Unit 0 - Scientific Foundations of Psychology (Week 5)

Module 1 - Psychology & its History

• Key elements of the “scientific attitude” - Curiosity, skepticism, & humility

• A smart thinker asks, “Does it work?”

• Critical Thinking - Examines assumptions, appraises the source, discerns hidden biases, evaluates evidence & assesses conclusions

• Critical thinking when informed by science helps clear colored lenses of our biases. Must also consider the credibility of sources

Module 2 - Today’s Psychology & its Approaches

• Cognitive Psychology - Study of how the mind processes and retains information, how thinking & emotion interact in anxiety, depression & other disorders

• Cognitive Neuroscience - The interdisciplinary study of the brain activity linked with cognition (including perception, thinking, memory, & language)

• Psychology is defined today as the science of behavioral & mental processes

• Nature v. Nurture issue - Controversy over relative contributions that genes & experience make to the development of psychological traits & behaviors

• Natural Selection - The principle that inherited traits that better enable an organism to survive & reproduce in an environment will most likely be passed on (Charles Darwin)

• Culture is the shared ideas & behaviors that one generation passes on to the next. For example, it influences standards of body types

• Positive Psychology - Study of human flourishing to discover & promote strengths & virtues that help individuals & communities to thrive

• Biopsychology Approach - An integrated approach that incorporates biological, psychological & social-culture viewpoints

• Behavioral Perspective - How we learn observable responses

• Biological Perspective - How the body & brain enable emotions, memories, & sensory experiences; how our genes & our environment influence our differences

• Cognitive Perspective - How do we encode, process, store, & retrieve information?

• Evolutionary Perspective - How the natural selection of traits has promoted the survival of genes

• Humanistic Perspective - How we achieve personal growth & self-fulfillment

• Psychodynamic Perspective - How behavior springs from our unconscious; drives & conflicts

• Social-Cultural Perspective - How behavior & thinking vary across situations & culture

• Psychology influences culture. Individual thoughts and actions influence cultural norms and practices as they evolve, and these cultural norms and practices influence the thoughts and actions of individuals

Module 3 - Subfields in Psychology

• Psychometrics - Study of the measurement of human abilities, attitudes, & traits

• Basic Research - Pure science that aims to increase the scientific knowledge base

• Types of Psychologists:

  • Cognitive psychologists - Studying internal mental processes

  • Developmental psychologists - Studying our changing abilities from womb to womb

  • Educational psychologists - Studying influences on teaching learning

  • Experimental psychologists - Use scientific methods to collect data & perform research

  • Psychometric psychologists - Theory & technique of psychological measurements

  • Quantitative psychologists - Develop & analyze a wide variety of research methods

  • Social psychologists - Exploring how we view & affect one another

  • Forensic psychologists - Intended to provide professional expertise within the judicial & legal systems

  • Environmental psychologists - Study the interaction of individuals with their natural & built (urban) environment

  • Health psychologists - Researchers/practitioners concerned with promoting health & preventing disease

  • Industrial-organizational psychologists - Study the relationship between people & their working environments

  • Neuropsychologists - Investigate the relationship between neurological processes (structure/function of the brain) & behavior

  • Rehabilitation psychologists - Work with people who have lost optimal functioning

  • School psychologists - Assesses & intervene for children in educational settings

  • Sports psychologists - Study factors that influence participation in sports/physical activities

  • Clinical psychologists - Promote psychological health in individuals, groups, & organizations

  • Community psychologists - Deal with broad problems of mental health in community settings

  • Counseling psychologists - Help people adjust to life transitions or make lifestyle changes

Part II: Research Methods: Thinking Critically with Psychological Science

Module 4 - The Need for Psychological Science

• Hindsight bias - The tendency to believe, often learning an outcome, that one would have foreseen it (I-know-it-all-along phenomenon)

• Overconfidence - tend to think we know more than we do

• Perceiving order in random events - Random, unpredictable world is unsettling. Have a built-in eagerness to make sense of the world

Module 5 - The Scientific Method & Description

• Scientific attitude (curiosity, skepticism, & humility) is the foundation of all science

• Scientific method:

  • Theory - Explains behaviors or events by offering ideas that organize observations

  • Hypothesis - A testable prediction, often implied by a theory

    • *The falsifiability - the possibility that an idea, hypothesis, or theory can be disproven by observation or experiment is a mark of its scientific strength

  • Operationation definition - A statement of the exact procedures used in a research study

    • EX: Human intelligence may be operationally defined as what an intelligence test measures

  • Replication - Repeating the essence of a research study, usually with different participants in different situations, to see whether the basic finding can be reproduced

• Descriptive methods:

  • Case study - Examines one individual or group in depth in the hope of revealing things true of us all

    • EX: Studying a few chimpanzees has revealed their capacity for understanding a language

  • Naturalistic observation - Observing/recording behavior in natural situations without manipulation

    • EX: Analyzing/videotaping parent-child interactions across cultures

  • Survey - Looks at many cases in less depth, asking people to report their behaviors/opinions

• People often respond negatively or positively to some word choices more than others. As a result, the wording of questions may influence responses to a survey

• Sampling bias - A flawed sampling process that produces an unrepresentative sample

• When dealing with research all those in a group being studied from which samples may be drawn are the population

• Random Sample - That fairly represents a population because each number has an equal chance of inclusion

• The author’s point to remember is to think critically before accepting survey findings. The best basis for generalizing is from a representative sample (Rep sample def - a group of people that accurately reflects the characteristics of a larger population)

Module 6 - Correlation & Experimentation

• Describing behavior is the first step toward predicting it

• Correlation - Measure of the extent to which two factors vary together, how well either factor predicts the other

• Correlation Coefficient - A statistical index of the relationship between two things

• Variables, when discussing correlation, are anything that can vary and is feasible and ethical to measure

• Scatter Plots - A graphed cluster of dots, each representing the values of two variables. The slope suggests the direct relationship between the two variables

• Positive Correlation ex: If two sets of scores such as for height & weight rise or fall together

• Negative Correlation ex: If two sets of scores relate inversely, one set is going up as the other goes down

• Illusory Correlation - Perceiving a relationship where none exists or perceiving a stronger-than-actual relationship

• The tendency for extreme/unused scores or events to fall back toward the average is meant by regression toward the mean

• Experiment - Research where the independent variables are observed and how they affect dependent variables by random assignment of participants

• Experimental group - group exposed to the treatments that is to one version of the independent variable

• Control group - a group not exposed to treatment; serves as a comparison evaluating the effect of the treatment on the other group

• Random assignment - assigning participants to experimental and control groups by chance, thus minimizing pre-existing differences between the different groups

• A point to remember when dealing with experiments is unlike correlational studies, which uncover naturally occurring relationships, an experiment manipulates a variable to determine its effect

• Double-blind procedure - Where research participants and staff are ignorant about whether the participants have received the treatment or a placebo

• Placebo effect - Experimental results caused by expectations alone; any effect on behavior caused by the administration often an inert substance or candidate that the recipient assumes is an active agent

• Independent Variable - factor being manipulated in an experiment

• Dependent variable - factor that can vary when independent variable is changed. the outcome that is measured

• Confounding variable - factor other than the factor being studied that might influence a study’s results

• *Double blind procedures reduce experiment bias - bias caused when researchers may unintentionally influence results to confirm their own beliefs

• A key goal of experimental design is validity. The extent to which a test or experiment measures or predicts what it is supposed to

Module 7 - Research Design & Ethics in Psychology

• Understanding how research is done/how testable questions are developed and studied

• Quantitative research - A research method that relies on quantifiable, numerical data. EX: Temperature, metric system

• Qualitative research - Research method that relies on in-depth, narrative data that are not translated into numbers. EX: Colors, emotions, pain level

• An experiment intends to be a simplified reality, one that stimulated and controls important features of everyday life, in a laboratory environment

• The main purpose of an experiment is to test theoretical principles

• Psychologits study non-human subjects because they find them fascinating and it helps them better understand humans

• Two issues emerge when debating if it is morally acceptable to use animals in research:

  • Is it right to place the well-being of humans above other animals?

  • What safeguards should protect the well-being of animals in research

• Four main ethics codes when working with humans:

  • Obtain potential participants’ informed consent to take part

  • Protect participants from greater-than usual harm and discomfort

  • Keep information about individual participants confidential

  • Fully debrief people (explain procedure afterward, including any temporary deception)

• Values affect what we study, how we study it, and how we intercept results. Researchers’ values influence their choice of research topics. (Conformity v. independence, sex discrimination v. gender differences)

Module 8 - Statistical Reasoning in Everyday Life

• For psychologists, statistics are the tools that allow them to measure variables and then interpret results

• *Doubt big, round, undocumented numbers. (Someone’s guessing)

• Descriptive statistics - Numerical data used to measure and describe characteristics of a group. Includes measures of central tendency and measures of variation

• Histogram - A bar graph depicting a frequency distribution

• Mode - Most frequently occurring scores in a distribution

• Mean - Arithmetic average of distribution, obtained by adding scores and dividing by # of scores

• Median - Middle score in distribution; half the scores are above it and half below

• Skewed distribution - A representative of scores that lack symmetry around their average value

• The amount of variation in the data is how similar or diverse the scores are

• Averages derived from scores with low variability are more reliable than averages based on scores with high variability

• Range - The difference between the highest and lowest scores in a distribution

• Standard deviation - A computed measure of how much scores vary around mean score

• Normal curve (normal distribution) - Describes the distribution of many types of data; most scores fall near the mean and fewer and fewer near the extremes

• Inferential statistics - Numerical data that allow one to generalize to infer from sample data the probability of something being true of a population

• Meta-analysis - A statistical procedure for analyzing the results of multiple studies to reach an overall conclusion

• Three principles to keep in mind when deciding when it is safe to generalize from a sample:

  • Representation samples are better than biased samples

  • Less variable observations are more reliable than there that are more variable

  • More cases are better than fewer

• The underlying logic when it related to the possibility of obtaining results by chance is when overages from two samples are each reliable measures of their respective populations then their differences is probably reliable as well

• Statistical significance - A statistical statement of how likely it is that an obtained result occured by chance

• Final point to remember for Unit 0 is that several significance indicates the likelihood that a result could have happened by chance, but this does not say anything about the importance of the result