Psychology Overview Notes

What is Psychology?

  • Psychology = scientific study of mental processes and behaviour
  • Mental processes: brain activities when thinking, observing, using language
  • Behaviour: observable activities of an organism

Levels of analysis

  • Brain: structure and function (e.g., amygdala and aggression)
  • The person: thoughts and feelings (personality factors)
  • The group: family, culture (media exposure effects on aggression)

Psychology’s Roots

  • Philosophy (~400 BCE): Aristotle, Plato, Socrates; questions about the mind; development of scientific methods
  • Physiology (1600s): Descartes on mind-body dualism; Locke on learning by experience
  • Psychophysics (1800s): Fechner quantified mental events; relation between physical stimuli and psychological effects

The Early Days of Psychology

  • Wilhelm Wundt: opened the first psychology lab (1879, Leipzig); established psychology as a science with careful observations and experiments

Early Days: Consciousness experiment

  • Task: press a button when the ball drops (timespan ~1/10 s) vs when consciously aware of hearing the ball hit the platform (~2/10 s)

The Early Days: North America and Canada labs

  • G. Stanley Hall (1883): first psychology lab in North America; 1887: first psychology journal; 1892: influential in establishing the APA
  • James Mark Baldwin (1890): first psychology lab in Canada (University of Toronto)

Battle of the ‘schools’: Structuralism

  • Structuralism (Edward Titchener): basic elements of consciousness; relied on introspection; not very scientific

Battle of the ‘schools’: Functionalism

  • Functionalism (William James): focus on function/purpose of consciousness; influenced later schools; Principles of Psychology (1890)

Gestalt psychology

  • Perception cannot be reduced to elements; the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; learning tied to perception

Perspectives on Behaviour

  • Major perspectives: Psychoanalysis, Behaviourism, Humanistic psychology, Cognitive psychology, Psychobiology/neuroscience

Psychoanalysis

  • Sigmund Freud (early 1900s): focus on the unconscious; drives, wishes, needs, desires we are not aware of; importance of early childhood experiences

Behaviourism

  • Dominant in early 1900s; John B. Watson: focus on observable behaviour; phobias can be learned (Little Albert); Ivan Pavlov: classical conditioning in dogs

Skinner and Bandura

  • B.F. Skinner: consequences shape future behaviour; studied rats and pigeons
  • Albert Bandura: learning by social observation

Humanistic psychology

  • Reaction to psychoanalysis and behaviourism; emphasised unique human qualities; focus on freedom and personal growth; Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers

Cognitive psychology

  • Cognition: mental processes in acquiring knowledge; 1950s–1960s (Neisser, Miller, Chomsky, etc.); applied scientific method to study the mind; became dominant

Psychobiology/Neuroscience

  • Behaviour explained by physiological processes; heavy reliance on technology
  • Key figures: Karl Lashley (1950s): brain-area removal effects in rats; Donald Hebb (1950s): cell assemblies; Wilder Penfield (1970s): electrical stimulation evokes responses; Roger Sperry (1980s): left vs right brain functions