PSY 121

Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior

1. scientific knowledge: systemic and evidence-based understanding (ex. positive reinforcement)
2. scientific process: systematically assesing testable ideas (ex. scientific method)

collecting/organizing data and drawing conclusions about those data
assumptions, rules, and procedures that scientists employ for empirical research.

intuition is not reliable as we may make the wrong associations between cause and effect based on our own “feeling” rather than logic. It is not as thorough or systemtically obtains as systematic findings.

The Nature vs. Nurture debate
Plato → knowledge is innate
Aristotle → aristotle believed that knowledge was acquired (learning + experience)

Introduced principle of dualism: mind is fundamentally different from the body. first to understand that nerves control muscles.

Developed a psychology laboratory in Leipzig, Germany. began structuralism (more scientific than philosophic on the nature of consciousness itself.)

Founded a psychology lab in Harvard University

1. Structuralism
2. Functionalism
3. Psychdynamic
4. Behaviorism
5. Cognitive
6. Social-cultural

uses introspection to identify basic structures of psychological experience (asking research participants to describe their experience when performing mental tasks, breaking down their mental process.)

uses evolutionary theory to understand different behavhuours such as romantic attraction, stereotypes and prejudice, and even psychological disorders, as products of evolution.

Fitness: the extent to which having a given characteristic helps the individual organism survive and reproduce at a higher rate than do other members of the species who do not have the characteristic.

closer look into one’s consciousness

2. focuses on the role of unconcscious thoughts, feelings, memories, and early childhood experiences being critial in determining behavior

a process of talk therapy and dream anaylsis used to help patients explore unconscious drives

based on the idea that it is not objectively possible to study the mind and so psychologists should limit their attention to the study of visible behavior (because we can predict behaviour witout knowing what happens inside the brain)

experiences in the environment can produce certain behaviours
ex. Pavlov’s dog, Little Albert, and Skinner Box

1. The study of mental processes, including perception, thinking, memory, and
judgments influencing on our behaviour/physiology
→ thinking has a great influence on behaviour
Ex. Milkshake study

The study of how the social situations and the cultures in which people find
themselves influence thinking and behaviour( How people percieve themselves and others, and how people influence each other’s behaviour.)

perspectives that are used to understand behaviour at different levels:
using depression as an example due to its biological, social, and cultural factors...

1. low: biological influences (ex. genetic influence, chemicals in the brain)

2. middle (interpersonal): abilities and characteristics of individual people (ex. interprets experiences more negatively)

3. high: social groups, organizations and cultures. (ex. psychologists study differences in the prevalence of depression between men and women)

1. Individual differences: vartiations among people on physcial or psychological dimensions. ex. while many people experience symptoms of depression, the experience varies dramatically among people

2. multiply determined behaviour: produced by many factors, which occur at different levels of explanation. they also are associated with each other in that one cause will cause another cause that furthers the first cause.

ex. some people may be depressed because of biological imbalances in their brain. The resulting depression may lead them to act negatively toward others around them, which leads those people to respond more negatively to them, which then increases their depression.

a paradigm guides scientists and practitioners with a set of assumptions about what to study and how (research methods)

it has no role in psychology-- there is no single, overarching paradigm due to its youth as a study and wide range of scope. instead, they have schools of thought, providing frameworks for organizing data and connection theories but no overall stance.

textbook chapter 2 figure 2.1
powerpoint slide 11

measures biological physiolocigcal, or genetic variables in attempt to connect them to cognitiveehaviorual variables. originated from early structuralist and functionalist studies.
subfields: behavioural neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, physiological psychology, and neuropsychology; all pertain to brain activity.

all behaviour is controlled by the central nervous system— so psycholygists seek to understand brain structure and function to understand cognition and behaviour.

frontal lobe/morto cortex: complex cognition (motor skills, expressive language)
occipital lobe/visual cortex: visual stimuli
paretial lobe/somatosensory cortex: sensory information (pressure, touch, pain)
temporal/auditory cortex: interprets sounds

first display of the relationship between our brain and behaviour/personality

1. perpipheral 2. central
1a. autonomic 1b. somatic
1aa. sympathetic 1ab.parasympathetic

focuses on unconscious thoughts, feelings, and memories. it imposed that much of metntal life is unconsious and that past experiences, especially early childhood, shapes one’s psyche.

phenominal: current experience
access: recalled experiences from memory

1. conscious: what we are aware of
2. preconsious: could be aware of if we reached for it, avaiable to be recalled.
3. unconscious: what we can’t remember
---
super ego: operates for perfection
ego: operates on reality
id: operating on the pleasure principle

a psychoanalytist on Freud's theories, introducing the concepts of archetype, collective unsconscious, and individuation.

Introvert: solitude to recover energy. reflective
Extravert: needs sociability to recover. action oriented

Thinking: cause and effect relations; logical.
Feeling: sense of valuing positively or negatively

Sensing: oriented toward the senses: detailed, concrete, and present
Intuitive: goes with hunches; impractical, sometimes not present.

Judging: tends to planning and decision-making: like structure
Percieving: tends to spontaniouty, open to new experiences, may procrastinate

an approach that is based on the premise that it isnt possible to make objective observations on the mind, but we can make inferences on them based on obersvable behaviour.

1. Pavlov’s dog :Classical Conditioning
found that a stimulus (either the food or, after learning, the tone) would produce the response of salivation in the dogs.
2. Little Albert: Operant Conditioning
Watson found that systematically exposing a child to fearful stimuli in the presence of objects that did not elicit fear could lead the child to respond with a fearful behaviour to the presence of the objects.
3. Skinner Box: Classical and Operant Conditioning
BF Skinner used the ideas of stimulus and response, along with rewards or reinforcements, to train pigeons and other animals. His theory, “the Law of Effect”, states that behaviour is shaped by its consequences.

type of learning that occures automatically outside of our conscious awareness through repeated associated between different stimuli— the smell of a cologne, the sound of a specific song can trigger memories, emotions, and such associations.

type of learning that erfers how an organism oprerates on the environment or how it responds to what is presented to it in that environment

focuses on the study of mental processes such as attention, memory, perception, language use, problem solving, creativity, and thinking, and how these affect our behaviour. theories include developmental, cultural, neural, computational, and moral perspectives.

a school of psychology that aims to ehnahce human qualities of choice, creativity, the interaction of the body, mind, and spirit, and to be more aware, free, responible, life-affirming, and trustworthy. offers a more holistic view of human life.
Maslow’s view of human needs was more complex than Roger's.
Roger → unconditional positive response
Maslow → variety of needs that differ in timing and priority

uses adaptive strategies to focus on helping individuals challenge their own patterns and beliefs and replace erroneous thinking, such as overgeneralizing, magnifying negatives, or catastrophizing, with more realistic and effective thoughts

Main premise is that while today the human mind is shaped by the modern social world, it is adapted to the natural environment in which it evolved.

1. The brain is an information-processing device (produces behaviour in response to outside/inside inputs)
2. The brain’s adaptive mechanisms were shaped by natural selection (fight or flight response)
3. The brain has evolved specialized mechanisms for common problems, giving modern humans stone-age minds.
4. Most contents and processes of the brain are unconscious
5. Human psychology consists of many specialized mechanisms for different classes of information. These combine to produce behaviour.

1. Basic: research that answers fundamental questions about
behaviour.
2. Applied research: research that investigates issues that have implications for everyday life and provides solutions to everyday problems.

example:
A basic research study may investigate the different types of studying that students most commonly employ (ie., studying with peers, reading alone, watching videos, generating your own questions, flashcard etc.) impact students recall of various types of information.
An applied research project may build off of the basics research findings and identify the most research supported study strategies for helping first year psychologyy students remember the key points of major psychological theories.

1. Descriptive research: research designed to provide a snapshot of the current state of affairs. (there are 3 types of Research Designs)
a. Case Studies: based on descriptive records of one or more individual’s experiences and behaviour
b. naturalistic oberservation: based on witnessed events
c. surveys: interview or written survey to get a sample of the beliefsehaviours of the people of interest
2. Correlational research: research designed to discover relationships among variables and to allow the prediction of cause and effect
of future events from present knowledge
3. Experimental research: where a set of variables are manipulated while the other set of variables are being measured

based on systematic collection and analysis of data

a. the set of assumptions, rules, and procedures scientists use to conduct research.
b. the scientific method demands that the procedures used be empirical, objective, and replicable

1. generality: summarizes many different outcomes
2. parsimonious: provides the simplest explanation of those outcomes
3. falsifiable: the variables of interest can be made and measured to be correct or incorrect

a. any attribute that can assume different values among different people or across different times or places
b.
1. Conceptual variables: abstract ideas that form the basis of research hypotheses. ie, age, gender, anxiety, cognitive development, learning, sexism. (ie. road rage)
2. Measured variables: variables consisting of numbers that represent the conceptual variables. (# of drivers, timing)
3. Operational: a precise statement of how a conceptual variable is turned into a measured variable (how we’ll measure road rage: facial expressions, yelling, etc.)

a broad area within psychology that is concerned with what is means to be moral and how to act morally.
In general, scientific research in psychology is only ethical if its risks are outweighed by its benefits

1. weighing risks against benefits
2. acting responsibly and with integrity (transparency)
3. seeking justice
4. respecting people’s rights and dignity
5. ensuring that each of the above applies to three groups of people (research participants, science, and society)

- minimizing the risks
- be able to explain/justify their decisions
- seek feedback about these decisions from others
- ultimately take responsibility

(CDDAI)
concerns informed consent, deception, debriefing, the use of nonhuman animal subjects, and scholarly integrity in research.

refer to table 3.3

1. Threats to Construct validity:
Although it is claimed that the measured variables measure the conceptual variables of interest, they actually may not.
2. Threats to Statistical conclusion validity:
lack of statistical data.
3. Threats to Internal validity:
the cause of a studied effect may be wrong; it could be an unexpected variable
4. Threats to external validity:
claims of general effacts might be wrong; the observed effects may actually only be found under limited conditions or for specific groups of people

1. Central Tendency: the point in the distribution around which the data are centered
2. Arithmetic Mean: the sum of all the scores of the variable divided by the number of participants in the distribution
3. Outliers: extreme scores within the distribution
4. Median: the score in the center of the distribution
→ 1 3 5 [9] 15 18 30
5. Mode: the value that occurs most frequently
→ 3 [7] 5 [7] 4 12 [7] 20

Dispersion: the extent to which the scores are all tightly clustered around the central tendency

to calculate, find the range: max - min

refer to table
1. a visual image displaying the relationship between two variables.
2. linear relationship: when the scatter plot can be estimated as a straight line
3. pearson correlation coefficient (r): a statistical measure of the strength of linear relationships among variables
→ positive/negative signs indicate the direction
→ distance from zero indicates the strength of the relationship