Introduction to Psychology

• Course includes introduction, psychology, learning, cognition, memory, motivation, emotion, personality and consciousness.
• There will be midterm and final exams.

What is Psychology

• Psychology is the scientific study of the mind and behavior.
• The word origins are Greek: "psyche" meaning life, and "logos" meaning explanation.
• Psychology is relevant to students, media, and everyday life.
• Psychologists concentrate on conceptions and motivations, work in forensic fields, and provide counseling.
• There are hundreds of thousands of psychologists globally, many in unnoticed fields.

Psychology as Science

• Scientific methods are the foundation of psychology.
• Research psychologists use scientific methods to discover the reasons behind actions.
• Psychologist-practitioners use current data to improve lives.

Empirical Methods

• Empirical methods are used in psychology.
• They include organizing and collecting data, and forming conclusions, which provide framework to collect, analyse and interpret data.
• Scientific methods include procedure and assumptions to conduct empirical research.

Learning and Cognition

• Learning is a lasting change in knowledge or behavior due to experience.
• Learning is essential for safety and efficiency.
• Cognition is the mental process that allows to gain knowledge.

Classical Conditioning

• Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936) studied classical conditioning: learning through association.
• Conditioning is associating a bell sound with food, where the bell sound alone elicits salivation.
• Classical conditioning associates a stimulus with a response and also stimulates subject's mind for a particular response.
• Unconditioned Stimulus (US) triggers a natural response.
• Unconditioned Response (UR) is the natural response to the US.
• US-UR examples: shivering in response to cold, blinking due to light.
• Neutral Stimulus (NS) doesn't naturally cause a response.
• Conditioned Stimulus (CS) is a former neutral stimulus that, after repeated pairing evokes similar response.
• Conditioned Response (CR) is the learned response to the conditioned stimulus.
• In Pavlov's experiment, the tone was a neutral stimulus which became a conditioned stimulus after it produced a conditioned response.
• The unconditioned and conditioned responses are the same behavior, but are produced by different stimuli.

Classical vs Operant Conditioning

• Classical conditioning teaches organisms to associate new stimuli with automatic biological responses like fear.
• Classical conditioning involves performing existing behaviors due to new signals, not learning new actions.
• Operant conditioning is behavior based on consequences that can involve new actions.
• Organisms learn from the repercussions of its actions in operant conditioning.

Operant Conditioning

• Operant conditioning helps to learn through punishments and rewards.
• Individuals can make associations between particular behavior and a consequence.
• B. F. Skinner (1904–1990), an influential psychologist, explained operant conditioning.
• Skinner created operant chambers known as Skinner boxes to study learning systematically.
• Skinner boxes are structures big enough for animals like rodents.
• Skinner's experiments show animals repeat actions leading to rewards and stop actions that don't.
• Skinner used "reinforcer" for events increasing behavior, and "punisher" for events decreasing it.
• "Positive" means presenting something; "negative" means removing something.
• Positive reinforcement involves presenting a pleasant stimulus after response.
• Negative reinforcement strengthens a response by reducing something unpleasant.

Modeling

• Modeling, or observational learning, involves learning by watching others.
• In 1963, Bandura studied children watching adults interact with a Bobo doll either live, filmed, or in cartoons.
• The model was violently punching, kicking, sitting on, and hitting the blow-up doll with a hammer.
• Findings showed the children repeated the behaviors.
• New behaviors can be learned by observing and imitating others.
• Observational learning allows animals to learn without having to engage in risky actions.
• Modeling may cause issues for kids growing up in violent families because they see aggression happening to family members.

Socal Cognitive Learning

• Cognition is acquiring and using knowledge.
• Social cognition is way of human thinking that understand and predict the behaviour of ourselves and others and consider the ways that our judgments about other people guide our behaviors.
• Social environment shapes thoughts, emotions, and actions, often without being noticed.

Attribution

• Attribution is how people analyse actions they see around them, trying to understand the motives behind the behaviors.
• When one is trying to understand any behavior people often use a co-variation principle, considering the context and consistence of behaviour.
• Causal attributions falls into two types: those outside person, called situational attributions and those centered on an individual dispositional atributions.
• Cultural background cause attribution differencies which depends on whether a culture is more individualist or collectivistic.

Memory

• Memory is defined as storing and recovering informaton that helps to understand environments.
• Memory includes acquisition, storage, and retrieval.
• Acquisition is the phase where one receives the information.
• Storage is record in the nervous system, which is the memory trace.
• Retrieval is drawing information from storage.

Explicit and Implicit Memory

• Memory conceptualized in types:explicit and implicit.
• Memory has sensory, short and long term stages.
• Explicit memory is knowledge and experiences that can be consciously remembered.
• Types of explicit memory are episodic and semantic.
• Episodic memory is firsthand experiences, such as recollections.
• Semantic memory is knowledge of facts and concepts.
• Explicit memory assessed when tested individual consciously attempts to remember information.
• Implicit memory is the knowledge that cannot conciously access; however, implicit memory have a direct effect on behaviour.

Stages of Memory

• There are three memory stages: sensory, short-term, and long-term.
• Sensory memory stores sensory information briefly.
• Sensory memory gives brain moment to process sensations and see world as stream of events
• Short-term memory keeps small amounts of information temporarily, for a few seconds to less than a minute.
• Working memory involves processing the information in the short term memory.
• Long-term memory stores information for days, months or years.