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• Psychology: the scientific study of the mind, brain, and behavior.

Levels of Analysis

• Social Culture Influences (behavior): social or behavioral level, involves relating to others and personal relationships.
• Psychological (mind): mental level, involves thoughts, feelings, and emotions.
• Biological (brain): molecular or neurochemical level, involves molecules and brain structures.

Main Challenges in Psychology

• Actions are multiply determined, occurring at different levels of explanation, emphasizing caution against single-variable explanations.

• Psychological influences are rarely independent, factors may be highly associated with one another, making it difficult to pinpoint which cause or causes are operating

• Individual differences exist in thinking, emotion, personality, and behavior among people, gender, ethnicity, age, and cultural differences which makes it challenging to come up with explanations that apply to everyone

• Scientific Theory: Explanation for a large number of findings in the natural world, example: negative attentional bias in depression.

• Hypothesis: Testable prediction derived from a scientific theory, example: depressed individuals will focus more on negative words in a memory test compared to non-depressed individuals.

• Confirmation Bias: Tendency to seek out evidence that supports hypotheses and deny, dismiss, or distort evidence that contradicts them.

• Example: biased search for information- "are dogs better than cats?" "are cats better than dogs?", and the Hastorf and Cantril Football Game Study where Dartmouth fans saw Princeton players committing more penalties.

• Psychological Pseudoscience: A set of claims that seems scientific, but isn't, pseudoscientific claims are testable.

• Dangers of Pseudoscience: Opportunity cost (indirect harm) where people may forgo opportunities to seek effective treatments, and Direct Harm which can cause psychological or physical harm (even death) and an inability to think scientifically as citizens

• Warning signs: Overreliance on anecdotes, stories about a single person which do not provide information on cause and effect and do not tell how representative the cases are, meaningless "psychobabble" using scientific-sounding words that don't really mean anything (e.g., neuropower, orgone energy accumulator), Talk of "proof" instead of evidence and science provides

• Scientific skepticism: Evaluating all claims with an open mind, but insisting on persuasive evidence before accepting them.

• Scientific Thinking Principles include: Ruling Out Rival Hypotheses (alternative explanations) and Correlation Isn't Causation which is the correlation-causation-fallacy, an error of assuming that because one thing is associated with another, it must cause the other, a variable is anything that can vary such as height, age, weight, IQ, income, extroversion, anxiety rating, memory scores, brain activity

• Falsifiability: Capable of being disproven.

• Replicability: When a study's findings are able to be duplicated, ideally by independent investigators.

• It is important to know the study's methods and participants, if it can't be duplicated, it increases the odds it was due to chance.

• Example: the 'supersynapse app' said that 5 studies were done about it, but the studies were not done by independent researchers (possibly biased), and no details were noted.

• Extraordinary Claims: Require extraordinary evidence, the more a claim contradicts what we already know, the more persuasive the evidence must be to accept it.

• Example: "this medication is guaranteed to help everyone" = extraordinary claim.

• Occam's Razor (Principle of Parsimony): If two explanations account equally well for a phenomenon, generally select the more parsimonious (simpler) one.

• Example: crop circles- aliens or pranksters?

History of Psychology

• Early Psychology: Study of the mind.

• Psychology in Greek philosophy, psychology = psyche + logos, psyche: soul, spirit, or mind, and logos: the study of a subject

• Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle debated the mind and body, and nativism vs. empiricism (nature vs. nurture).

• Rene Descartes noted that some human behavior is mechanistic like the behavior of animals (body [physical reflexes]) and other behavior appeared to be based on reason (mind [soul]), and proposed dualism: the idea that our body and mind are separate, and he also saw the mind as being in the pineal gland, as it is in the center of the brain

• Naci, Owen, and Colleagues: Conducted a modern-day mind vs. body experiment.

• Had healthy participants and a brain-injured (vegetative) patient view a suspenseful Hitchcock movie whilst in an fMRI, and found that moment-to-moment brain activity for both the healthy and vegetative patient was highly similar which showed that the mind is hidden from view and difficult to study

• Donders Decision Making Experiment: How long does it take a person to make a decision?

  • Reaction Time: how long it takes to respond to a stimulus
  • Simple RT: Subject presses a lever or button when a light is turned on.
  • Choice RT: More complicated, a subject has to press one of two buttons.
  • Choice RT – Simple RT = Decision time, choice RT is typically 100 milliseconds longer than simple RT, and important as it was one of the first psychological experiments, and showed that mental responses cannot be measured directly, but can be inferred from behavior

• Wilhelm Wundt: Developed first psychology lab in Leipzig.

• Scientifically examine consciousness- the awareness of immediate experience (how different must two colors be to tell them apart?, how long does it take to react to a sound?, what thoughts occur when we solve a math problem?)

  • Methods included RT experiments and Introspection where trained observers carefully reflect and report on their mental experiences (visual stimuli or auditory tones)

• Structuralism: Aimed to identify the basic elements of the psychological experience (asks ‘what’ questions).

  • Edward Titchener who was a student of Wundt used introspection, wanting a comprehensive map of the elements of consciousness

• Problems with structuralism: reports are subjective, not objective (too cold in the room vs. the temperature here is 10 degrees c), imageless thought which is thinking that occurs without images or sensory content (Oswald Kulpe)

• Lasting scientific influence of structuralism correctly emphasized the importance of systematic observation and Wundt's methods used qualitative and quantitative data

• Ebbinghaus: Memory and forgetting (studied a list of nonsense syllables and then said them aloud, and repeated them until he had each list perfectly memorized.)

• How rapidly do we lose learned information measured by how long it took to re-memorize the list after different intervals of time using the savings formula where savings measure (original time to learn list) minus time to relearn the list after a delay

• Ebbinghaus' forgetting curve: Shows savings as a function of retention interval (the more time that passes means that it will take longer to relearn the material), the difference in relearning after two days vs. 31 days is approximately the same, meaning that we need to review material within two days of initially learning it

• Functionalism: Asks ‘why' questions and William James used observations based on the functions of his own mind, not experiments

• Behaviorism: Focuses on uncovering the general principles of learning underlying animal and human behavior.

• Eliminated the study of the mind, founded by John B. Watson criticized the study of consciousness, and psychological science must be objective, not subjective and focused on classical conditioning

• Association between things (ex: when a fire alarm sounds, immediately get up and leave a building) to understand human behavior (responses) in relation to external/environmental factors (stimuli)

• B.F. Skinner: Examined operant conditioning, rewarded and punished which had a lasting influence of behaviorism, influential in models of human and animal learning and is still in use today

• Reemergence of the Mind in Psychology with Tolman who trained rats to find food in a four-armed maze.

• When a rat was placed in a different arm of the maze, it went to the specific arm where it previously found food, believing that the rat created a cognitive map, a representation of the maze in its mind

• Cognitivism: Arose in response to the behaviorists using information-processing approach which is insights from the digital computer as the mind operating in terms of stages/sequences

• Cognitive psychology: The study of mental processes (perception, attention, memory, emotions, language, deciding, thinking, and reasoning), thinking affects behavior in powerful ways such as the interpretation of rewards and punishments, some might find a B grade is good while others think it is bad

• Piaget: Posited that children think differently than adults

• Cognitive neuroscience examines the relationship between brain activity and thinking

• Psychoanalysis: Focuses on internal psychological processes of which are we unaware

• Unconscious mind contains thoughts, memories, and desires below the surface of conscious awareness.

• Sigmund Freud felt that sexuality and aggression were repressed and in the unconscious noting Freudian Slips is psychological life is filled with symbols, the concept of the unconscious based on observation

• Other components of psychoanalysis: dream analysis with a strong role of childhood experiences (childhood has a large role to play) which received criticisms of psychoanalysis which were difficult to falsify (sexist) but also provided positives about psychoanalysis which was the importance of childhood development and the idea that some processing is unconscious (ex: biases, priming)

• Priming is the effect if words are related to a meaning such as the word pair of 'bread' and 'butter' vs. the word pair of 'bread' and 'computer.'

• Humanism emphasizes unique qualities of humans, free will, and the potential for personal growth

• Began in the 1950s in opposition to behaviorism and psychoanalysis focusing on free will and the potential for growth.

• Abraham Maslow understood psychological disorders result from the hindering of human needs using the hierarchy of needs.

• Modern Psychology: Clinical psychologist and their focus is on mental disorders, and Psychiatrists with their focus on medicine and mental disorders, and counseling psychologist, and their focus on temporary problems along with school psychologist who focus on helping children and youth.

• Developmental psychologist study how and why people change over time, experimental psychologists using research methods to study perception, attention and memory, language, thinking, social behavior, biological psychologistexamining the physiological bases of behavior in animals and humans and forensic psychologists assessing and diagnosing inmates while conducting research.

• Industrial-organizational psychologists work with companies to select/evaluate employees, research working environment conditions, and evolutionary psychologists applies Darwin's theory of natural selection to human and animal behavior such as anxiety warns us of upcoming danger... or deadlines?, which is very controversial

Research Methods

• Research Methodology which is a way to systematically solve or answer a research problem requires selection of the research method is crucial for what conclusions you can make

• 3 Guiding Principles for Applying the Scientific Method to Psychology

• Generalizability also called external validity is a measure of how useful the results of a study are for a broader group of people or situations, and to do this, that needs a representative sample of the population as the sample depends on the research question.

• Since Ebbinghaus only experimented on himself with his memory experiment, that would equate to low external validity so it's important to ask "are our findings W.E.I.R.D - Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic"

• A 2010 review of social and behavioral science studies found that W.E.I.R.D people represented around 80% of study participants and random selection, a procedure that ensures every person in the population has an equal chance of being chosen to participate, is one way to increase generalizability.

• Example: use list of Canadian census population data, randomly scramble names, contact every 1000th person, or use a list of 1000 customers, randomly scramble names, and contact every 5th person to get a sample of 200 people, if a larger sample is not random, it is better to have a smaller random sample – ex: it would be better to ask 100 people across Canada about Drake than it would be to ask 100 000 people from Toronto (since it is his hometown, and people are more likely to be biased there)

• Reliability: Consistency of measurement, a reliable questionnaire should yield similar scores over time = test-retest reliability

• Interrater reliability: Extent to which different people agree on the characteristics they are measuring such as two psychologists giving separate diagnoses = low interrater reliability or a job interview panel all liking a candidate = high interrater reliability

• Validity (Construct Validity): Extent to which a measure assesses what it claims to measure, such as a word test is not a good test of numerical ability = low validity or a math test to measure numerical ability = high validity

  • A valid test must also be reliable, but a reliable test can be completely invalid such as a polygraph could be reliable but be invalid, as it's actually measuring a person's stress level and finger measurements to test for intelligence would have test-retest reliability and interrater reliability as the finger measurements should remain the same, and other researchers should agree the measurements are accurate, but it would not be valid, as the length of ones finger does not equate to intelligence levels

• Types of Research Designs

• Psychologists can't always exert experimental control over variables, only describe patterns of behavior and discover links/associations between variables

• Naturalistic observation: Watches behavior in real-world settings without trying to manipulate the situation, it can be conducted in real-time or via video recordings, and also via social media and wearable technologies (ex: Jane Goodall observing Chimps, ex: Robert Provine's Investigation of Laughter, ex: Wansink and van Ittersum's Buffet Study) which leads to pros of high external validity and a good starting point to study animal behavior

• Cons of Naturalistic Observation Studies include low internal validity, and cannot draw cause-and-effect inferences because of it

• Case Study: Examines one person or a small number of people, it is used to study rare brain damage and/or unusual conditions, and can inspire new hypotheses about the brain and behavior with an example of Henry Molaison (experimental operation to remove portions of the hippocampus, observed by Dr. Brenda Milner from McGill with the inability to form new memories) as well as Prosopagnosia, extreme impairment of the ability to recognize faces.

• Pros of Case studies include a high level of detail of rare psychological phenomenon, and Cons include low on both external and internal validity

• Self-Report Measures and Surveys use self-report measures (questionnaires) to assess participant characteristics such as demographics, personality traits, mental illnesses, measure opinions and market attitude and political polls.

• Challenges to surveys: People's responses can vary depending on how the question is presented with many different formats (agree/disagree "the best way to ensure peace is through military strength [55% agree, 42% disagree])

• Pros of self-report measures (questionnaires): Easy to administer to get direct information about emotions, personality, opinions, and Cons of self-report measures is the potential for dishonesty.

• Correlational Designs examine strength of association between two variables, correlations can be negative, zero, or positive, and correlation coefficients range from -1.0 (perfect negative correlation) to +1.0 (perfect positive correlation) and a higher absolute value means stronger relationship however correlation does not equal causation

• Experimental Designs permit cause and effect inferences where the only way you can make a causal claim it is high on internal validity and has two essential components which are random assignment of participants to conditions and a manipulation of an independent variable.

• Random assignment randomly sorts participants into one of two groups with an experimental group that receives manipulation a control group that does not receive manipulation, within within-subject design participants are their own control group where you don't need random assigment however the data might have a fatigue effect since participants are in both groups and between-subjects designs need random assignment to avoid biases

• You can also use independent and dependent variables, where the independent variable is manipulated and the dependent variable is variable the experimenter measures to see if the manipulation has an effect (ex: if one is conducting an experiment to see if distracting music influences typing performance, the independent variable would be the music, the dependent variable would be typing performance)

• Experiments have high internal validity if the independent variable is the only difference between the experimental and control groups and confounding variables such as room temperature, are any variable (not the independent variable) that differs between the experimental and control groups.

• Placebo effect: Improvement because you expect improvement; need an experimental group (receives medication), placebo group (receives sugar pills) and a control group (receives nothing).

• Participants must be blind to what group they are in for results to be accurate which is a blind design

• Experimenter expectancy effect: Researchers' hypotheses lead them to unintentionally bias their outcome

• Double-blind designs: Experimenter and participants unaware of the treatment, prevents experimenter expectancy effect and the placebo effect.

• Demand Characteristics: Cues that participants pick up allowing them to guess the researcher's hypothesis, requiring work to conceal the true purpose of the study (without being unethical)

• Reactivity: refers to the tendency of participants to change their behavior when they know that they are being observed.

• Social desirability bias where positive impression management is our tendency to respond in ways that we feel are more appropriate or socially acceptable to others

• Response sets where the tendency of participants to distort their self-report responses in a positive way such as trying to impress the researcher.

• Statistics in Psychology research involves descriptive statistics which organize data into meaningful patterns and summaries and also includes central tendency where the group data tends to cluster with three main measures which are mean, median, and mode (mean is affected by outliers, but the median and mode are not)

• Example: mean is the average of all scores, median is the middle score in the data, mean is the most frequent score in the data

• Variance: how loosely or closely scores are clustered, the range is the difference between the highest and lowest scores, and standard deviation is how far each data point is from the mean

Ethical Issues in Research Design

• Tuskegee Syphilis Study (1932-1972) where participants included 399 African American men, were diagnosed with syphilis, but not informed as they were not given treatments, even though treatments were available and Stanley Milgram's Obedience study measuring of study participants to obey an authority figure.
• Participants administered 'shocks' to a 'learner' but were not informed that the shocks weren't real and that the ‘learner' was part of the study, many people suffered psychological distress following the experiment because of it
• Ethical Guidelines for Research: Overseen by the Research Ethics Boards (REBs) which are an important component of research on humans and animals, REBs require informed consent where participants must know what is involved in the study prior to participation (purpose, duration, any potential risks or adverse effects, right to withdraw) and debrief where at the end of the study, participants should be fully debriefed about the true nature of the research and should be informed of any deception that was used from the beginning of the study

Biological Psychology

• Biological psychology studies the relationship between the nervous system and behavior, the central nervous system includes the brain and spinal cord, and the peripheral nervous system which is all nerves outside the brain and spinal cord (is divided into two branches)
• Somatic nervous system: Controls and coordinates voluntary movement, and the autonomic nervous system controls the involuntary actions of our internal organs and glands and also has 2 divisions.
• Parasympathetic division more relaxed state- rest and digest (pupil constriction, slow heartbeat, stimulates digestive system activity, etc)- a return to homeostasis and includes the sympathetic division which is a fight or flight- production of adrenaline (pupil dilation, increases heartbeat, decreases digestive system activity, etc)

Brain Mapping Methods

• Phrenology: One of the earliest brain mapping methods

• Skull shape-> brain size-> psychological traits – which thought skull shape was akin to our brain size and our psychological traits.

• This is falsifiable but also presents the major positive contribution in spatial organization where different functions are located on different areas of the brain

• Neuropsychology: Links areas of brain damage to cognitive function. Animal models to map out certain functions in the human brain

• Standardized tests- neuropsychology tests are standardized such as The MoCA (Montreal Cognitive Assessment) is a standardized cognitive assessment test

• Localization of Function: Specific functions are served by specific areas of the brain. Example: Broca's Aphasia: language production is impaired by frontal lobe damage, can't produce speech, but are able to understand speech, and Wernicke's Aphasia: damage to the temporal lobe, spared production, impaired comprehension, long complete sentences that lack meaning, adding unnecessary words and creating made-up words

• Double Dissociation: If damage to one area causes function A to be absent while function B is present, and damage to another area causes function B to be absent while function A is present.

• Electrical Stimulation involves Wilder Penfield where the brain of one of his patients with electrical probes was stimulated to assess the function of different regions (E.g. motor cortex, temporal lobes) and showed that brain cells use electrical activity to send information

• Electroencephalograph (EEG): Measures electrical activity via electrodes on the skull that detect electrical change in the range of milliseconds and is really good at timing information and is a functional method in that is measures brain activity it also better knowing when information occurs rather than where and its related to ERP (event-related potential): timing of brain activity in relation to certain cognitive events, shows how activity can change in relation to cognitive events, and is derived from averaging EEG signals (derived from the mean of EEG brain waves) and the the P3 ERP component plays a role in attention and stimulus novelty which demonstrates fast timing information (millisecond scale)

• Structural Neuroimaging Techniques look at at the appearance of the brain, but do not show activity using computed tomography and magnetic resonance imaging

• Functional Neuroimaging Techniques help measure the function of the components of the brain, such as a Positron Emission Tomography and the use of magnetic resonance imaging

• CT scans involve X-rays to construct 3D imagines of the brain

• Magnetic resonance Imaging, also known as MRI scans use magnetic fields to directly visualize the brain structure and measures the release of energy from water molecules in biological tissues in relation to the magnetic field and application of a radiofrequency current -PET scans, involving consumption of radioactive glucose molecules to give a picture of neural activity and FMRI scans use magnetic fields to visualize brain activity which is measured by changes in the blood oxygen levels

• Another functional method utilized, is magnetoencephalography which measures the tiny magnetic levels created by the brain activity-MEG is the acronym for this method.

  • The spatial distributions can be superimposed onto an MRI scan.

• Manipulating the brain occurs with Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS): Modifies brain function through implanted electrodes.

  • This could provide a potential treatment for treatment-resistant disorders . It is invasive.

• Transcranial is the process of applying strong, magnetic fields to the surface to enhance the interruption of certain factions.

• Our understanding of Neurons is that the brain is composed of a nerve net

• Neurons- Specialized communication cells.

The Neuron

Dendrites-Branch-like extensions of tissue that receives information. Cell body- Contains mechanisms to keep the cell alive. Axons- Transmits signals (info) to the neurons. Synaptic transmission- Neurons communicate via a combination of electrical and chemical signals

• Three glial cells that promote speed and assist in new connections are the Oligodendrocytes.
• Action potential-Electrical impulse that triggers neurotransmitters and measures 40mV All or none response Is followed to refractory stage.
• resting potential is -70mV
• Neurotransmission is how we receive the proper neurotransmitters
• Key neurotransmitters are specialized with functions such Glutamate
• Psychoactive drugs system allows for the increasing of activity and the manipulation of neurotransmitters
• Major parts of the brain is the spinal cord and cerebral cortex and the frontal lobes, and the limbic system assist with functions such as emotion, memory, fear and aggression

The Brain

Parietal Lobe– Processes spatial perception, touch information and senses. Unilateral Neglect- Not being able to see what is damaged. Neglecting whatever side of the brain is damaged. Temporal- Processes auditory information, language and long-term memory The parts of the brain are specialized for vision.