Branches of Psychology Quiz

Branches of Psychology

• Structuralism: Founded by Wundt, focused on sensation, perception, and attention through experiments (e.g., optical illusions). A limitation was that people may not be truthful in their responses.
• Functionalism: Founded by James, connected to Darwin's theory. Examined how mental characteristics adapted for survival, analogous to physical adaptations.
• Psychoanalysis: Developed by Freud, aimed to uncover unconscious thoughts through talk therapy.
• Behaviorism: Founded by Watson, focused solely on observable behaviors, rejecting internal mental processes as unmeasurable. The only branch concentrating solely on external factors. Added to psychology in 1920.
• Humanism: Founded by Maslow, emerged in the 1950s. Stressed individual control over lives and downplayed the role of backgrounds/experiences. Contrasted with behaviorism and abnormal psychology.
• Cognitive Psychology: Studied mental processes like memory, learning, and thinking, tracing its roots to the late 19th century. Expanded significantly in the 1950s, focusing on brain processes and information processing.

Definition of Psychology

• Psychology is the scientific study of mental processes and behaviors, considered the science of the mind. It explores the relationship between the brain, mind, and behavior.

History of Psychology & Personality

• Ancient Greeks: Noticed individual differences in personality, proposing that four bodily fluids influenced personality types (a limited theory). They were the first to consider individuality as stemming from the body, not divine intervention.
• Hippocrates: Recognized the brain's role in influencing personality and behavior, challenging the belief that personality originated in the heart.
• John Locke: Introduced the concept of the mind and its development through sensory information, processing complex ideas, and drawing conclusions.
• Phrenology (Gall): An early attempt to understand behavior through skull bumps, highlighting important ideas like brain regions controlling different functions, widespread brain usage, and the seat of character, emotion, intellect.

Parts and Lobes of the Brain

• Frontal Lobe: Largest lobe, located under the forehead, responsible for personality, emotions, language, memory, social behavior, decision-making, and short-term memory.
• Parietal Lobe: Located at the back and top of the head, involved in sensory perception, touch, object manipulation, voluntary movement, and spatial reasoning.
• Temporal Lobe: Positioned above the ears, responsible for auditory perception (hearing), long-term memory, object categorization, and visual memory/object recognition.
• Occipital Lobe: Situated at the back of the head, processing visual perception (location, form, what we see), distance/depth perception, color, and object/face recognition.
• Cerebellum: Not a lobe, controls balance, coordination, and voluntary motor skills.
• Brainstem: Connects the brain to the spinal cord, managing automatic functions like breathing and heartbeat, coordinating movement, and timing of muscle actions.

Structures within the Brain

• Amygdala: Works with the hippocampus to create emotional memories, linking fear, aggression, and anxiety to specific people/places. Hardwires memories for future threat recognition.
• Hippocampus: Converts short-term memories to long-term memories. Organises, stores, and retrieves information. The size differences between male and female brains might correlate to perceived emotional differences.
• Medulla: Controls breathing through the pre-Botzinger complex, regulating breath rhythms.
• Pons: Houses the locus ceruleus, which is crucial for attention.
• Hypothalamus: Connects the central nervous system to the endocrine system (hormone-producing glands), regulating body temperature, thirst, hunger, and circadian rhythms. Controls the pituitary gland.
• Pituitary Gland: Releases hormones regulating various bodily functions and behaviors, a key component of the endocrine system. Involved in stress, growth, and reproduction.
• Thalamus: The "grand central station," relays sensory information to the cortex (vision, hearing, touch).

Right and Left Brain Functioning (Sperry)

• Left Hemisphere: Logical, analytical, controls the right side of the body, associated with verbal tasks, detail-oriented thinking, logical decision-making, caution, objectivity, and language skills.
• Right Hemisphere: Creative, intuitive, controls the left side of the body, associated with non-verbal visual tasks, holistic thinking, intuitive decision-making, adventurousness, subjectivity, emotion understanding, and reading facial expressions.

Specific Brain Facts

• Brain Weight: 3 pounds
• Brain Composition: 60% fat
• Brain Power: Produces ~23 watts of power when awake
• Blood Supply: Receives 20% of the body's blood and oxygen.
• Consciousness Loss: Loses consciousness almost 8-10 seconds after blood supply stops.
• Oxygen Deprivation: Can survive 5-6 minutes without oxygen, but permanent damage occurs after.
• Blood Vessels: ~100,000 miles in length.
• Neurons: 100 billion.
• Neuron Development: 250,000 per minute in early pregnancy.
• Memory Loss: Aging brains may struggle with filtering old memories, impacting new learning.

Sigmund Freud

• Biography: Freud was a neurotic individual, experienced various children, and was a cigar smoker.
• Psychoanalysis and Dreams: Focused on the unconscious mind to understand behavior. The "Interpretation of Dreams" was a famous work that explored dreams as wish fulfillment, arising from repressed desires. Anxiety manifest as nightmares.
• Theory of Personality (id, ego, superego): Divided the mind into conscious and unconscious realms. Personality arises from the interaction of the id, ego, and superego.
• Id: Pleasure principle (basic needs).
• Ego: Reality principle, balances id and reality.
• Superego: Morality principle (right vs. wrong).
• Psychosexual Stages: Explained neurotic disorders in terms of unresolved issues in these developmental stages.
• Stage 1: Oral (0-2): Trust vs. Mistrust. Fixation can cause mistrust, over-trust, habits like smoking, nail biting, over-talking.
• Stage 2: Anal (2-3): Independence vs. Dependence. Fixation leads to anal-retentive (control) or anal-expulsive (disorganized) personalities.
• Stage 3: Phallic (3-6): Sexual associations and Oedipus/Electra complexes (same-sex parent jealousy).
• Stage 4: Latency (6-puberty): Forming relationships, social/intellectual development.
• Stage 5: Genital (puberty-death): Mature relationships and self-understanding.

Dreams & History

• Ancient Egypt: Dreams viewed as messages from gods.
• Bible/Biblical Times: Similar concept of divine messages.
• Middle Ages: Some interpretations linked nightmares to the devil.
• Biology of Dreams: Associated with REM sleep (rapid eye movement), marked by intense brain activity. Adults spend a quarter of their sleep in REM and dreaming. REM happens in the final sleep stage.

Neo-Freudians (Adler, Jung, Horney)

• Alfred Adler: Focused on power as a key motivator, contrasting Freud's sexuality focus. Developed concepts such as inferiority/superiority complexes.
• Carl Jung: Disagreed on unconscious motivation being solely sexual. Proposed the personal and collective unconscious, psychological functions (sensation, intuition, thinking, feeling), and personality types (introvert/extrovert).
• Karen Horney: Challenged Freud's focus on sexuality, applying feminist perspectives.

Classical and Operant Conditioning

• Ivan Pavlov: Discovered classical conditioning through dog experiments. Learned associations between stimuli produce specific responses, e.g., a bell (neutral stimulus) paired with food (unconditioned stimulus) eventually elicits saliva (conditioned response).
• B.F. Skinner: Developed operant conditioning, explaining behavior through consequences (rewards/punishments).

John Watson

• Behaviorism: Pioneered behaviorism in 1920. Conducted the Baby Albert experiment, demonstrating fear as a learned response to a stimulus. Believed in "tabula rasa" (blank slate).

Erik Erikson

• Stages of Psychosocial Development: Extended Freud's psychosexual stages, emphasizing social and environmental influences on development throughout life, instead of childhood alone. Introduced the concept of identity crisis (common in adolescents).

Abraham Maslow

• Hierarchy of Needs: Proposed a hierarchy of needs, starting with basic needs (physiological, safety) to reach self-actualization (achieving one's full potential).

Jean Piaget

• Learning Stages: Identified four stages in children's cognitive development, highlighting progressive reasoning abilities.

Perception & Testing

• Rorschach Inkblot: A projective assessment examining personality through perceptions of inkblots.
• Perception: The multi-stage mental process of selecting, organizing, and interpreting sensory input, influenced by personal experiences.

Stanley Milgram

• Theory of Obedience: Explored obedience to authority figures, demonstrating how people can be pressured to perform actions conflicting with their values. Famous for the teacher-learner shock experiment. Majority of participants continued to highest shock levels given instructions.

Harry Harlow

• Social Isolation Experiments: Demonstrated the crucial role of caregiving, affection, and social relationships in rhesus monkeys raised in isolation. Emphasized the importance of emotional comfort in development.

Memory

• Three Levels of Memory:
• Sensory: Brief storage of sensory information.
• Short-term: Temporarily holds attentive information (~15-20 seconds).
• Long-term: Stores meaningful information permanently, with no capacity limits.
• Amnesia: Partial or total loss of memory, impacting different memory types (episodic, semantic, procedural).

Psychopaths and Sociopaths

• Psychopath and Sociopath: Distinct but overlapping personality disorders, with overlaps in symptoms but different etiologies. Psychopaths are more overtly affected in their judgments, while sociopaths maintain some degree of social conformity.

Abnormal Psychology

• Mental Health: Emotional/cognitive well-being. Mental illness is a non-normative psychological pattern causing distress or disability.
• Neurosis: Mental distress that perpetuates anxiety and self-doubt.
• Psychosis: Loss of reality contact, impairing social functioning (requires medical intervention).
• Defense Mechanisms: Strategies for protecting self-esteem in the face of stress.
• DSM-5: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, used for diagnosing mental illnesses.