreement between psychoanalysts and humanists?

The capacity for free will and change

Eclectic Approach

Uses different therapeutic based on their effectiveness for current situation

Levels of explanations

Acknowledgment that different explanations for a phenomenon can compliment one another

Ultimate explanations

Seeks to describe the reason why a trait, behaviour or mental process exists by appealing to its role in the process of evolution

Proximate explanations

Seeks to describe immediate causes of a trait behaviour or mental process

Functional explanations

Type of proximate explanation that seeks to identify a specific problem to the cause, of a trait, behaviour or mental process

Process Oriented explanations

Type of proximate explanation that focuses on how a specific retinal or physical directly explains a trait or behaviour

Evolutionary Psychology

A study of psychology from an evolutionary perspective, it proposes that many process have developed in response to natural selection to solve adaptive problems

Culture

Shared set of beliefs, attitudes, behaviours, customs, belonging to a specific group or community

Feminist Psychology

Approach to psychology that is critical of cultural influences on gender and gender differences in behaviour

Intersectional approach

An approach that emphasizes examining how multiple social identities intersect at the level of the individual person to alter their experiences

Rationalism

the belief or theory that reason is the key source of knowledge

Hermann Ebbinghaus

• German psychologist

• Pioneered work on memory and learning

• Conducted experiments on himself

• Studied process of memorization and forgetting

• Findings laid foundation for experimental psychology

• Discovered "forgetting curve"

• Introduced concept of "spacing effect"

Aristotle used what theory to reason that human thoughts, perceptions and emotions were?

Rationalism

Data

Facts or information collected, examined and considered in the decision-making process

Scientific Theories

Rational explanations to predict and describe futre behaviour

Scientific Method

a six-step method of acquiring knowledge and methodologically answering questions

What are the 6 steps of the scientific method?

1. Identify the problem

2. Gather information

3. Generate a hypothesis

4. Design and conduct experiments

5. Analyze data and formulate conclusions

6. Restart the process

Replication

to redo a study using the same methods but different subjects and investigators

Descriptive Methods

any means to capture, record or otherwise describe a group. These methods are concerned with identifying “what is” rather than “why it is”

What are 4 popular descriptive methods?

Naturalistic observation, participant observation, case studies and surveys

Naturalistic Observation

observation of behaviour as it happens without manipulating or controlling the subject’ natural environment

What is the benefit of naturalistic observation?

Helps us generate new ideas about an observed phenomenon

Field experiments

an experiment that takes place in a real-world setting in which a researcher manipulates and controls the conditions of the behaviours under observation

Operational definition

how a researcher decides to measure a variable

Variable

something that varies in the context of a research study

Reactivity

a change in a person or animal’s behaviour that is the result of being observed by others (aka the Hawthorne effect)

Interrater reliability

the extent to which two or more observers (raters) agree with each other about their observations. It is usually assessed as a correlation

Participant observation

a research method in which a research becomes part of the group under investigation

Case Study

an in-depth analysis of a unique circumstance or individual

Ablation

a medical procedure to remove or otherwise destroy tissue

Hippocampus

a part of the cerebral cortex known to play a role in the transference of certain memories into long-term memory stores

Entorhinal cortex

a part of the cerebral cortex found on the ventral part of the temporal lobes and known to play a role in behaviour and memory

What are the 3 types of memories

Episodic, sematic, procedural

Surveys

a method using questions to collect information on how people think or act. They give correlations at best

Population

all the members of a group

Sample

a portion of the population

Sampling error

a sample that deviates from a true representation of a population

Bias

an unfair or unequal representation of a population of people or things that results from flawed sampling strategies (intentional or not)

Wording effects

the influence of language or working on people’s response to survey questions

Response bias

the tendency for people to answer the questions the way they feel they are expected to answer or in systematic ways that are otherwise inaccurate

Acquiescent response bias

the tendency for participants to agree or respond “yes” to all questions regardless of their actual opinions