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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?
Identify the problem
Gather information
Generate a hypothesis
Design and conduct experiments
Analyze data and formulate conclusions
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
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